Install a distro to USB HD/MP3 player?
 

Hello :)

I recently bought an MP3 player- specifically a Venturer 40Gig one. It's rather large and ugly, but what the hey. Anyway, 40GB is a fair amount of space, and I really doubt I'll fill it all with music, so I decided it might be a good idea to install a distribution of Linux to it- a relatively large, more desktop oriented one, compared to the Feather Linux I have on my smaller USB pen. Currently I'm relatively new to Linux, though I've tried a few distros- Ubuntu, Vector and Gentoo are the ones I remember- but they were all on an older, relatively low end box. However, from my good experiences with Knoppix and its lighter child Feather, I took a look at Kanotix (because it claims to be better for HD install than Knoppix and seems more of a desktop distro, and also for KDE pre-installed etc). I plan to be installing this using the HD install script, but pointing them to the USB HD instead of the internal HD (To make double sure, I'll make sure hda is unmounted ;), it wouldn't do to overwrite the contents of the family PCs HD).

It seems all good, and I'm fairly confident on install issues, but for one thing. I don't want to mess up my MP3 player and degrade it to a simple external HD! I don't know much about the internals of the player, and how it boots etc- what it expects to find. My guess would be that the firmware is fairly generic, and Venturer load it onto all their MP3 players, where it detects the size of the HD at startup- this is sort of supported by an info screen that tells you stats about the capacity (Total size and currently available). However will it be safe to partition it? If it simply looks at the first partition and assumes that's all there is, that would be fine, but otherwise I may be in trouble. The manual does warn against formatting the drive "from your computer", and to use the built in "format" menu option instead, and I'm not entirely sure why, but I *assume* there's a good reason.

So does anyone know a little more about this type of MP3 player, and/or has experience with installing Linux distros to it (whilst retaining mp3 functionality)? Thankyou in advance :)

I've never heard of the Ventura but I know a lot of information exists on this topic for iPods and iRivers. I installed and ran FreeBSD off my iPod a while ago which was fun, I just made a backup of my firmware which was pretty easy using tech info I found online and torched the partition table. After I had my fun I restored the original partitions and wrote the firmware back on.

Do some research on that player and see if you can figure anything out, I'd start by checking whether or not the Rockbox project supports your device because if they do, they've already done the leg work for you and you'll find the info in their wiki :)

Thankyou!

Unfortunately, my player isn't listed by the Rockbox project, so no dice there unfortunately :(. I'm having a bit of trouble finding further information on it- documentation seems to be thin on the ground- even the manufacturers website doesn't seem to list this model, and most of the results turned up by google are just a recap of the info you can find on the packaging or in the Argos catalogue (because Argos seems to be one of the very few places you can actually buy this thing new)- no technical specifications or utilities. Most stuff like that seems (unsurprisingly) to focus on the more well known and widely used media players. As mentioned above, I would really like to keep functionality as an MP3 player, and also be able to boot off it without having to fix it each time- so destroying current partitions or anything isn't the best way for me. To avoid having to write a bootloader (to the MBR?) which might foul it up, I could use a bootdisk floppy perhaps?

Anyway, did a little investigation myself- using "Partition Table Editor" I got some information about the partitioning scheme. However, to be honest, it doesn't make much sense. The software lists all four main partitions, gives their type and some other info.

#:Type
1:72
2:65
3:79
4:0D

Also, the total reported size of all partitions is apparently 2448056 MB, which is obviously wrong, although the total size of the drive listed by the program looks fine- "38083MB"

So all the primary partitions are taken, and I don't know how large each is, or what purpose each serves :( I would assume it should be safe to partition the storage partition.

Is there another solution than partitioning perhaps?