empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. Help?

Posted by: Ezekiel

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 06/01/2006 15:52

I've had luck running my empeg on all but the coldest days (<10 Degrees F) with stock Empeg LTD drives installed (YMMV standard disclaimer etc.etc.)

Having a remote car starter may be simpler than the system you describe - let the car warm for 5 minutes on a cold day (or cool on a hot day), by the time you get into it the empeg would be warm/cool enough to operate. It'd be nicer for you as well without all the dash/empeg hackery. Of course if you're into that kind of thing, have at, sounds like fun!

-Zeke

Posted by: Robotic

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 06/01/2006 19:42

Quote:
...
Having a remote car starter may be simpler than the system you describe - let the car warm for 5 minutes on a cold day (or cool on a hot day), by the time you get into it the empeg would be warm/cool enough to operate. ...

Hmm, interesting.
But I'd have to modify my Empeg install. Currently the unit is powered on during a car start, then if I've left the player 'off' it will shut down again (sleep mode) after boot up. Otherwise it wakes to the state I've left it in.
I'd have to run power to the empeg from a switchable source- not the ignition controlled source.
... if I understand all of this correctly in the first place, that is...

Sure glad the SF Bay Area doesn't freeze much.

Posted by: JBjorgen

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 07/01/2006 00:42

You could always pull the empeg slightly out of the sled when getting out at night.

Posted by: edsmiata

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. Help? - 12/01/2006 11:53

all this chatter about hot/cold weather forces me to make this post..

i live in NJ and garage my car overnight and unliss i am uploading some songs never take the empeg out of the car...reading all this makes me wonder exactly how much i have shortened the life span of my drives and how can i figure it out..

presently my 50gb are pretty much fully utilized and i would need to upgrade to a larger drive anyways...

having said all that is there anyway i can back up the music on my empeg directly onto another HDD without that HDD being installed in another device? I would like to do this so i dont run the risk of having my HDD blow out without having a back up..then when i need to swap out drives i already have all my tunes on a drive that can be immediately installed

(yes i do have all my tunes on my desktop...but i am just looking to take a short cut)

thanks,

Ed

Posted by: Roger

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. Help? - 12/01/2006 12:36

Quote:
is there anyway i can back up the music on my empeg directly onto another HDD without that HDD being installed in another device?

Well, the HDD will need to be installed in some kind of device

Seriously, though, you could put the new hard disk in the empeg, copy the tracks across, and then take the new disk out and stash it somewhere safe.

If you can get hold of a 3.5"-to-2.5" converter, and you've got a Linux box, or a copy of Cygwin, you can follow my rsync on empeg page to back up your empeg to a PC.

Just follow the instructions except that you use your PC as the destination instead of another empeg.

Posted by: pgrzelak

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 12/01/2006 12:37

Greetings!

Given that your garage the car, you should not have severe trouble or shorten the hard drive life that much.

But if you want to back up without a computer and are upgrading your drives anyway, the best recommendation I have is when you upgrade your empeg's drive(s), copy the files directly by using the empeg as the installation device similar to Step 7 of the drive upgrade FAQ and put your original drives in a safe place. I can send you more detail if you choose to do this.

Otherwise, I do not know of a direct disk connection method that will work well with the empeg. Perhaps a network attached disk, but you would still need something to do the connectivity...

Posted by: edsmiata

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 12/01/2006 13:19

what i will eventually do is upgrade to a larger drive...i would imagine that i would need about 20 more gb so do i go with one 80gb, and thus have a brand new drive, or keep the old ones in and risk a breakdown, which at that point what hs been store don them is now lost??

Ed

Posted by: pgrzelak

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 12/01/2006 14:01

If you are upgrading for capacity, I would go for the larger drive (there is not that much difference in price), use that and keep the old drives as a mirror of what you have on the player today.

Posted by: edsmiata

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 12/01/2006 14:29

ya...thats what i wanted to hear...where is the best source for these things these days??

Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. Help? - 12/01/2006 18:54

is there anyway i can back up the music on my empeg directly onto another HDD

I only

wish
and
wish
and
wish
and
wish
and
wish
and
wish
and
wish
and
wish
and
wish

that there were an easy way to do this.

Surely it isn't rocket science to write a Windows application that, upon clicking an icon on the desktop, would make an exact mirror copy of my empeg onto the PC hard drive of my choice! (Well, actually to me it would be rocket science. I once wrote a program in Basic that said "Hello World" right there on the monitor screen, and that is about the extent of my programming ability.)

Will nobody write a reasonable, idiot-proof backup program for the empeg? One that does not require a Linux box, or a bunch of other software to make it work?

Oh -- and it would be a good idea to make the program such that it could restore the backup to the empeg.

Sigh...

tanstaafl.

Posted by: edsmiata

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. Help? - 12/01/2006 19:07

the silence is deafening...

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 02:14

These days, with Hijack in place, it could probably be done with an FTP script called from a batch file. The basic components are already there.

Posted by: schofiel

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 08:25

Because it's non-trivial, that's why.

Posted by: mlord

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 12:15

The application is called FTP, and works on any O/S. Except that the Microsoft OS doesn't seem to have any normal way to do raw writes to a hard disk. But all of the other OSs do. Just FTP to your empeg, and GET /dev/hda, and give the name of the destination drive as the place to put it.

Done. One, trivial command. Except for the microsofties.

Posted by: Roger

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 14:22

Quote:
Except that the Microsoft OS doesn't seem to have any normal way to do raw writes to a hard disk.

Define "normal". If you mean that it has no user-visible equivalent to /dev/hd* then I'll agree.

However, the Win32 API supports raw HD reads and writes perfectly well.

On the other hand, I fail to see how this is relevant. If you GET /dev/hda, you'll end up with a file called hda that is an image of the empeg's hard disk. You should be able to PUT /dev/hda later, no?

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 17:30

Quote:
If you GET /dev/hda, you'll end up with a file called hda that is an image of the empeg's hard disk. You should be able to PUT /dev/hda later, no?

If this is true, then the steps in the FAQ for saving and restoring the dynamic data partition would be a lot easier, too, wouldn't they?

This is an interesting idea. If the FTP commands GET and PUT work for an entire disk partition, then we really DO have a simple and trivial way of backing up and restoring disk images on the car player.

And if they don't, maybe we could convince Mark to alter the FTP daemon in Hijack so that they do?

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 17:31

Wait, isn't there a file-size limit in Windows? Can you make an 80-gig file?

Posted by: Roger

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 19:33

Quote:
Wait, isn't there a file-size limit in Windows? Can you make an 80-gig file?

Depends on the FTP client. There's nothing stopping you in either the Win32 API or in NTFS.

Posted by: mlord

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 20:07

Quote:
Wait, isn't there a file-size limit in Windows? Can you make an 80-gig file?

Oh, now there's a thought. I dunno if the Hijack FTP server works (or not) with files larger than 2GB/4GB. Never tested, never thought about before.

EDIT: Okay, I've looked through the source code, and it appears as if it *should* work fine for a raw drive .. gotta try it to make sure, but it oughta work.

Cheers

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 20:15

Without thinking about it too hard, doing a backup that way doesn't make a lot of sense anyway. You're liable to get a lot of "blank" space taken up by unfilled filesystems, and it requires a restore to a drive of the exact same size (unless you don't care about your new 120GB drive still only having enough space to store 12GB worth of music). It makes more sense to back up filesystems as files and only read raw devices for non-filesystem slices.

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 20:16

Agreed. Well, it would be helpful in the case of the dynamic data partition anyway. Anyone wanna try it?

Posted by: mlord

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 21:00

Works fine for the dynamic data partition.

Still transferring for the full disk image trial..

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 21:26

Excellent. What are the exact FTP commands you're using?

Of course, I'm sure you're testing on Linux. It would be cool if someone else could follow up and make sure the same command work with the Windows FTP command-line. They *should* but of course, who knows. It's Windows after all.

I'd do it myself but I'm doing other stuff today...

Posted by: mlord

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 21:58

Quote:
Excellent. What are the exact FTP commands you're using?

Entire disk:
GET /dev/hda

Any single partition, same command, change hda to hda3 or whatever (I don't remember which partition holds the dynamic data).

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 22:17

So the entire disk includes all partitions including the dynamic data?

so an example of an entire disk backup for a two drive player is:

GET /dev/hda
GET /dev/hdb

I assume you have to put the FTP software into binary mode first... or at least that's what you'd want to do on windows anyway...

To restore, what would the PUT commands look like?

Posted by: mlord

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 22:22

Yup, that's all correct.

And going the other way is just a simple PUT command. For example, these two commands copy the drive to a PC, and then write it back again (pointless in itself):

GET /dev/hda junk
PUT junk /dev/hda

Those just use "junk" as the name for the file on the PC side. Or one could omit that, and the two lines become:

GET /dev/hda
put hda /dev/hda

Cheers

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 13/01/2006 22:36

Okay, very very cool. I shall update the FAQ entry with this, soon.

Posted by: edsmiata

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 15/01/2006 19:57

and make sure it's in E N G L I S H for the rest of us illiterates!!!

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 15/01/2006 20:47

Quick question: Do you need to put the player into RW mode before doing the PUT commands?

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 15/01/2006 21:03

No. It's safer to leave them RO. Even safer to unmount them altogether, but that's not really possible.

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 15/01/2006 21:05

Actually, Mark, will the NFS server work if the disk has just been replaced? And will it understand what /dev/hda even is? It is a filesystem construct, after all.

And, in the case of a restore onto an "old", already-built disk, is Hijack going to panic when it notices a filesystem inconsistency?

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 15/01/2006 21:37

Quote:
Actually, Mark, will the NFS server work if the disk has just been replaced?

In the instructions I'm writing, I'm making sure that before someone does a PUT to restore the disk, they've done a full disk rebuild, software install, and hijack install, so that the player is fully working again.

Although I have a related question: Should the player software be exited out to the shell prompt before doing a full-disk PUT operation? And if so, is there a hijack command that'll do that for me via the FTP command-line interface, similar to the SITE RO and SITE RW commands?

Posted by: mlord

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 15/01/2006 21:51

Quote:

Although I have a related question: Should the player software be exited out to the shell prompt before doing a full-disk PUT operation? And if so, is there a hijack command that'll do that for me via the FTP command-line interface, similar to the SITE RO and SITE RW commands?

It would be best to stop the player app while doing the image restore, but it should work regardless. I think Bitt once figured out the correct FTP SITE EXEC for that.

Cheers

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 15/01/2006 22:17

Quote:
I think Bitt once figured out the correct FTP SITE EXEC for that.

Cool, thanks. that'd be useful to put into the instructions, if anyone knows it.

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 15/01/2006 22:34

Okay, the updated FAQ entry is here.

I'm a bit brain-addled at the moment and can't bear the thought of fact-checking and typo-checking that entry right now. So if anyone notices any errors, please report them here. Thanks.

Doug, your one-click backup/restore solution is now just a batch file away. I think you know how to write the batch file at this point, you've done FTP scripts before, right?

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 01:04

This:

Code:

SITE EXEC kill -2 `ps ax | grep player | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1;}'`

might work, but don't quote me on that. Someone test it first.

Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 02:47

you've done FTP scripts before, right?

Yes, like the ones I run to use the player as a file taxi.

tanstaafl.

Posted by: tfabris

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 03:11

Cool, thanks Bitt. Okay, that's a pretty complicated little command, there. I understand why it has to be complicated, but for now I think I'll leave the FAQ entry as-is, where it says to kill the player via the shell prompt with the serial cable.

Posted by: julf

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 08:31

Quote:
Code:

SITE EXEC kill -2 `ps ax | grep player | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1;}'`

Trivial simplification:
Code:

SITE EXEC kill -2 `ps ax | grep -v grep | awk '/player/{print $1;}'`

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 12:15

Well, if you're going to do that, you probably don't need the other grep either.

Code:

SITE EXEC kill -2 `ps ax | awk '/player/{print $1;}'`

Posted by: cushman

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 12:38

awk isn't included in the default player image, though.

Posted by: julf

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 13:09

Quote:
Well, if you're going to do that, you probably don't need the other grep either.

Well, unless you anchor the awk pattern (not able to connect to my empeg right now to see the output of ps), you will end up selecting the grep line too...

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 13:51

What grep? There are no greps left.

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 14:07

ISTR it working at some point. Maybe it's in the developer image?

Hmm, all in bash. Tough one. It'd help if bash wasn't a pile of crap (they really need to stop claiming it's ksh-compatible).

Code:

SITE EXEC kill -2 `set $(ps ax | grep player | grep -v grep); echo $1`

Posted by: julf

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 14:39

Quote:
What grep? There are no greps left.

Duhhh! I need more coffee...

Posted by: Mataglap

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 14:41

If you put the first letter of your search string in square brackets you don't need the grep -v. (The process table will show the brackets but grep parses them as indicators of a class that consists of the lowercase p.)
Code:

SITE EXEC kill -2 `set $(ps ax | grep [p]layer); echo $1`

--Nathan

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. He - 16/01/2006 16:15

Ah, good trick.

empeg in cold weather. it's ch-ch-chilly and it won't b-b-boot. Help?