Is it easy to merge two Empeg HD's back together?

HI!

I'm currently still using my original 60gig Empeg with two 30 gig HD's, but I'm running low on diskspace.

I figure if I'd install an 80gig drive I'd be able to put all my music back on one drive AND still have 20gig to spare (which is MORE than adequate)

Question is : is it easy to copy all the fids back onto ONE drive after they have been split up on two drives ? IIRC the FIDS on the slave drive have a different extension?

Greetings!

The fid filenames on both drives should be completely unique. You should be able to just copy the one fids directory onto the new 80GB drive, then the other fids directory. You may have to wait as the database tried (and will probably fail) to rebuild properly, but it should work.

Ah! If that's all there is to it, I'll most certainly try this! But I'll still have to wait a week or two before the 80gig will be available at my local computer shop.

Thanks!

BTW Paul, have you seen some speed increase with your new 80gig HD's? They're only 4200RPM, but they are they first laptop drive's I've ever seen that have 8meg of cache.

Ie, set up the new disk as solitary master and run the disk builder image.

Shut down, mount one of the old drives as slave (remember to add/change jumpers if neccessary) and copy the fids across from old to new drive.
Again shut down, replace the slave with the second old drive and repeat the copying of fids to the new drive.
Shut down and remove the old drive, then start again and let the player rebuild the database. Sync to let emplode write the database to disk.

/Michael

Greetings!

I haven't really noticed a difference in speed. The player is so good with keeping things cached and the drives spun down that it is hard to notice. I have not had any delays or problems, though.

One recommendation, and I think it was mentioned elsewhere in the BBS, is to modify the original /bin/rw and /bin/rwm scripts on the player so that they do not do a mini-fsck every time the scripts are run. On smaller, less full drives, it is not a problem, but you feel it here. Just add the nocheck flag, thus:

mount -n -o remount,rw,nocheck /drive0
[ -e /proc/ide/hdb ] && mount -n -o remount,rw,nocheck /drive1

On a positive note, the drives are quieter and use less power than my old 60s.

A week or two until they are available???

Thanks for the info Paul.
Though I have absolutely no idea what that comand line means (knowing absolutely nothing about Linux), I hope I'll be able to pull it off anyway. I've still got the documentation laying around here somewhere from when I tried to add that 48gig IBM drive. (I'm still very grateful for the help you provided back then)

A week or two until they are available???

Yes, everything goes a little slower around here. On the importer's site it says that they will receive them next tuesday, but it might take up to the next monday thereafter before my local shop has them then.
Sucks, but I've gotten used to it.