Well, I suppose it had to happen eventually. The 12GB hard drive in my Mk2 sounds like a dying llama when it is running. It still seems to work fine, but those noises emenating from a hard drive are never good, and I've heard them way too many times.

So basically what I want to do is replace the 12 gigger with a 30 gigger or so, and transfer all my muzak/database to the new drive before the 12 dies. Anyone happen to know of a good mirror software that would run on the empeg? Maybe just a cpio across the drives? Or is there an easier (better) way to mirror even partition information from one drive to another?

I just need to be able to drop the 30 gig in, and have it run normally as if nothing ever happened. I don't know how the empeg partitions are setup, or the bootloader, and so on. Is it possible to just drop the 30GB drive in there and install 2.00-beta7 onto it without even having any partitions on the drive? Then I can just use tools to backup the fids and music to my PC hard drive, and transfer it back?

Suggestions would be great! Thanks!

I think you should pretend you are adding 30GB drive as slave (see FAQ). When done, drop to shell and copy everything from /drive0 to /drive1 (cpio is the command I would use; ordinary cp will do, too), but delete files describing database (IIRC, database, playlists and fids in /drive0/vars). Copy whatever else is of interest (custom SW, config.ini, whatever). Finally, install the new disk as the only one and perform a sync or two to rebuild database.

Good luck!

Yeah, that's what I figured.... I just thought it MIGHT be easier if the empeg upgrade software was smart enough (or didn't require) to be able to partition a drive/install everything needed from the upgrade files.

What a PITA. :-)

Well, the SW that partitions and tests a new drive is a special version of upgrade software, isn't it? I mean, one applies it more or less as one would a regular upgrade.

There are complete details on exactly how to do what you want in the Drive Upgrade Guide.

What you do is format the new drive, installed in the player. Then you plug the old drive in as a slave, and copy its FIDS directory over to the new drive. It's all done in the player, and it's done without any imaging software. You don't want to run any imaging software as it might get the partition tables wrong.