Virtualbox + USB-serial adapter = sadness

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?

The player has to have a hijack kernel on it for upgrader -- I would have thought yours would have it already?

Cheers

It has hijack on it, but once I yank the drive I'm replacing and put a new drive in, the player doesn't boot, so it can't bring up networking... right?

Right. I never did write something to cope with that sad situation.

Is the old drive totally dead? I.e. is it possible to put the new drive into the 2nd drive bay, boot up, copy over the partition containing hijack, then replace the old drive with the new one?

Hijack is in the flash memory, but to do networking it uses the root partition.. probably simpler to find a working serial connection for this one-off use.

Isn't it possible to connect the new drive to an external enclosure or something like this, partition the disk manually and then copy the content from one disk to the other?

Stig

Not necessarily a very useful comment as you're using virtualbox, but parallels works fine with both prolific and ftdi usb-serial adaptors (winxp under parallels, driver installed on winxp).

The USB support of different VM apps is hugely variable...

Actually, that's quite useful, as Parallels has a 14-day trial, so it's not going to cost me anything to give it a shot. Thanks much for the suggestion.