I got a Empeg from ebay and it was not been updated. The about says it is version 1.03 and I can not connect to it over usb or ethernet in Emplode. It will see my device on Ethernet and usb, however I gives me message "The Operation has been complete successfully" and does nothing else. It does this in windows xp and windows 7.

Jemplode will not find it at all, when I specify the network address it returns "failed to receive packet".

My serial cable should be here tomorrow; hopefully it will let me flash it to newer firmware.

Is there a copy of Emplode v1.0? I did not get a disk with this and the Emplode v2.0 download page says it is only compatible with 2.xx

I updated the firmware via serial cable. I used bigdisk build as recommended in the FAQ. After flashing it reboots and displays "drives already built" message.

I used these commands, I could not execute the last command "ROM" it says command not found -
http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/308693/help_needed_drives_already_bui

With this method -
http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/6527?PHPSESSID=9e1837a0702867f299fc52f4312ac889

This was supposed to reformat my drive so that the new firmware could rebuild it and make it usable. This did not work. I still got "drives already built" message after it was rebuilt successfully.

I ended up just installing the v3 alpha 10 firmware from empeg web site, then installing the hijack kernel through linux (I could not get the windows kernel utility to work).

Everything is working now and I am syncing Soundgarden albums as I am typing this.

Long time since I fiddled with this, but...

Did you type "ROM" or "rom"? - in Unix case matters and the command is 'rom'...

rom - short for read only mount (counterpart to rwm - read write mount) which remounts the partitions as read only.
Not doing so isn't harmful as such, but an unexpected shutdown (IIRC anything besides explicitly using the 'shutdown' command) should
trigger an fack (file system check) on next startup as the system would be uncertain as to the consistency of the file systems on partitions
that were writable at the time of shutdown.

After reading your post I decided to try it again. It turns out I was using the hard drive builder firmware. The command prompt was just a Bash 2.0 for the builder and the rom command did not work. I think I messed up the hard drive (it was only the stock 10 GB), it will not mount anymore, it gives me mounting errors in hyperterminal and in jemplode it says I has 0 space.

Im going to wait for my 160 GB hard drive (with a 5 year warranty, btw) to ship in before I try this again.

While you wait for the 160, you might want to familiarize yourself with the way the builder and the firmware updaters work, practicing on the 10gb drive.

Here is the full procedure:
http://riocar.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Drive_Upgrade&file=index

Yeah that FAQ cleared up my second post completely. The builder firmware did what it was supposed to do( build the drive). I was expecting it actually be the full player firmware. I then actually did what I was supposed to do in the FAQ (install the player firmware) which gave me a working drive.

Sorry about all the confusion. I am a computer science major and jumped at the chance for linux in my car stereo, without first reading the instructions.

Congrats. You purchased the best car stereo ever (albeit 10 years late )

Yeah, welcome to the club!

If installing stuff to the empeg seems somewhat clunky, that's because it is somewhat clunky.

But do keep in mind that all of this was one of the first embedded Linux products on the market, and it pre-dates nearly all of the modern embedded tools/support/drivers we have nowadays.

Cheers