I am replacing my existing 18 GB drive with a 40 GB drive.

Before I started, I made sure I could get a shell prompt on my 18 GB drive with hyperterminal, and I could indeed do so.

I took the player apart, hooked the 40 GB drive to the IDE cable, and installed the disk builder upgrade on it.

I then installed the developer version of Beta 2.0 RC1 on the 40 GB drive because that is what was on the 18 GB drive and I figured it would be best to have them match. The intent was to get a shell prompt and copy the 18GB drive over to the 40 GB drive (using the command # cp -a /drive1 /drive0), then remove the 18 GB drive. (The drive is in the process of dying with bad sectors).

I then jumpered the 18 GB drive as slave and powered up the player. The player booted almost normally, except that it spent a long time at "building music database". This didn't concern me too much because the database is now on the slave drive and the player is probably looking at the primary drive. However, once it is all booted up, no playlists are found.

Hyperterminal works in that it displays the bootup information from the player; but apparently it will not accept any input from my keyboard. I cannot use the "q" command to get to the linux shell on the player in order to copy my 18 GB drive to the new 40 GB drive.

The bootup log looks pretty normal to me:

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k initempeg init 0.8
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
Mounting second music partition
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To Comply...
Starting player
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00-rc1 2003/01/15.
! tunedb_disk.cpp :1274:Database size mismatch error.
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Jan 15 2003
Vcb: 0x4054d000
Vcb: 0
Vcb: 65536
Vcb: 0
Vcb: 65536

I am confident that the IDE cable is good (I tried both my two-year-old Mark II cable that has never given me a moment's trouble, and a brand new cable destined for my Mark IIA spare) and I am confident that the connectors are installed properly, not misaligned.

If I try to boot up with just the 18 GB drive attached, it won't boot, I suspect because it is set as a slave drive. I didn't have a proper jumper for the drive, and since it was dying and never to be used again once this process was finished, I bent and soldered the two "slave" pins together, so I cannot very easily "unslave" the drive. However, before I did this bit of butchery, I did check and the drive would boot up solo and I could access the playlists and play music.

If I try to boot with just the 40 GB drive attached, it boots right up, but I still cannot get to a shell prompt.

I don't know where to go from here. Anybody got any ideas?

tanstaafl.