Been years since I've been here... surprised its still got such a good following! That's awesome.

So anyway, does anyone have a list of modern day hard drives that will work with the Empeg? Mine have finally started to crap out and I need to replace them. Or will pretty much any modern-day laptop drive work OK with it?

Sorry if there is a FAQ entry or something for this, but just figured I'd try. :-)

I also have a Rio Car that I bought and never unboxed if anyone is interested in buying it......

Welcome back.

Any laptop IDE hard drive will work. It's important you get the "IDE" part right, because since you were last here, they've started coming out with laptop SATA drives, which won't work on the empeg.

Since you were last here, the available hard disks have also gotten bigger, big enough to cause issues with the original firmware, and now upgrading your hard disks to something bigger than 60gb involves using custom-modified versions of the builder image and player firmware that supports large hard disks.

But before assuming that it's the hard disk crapping out, check here and go through all those diagnostic steps to make sure that you're not having an easily-repairable problem unrelated to the disk itself.

When you're ready to put new disks in the player, the entire procedure is here.

The Drive Upgrade Guide should answer your questions on what can be used. Specifically the "Selecting a disk drive" section.

And welcome back. Yep, a lot of us are still here, and still wondering when anything might come close to replacing the empeg.

And as you can see, Tony is still here beating everyone else to the answer posts :-)

Haha, some things never change.

I remember back when Tony signed up, and they had to get a bigger pipe to handle the post volume. ;-)

I agree too... nothing beats the empeg. The only problem is I bought an M3 and didn't want to rip apart the dash to fit my empeg... so unfortunately, I'm stuck with just an iPod hookup in the M3... However I do drive my Jeep around during the winter which is where the empeg is still installed... and dying.

And that was the information I was looking for. I didn't want to get a non-compatible hard drive (eg: SATA or too big). Thanks for the useful posts.

Now another question. Is there an "easy" way to mirror the old drive's information to a network drive so I can just put it back on the new hard drive without having to re-upload and re-index all my songs? That is the part I'm not looking forward to.

Mm, looks like I can just copy the fids directory.

Will this pose a problem as I have two drives in my empeg right now? Can I just copy the contents of the fids directories from both of the drives into the single (replacement) drive without having any conflicts?

Yes, you just copy the fids directory.

If everything is operating normally on the empeg, then the files that exist in the fids directory on both drives should be unique. You should be able to combine the fids folder from disk0 and disk1 together onto a new (larger) single hard disk, and theoretically there should be no conflicts.

There are some pieces of information that you will lose if only the fids folder is copied. The fids folder has only your playlists and songs. Other settings are in other places.

For more information about backing up and restoring the player, and saving those other settings, look here.

Please note that you don't have to back up your files onto an FTP server like that if all you're doing is installing new hard disks. The drive upgrade guide has full instructions on how to do this in situ.