Hello

When the temperature drops to the dismal lows of 3 Celcius and below my EMPEG reports 'No hard disk found contact support'. Hello . There is a lot of clunking as the disk attempts to mount, on warming up the car the disk starts OK.
The SW is version 2.00 consumer with HiJack kernal. The HW is standard 20GB Mk. 2.
Any Owners know what to do or is there an unfixable problem?
Thanks.

I don't wish to be churlish, the player is in the car tonight and it's too cold to collect.
Aren't the EMPEGs specified to work from, say -10 to +55C, and the factory harddrives able to cope in a British winter?

Yeah, um, I'm not sure how you're expecing a hard disk to function at 3c.

Doing what you're doing is going to severely shorten the life span of your disk drive. Better be ready to replace it, and I hope all your MP3s are backed up on your PC.

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Quote:
[orange]We considered various heating options.....

Sounds like an opportunity for another project for someone. I actually had my hard drive complain of the temps awhile back, forget what the temps were but somewhere in the low 20's F region. I have a mix of drives, the original & a self-installed. The options for a solution for people in the more cold prone areas seem approachable of course. Taking the player out is the most ideal if you remember or get in the habit of it. I have left mine in the car much more often than not. I have temp extremes here of anything from 0F to indeces of 105F (sealed black vehicle) & have had little problems w/the drives balking. Is it worth any trouble, probably as I'm sure the drives are on borrowed time now, do I want to have replace them, NO! It's like Tony says the drives subjected to these extremes isn't good, start thinking of replacement before it's too late.
One solution might be a small bulb as a remedy as a small filament bulb can generate enough heat to keep a small area much warmer & the bulb wouldn't have to be that big. On the extreme side perhaps a small hydrogen plant:) The matter of a battery operated object having something running overnight can have it's own barriers though as everyone knows. It's not something that's insurmountable though. I have no idea what I'm leading to but certainly people on this board have the knowhow.
My biggest ? is Roger mentioned various heating options can they be divulged on this board as to the methods looked at?

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

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

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

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...

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

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.

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

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.

the silence is deafening...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Works fine for the dynamic data partition.

Still transferring for the full disk image trial..