Experience with Escient Fireball and Modules

vining

I believe the "buggy" comment was in regard to the video ARQ. The Kaleidescape lawsuit has been settled but I don't know if the decsion will hold up on appeal if the DVD CCA does in fact appeal.
http://www.kaleidescape.com/company/pr/PR-20070329-DVDCCA.html

ekeppel

Wiping the hard drive, for those who are interested...

In the past, we have had problems with hard drives going out on many of our customer's E-40 Fireballs. We had quite a rash of them dying this last year, but to be fair, they do run pretty much 24/7 and have been in service several years straight.

At any rate, in the course of diagnosing these bad drives, Escient technical support directed me to their FTP site where they host Esicent OS ISOs for download.

These CD images can be downloaded, burned to a CD-R and then loaded into the Escient. You would then reboot the Escient with the CD in the drive, and it will refresh the drive with a fresh copy of the Escient operating system and can remove all music files (depending on the image you download; one is called "Golden", and the other is "Delta".)

The Golden ISO essentially starts over from scratch to give you a fresh Escient without any music like it came from the factory. The Delta ISO attempts to preserve existing music, and only overwrites the operating system files.

Both of these come in really handy when you run into problems, so call up Escient tech support and ask for them. I keep a couple of these disks around, since sometimes just refreshing with the Delta will solve no-boot problems and such.

Keep in mind, though, that it may only be a matter of time before your Escient's HDD goes full belly up if you are having these sort of problems. Perhaps by now Escient has switched drive manufacturers and we will see longer drive life.