I tried again this morning to upgrade my original Rio Central to the new software. I was able to successfully upgrade my second unit (I bought a second one from Overstock.com).

But my original unit won't upgrade, using the same CD that I burned for the one that did work. I thought I'd post the error message and see if anyone else was having the same issue...I've tried powering off from scratch with the upgrade CD in the drive, and I've also tried just inserting the upgrade CD while the unit is running. I can get it to read the CD and display the menu, but when I try to select the upgrade, then I get an error message right away.

It says "There was an error applying upgrade (status 0xc0044000). CD may be damaged or improperly written".

Does anyone have any ideas about what is happening? The only difference between my two units is that the successful upgrade has very little recorded on it (120GB Drive upgrade), while the original unit that won't upgrade has 20GB free on a 120GB drive, lots of music, etc.....

Thanks for any suggestions...I've attached a photo of the Central screen showing the error message...

Randy

Check to see if you already upgraded it. I've seen that error, but only after I upgraded the central.

Alternately, have you tried to upgrade again?

It has the original software and I've tried it several times. This morning I decided to take a photo of the screen and post the attached photo....It's been doing this for awhile....

Thanks, Randy

What version of software is on the central currently? Did you first upgrade the software through the internet upgrade?

I'm assuming that the disk is good... You might want to try to burn another before doing anything drastic.

Do you remember how you managed to get around this problem? I traded out the central you sent to me with my parents, and it's been working flawlessly for them. Their old central which is now mine has been acting up for the past few months, and is now giving me this error message.

It was running 1.02 and crashing every few hours, I attempted to upgrade to 1.10, which claimed to have failed but seemed to work except that it still wasn't serving the dell receiver, so I attempted to install 1.10 again. It failed again, but when I restarted it wouldn't boot. Hence the attempt to upgrade again. I've tried the 1.10 cd you sent me with the new central, a 1.02, and a 1.10 cd I burned from the image I put online.

Matthew

Hi Matthew,
I've been able to work around this problem a couple of ways, let me see if I can recall the details....

First of all, there is definitely a link between this error and a hard drive that has a bit of music on it. In other words, I've never seen the error message on a blank or new hard drive. When I see the error, it's always on a drive that has been used for awhile and consequently has a little or a lot of music on it.

So one way to get around the problem is to remove the drive, put it in a PC (I use removable disc caddies), and then use Partition magic to remove the existing partitions and also the contents. Then I put the drive back into the Central and load up the new software. Of course, that will delete all the music you currently have on the Central.

You can use jEmplode to download all the music to your PC and re-upload it if you want. Or one method I used when I had 100 GB worth of music on the drive...

A) I installed the 1.10 software on the Central on a blank drive
B) I inserted the old Central drive with the music in one slot on my PC.
C) Then I inserted the 1.10 Central drive in the PC
D) Then I used partition magic to duplicate the partition that has the music content from the old hard drive to the new 1.10 drive.
E) Insert the new 1.10 with the music into the Central and boot it up. It worked for me....

If you don't care to keep the music on the Central, the upgrade process is easy...Does that help at all?

Thanks, Randy

Ok, i'll fdisk the drive back to a cleaner state and see if that makes it happy. I should take a picture of what my server looks like with the four drives of the raid array and the centrals drive tray with HD and CD all spilling out the side of the case.

Matthew

Hmmm. The linux server can't recognize the drive. It recognizes a different spare drive just find. I just put the central drive back in, I'm going to see if it fails to recognize it a second time. The only comfort is this is a retail drive and western digital should replace it.

This'll be the seccond drive to fall victim to this central in six months, and it's never been right. Was the seccond drive never good from the start? Is the central eating drives? Could some sort of mainboard problem cause it to eat drives? How's the >120GB central project going? Ok, time to take a breath and go check and see if the drive wasn't recognized again.

Matthew

Seccond try, same problem. Debian gives an error message about it being unrecogized and "status=0xd1". The bios can't recognize it either. I've got a stack of three 250GB hard drives here, but they're not going to do me any good.

Matthew

While I'm interested in the larger hard drive project for the Central from a "can it be done" perspective, please see my previous posts about why I don't fill up my 120GB drives anymore. Basically, the performance of a 120GB drive with perhaps 100GB of music on it is not very stable.

It seems like the Central would need additional memory and some software tweaks so that the new memory is accessible. Otherwise, a 250GB hard drive with lots of music on it is just not going to be very stable....

Oh, and fyi, my previous post about using Partition Magic on the Central disc was based on a Win XP machine...

Thanks, Randy

You can stuff another 16MB (2 chips of 4MB x 16 3.3v SDRAM) on the board (there are empty positions on the board), and enable them in the e000 linux loader (as per the carplayer upgrades). You then need a patched kernel to recognise the 32MB, and it should "just work" - ie, it'll page less and generally should work faster/better.

Actual changes to the player code shouldn't be needed as it doesn't have a fixed size cache in the same way that the carplayer does.

Hugo