Old Flakey the laptop turned out to be too flakey to put win98 on. Or maybe it was a sign.
If anyone's interested, the solution I finally reached to configure a replacement empeg drive was:
- put the old drive back in
- install a developer 3.0-a11 player image using upgrader
- add the new drive as the IDE slave hdc
- connect to the empeg via the serial port using minicom
- manually partition and format the new drive (including mounting the music partition, hdc4, and creating the fids and var directories as specified in the formatting guide)
- transfer the root partition containing the player image to the new drive: dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/dev/hdc5
- remove the old drive and set the new one as IDE master
- reboot
It came up with an empty database and jempeg created a config.ini file. It's now been synchronizing happily for about 24 hours. Hopefully 3.0a11 turns out to be relatively stable. I started work on a bash script to create a duplicate music tree which will symlink mp3s and convert oggs, but I'd rather not.