Upgrade via serial fails on Win2K(laptop)

Just got my empeg-car, loaded ~1Gb via ethernet but sync failed at about 75%.
Checked the BB and decided to upgrade to 1.01
What a pain in the ass!
No response from unit on serial cable!! but Ethernet works fine, USB works fine.
Back to the BB to find info on how to test the serial cable with hyperterminal (shame this is missing from the manual)still no response so tried my Win 98 desktop,
and at last I got a response in hyperterminal.
Restarted everything and upgraded Ok.

Now I'm back to using the Win2K laptop with USB for upload and sync works fine.

Excellent unit, shame about these glitches. Just thought I'd share my findings with everyone.

CJ.

Mk2 12Gb Green

You can only carry out firmware upgrades over serial. You also need a null modem cable (cross cable) that should have been supplied. There were supply problems with this cable that meant some were despatched with straight through (DTE-DCE) cables. This could be the reason why you could not establish contact over serial.


One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

The cable in question sounds fine, as CJ said the upgrade worked from windows 98.
The question is, if hyperteminal and the upgrader fail on the Win 2K laptop, does the serial port work at all?

I have problems upgrading my empeg when using my PC under windows (works fine under linux) but I've always been able to connect fine via a terminal emulator.

Just something to check.

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

Greetings!

There have been issues with timing the serial port under windows 2000. Basically, in many cases the upgrader does not see / find the empeg. This is more an issue with windows 2000 - the upgrade program cannot get to the serial port fast enough to get into the upgrade mode. (You will notice in booting with hyperterminal that there is a short moment where you can abort the player run and enter the upgrade mode - this is not responded to quickly enough under W2K.)

Best solution I have found, fun the upgrade utility, let it get around half way through the discovery phase and then plug in the empeg. This way, the upgrade utility already has the serial port and is in loop watching for it. Other fixes that have helped: verify that there are no drivers (Palm, tablet, etc.) running off the serial port, disconnect the ethernet and USB ports during an upgrade.

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (40GB Green)

I should mention that my usual trick to upgrade is to power up the empeg, and leave it running.
The upgrader will reboot the player, and the upgrade will work perfectly.
(And it's not just a windows 2000 problem, I'm running Win98... =)

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

Just got my empeg-car, loaded ~1Gb via ethernet but sync failed at about 75%.

Hope you managed to upgrade to 1.01. If you are still having problems with ethernet after that, please try this modified kernel:

http://bkernel.sourceforge.net/tmp/zImage.eth-patch

It includes a patch to the ethernet driver that solved a timing issue for me (see my post about it). The BBS FAQ has an entry on how to upgrade the kernel.

Good luck,
Borislav

I did manage to upgrade my empeg-car to software ver 1.01 from a Win 98 PC, so the unit is fine and the supplied serial cable is fine, however the upgrade utility runing on Win 2000 is NOT fine.
I added more albums via USB and the sync worked Ok first time. So no further problems to report.

A quick question though...
If you have USB why would you need 10Mb Ethernet since USB appears to be faster ?
Now if the empeg-car had 100Mb Ethernet that would be different.
The price difference between a 10Mb NIC and a 100Mb NIC is sod all so why limit a top piece of kit to old technology when there is a requirement to load 10's of Gb of music before you can use it.

CJ.

Mk2 12Gb Green

the unit is fine and the supplied serial cable is fine, however the upgrade utility runing on Win 2000 is NOT fine.

Are you sure that the serial port is even functioning on that Win2000 machine? Maybe it's not the software's fault. What else have you got which uses that serial port, and does it work?

Or perhaps you've got a software utility that claims the port constantly? For instance, a Palm sync utility?


If you have USB why would you need 10Mb Ethernet since USB appears to be faster ?

1) The theoretical maximum speed of USB is faster than the theoretical maximum speed of ethernet, yes. But there's a lot of system overhead associated with USB, making it much slower than that. So actually ethernet is a tiny bit faster at the current time.

2) Ethernet is useful for developers who want to monkey with Linux on the Empeg.

3) Some computers/OS's can't run USB (95/NT4) but can run ethernet.

4) Ethernet is cool.

5) Interesting applications can be written for ethernet, like the Displayserver applet.


The price difference between a 10Mb NIC and a 100Mb NIC is sod all so why limit a top piece of kit to old technology when there is a requirement to load 10's of Gb of music before you can use it.

1) 10mb is plenty fast, and you only need to load the 10gb once. After that, little synchs take only a couple minutes.

2) Although you can buy a 100mb ethernet card for your PC easily, it's a different story trying to source raw chips and integrate them directly into a custom board as they've done on the Empeg.

3) Even if Empeg could source the chips and make them work in their design, the other hardware inside the unit isn't fast enough to keep up with the 100mb rate anyway- the drives are linked through an ISA bus that would limit your upload speed anyway.

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Tony Fabris

We run Win 2000 on several machines here, and both emplode and upgradetool work fine on them. In fact they are developed on a Win2000 machine.

Have you got Hyperterminal talking to the empeg on the 2K box?

Ethernet is included on the player primarily for developers, but clients with a network often find it more convenient than USB for synchronising the player. Also, in a future release, it will synchronise a lot faster than USB (due to protocol and interrupt load issues).

Rob

Hhhmmmm...
I did not get any response within hyperterminal on my Win 2K laptop!

I am not aware of any other software using COM1.

I'd really like to solve this one.
I'll try again now I know everything else is working normally.

CJ.


Mk2 12Gb Green

1) The theoretical maximum speed of USB is faster than the theoretical maximum speed of ethernet, yes. But there's a lot of system overhead associated with USB, making it much slower than that. So actually ethernet is a tiny bit faster at the current time.

As long as no other ethernet devices try and use the same network.

Does anyone have any real world data transfer figures (minus the overheads)

I'm just glad I paid the extra and bought a dual speed hub (my PC's are 100Mb) so at least I have the choice.

3) Even if Empeg could source the chips and make them work in their design, the other hardware inside the unit isn't fast enough to keep up with the 100mb rate anyway- the drives are linked through an ISA bus that would limit your upload speed anyway.

Ahh! now I see the difficulties. If you look at a new fast ethernet PCI card (like from 3COM) there is basically only 1 IC on there and no real diffence in cost over 10Mb. I thought they could have used an IC like that. But that assumes you have a PCI bus!! Wrong!
So old technology IS the limiting factor.

"Ethernet is cool".
Fast ethernet would be excellent!

CJ.

Mk2 12Gb Green

Does anyone have any real world data transfer figures (minus the overheads)?

In 1.0/1.01 Ethernet runs at about 400KBytes/sec for smallish files under ideal conditions (crossover cable). This falls to more like 150-200KBytes/sec on large (>15M) files due to a player bug, since fixed. USB goes no faster.

1.1 will do more like 500KBytes/sec over both USB and Ethernet from Windows, 700KBytes/sec over Ethernet through a 10/100 switch from Linux, and 800KBytes/sec over Ethernet through a crossover cable from Linux.

The memory-to-disk bandwidth is about 4Mbytes/sec. The empeg has been clocked at 1135KBytes/sec in through Ethernet and into memory, an astonishing 97% of back-to-back saturation wire speed. Then the kernel fell over

It's trying to do both disk I/O and network I/O at the same time that slows things down to 800Kbytes/sec. The only way to avoid that would be to put both disk and Ethernet on PCI, which would colossally increase the complexity (and thus price) of the player.

Peter

Then the kernel fell over

oooh Bugger!

put both disk and Ethernet on PCI, which would colossally increase the complexity (and thus price) of the player.

Dear God no!

Murray 06000047
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