Need Help Increasing Drive Capacity

[redstripe]

I desperately need to increase the drive space on my Hometroller-SE Pro from its stock 4gb capacity and I'm looking for suggestions on the easiest way to go about it. I've been unsuccessful in searching for help.

I'm not incredibly PC savvy but follow directions well . I'm running HS3 on the embedded XP and presume I can rather easily swap the 4gb card for an 8gb card - is this correct?

- Is there a specific CF card I should be getting?

- I have a restore stick and can certainly "start over" and restore my configuration but was hoping there was a simpler route... can I somehow clone my existing system onto an external or thumb drive, swap the CF cards and clone the system onto the new card with everything in tact?

Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.

[Rupp]

Can't you just add an external hard drive to the unit?

[redstripe]

Can't you just add an external hard drive to the unit?

Thanks for the response. Had hoped that would be the simple solution but (and this is where my non-PC sensibility lies) I can't imagine it's as simple as, say, dragging the Program Files folder onto the external drive and running HS from there. Or is it?

[Rupp]

Thanks for the response. Had hoped that would be the simple solution but (and this is where my non-PC sensibility lies) I can't imagine it's as simple as, say, dragging the Program Files folder onto the external drive and running HS from there. Or is it?

No it's not that easy. What files are taking up all of your space as HS shouldn't be taking up 4 GB of space.

[Pete]

I did one last year or year before. Purchased a 16Gb SSD DOM and installed it. Booted up with an external Ubuntu live CD. Used GParted to write the image from the CF card to the SSD DOM. Expanded the SSD image to a full 16 GB.

You can also just write the image to a USB stick. Then plug in the 16Gb SSD DOM and write the image back from the USB stick to the new SSD DOM.

[Wadenut]

Not entirely sure about the SE, but I have experience with both an HT2 and HT3.
Check to see if the board has any SATA connectors. If it does, you're laughing.
At that point, you can install a SATA hard drive in place of the CF card or DOM and if the restore stick won't restore the system to the drive (The HT2 wouldn't while the HT3 did for me, likely a bad restore stick as it wouldn't work for me with the original config either) you might use software like Acronis (http://www.acronis.com/en-us/) to clone the existing card to the larger disk. You may need to do this in a separate machine. In my case I used a 120GB SSD in both cases but you could go larger. Whatever you do, don't try to install a CF card along with the DOM if that's what's in the machine now (like the HT2). The HT2 didn't like that, and I fried the DOM. While I did eventually 'fix' it, it's not worth the stress.
As I recall, there were some BIOS adjustments to be done as well re. boot sequence.

[Pete]

Yeah the one I played with had the smallest IDE socket (laptop size) DOM and SATA port.



I couldn't find a SATA DOM that would fit right so I went with a 16Gb IDE DOM which worked. It was Hector's Hometroller. I did test out running Ubuntu on it and it did OK but not great. It was still pretty slow.

Googling this morning looks like it has a 500Mhz-1Gz Epia Via CPU. I used these for CarPCs years ago. Personally you could update it for more space. That said the 1Gz single threaded CPU is really pushing running HS3 on it. 1-2 Gb of RAM is not much. I was able to get Hector's Hometroller running Ubuntu for HS3 but it was really slow.

Open it up and take a picture of the motherboard.

[redstripe]

Thanks for all of the replies. If I understand correctly per Pete's suggestion I can write the disk image to a USB stick then copy it back onto a newly installed CF card. A few have mentioned an SSD DOM. Do I presume correctly that the CF card is the only "drive" in the unit and I don't have an SSD DOM or am I missing something? I haven't opened it up yet but it looks like the CF card should just slide out.

I may even try copying the image onto a USB stick and booting up from that - I can't imagine why that wouldn't work but, again, my PC manipulation skills are slim. Please correct me if I'm getting this all wrong and thanks again for the kind assistance.

What files are taking up all of your space as HS shouldn't be taking up 4 GB of space.

The system folder alone is 2.2 gb. Even trimmed down as much as possible (I even took Chrome off) I have just shy of 1 gig left. Before I recently restored it I was running out of space for updates. I'm assuming some non-essential files went away with the restore but it's clearly time for a space upgrade.

Googling this morning looks like it has a 500Mhz-1Gz Epia Via CPU. I used these for CarPCs years ago. Personally you could update it for more space. That said the 1Gz single threaded CPU is really pushing running HS3 on it. 1-2 Gb of RAM is not much

The processor is VIA Eden 1Ghz with a gig of RAM which I would have hoped was enough as I bought this unit from Homeseer just over two years ago with HS3. Perhaps this is why it gets so hot - something I've read about elsewhere on the forum. In any event, it generally runs smoothly and I haven't seen real speed hiccups to speak of.

[Pete]

Best to take a picture of the motherboard first to see if you can fit a DOM in it rather than utilize a CF card. You can also copy the CF card to another one which is larger using a USB to CF card device (well two of them). Note easy to do in Windows or Ubuntu.



You will not be able to boot with a USB stick with the BIOS on the device.

1Ghz Via Eden / 1Gb of RAM is a bit slow in embedded windows. I tried with Ubuntu and it was still slow.

If you can take the memory to 2Gb it will help some with an IDE DOM drive to speed it up a bit.

[redstripe]

Thanks Pete. I appreciate all the assistance & will report back.

[Pete]

Yup; you can do this in vivo using free tools in Windows or non in vivo using free tools on a live boot up disk of either windows or linux.

The basics are the same. You do a raw copy of the media (raw bytes of media - not OS) (whatever it is) to another media then expand it to the full size of the media. Lately here for my HS3 touch screens running on embedded windows I just copy the media then expand it the media once it is running in vivo. Works fine.

First things first is you want to find out what you can use, purchase it (thinking less than $30) and do the do. You will not mangle the source as you are just copying the media. Keep it on the side and intact to use in case....