I just got a Rio S30 for my parent's Central. The Central is locking-up when transfering music to the S30. But, this isn't the first time it has been acting weird and locking-up. It seems to still play music, but the front panel buttons don't respond and the transfer stops. I'm running the latest beta. I would go back to the final release, but the Central didn't seem to actually encode music with that version.

If it's the hard drive, how would I go about moving all the music to a new drive?

I don't have a full answer for you, but I know the reason the latest release is beta and took so long to come out is that the music downloading to portables is broken in some way. The guys thought that they hadn't cause the problem, and it had always been broken, but QA wouldn't let them release it.

I suspect to copy your music you'd need a linux box or live CD to mount the HD.

Matthew

Hi Rob,
I'm not sure if your unit would run long enough without failing or going unstable, but you can use jEmplode to download the music from the Central to your PC. It does take a while (when my 100GB transfer finishes, it'll be almost one week.

Any chance you have a 120GB drive with lots of music (almost full)? I've noticed some stability issues on my unit with that much music...

Thanks, Randy

No, it has the stock drive (40GB I think).

There were some discussions on this BBS quite a while back about the proper mount commands that would let you copy the data from and old disk drive to a new disk drive. You would do it by putting one of the disk drives in place of the CD-ROM, then mounting that drive with a shell command, then copying files over. Do a search on this forum and see if you can find the discussion.

Please note that to get a shell prompt on the central, you need one of two things:

- A debug header, a custom piece of electronics that only us beta testers got.

or

- A USB keyboard. The Central accepts USB keyboards. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del and you get a shell prompt right there on the Central's screen.

I guess I forgot to suggest the obvious, which is how I back up entire Rio Central hard drives. And that is to use Ghost software to clone the existing Central drive onto a new drive. A 40GB drive will take about 30 minutes to clone on my PC...

I could do it for you if you don't have the capability on your PC to do it. I have a special "Test-bed" PC that has an OS disk with Ghost on it and two empty drive bays for source and destination hard drives to back up....

Thanks, Randy

Ok, I will try the ghost method first since that seems the easiest and I don't think I have a USB keyboard. And, if the Central is anything like an empeg, copying stuff from disk to disk is painfully slow.

If you know the pinouts of the plug on the Central's motherboard.

I'm just in the process of trying to build one for my Central. I've decided to give the RAM upgrade a go, and it looks like I will need to flash a modified boot prom onto the unit to get it to recognise the extra RAM. From what I understand, you need serial port access to do this.

Hugo is on holiday at the moment, but I'm hoping that he will be able to provide a little bit more information on what needs to change in order to get this working when he gets back. I'm also trying to figure out what value capacitors I need to use for decoupling on the extra ram. There are empty pads for them, so I'm guessing I ought to fit them.

Andy.

Working out the pinout of a serial port just by trial and error with some basic tools is simple.