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MPC goes thru a lot of trouble and time consuming efforts to enable users finding their way into the digital words including writing up extensive reviews, guides and providing constant support online at the Forums. MPC is not a commercial organization and therefore counts on the users for keeping MPC healthy in a financial way to continue our work and projects online. If you benefit from our work and appreciate everything we do, consider supporting MPC by making a small contribution. In return, you get even more benefits than already available out there for free http://www.mpcclub.com/mpc_options/mpc_options.htm Thank you in advance! Yours Truly, Hi-Jack

to the PCH A-100 not having a USB Slave connection so it can serve you as external USB disk beside its media abilities. Instead you are limited using FTP and SAMBA mounting to PC which delivers you a poor 4-6MBps. That said, it is rarely so that the scene, mostly referred to as the community, is limited to these speeds due to what we call design limitations. Bringing a HD player with internal hard drive and then not offer speeds worthy to be used with copying HD files is a killer and here is the solution: Another Hi-Jack Guide! In this guide, we cover first the SMB connection and how this is done. Next, we will offer a more difficult, but much faster solution to transfer data to the internal hard drive which might scare you off, but really, it is not as hard as you might think so at least try it if owning a big hard drive as the time you spend doing it as in method 2 saves days against the time spend doing it in the official method 1. In the end, we could be saving you a whole days time transferring your files using our alternative method. Now thats a massive time saver for all of us. Do read our ATTENTION heading before starting. It is important to make sure our and your efforts were not a waste of time!!!

Contents
MPC Message ......................................................................1 Fast Copy with PoPCorn Hour ............................................1 Method 1: SMB mapping ...................................................1 Method 2: The Hi-Jack way (medium skill) .........................2 ATTENTION: (READ CAREFULLY!!) ....................................3 Speed Difference ..............................................................3 Super TIP for more convenience ........................................3

Method 1: SMB mapping

You all know a hard drive inside a PC being accessible using a drive letter. The hard drive that contains your windows OS for example is usually on the C: drive. In the same way as using the hard drives inside the PC, you can connect to the PCHs internal hard drive and map it as a drive letter. What you need: Only the IP address of your PopCorn Hour unit.

Fast Copy with PoPCorn Hour

What a mistake might be the first thing you say after seeing PoPCorn Hour A100 and you just fitted in a hard drive. Searching a way to fast fill a 750GB hard drive is not possible due

On the PopCorn Hour unit, go into the Setup and select the network. Here you will find the IP Address assigned to your media player. Now on your PC, click the Start menu and select RUN. Enter the following command in the field and press enter:

net use v: \\IPADDRESS\share (replace IP address with your IP like in the example below)

Step 2: Shut down the PC. Take out the hard drive of the PoPCorn Hour media player and connect it to your PC. It doesnt matter if its slave or master for all I know but if it fails, try master (mine is ) Step 3: Boot your PC and once live, go to your start menu and open the Ext2SFD program. You will see it loads the interface and if all is well, you will see 3 partitions of which 1 is SWAP and 2 others are EXT3. This is your PoPCorn Hour hard drive.

Once this is done, if you now go check inside My Computer from your desktop, you will see there is a new drive V: in our case accessible in windows. We can now start copying all movies, music and pictures we want on it at the allowed copy speeds which isnt much if you have a load of data to copy! But thats why there is another method

Method 2: The Hi-Jack way (medium skill)

Since the unit is easily opened and the hard drive can fairly easy be removed, it is beneficial if using a big drive (320GB and up) to do the initial filling using your PC. There is a problem where windows will not be able to read the hard drive being in EXT3 format and windows only supports FAT32 and NTFS. This can be resolved with a so called Windows EXT2/3 driver application. In a first step, we will install this, shut down the PC, insert the Hard Drive of the PopCorn in the PC and then boot it up. The software will then make the hard drive available to Windows by a drive letter and offer you read and write access at full speed, up to 6X faster than the performance in method 1. Imagine, every hour you copy files using the SMB method; you only need 10 minutes using this tip. One important message, after copying you must FLUSH the data TO DISK using the software. Do not shutdown the computer before this is done as it will result in all data you have copied to be removed from the CACHE. I am not aware of how much data you are allowed to copy in one session so part of the experiment is still yours Download the Ext2Fsd program: Here Step 1: Install the program and when prompted, select all the options about read/write EXT2/3 formatted disks and let the server start automatically as well. Its a straight forward installation.

Check the sizes beside the entries. The biggest of the three available is your data partition. This is where your data should be located. At this moment however, the drive is not yet available to windows as we have not assigned a drive letter yet.

Right Click in the Volume field of the entry that has the biggest disk space available on the PCH A-100 hard drive. Select from the available options Change Drive Letter. Now in the new windows, click ADD and select a drive of your choice from the list of available letters. Select the option Mount via DefineDosDevice, will be lost after

reboot as option. We do this, because we want to remove the hard drive after copying and its no use leaving the connection fixed on the PC.

Speed Difference
The whole purpose of this guide is showing you with a little workaround everyone can handle, a serious increase in speed performance to initially fill up the hard drive. After all, copying one file occasionally or transfer your 750GB media collection to the internal drive is 2 different things. And here it is:

Click on OK after you are done and close the other windows as well. If you now go check inside My Computer from your desktop, you will see there is a new drive E: in our case accessible in windows. We can now start copying all movies, music and pictures we want on it at full speed!

In case of 750GB copy, you save about a full day (24 hours) of time installing a little program and spending 10 minutes on connecting the drive to your PC. Thats a massive difference and a great tip we hope you all will find useful and enjoy

Super TIP for more convenience

The hard drive should be connected to PC though not necessarily mentioned as in our guide. If you have an external USB enclosure or wish to avoid connecting the hard drive internally by acquiring one, it should work in the same way as what we done but add a little more convenience to it of not having to open your PC A removable drive cage is also a solution so you can go 3 ways with this guide leading to better performance for filling up the hard drive. This tip is also valid for several other models like Istar, Dune HD Ultra and others having a hard drive.
Digitally signed by hi-jack DN: cn=hi-jack, c=BE, o=MPC Club, ou=Board Members, [email protected] Reason: I am the author of this document Date: 2008.01.12 15:02:19 +01'00'

hi-jack
ATTENTION: (READ CAREFULLY!!)
There is one crucial step to successfully coping data on the drive like this using this tool. After you done copying files you must flush the cache to the hard drive otherwise there will be no new data on disk inserting it back inside the unit.