question / possible FAQ

How does the EMPEG handle a second harddrive?, i.e how does it begin to fill this drive, does it completely fill the first before it stores MP3's on the 2nd?

this is also a candidate for a FAQ entry along with the EMPEGS internal partition and directory structure/descriptions.

cheers,
Jaidev

..it puts the file on the least-used drive.
-mark

This space used in memory of the victims from 09/11/01

How does the EMPEG handle a second harddrive?, i.e how does it begin to fill this drive, does it completely fill the first before it stores MP3's on the 2nd?

It puts each file on the disk with most free space. Thus if you have a half-full 10G disk and add a new 48G, everything will go on the 48G disk until it too has only 5G of space left.

Peter

So what if you had two drives in the empeg, and filled it up, and wanted to replace one or both of the drives. How do you migrate the music over?

Calvin

How do you migrate the music over?

By formatting the new drive, then plugging the old drive back in and copying the files (contents of the FIDS directory) from the old drive to the new drive at the shell prompt. Do this for each drive you are replacing. It involves a little game of "musical drives", but it's not complicated. It's all covered in the FAQ.

___________
Tony Fabris

But if the unit had 2 drives to begin with, how do you plug both the old drives *and* the new drives in at the same time?

Do you do them one at a time?

If I had to guess, if there's 2 full drives, and the upgrade path is to 2 bigger drives..

Remove Drive B,
Plug in empty Drive C
Copy Drive A to C
Remove Drive A
Plug in empty Drive D
Remove Drive C
Plug in Drive B
Copy Drive B to Drive D
Remove Drive B
Plug in Drive C

will this work? Or is there easier ways?

Can the contents be backed up onto the computer, both drives removed, new drives put in, and resynced?

Calvin

Do you do them one at a time?

Correct. Like I said, it involves a small game of Musical Drives.

___________
Tony Fabris

If there is enough place on another drive, simply copy /driveN/fids/* to /driveM/fids and erase /drive0/var/database (I don't whether there is /drive1/var/database) to force database to be rebuilt.

Even better, grab the oportunity and back your player up by copying everything from /drive[01]/fids on one of those cheap 80-100GB IDE drives using either ftp or one of several backup utilities developed recently (see FAQ and search a bit around the boerd). When you install the new disk, simply restore everything.

BTW, it might be possible to back up EQ settings etc by copying contents of /dev/hda3 using dd. I have not tried that (but Roger says all dynamic data is there).

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

Can the contents be backed up onto the computer, both drives removed, new drives put in, and resynced?

Yes, but it is better that, after copying /drive[01]/fids/* to the computer and replacing drive(s), you simply copy everything back where it was. Syncing back is not simple, because tune files don't have meaningfull names and one cannot reproduce multiply linked playlists on the computer filesystem. By copying everything back and using sync just to rebuild the database one keeps playlist structure contained within their own 'fid' files.

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

/empeg/var is symlinked to /drive0/var.

If you've ever had the disks the other way round, then there would be a /drive1/var/database.

You also need to delete the 'tags' and 'playlists' files from the same place.


-- roger

Oops! Thanks!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green