I don't have a Windows machine lying around anymore, so when I found myself needing to replace the hard drive in my empeg, I figured I'd run emplode in a Windows VM on my Mac, using a Prolific brand USB-to-serial adapter. Unfortunately, I can't get any love from the gods of virtualization. Depending on how I set up the serial port in Virtualbox, the VM either freezes on startup (when the serial port is in "host device" mode) or gives me a "failed to bind to socket" error (when the serial port is in "host pipe" mode.) I even tried not configuring a serial port and presenting the USB device to Windows, then installing the Windows drivers to do the serial-to-USB magic inside the VM, but that didn't work either (possibly because the host OS is already doing the magic?)

Anyway, I guess I was wondering if anyone had successfully used emplode in a VM to run emplode over serial before, and, if so, what you used. I haven't tried Parallels or VMwware yet, but if someone's had success with them, I can give them a try. I also have a Keyspan USB-to-serial adapter I can try, but I couldn't find it yesterday.

Otherwise, is there some sneaky way I can do the drive replacement over ethernet? The last I saw "upgrader" was only good if you already have a player that's already been upgraded over serial (so it's reachable on the network.) Has any of that changed?