noob setting up carputer w/ WL-HDD

[blarg]

hey, I'm very new to this device, and I did some searching, but not really finding what I'm looking for so....here goes:

the idea is this: I have a Dell Axim X51v running WM5.

Its set up in my car as my GPS and MP3 player. I've been playing MP3's from a 1GB SD card, but I've read about people setting up wireless hard drives to store their MP3's. I plan to have the WL-HDD hardwired in my car.

I bought a 160 GB drive and installed it. I've read that you can't have partitions larger than 40 GB on this thing, so 4x40=160 and that's about the best you can do.

When I installed it, the internal formatting program allowed me to format the whole drive as one 160 GB partition! However, my Windows XP machine can't read it. I installed a driver to mount EXT3 filesystems, and the driver DID detect the partition, but I was unable to access it.

I gather that none of the custom firmwares have full NTFS support yet?

I plugged the drive into my router and started to transfer my MP3 collection yesterday (about 120 gigs) and 24 hours later, its STILL GOING! it would be really nice if I could just connect it to my PC via USB or something, but I can't get it to read the file system.

Also, did I understand correctly that the WL-HDD does not support WPA-PSK or WPA2 in client mode?

I'd like to be able to connect to my home network when my car is parked so I can update the music collection and video files from my TiVo, but it appears that you cannot connect to a WPA-PSK network, right? you can only HOST one on this device?

thanks a bunch for your help!

so...if I'm just going to use this device to host files in my car, would there be any benefit to running the custom firmware?

[PocketBrain]

I have a WL-HDD with a 60GB drive, two 30GB partitions. Basically, if you are going to use it as a file server only, you are okay with the standard firmware, as I have done this successfully, setting the WL-HDD in AP mode. Your transfer speed seems a little slow; have you tried connecting between the ethernet ports on your PC and WL-HDD? I have a Dell Axim X50/520. I still haven't bridged to my home network, but I'm updating the firmware tonight and retrying. I normally take my little ASUS inside with me and hook it up directly to the PC. It carries movies, music, and a full Mapopolis North American map pack. I have also tested it with an external USB drive connected to the USB port, and it works, albeit slowly, more slowly than a direct file transfer from the WL-HDD's installed drive. I am thinking Oleg's firmware would allow me to terminal in and start a file transfer from drive to drive then disconnect, but haven't flashed Oleg or researched it much yet. F/W version is 1.2.3.4.

[blarg]

when I tranfered files I WAS going through ethernet (I gave up on getting it to connect through wifi to my network...too complicated), and it was SLOW. Took about 24 hours to transfer 120 gigs (over ethernet).

It does work great in the car though. 120 gigs of music, and then I dump all my TiVo recordings (after re-compressing them for PPC)...and the x51v actually has enough memory to store the entire west coast map internally...I have TomTom and the entire north america set on the HDD, but its not like I'm going to suddenly drive cross-country on a whim.

it took a long time when I booted up PocketPlayer and told it to read the contents of the drive, (took about 25 minutes), but once it loaded I saved it as a new playlist (that loads by default) so it doesn't take all that time anymore. I just have to do it once every time I update the music on my HDD....that doesn't happen TOO often, and I can just leave it over night.