Emtec Movie Cube HDD Upgrade
09/11/08 14:37
A while ago now, I think around 3
years back I bought an Emtec Movie Cube, for those of you who dont know
what it is, its an external HDD drive running Linux that you can
connect directly to a TV and then play back files, whether they be
movies, music or photos on the TV.
It comes with a remote and was supposed to have firmware updates in order to keep up to date with codecs as things change and originally it came in 2 capacities, a 40GB version or an 80GB version. Copying files to it couldnt be simpler, you just connect it to any computer via a USB port and it will then show up as an external drive and you just drag and drop the files onto it and create directories as you wish.
So far we have been quite happy with it and it came in especially useful after my daughter was born (Tivo isnt here yet), as we would just put programmes etc that we wanted to watch on it and could pause them if she needed us.
The only downside with this those has been the HDD size, we quite quickly ran into the 80GB limit as we werent able to watch things too often and some nights we were just so tired that we went to bed once we got Elizabeth to sleep.
So I decided this past weekend to take a look and see if there was something that I could do with it, the first thing that I decided to check was whether the Linux installation was on the HDD itself or on a chip in the enclosure.
I connected the drive up to the computer and took a look at it in Disk Utility and t showed up that it only had the one partition on there where I have all of the files that we are watching, this was good news as it pointed to the possibility that Linux was actually part of the hardware and not stored on a hidden partition.
The next step was to check the enclosure itself, so I took the drive apart and took a look at the PCB inside and sure enough there was the ROM chip with Linux on, so now the last obstacle was whether it would support a larger drive. I checked on the internet but I wasnt able to find anyone who had done this already and also Emtec’s site is notoriously useless, so I didnt find anything there that would help. I then decided that the best thing to do would be to just take the plunge and see if it worked, after all the main advantage here is that as I am replacing the drive with a larger version I would still have the original drive to put back in case things didnt work out.
The drive that was inside was an IDE 2.5” Travelstar, rated at 4800rpm and as I mentioned earlier it had a capacity of 80GB, dismounting the drive wasnt hard but it is quite fiddly as the connector is stiff and at the end of the PCB there are some components that stick out from the PCB itself. Needless to say, I was unlucky and when the HDD suddenly popped free of its connector it hit one of these components and it popped off
Some work with the soldering iron and
I had it back on, though my soldering skills leave a lot to be
desired.
The replacement drive was from an Apple Macbook, I believe it was an Hitachi 120GB at 5400rpm but I could be wrong about the manufacturer.
My first step was to attempt to clone the original drive to the new one, originally I wanted to use SuperDuper to do it but when I tried it couldnt see the source drive at all. I next tried Carbon Copy Cloner, which could see the source and destination drives, which was great, so I set it to erase the destination drive and clone the first one to the destination and went to put my daughter to bed.
When I came back, I discovered that for some reason CCC hadnt erased the destination drive at all, it had just tried to copy the files over and had ran out of space. I noticed that the format of the destination drive was still Mac OS Extended and not MSDOS as the source was. So I went into Disk Utility, selected the destination drive, created a new partition on it, thus erasing everything but for some reason I couldnt choose MSDOS as a format, just the standard journaled or non-journaled formats and NTFS (I have mac fuse installed). So I left it on journaled, created the partition and then went to the erase tab, here I found that I could erase the drive as MSDOS, so one problem solved.
Once done, I started up CCC again and it couldnt see the destination drive at all, neither could Superduper, so I tried Drive Genius 2 and its duplicate drive option, which could see both and was quite happy to clone them. I started this going and 2 hours into the clone, at around 68% it stalled, I left it for 30 minutes but it didnt recover itself so I restarted it and afterwards had a lot of problems with OS X itself. Everything was really slow and behaving erratically. I rebooted into single user mode, ran Applejack and did a fsck on the disk, cleared out caches etc and that seemed to sort out those weird problems I was having and this time when I started Drive Genius 2 it finished after 3 hours successfully.
At this point I was quite happy and imagined just putting the new drive into the enclosure and booting it up would be the next step, except I then noticed that the mounted drive on the desktop was listing the same size and capacity as the original source drive, that is to say 72GB. Of course this was because DG2 had literally copied the drive sector for sector but I didnt think this was a problem, I thought that I would just open disk utility, expand the partition to include the free space and that would be it. Except of course for the fact that disk utility couldnt expand the partition, it could see the free space but all of the options were greyed out, which I am guessing was a result of it being an MSDOS partition. I looked around for a while for a way to expand the partition non-destructively with something I had on my machine already but Im not enough of a Unix person to find the command I needed in the terminal and so I ended up getting ipartition.
This worked out quite well, ipartition provided a nice GUI, so I just grabbed the partition, stretched it into the free space and left it to run, which took about 2 hours. In the morning when I came back downstairs, I popped the drive into the enclosure, reconnected it to the TV and fired it up and was quite happy to see the Emtec logo, this made me happy for a few reasons, one it meant my soldering although terrible had worked and not fried something and that the Emtec could take larger drives, as well as now having an extra 30GB of space. So what I thought would be a relatively quick 2 hour job, turned into a bit of an adventure but with a happy ending
It comes with a remote and was supposed to have firmware updates in order to keep up to date with codecs as things change and originally it came in 2 capacities, a 40GB version or an 80GB version. Copying files to it couldnt be simpler, you just connect it to any computer via a USB port and it will then show up as an external drive and you just drag and drop the files onto it and create directories as you wish.
So far we have been quite happy with it and it came in especially useful after my daughter was born (Tivo isnt here yet), as we would just put programmes etc that we wanted to watch on it and could pause them if she needed us.
The only downside with this those has been the HDD size, we quite quickly ran into the 80GB limit as we werent able to watch things too often and some nights we were just so tired that we went to bed once we got Elizabeth to sleep.
So I decided this past weekend to take a look and see if there was something that I could do with it, the first thing that I decided to check was whether the Linux installation was on the HDD itself or on a chip in the enclosure.
I connected the drive up to the computer and took a look at it in Disk Utility and t showed up that it only had the one partition on there where I have all of the files that we are watching, this was good news as it pointed to the possibility that Linux was actually part of the hardware and not stored on a hidden partition.
The next step was to check the enclosure itself, so I took the drive apart and took a look at the PCB inside and sure enough there was the ROM chip with Linux on, so now the last obstacle was whether it would support a larger drive. I checked on the internet but I wasnt able to find anyone who had done this already and also Emtec’s site is notoriously useless, so I didnt find anything there that would help. I then decided that the best thing to do would be to just take the plunge and see if it worked, after all the main advantage here is that as I am replacing the drive with a larger version I would still have the original drive to put back in case things didnt work out.
The drive that was inside was an IDE 2.5” Travelstar, rated at 4800rpm and as I mentioned earlier it had a capacity of 80GB, dismounting the drive wasnt hard but it is quite fiddly as the connector is stiff and at the end of the PCB there are some components that stick out from the PCB itself. Needless to say, I was unlucky and when the HDD suddenly popped free of its connector it hit one of these components and it popped off
Some work with the soldering iron and
I had it back on, though my soldering skills leave a lot to be
desired.The replacement drive was from an Apple Macbook, I believe it was an Hitachi 120GB at 5400rpm but I could be wrong about the manufacturer.
My first step was to attempt to clone the original drive to the new one, originally I wanted to use SuperDuper to do it but when I tried it couldnt see the source drive at all. I next tried Carbon Copy Cloner, which could see the source and destination drives, which was great, so I set it to erase the destination drive and clone the first one to the destination and went to put my daughter to bed.
When I came back, I discovered that for some reason CCC hadnt erased the destination drive at all, it had just tried to copy the files over and had ran out of space. I noticed that the format of the destination drive was still Mac OS Extended and not MSDOS as the source was. So I went into Disk Utility, selected the destination drive, created a new partition on it, thus erasing everything but for some reason I couldnt choose MSDOS as a format, just the standard journaled or non-journaled formats and NTFS (I have mac fuse installed). So I left it on journaled, created the partition and then went to the erase tab, here I found that I could erase the drive as MSDOS, so one problem solved.
Once done, I started up CCC again and it couldnt see the destination drive at all, neither could Superduper, so I tried Drive Genius 2 and its duplicate drive option, which could see both and was quite happy to clone them. I started this going and 2 hours into the clone, at around 68% it stalled, I left it for 30 minutes but it didnt recover itself so I restarted it and afterwards had a lot of problems with OS X itself. Everything was really slow and behaving erratically. I rebooted into single user mode, ran Applejack and did a fsck on the disk, cleared out caches etc and that seemed to sort out those weird problems I was having and this time when I started Drive Genius 2 it finished after 3 hours successfully.
At this point I was quite happy and imagined just putting the new drive into the enclosure and booting it up would be the next step, except I then noticed that the mounted drive on the desktop was listing the same size and capacity as the original source drive, that is to say 72GB. Of course this was because DG2 had literally copied the drive sector for sector but I didnt think this was a problem, I thought that I would just open disk utility, expand the partition to include the free space and that would be it. Except of course for the fact that disk utility couldnt expand the partition, it could see the free space but all of the options were greyed out, which I am guessing was a result of it being an MSDOS partition. I looked around for a while for a way to expand the partition non-destructively with something I had on my machine already but Im not enough of a Unix person to find the command I needed in the terminal and so I ended up getting ipartition.
This worked out quite well, ipartition provided a nice GUI, so I just grabbed the partition, stretched it into the free space and left it to run, which took about 2 hours. In the morning when I came back downstairs, I popped the drive into the enclosure, reconnected it to the TV and fired it up and was quite happy to see the Emtec logo, this made me happy for a few reasons, one it meant my soldering although terrible had worked and not fried something and that the Emtec could take larger drives, as well as now having an extra 30GB of space. So what I thought would be a relatively quick 2 hour job, turned into a bit of an adventure but with a happy ending