Disk upgrade...

Hi everyone,

I upgraded the disks in my player and my SO's player. After manually building the disks, I decided to cheat and I used dd to copy all the partitions except the music partition.

It "sorta" worked, but I intermittently get the Hard Disk Not Found error, or sometimes I only get playlists from one of the drives. Serial log shows that sometimes the second drive is not recognized at boot.

I figured I damaged the IDE cable, so I installed my Eutronix spare. No improvements.

I just installed the 2.00final image and hijack, figuring that dd might not have been the best way to do the upgrade. This might fix it, which would be great, but I really want to know why I can't use dd to move the player software from one disk to the next. The thing boots from flash, right, so this is not a boot block or boot loader issue. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is there some reason this woudn't work?

If I don't see the second drive (intermittently) in the serial log, isn't this likely to be a hardware problem? Here's why I don't think so: both players are doing this. The only thing weird is the dd. So, what did I unintentionally do???

Thanks in advance,

Jim

IDE header problem -- very very common, requires soldering to repair it.

Cheers

I was afraid you were going to say that. Why now? I've used the thing constantly for years. Perhaps it was just barely making contact and messing with the cable caused a solder joint to break?

Quote:
Perhaps it was just barely making contact and messing with the cable caused a solder joint to break?

Yup. It's a heavily stressed mechanical component, which unfortunately was installed without regard to such -- instead it simply tries to rely upon ordinary surface mount soldering on small pads. The PCB was laid out with the correct holes for mechanical fasteners, but the connectors that were used used lack them.

Every time the unit is moved from horizontal (car, desktop, or dock) to vertical (carrying by the handle), considerable mechanical stress is placed upon the flimsy IDE header connections. Ditto for each time the cable itself is unplugged or reconnected.

The normal fix is to resolder it using sufficient new solder to establish at least a hint of a mechanical bond, and then to extend the IDE cables by a few centimetres to relieve the stress from carrying the unit.

Cheers