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