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#348929 - 06/11/2011 05:05 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: mlord]
drakino
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
One expensive route I did find for a DIY SSD is this unit:

http://www.jpcentury.com/pro_con.aspx?id=P_00000025

It takes 3 CF cards and presents them as one drive. The company selling them appears to be moving away from IDE to newer SATA ones, so if this interests anyone else, you may want to track them down soon. Though from reports by others here, SATA to PATA adaptors seem to work well in the empeg.

Price is a bit high at ~$230 or so. But this may be worth it if someone is sitting on several higher capacity CF cards.

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#348992 - 07/11/2011 19:35 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: drakino]
drakino
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
Hrm, something somewhere has gone wrong, and was exposed by my upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0 alpha 11.

Code:
empeg:/empeg# ls -al
total 4
drwxr-xr-x    4 0        0            1024 Jul 25  2005 .
drwxr-xr-x   15 521      220          1024 Oct  6 01:45 ..
drwxr-xr-x    2 0        0            1024 Jul 25  2005 bin
lrwxrwxrwx    1 0        220            14 Jul 25  2005 fids0 -> ../drive0/fids
lrwxrwxrwx    1 0        220            14 Jul 25  2005 fids1 -> ../drive1/fids
drwxr-xr-x    6 0        0            1024 Jul 25  2005 lib
lrwxrwxrwx    1 0        220            13 Jul 25  2005 var -> ../drive0/var
empeg:/empeg# ls -al /drive0
total 2
drwxr-xr-x    2 0        0            1024 Jul  6  1999 .
drwxr-xr-x   15 521      220          1024 Oct  6 01:45 ..
empeg:/empeg# ls -al /drive1
total 2
drwxr-xr-x    2 0        0            1024 Jun  2  1999 .
drwxr-xr-x   15 521      220          1024 Oct  6 01:45 ..
empeg:/empeg# mount
/dev/root on / type ext2 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
empeg:/empeg# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 3899 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1             1         5     40131    5  Extended
/dev/hda2             6        10     40162+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3            11        13     24097+  10  OPUS
/dev/hda4            14      3899  31214295   83  Linux
/dev/hda5             1         3     24034+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6             4         5     16033+  82  Linux swap
empeg:/empeg# fdisk -l /dev/hdc

Disk /dev/hdc: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 3899 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdc1             1         5     33232+   5  Extended
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(65, 15, 63) should be (65, 254, 63)
/dev/hdc2             5         9     33264   83  Linux
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(131, 15, 63) should be (131, 254, 63)
/dev/hdc3             9        11     16632   10  OPUS
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(164, 15, 63) should be (164, 254, 63)
/dev/hdc4            11      3900  31242960   83  Linux
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63)
/dev/hdc5             1         3     16569   83  Linux
/dev/hdc6             3         5     16600+  82  Linux swap


For the drive expansion, I ended up using gparted with the CF cards attached to a USB to IDE adaptor. /dev/hda is the CF card I cloned in the empeg first. /dev/hdc was cloned on my Mac using dd. I think my attempt to hang onto the nostalgia of all my old music loadout, along with whatever crazy hacks* I was doing in the past, and the HDD->CF conversion has introduced so many variables. Time I think to just nuke it from orbit and move forward with the new plans to integrate it into my newer music strategy.

* I was finding remnants of the GPS app, empire, emphatic, various web interfaces, my old distributed.net setup, strongbad TTS clock, random bits of debian linux, and some other things still on the drives.

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#348996 - 07/11/2011 20:33 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: drakino]
mlord
carpal tunnel

Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14472
Loc: Canada
What is it that you've found that "has gone wrong?"

Edit: oh, okay.. funny looking sector/cylinder ranges.
Still, it all looks valid. What's it supposed to look like?


Edited by mlord (07/11/2011 20:36)

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#349001 - 07/11/2011 22:22 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: mlord]
drakino
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
The other issue is that the music partition wasn't mounting properly, hence the missing fids folders /empeg/fids0 tries to point to. *edit* Also, hda and hdc should have been identical in fdisk. The block boundaries were weirdly out of place, probably a gparted failure that it didn't report well.

I could have dug deeper, but I just didn't trust the state of things any more. I can't remember every little thing I did to this unit, some of it dating back to my hacks I carried over from the Mark 1 in 99.

If I do want to revisit the "classic" empeg I used in the past, the data is still saved off, both on the drives I replaced, and as a backup I took.


Edited by drakino (07/11/2011 22:57)

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#349010 - 08/11/2011 01:22 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: drakino]
Ross Wellington
enthusiast

Registered: 21/02/2006
Posts: 325
Hi,

I noticed this statement in your post....

"Though from reports by others here, SATA to PATA adaptors seem to work well in the empeg."



I am still trying to get these to work. I could not get Emplode to play well with it.

I don't think I have seen a post of success yet. Did I miss something?

Thanks,

Ross
_________________________
In SI, a little termination and attention to layout goes a long way. In EMC, without SI, you'll spend 80% of the effort on the last 3dB.

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#349011 - 08/11/2011 01:46 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: Ross Wellington]
mlord
carpal tunnel

Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14472
Loc: Canada
Oh, so there's supposed to be tunes/playlists there already. That's what I blindly missed. smile

And yeah, I'm with Ross: I don't recall seeing many success reports with adaptors yet. That said, they should work, though I do know that a lot of them are quirky.

Cheers

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#349057 - 09/11/2011 19:55 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: mlord]
altman
carpal tunnel

Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
Originally Posted By: mlord
Originally Posted By: altman
cat (treating it as a char device)

The device is a block device, regardless of the program opening/reading from it.

cat uses 32KB buffers by default in such situations.
The kernel reads a maximum of about 64KB at a time from IDE drives.


I understand that, but isn't it going to be going through at least one more set of buffers using cat vs dd? Memory bandwidth isn't amazing on the empeg either smile

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#349059 - 09/11/2011 20:29 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: altman]
mlord
carpal tunnel

Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14472
Loc: Canada
No, dd and cat both do pretty much the same system calls normally: read() followed by write().

Newer versions of dd have a "DIRECT_IO" flag, which gets rid of one memcpy (or possibly both) from the loop. That would be quicker on an empeg, but probably neutral on a PC.

With dd, one can also easily specify a very large buffer size, which will reduce the number of read/write calls, saving a tiny amount of overhead.

Cheers

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#350569 - 06/03/2012 04:56 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: mlord]
rjlov
member

Registered: 16/12/1999
Posts: 188
Loc: Melbourne, Australia
Some more datapoints relating to SATA -> PATA...

My empeg hard disk has been making funny noises, and is occasionally (although with increasing frequency) refusing to start up. I figured I'd try out the SATA situation.

I ordered two separate adapters, and have tried them with both a 500G WD drive, and a 120G Intel SSD, just with one drive at a time.

With the JMicron based one, the empeg didn't seem able to accurately identify the drives, for either drive.

With the Addonics adapter, the empeg was able to identify each drive properly.

I was able to partition and format the 500G drive with no problems. However, as Ross has experienced, the ethernet was broken with this adapter. Also, the USB was broken. Both work fine when I use the old PATA hard drive instead.

I've attached a boot log from this. There seems to be an issue detecting the ethernet adapter, and I can't help but wonder if I was able to force the kernel to look for it at a particular address, maybe it would work?


With the Intel SSD, things seem to go wrong when I start writing significant amounts of data to the drive. Trying to format a partition or install the bigdisk builder on it fails. I haven't catalogued the errors yet, but the most common one I see on the empeg display is hda: err: write_intr (which is obviously missing all the interesting stuff at the end). (The SSD works fine plugged into a SATA->USB converter on my PC.)

Is it possible that the SSD is just returning from writes too quickly? This seems unlikely: given that HDDs have caches I would expect many writes to return very quickly.

Anyway, my plan is to see if I can get some more details about the errors with the SSD, and maybe that will be helpful.

If anybody has ideas about what sort of logging / debugging might be useful for this, I'm all ears.

Richard.


Attachments
bad-boot-log.txt (365 downloads)


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#350695 - 09/03/2012 01:42 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: rjlov]
rjlov
member

Registered: 16/12/1999
Posts: 188
Loc: Melbourne, Australia

I've got some more logs, and I'm not really sure what they mean.

Some random, possibly interesting facts (some reiterated from before):

  • if the SATA->PATA adapter is a slave, then the ethernet is recognised (although writing this I realise that I didn't test if the ethernet actually works).
  • SATA->PATA works fine (albeit stomping on USB and network) with a spinning disk, was able to build disk and also copy about 60G of music to it, with no errors that I noticed.
  • SSD with SATA->PATA has issues with writing. Errors generally look like:
    Code:
      hdb: lost interrupt
      hdb: stat_err: status=0x58
      hdb: drive not ready for command
      hdb: stat_timo: status=0xd0
      ide0: reset timed-out, status=0x80
    

    (See attached log of mke2fs for details)
  • I did once see errors like this, but haven't been able to reproduce reliably:
    Code:
      hdb: stat_timo: status=0x80
      end_request: I/O error, dev 03:44 (hdb), sector 262232
      hdb: drive not ready for command
      hdb: stat_err: status=0xff
      hdb: no DRQ after issuing WRITE
    
  • SSD advertises itself as having a 0kb cache, (see attached output from hdparm -i/-I) I wonder if that might be part of the problem.


In the absence of suggestions I'll just keep pottering away. I'll post here in the event of a breakthrough.

Cheers,
Richard.


Attachments
hdparm-log.txt (445 downloads)
mke2fs-log.txt (349 downloads)


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#350698 - 09/03/2012 05:31 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: rjlov]
Ross Wellington
enthusiast

Registered: 21/02/2006
Posts: 325
Hi,

I ended up giving up on this for a while.

After I got the hardware somewhat working (much the same problems as you are experiencing), I ran into problems with Emplode and Jemplode not enjoying the SATA experience.

I hope you find something I missed.

In the meantime, the WD 250GB PATA drives went up in price.

Thanks,

Ross
_________________________
In SI, a little termination and attention to layout goes a long way. In EMC, without SI, you'll spend 80% of the effort on the last 3dB.

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#350702 - 09/03/2012 11:47 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: Ross Wellington]
mlord
carpal tunnel

Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14472
Loc: Canada
Newer drives, especially SSDs, are a lot faster with ATA protocol state transitions than older drives. This exposes flaws in the original (Intel) ATA protocol spec, as well as races in the Linux IDE code that I wrote nearly 20 years ago.

I believe those races have been discovered and fixed in upstream kernels, and I could probably find/fix them here with a few hours of fussing about.

There's also the possibility that the protocol bridges themselves may require slightly special handling, though I doubt it. Those things are not well tested on ancient, slow, PIO-only hosts (like the empeg) though.

Cheers

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#359836 - 26/09/2013 16:25 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: drakino]
Redrum
old hand

Registered: 17/01/2003
Posts: 998
Well it looks like HD number three, or maybe four, I kind of lost track, is on the way out. I have to use the old wack and spin procedure to get the HD to spin up.

I'd really like to use a non-mechanical drive this time. So I'm looking for advice. Is this the path I should go down or has anything newer and better come along?

I only need about 20G of space. I just want “whatever” to last more than a couple years. I’m not hard on the empeg???

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#359838 - 26/09/2013 16:47 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: Redrum]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5680
Loc: London, UK
Originally Posted By: Redrum
Is this the path I should go down or has anything newer and better come along?


You can get PATA SSD drives which just work, you know...
_________________________
-- roger

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#359839 - 26/09/2013 17:00 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: Roger]
Redrum
old hand

Registered: 17/01/2003
Posts: 998
Wow, thanks. I was not looking forward to "making something fit."

Just drop in it you say... great.

I sure have been out of the loop lately on things like this. I really should spend more time inside reading and not out in the sun smile

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#359890 - 07/10/2013 11:41 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: Roger]
Redrum
old hand

Registered: 17/01/2003
Posts: 998
OK, now I’m totally transistorized. I think these transistorized devices will really catch on. smile

No issues at all on the install. Just trying to recall Linux commands was the biggest problem. I hope this lasts longer than the other drives. I plan on having my Jeep and empeg til I'm dead.

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#359893 - 07/10/2013 19:40 Re: Current HD->CompactFlash status? [Re: Redrum]
mlord
carpal tunnel

Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14472
Loc: Canada
Speaking of which. I recently replaced the 128GB mSATA drive in my notebook with a 256GB mSATA drive. Which left me with the original 128GB mSATA. Dx.com and various eBay sellers have mSATA-to-IDE44 adapters, which would allow it to work inside an empeg.

So if you find yourself with a spare mSATA, that's one option.

Cheers

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