OK, looks good, but the only way to do that is to get hold of one of those laptop to PC IDE adaptors, right?

You can follow these instructions on the empeg itself (I did) as long as you keep the original drive for hda in there while you upgrade hdc.

You'll still need to get serial working in order to install the software upgrade at the end of the process. This means that you still need to work out why you're getting corrupted serial output from the empeg.

Try a different cable. Try a different serial port. Try a different PC.

There ought to be a Unix console serial upgrader somewhere. All the code you need is in the emptool sources, in lib/protocol/upgrader.cpp. I think you'll need to write a main() for it, though.

And is it really easier to do a manual partition and format???

No. You'll need to solve your serial problems either way.