I cannot find the original thread from last November (?), but there was discussion and interest at one point in having Hijack support for a combo CF + disk empeg system.

The idea being, to boot off the CF, and not spin-up the hard drive unless absolutely needed (eg. for playing a tune that's not buffered in the CF).

This would allow use of the tuner/aux inputs without wear and tear on the hard drive, especially during extreme (very hot or cold) temperatures.

Well.. I've been working on that now, for the past couple of hours, and the code is nearly ready to try out.

I'll be the lab hamster this time around, but I'm just wondering who else might be interested?

Doing this requires a hard drive that supports the Power-Up In Standby feature set, as reported near the bottom of hdparm -I output.

You can test your drive for this feature by grabbing the contents of /proc/ide/hda/identify from your player, and pasting it as input to a hdparm --Istdin command on another system. Or just post it here (256 16-bit words in hex/ascii) and I'll decode it for you.

In addition to a capable hard drive, you'll also need a CF card of suitable size, likely 128MB or larger (TBD).

The approach I'm taking is to just connect the CF card as the SLAVE drive, and have Hijack automatically manage it. No formatting/copying of files required, and the CF can simply be removed at any time to revert back to disk-only operation.

Cheers