Hi all,

I am jumping back into the empeg community after many years of simple enjoyment of my empeg. Recently I attempted to rebuild my drives as a practice run for a pending 250GB upgrade, and I hit some snags as reported here:

thread: wanted to erase it, but I think I killed it

I would like to ask the community if it makes sense to modify two aspects of the current drive upgrade document that Tony Fabris maintains. The problem is, I don't know enough of the history here to know if the recommendations are sensible.

• The upgrade document currently points people to www.empeg.com for the .upgrade image files. But, the car2-builder.upgrade image there failed to work for me, and also failed to work for the poster in this thread. There are LBA48 images at rtr.ca/bigdisk which are mentioned by the drive upgrade document, and these worked flawlessly for me. (Note, I have two 30GB drives so I shouldn't have needed these.)
  
  Is there any reason we wouldn't want to recommend the LBA48 images as the primarily recommended upgrade images? How many folks going forward will be upgrading to small disks, now that you can buy 250GB drives for $99 shipped? And even if they did have a small drive, what's the harm of using the LBA48 image?
• The upgrade document says if you get a "drives already built" message from the drive builder, that you need to press Enter to get things going. However, this did not work for me, or for the other poster mentioned above. A look at the 'init' script shows that if it detects fids/ on the drive, the script simply aborts to a bash prompt. Hitting Enter simply invokes another prompt. The linked post above describes the solution - remount the drive read/write, delete the fids/, and reboot the player, and the drive builder will happily go on to make the filesystems.
  
  I don't know if hitting Enter is the right behavior in any other upgrade image, but I know it's required for the LBA48 builder. Does anyone have experience to share here on whether the upgrade document should be modified with the fids/ deletion steps?

- Chris