Well, I think I have a solution to report on. I wasn't able to get satisfactory results with jEmplode. As I mentioned above, only the song title tags copy over with the song and all of the other fields come in blank. That would be a lot of work to fix up, so that doesn't seem to be the way to go...

I tried downloading songs from jEmplode to my PC hard drive. I was able to build up a CD's worth of songs on the hard drive, but didn't see a real slick and easy way to copy those songs back over to the other Central. It looked like more of a manual process than I wanted to attempt with 90 GB of tunes...

So I had an idea that turned out to be pretty good and worked for this particular application...I got a copy of Ghost 2003 and did some experimenting. I was able to duplicate the entire Central hard drive using the Ghost cloning feature in 90 minutes for 120GB drives. One nice feature of Ghost is that it reports the serial numbers of the drives so you can keep track of which is source and which is the destination drive (I didn't want to copy a blank hard drive over my full one!)...So Ghost helped me duplicate the drive pretty quickly....However, since the drive was a duplicate of the original, it also wouldn't allow me to install the 1.10 software update....I got the same error message as reported in the Central forum previously. Since my goal was to end up with an upgraded hard drive that has both the latest software and all my music, I knew I had to keep at it...

So this morning I had another idea that worked successfully and helped me solve all of my problems. I was able to end up with an updated software version and all of my tunes on the 120GB drive as follows:

1) I started with a blank hard drive in the central
2) I used the original CD to format the drive and install the original software.
3) Then I used the update CD to install 1.10 (it has always worked on a blank drive, but seems to fail on a disk that I've been using for awhile or a drive that has lots of music on it)
4) So now I had a drive that had no music, but did have 1.10.
5) I stuck that drive back in my PC and used Ghost to only copy the large Linux partition contents from the original drive to the new drive. There are 4 partitions, but the other three are quite small. The one to copy is the large partition with all the music. That took 90 minutes.
6) I tested my new "master" drive back in the Central and it works!!!! So now I have all my tunes, playlists, etc. and the new updated software.

I'll test this for awhile and see if it really is working, but for now I think I've solved my problem....

Randy