Hi,

My Mk2 has two 20 GB drives from the days of yore, which I am contemplating upgrading to create more space. The upgrade seems simple enough.

As I read it, once partitioned and formated etc., I can simply copy the music files and tags from one old disk to another new disk using any Linux copy mechanism, and the database can be easily rebuilt - so logically, as long as the files are correctly named, with the right data tags, it doesn't matter how they got on to a correctly formatted disk?

My motivation to upgrade the drives is to switch from MP3 to FLAC, mainly because I'm ripping all my CDs to FLAC for use within the home, and I can keep a single consistent central database of music files. However, I am dreading the time it's going to take to load all this data via USB or Ethernet on to the player (200GB at 10 Mbps HDX - and reading estimates from Roger's site of 1GB per hour makes this prospect more than 8 days on constant network traffic), so I was wondering if I could "cheat" and go directly over IDE from my server's disks to one of the previously partitioned, formated and FW loaded disks for the player, and then install the disk in the player.

It seems to me that the only tricky parts are going to be renaming the music file and creating the associated file tags. But once solved, it should be simple?? Has anyone tried this? Has anyone written/extracted the scripts to do this? Actually a better first question would be, are all my assumptions correct, and thus is it possible?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Alan