I just upgrade my hard drive in my Mark2 unit to a Hitachi 80GB
Travelstar. I followed the instructions to build a new drive and applied the developer upgrade as well. The unit boots up and I can navigate through its menus etc, but when I try to sync up with Emplode , the software continually crashes on my PC during the checking drive/sync phase. Did I miss something in the setup? Here is the log file Emplode dumps
when I try to sync the unit. Thanks.

Greetings!

Please take a look at this thread. There is a suspected builder bug that happens with newly formatted drives. Your symptoms seem very similar.

I took a look at the previous post and attempted to follow the the directions there, but still seem to be having the same problem...

Here's what I've done:
I have a single (new) drive installed as master in a mark2 unit.
I have installed Emplode 2.0 on my computer and used the
car2-builder-20011022.upgrade on the drive. My unit is plugged in using the AC adapter, not a sled and uses the null-modem serial cable.
Once the builder is finished, the drive reboots and starts the stress test. I let it run over night the first night before attempting to install the developer image. After unpluging the
unit from the stress test I ran the
car2-consumer-v2.00.upgrade which completed as well.
After unplugging the power again, I plugged the unit in again and tried to access it with Emplode 2.0 and it crashed again at the checking media stage.

This is what the previous post says will happen and did happen to me. I have tried to re-build the drive again using the same method as before, tried just reinstalling the developer image and even tried the consumer image... any hints as to which step I might be leaving out? I don't want to copy my old mp3 files over so do I need to copy anything else from the old drives? I can post the logs if you think it will help identify my problem. Thanks for the help

Could you post a boot log? Also, if you are willing to rebuild the drive again and post the log from that bootup, that might also be useful. Thanks!

Thanks for taking the time to help, I'm getting a bit frustrated! Here is a .doc wordpad file with the self test, rebuild log and
final boot log in it.

Saving as text would be much more useful to basically everyone on the internet. For starters, I'd be able to read it at all. (Even StarOffice/OpenOffice doesn't understand it somehow.)

Oh, I found text embedded in that file. This line is bad:

/dev/hda4: Memory allocation failed while setting up superblock

Sounds like swap needs to be activated before building the fs. I bet fixing that would solve the whole problem.

I think someone's come across this before, probably Paul, so I'll let him describe how to fix it.

Attached is a PDF

Funny.

Regardless, I can see it better, and the line

Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as ext2 but got error 22

seems to confirm my notion that the fs build failed. Now we just need someone to point us to how someone (Paul?) solves that problem.

Funny.

I was just trying to be helpful.

Greetings!

This seems to be a match to that builder bug that I was seeing before.

What I would like you to do is as follows. You will be interrupting the regular disk build slightly to capture data.

a) Run diskbuilder on your machine.
b) It will run through the first phase - flashing and pumping. As soon as the pumping completes, it will reboot the player. Remove power from the player immediately at this point.
c) Exit the builder, run hyperterm and set it to capture a fresh log file.
d) Apply power to the player. At this stage, the builder image will start building the disk. It should not prompt you to hit a key, since the music partitions are not completely built.
e) Watch for any errors in the build. I would always see:

EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,4)): ext2_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 64 not in group (block 3)!
EXT2-fs: group descriptors corrupted !
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda4, or too many mounted file systems

If you get a clean build without any errors, you can interrupt the stress test, and apply v2.0 developer and proceed as normal.

If you still get an error, please post that build log for me. Thanks!

Edit: re-reading your log file. You already have that boot data there. Looking it over again...

Okay... Looking through...

Yes, it is definately a memory problem while trying to build the filesystem. This is something that Laura found when trying to build an 80GB drive on a Mark I. From the look of your bootlog, this is a Mark2, with 12MB of RAM.

It might be that you cannot build the drive on this unit. I think you have two options:

a) use the builder to get the root partition in place, put 2.0 developer on, boot to player, quit to shell, run "swapon /swapfile" and attempt to build the other filesystems by hand.

b) build the drive in a Mark2a.

I will look to see if I can find the command sets for building the partitions manually.

Thanks for the help, I know you said I already posted the bootlog, but here it is again after following the steps you outlined.

Hi again everyone. I was just wondering if there was any progress on finding out how to create the directories manually? Since it seems that I have a Mark2 and not a 2a it looks like thats the route I'll need to take in order to format the new drive. Thanks for all the help... yet again!

Greetings!

I know that it is something like "mke2fs /dev/hda4", but I am not certain if you need any specific command switches on that. Anyone?!?

"mke2fs /dev/hda4"

That works, but might not be the most efficient use of space (lost space mainly from the *1 fid files which are very small VS a lot of space for inodes, considering that ~half the files are multiple megabytes large).

Ah, here are the mke2fs options the builder apparently uses: "-i131072 -m0 -s1" (128kBytes/inode, no reserved space for root/superuser, sparse super-blocks).

/Michael

Thanks guys! ...But now I need just one more favor... Being that I am not a linix guru, can anyone outline the steps I would need to follow, and the corresponding commands to format that partition? I know how to get Hyperterminal setup and how to load the developer image, but where do I go from there? Can I simply put in the mke2fs /dev/hda4 -i131072 -m0 -s1 command after booting up with the hyperterminal program and dropping to the shell command prompt? As of right now I have run both the builder and installed the developer image. My log files can be found earlier in this thread. Thanks for all the support everyone!

For those of you having this same problem, I found out that the initial build and subsequent update using the developer image for some reason did not create the directory structure that Emplode needed. I apologise if I write this incorrectly but since I don't really know linux all that well, this is what I found when comparing the old drives with the new one: /Drive0 and /drive1 need to have the following subdirectories in them: /fids, /lost+found, and /Var. On my rebuild I found that /Drive0 was missing the /fids and /var directories while /drive1 was missing all three. Once I made the new directories using the mkdir command, Emplode found what it needed and no longer crashes. I hope this helps out some of you at least, thanks.

The lost+found directory is special, it's used during filesystem checking. You have to recreate it with the mklost+found utility which I don't think is actually on the empeg...