Info for new Receptor owners

[jeamsler]

This information may have been posted in the past but I thought I'd post what I know for any new Receptor owners who are wondering how to keep their second hand Receptor working. Since Receptor is linux based you can access the drive directly using any of the linux based system maintenance packages that are out there. I use SystemRescueCD on a usb drive. You can plug this in and with a keyboard and mouse get at the drive for maintenance and backup/recovery. You may have to get into the bios to allow booting from the usb drive but not tough to do. The benefits are that you can move larger files (like sample libraries) over a little faster than by network connection. You can do a backup and recovery of one or more of the receptor partitions using the partimage utility on the SysRescue drive. This can be done to a separate drive in a usb enclosure if you like. In Linux you'll have to mount whatever external usb drives you want to use for backup. I know next to nothing about linux but I was able to figure this out so not tough. The most important thing I think is you can do maintenance on the Receptor installation if it starts acting flaky. You can use the gparted utility to do a disk check/repair of each partition (there are 3 important ones). The few times things started to act funny I've done this and everything was usually fixed and my Receptor was stable again. I'm not going to write a long explanation of all of this but if anyone wants they can PM me for specific info. And if anyone else has other things to add or other ways to maintain a Receptor (without taking it apart as I've done) please chime in.
Jon

[plethoraguy]

Awesome! please explain more... How do you get the receptor to boot from the linux tools/ usb drive?

[jeamsler]

Receptor 1
Insert USB boot device first
Hit DEL on startup to get to bios (if needed bios pw: MUSE123)
Go to Advanced Bios Features > Boot Sequence > Hard Disk Boot Priority
(Ignore the 1st Boot Device, etc settings - won't help you)
Find your USB device in the list and move it to the top using the + key.
Hit F10 to save, exit and reboot.
Receptor should boot from the USB now.
There is a boot menu as well but USB flash drives are not shown so you can't use that. Note that Hard Disk Boot Priority settings only apply to what is there at the moment and after you remove the usb it won't be remembered later if you put it back in. So you'll have to go through this each time you want to boot from the USB. After you remove the USB drive your receptor should boot as normal with no bios mod.

Receptor 2
It should boot automatically off the USB when inserted. If not you'll have to go to bios and to the boot section to set it to boot off USB first when present. You can also access a boot menu by pressing F11 on boot which does show the USB so if you do it with F11 you won't have to touch the bios but as I said it should be set already to boot from USB (mine was anyways).

[plethoraguy]

Pretty Great Idea Jeamsler, Thanks for sharing that.

I went ahead and bought the systemrescuecd on a USB thumbdrive. I am able to boot and run the linux system. I am having some trouble mounting or viewing the Internal Receptor drive though. Gparted will see it (shows as "unmounted") and potentially will let me resize it, but I can't view or access any of the files on the drive itself. Did your Internal HDD just automatically show up or did you have to do something special to access it?

I've played around a little in linux before and it now occurs to me that I might've been better off just getting a full linux distro, but I might still end up DL one to my usb thumb drive--probably Fedora: it is a RedHat variant and I believe that is what the Receptor OS kernel is derived from.

[plethoraguy]

OK, I haven't dabbled in linux in a decade, so I'm pretty rusty, but a little research online got me what I needed re: resizing my partition and mounting both the Internal and the USB external drive to desktop so I could backup using linux rSync.

My current question to you jeamsler (or anyone who wants to chime in); The muse drive has THREE partitions
sda1) FAT32 format, (probably Receptor boot OS?)
sda2) EXT3 format (on Receptor 2+) or EXT4 (on Receptor VIP), not sure what lives here
sda3) EXT3 / EXT 4 (as above) where the BULK of the drive space and most (all?) of the software I've installed (roughly 2 Tb) seems to live.

So to the question;
Do I also need to backup the 1st TWO partitions or is just the 3rd Large partition sufficient?

Anyone?

[andym63]

Hi
The fat 32 partition is not your receptor it is most proberbly your usb drive the one you have pluged in to your receptor.
Receptors do not have Fat 32 partitions on there internal hard drives.(ever)
You should clone the whole of your receptors HD not just the partitions.(Unless you are an expert on linux partition structure).If you are in the slightest unsure of what you are doing read the posts on the forum concearning this subject,untill you are certain of what you are doing.
I would recomend that you either use a Hardware HD cloner,or a unetbootin distro with ghost for linux and parted magic on a bootable usb thumb drive.Ghost can be used ti clone the Receptor drive to another Hd of the same size.I would avoid resizing if i where you unless of course you are absolutley shure what you are doing or if you have at least 2 working clones.

Regards Andy

[plethoraguy]

Thanks for the reply Andy. I have normally been using a hardware disk cloner (i.e. Yanking the drive out of the chassis and cloning the entire 2tb drive) but this requires cracking open the case and takes a couple of hours. I was lookIng for a simple and fast way to update my backup clone whenever I go about installng new plugin vsts. I did have a clean clone as backup before I used gparted to resize my partition (orig drive on my VIP was only 1 Tb). Worked without a hitch and only took a minute or two. Not sure what to tell you about the fat32 partition on the internal and the clone but I am fairly certain they are NOT the Linux thumbdrive, as that shows up independently. I did use rsync to archive just the large partition and it allowed me to update the clone pretty quickly with only the files that were new or had changed. I then booted from the clone and everything SEEMED good including the new changes I had made. I won't consider this clone as SAFE until I figure out what is happening/contained on the two smaller partitions on the internal and the clone. I'll look into Ghost (which I'd have to compile from a repository as it's not part of my distro) It seems like a reasonable tool to use instead of an external cloner, but again, I assume this would have to copy the entire 2tb, which still takes a long time. I am hoping worst case at this point is I have to mount and rsync all three partitions individually. Shouldn't take long to do the actual data transfer but kinda messy making 6 mount points instead of 2, and running rsync three times instead of once. Wish me luck that I don't brick this thing

[plethoraguy]

Also, fwiw, the only reason I'm on this road is because my VIP OS does not have the archival tool in the expert mode submenu. I think that version came out later and the orig owner never updated. I chatted with Kevin Bryson (last remaining hope for official muse issues) and he said there was no source for that update anymore. .

[andym63]

hi
Ghost will allow you to clone a partition allso.
On my quatto i have conected a sata cable and power cable to empty connectors on the Mainbord and pulled them out through the trapdoor on the bottom of the unit.So i can backup withought opening the unit it is also possible to boot from this infact i allways carry a reserve clone just in case never needed it yet though.
Regards Andy

[plethoraguy]

Yeah that external drive access is not a bad idea! I am just glad there are problem solvers like yourself with new ideas that extend the life / value of our investment in receptors. We are on our own now so it's important to share the knowledge. I get the fact that they had to make a business decision in closing up shop, but I wish they would've opened up the info gates a little more. Kevin Bryson is avail still on a paid private basis, and he was very helpful on a couple of issues I had earlier. But still, he will eventually tire of us and move on.

[plethoraguy]

ANDYM63, you were absolutely correct--ALL THREE partitions on the Receptor drive are indeed formatted as EXT3 or EXT 4 (depending on the the particular model). Only the linux boot thumbdrive has a FAT32 partition. Must've written it down on my notepad wrong.
That'll teach me for staying up late past my bedtime.

[andym63]

Hello
ive been there to !Once i accidentally deleted the grub partition (the first and smallest partition of the three)it completeley bricked my receptor.I had only had it a month.!

[Jace-BeOS]

What if your power supply died? Any third party power supplies that work in Receptor 1? All the supplies I've seen online lack the appropriate connections and Muse's repair service is more expensive than my unit is worth.

[plethoraguy]

Hey Jace, you should probably ask this question in it's own thread / topic. But I believe the cpus in all the various receptor models are off-the-shelf components so I can't imagine it would be too hard to replace. Do you know what cpu you are running inside the case?

[andym63]

Receptor2 (Pro max)
Motherboard and processor.
Intel core 2 duo (TM) E8400 @ 3.00GHz or E8600.(max)

motherboards in 2 variants.
Mb 1 .MSI G4 1M-P25 (MS-7292)
mb 2.Intel Desktop board DQ35J0
Both boards are socket LGA775

the intel board uses DDR2.
The Msi uses DDR3.
max 8 GB for both

Receptor power supply
Sparkle Power SPI220LE Flex ATX & ATX12V Power Supply (SPI220LE)