Hi everyone,

I upgraded the disks in my player and my SO's player. After manually building the disks, I decided to cheat and I used dd to copy all the partitions except the music partition.

It "sorta" worked, but I intermittently get the Hard Disk Not Found error, or sometimes I only get playlists from one of the drives. Serial log shows that sometimes the second drive is not recognized at boot.

I figured I damaged the IDE cable, so I installed my Eutronix spare. No improvements.

I just installed the 2.00final image and hijack, figuring that dd might not have been the best way to do the upgrade. This might fix it, which would be great, but I really want to know why I can't use dd to move the player software from one disk to the next. The thing boots from flash, right, so this is not a boot block or boot loader issue. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is there some reason this woudn't work?

If I don't see the second drive (intermittently) in the serial log, isn't this likely to be a hardware problem? Here's why I don't think so: both players are doing this. The only thing weird is the dd. So, what did I unintentionally do???

Thanks in advance,

Jim

IDE header problem -- very very common, requires soldering to repair it.

Cheers

I was afraid you were going to say that. Why now? I've used the thing constantly for years. Perhaps it was just barely making contact and messing with the cable caused a solder joint to break?

Sure, DigiKey stocks both types of headers -- the original and the one with the two plastic pegs to mate with the empeg board (dunno if the hole spacing lines up or not, though).

Problem is, the header pads are very very fragile (from stress already inflicted), and removing the existing header is thus far more risky than simply reinforcing the existing solder joints.

In any event, a low-temperature iron is *essential* when fiddling about with this, as too high a temperature (most irons) will simply delaminate more solder pads from the main board.

Cheers

The cable length is not a problem - the spacing between the cable's board connector and the first connector, is. The first connector needs to be 5mm further down the cable away from the board connector. I will be making modified ones available in the next couple of weeks if there is interest.

Have you checked that the second drive on each unit is properly jumpered for Slave, and that the jumpers are the correct size for the drive, and are making contact on the pins properly? If both drives register as Master, perhaps this explains some of the symptoms. Mark knows better than me on this as he wrote the drivers!!!!