Quote:
Part 1 is now done. My friend brought over his notebook with a linux distro and a usb drive unit and 2.5 to 3.5 adapter. All 3 drives are now partitioned and formatted.


It is absolutely best to do the filesystem formatting ON THE EMPEG, NOT A PC. For the simple reason that the Linux filesystem code has had a few significant changes since the version of Linux kernel used in the Empeg became obsolete. In particular, depending upon (luck) which version of which distro your buddy used, the filesystem may be created with flags/options that the empeg doesn't know about.

Or it might work by accident.

Linux is backward compatible with itself, but not always forward compatible.

Cheers