Formatting an empeg's Hard Disk Manually

The sequel to Partitioning an empeg’s Hard Disk Manually.

So, if you’ve followed the instructions on the previous page, you’ve now got a freshly-partitioned empeg hard disk. It’s time to format it.

Formatting the music partition

The music partition is stored on /dev/hdc4. You should format it with the following command:

empeg:/empeg/bin# mke2fs -m 0 -s 1 -i 131072 /dev/hdc4

This sets aside no reserved space for the superuser (that’s a zero after the -m) and uses 128KB per inode. We use the default block size and tell it to use sparse superblocks, which will speed up fsck. Aside: the builder formats it with -m 0 -b 1024 -i 131072. This is outdated. Do it the other way.

You should see output that looks a little like this:

mke2fs 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/
hdc4 is mounted.
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
92160 inodes, 2926602 blocks
0 blocks (0.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
90 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
1024 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208

Writing inode tables: done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

Initialising the swap partition

empeg:/empeg/bin# mkswap /dev/hdc6

Initialising the dynamic data partition

empeg:/empeg/bin# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc3
dd: /dev/hdc3: No space left on device
33265+0 records in
33264+0 records out

This writes as many zeros as possible to the dynamic data partition by reading them from /dev/zero (which is an infinite-sized source of zero bytes). It’ll stop when it hits the end of the dynamic data partition.

Creating directories on the music partition

The empeg player software stores its database files in /empeg/var, which is usually a symlink to /drive0/var. If this directory doesn’t exist, emplode will fail with a file not found error (0xC0041002). Both disks also need a fids directory, otherwise emplode won’t see the extra space. /empeg/fids0 is a symlink to /drive0/fids and /empeg/fids1 is a symlink to /drive1/fids.

So, once you’ve formatted the partition, mount it somewhere (if you’re using the empeg, /drive1 is a good place):

# mount -n /dev/hdc4 /drive1

Then you can create the directories:

# mkdir /drive1/fids
# mkdir /drive1/var

Note that these instructions assume that you’re using your empeg to format a second disk (so you’ve installed it as the slave). If you’ve installed the disk as master, you’ll need to change the above instructions so that “drive1” is “drive0”.

Installing a player image

The steps so far have prepared the disk only for holding music. If you’re planning on using the disk as the primary disk in your empeg, you’ll need to install a player image once you’ve fitted it.