Shuttle SN41G2 & Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen

[Doom9]

I've just contacted Creative customer support but you never know with those hotlines, so.. I finally have my Shuttle barebone up and running and besides the noise there's one thing bugging me: my brand new Zen won't work with the shuttle. Driver installation always aborts with an error that doesn't tell you anything (an error occurred while setting up the driver) and I've tried 3 different driver versions without any luck. Is there anybody who got the abovementioned configuration working? I got the Zen mostly because it can also serve as a portable HD and if I can only use it at the PC at my parents place it's pretty much useless.

[Leuf]

if you do a search in the sudhian.com shuttle forum for usb there are a bunch of threads about usb problems. None of them exactly fit your problem, but you might find something useful.

Haven't had any problems with my sk41 other than it being really toasty and a little noisy (working on both of those), but the only usb device I've tried is my printer.

[lusid]

Question about your new Zen...

Can it really work as a portable hard drive? or can it just be used to shuttle files. In other words, will windows see it as a drive letter and let you run stuff from it and save stuff onto it?

I didn't buy one because I was told that you had to use special software from creative to access it's filesystem, and that it couldn't really function as a hard drive in windows.

I ended up with an archos fm, which windows will mount as a drive without even asking for a driver, but I'm still curious what the deal is with the Zen.

[Doom9]

@lusid: It takes a special software

@leuf: it has nothing to do with usb.. it stops at the driver installation already and I wouldn't connect it via usb anyway. 400mbit Firewire is much better than 10mbit USB 1.1 ;)

[duartix]

I thought you had bought a SN41G2!
Why connect via USB 1.1? :confused:
SN41G2 has USB 2.0 support, right?

Sorry I can't help you Doom9, but you're very welcome aboard the SFF Revolution.
I personally went the Chyang Fun (http://www.chyangfun.com/) way.
For a home theater PC I believed (and still do) that besides the much more logical SPDIF Out on the back this is a much prettier picture on my living room: CF-968 (http://www.chyangfun.com/Product/CF-S968.htm)

Although it's a bit loud it's pretty well ventilated so I'll be reducing fan speed in sacrifice for less noise.

[Doom9]

My Shuttle has of course USB2 support. However, the Zen doesn't ;) There's a version of the Zen that comes with a USB2 port (and no Firewire) but it's not for sale on Europe as of now.
In the meantime I have been able to fix the problem and it was exactly what I feared it was. For some wicked reason Windows installed itself on drive letter e: (brand new HD, no idea why the first partition doesn't get letter c:) and Windows won't allow you to change the drive letter of the system drive using the onboard tools. All other programs and drivers work without problems (except for NVIDIA drivers wanting to be extracted to drive c: which was the drive letter my ZIP drive got).
Since all I got from customer support were 2 emails saying they got my message and I'm not a very patient guy I simply reinstalled windows, and this time it was installed on c:. And guess what.. now the driver installation works and I'm currently moving audio files to my Zen (via Firewire of course;)

[Scipio]

I personally went the Chyang Fun way.

Hm... nice barebones, but if I looked correctly, they don't offer an AGP port? (I only looked at the P4 boxes though.)

[Shabubu]

I had a load of trouble with this (i.e. windows installing to another drive than C). At first I assumed it was just because my harddisks are on a RAID controller (hp374), but I guess not. It finally shows that all that advice about installing one part at a time really was right ;)

[Mikel]

Are there actually any *silent* Barebones around?
If so, I would consider buying one.

Cheers

Mikel

[Doom9]

there are coolerless via c3 based barebones, but they don't even have enough cpu power to play fullscreen 640x divx rips with all the mpeg4 simple profile features. Yet it appears to be possible to mod shuttle barebones to make them pretty silent. First you have to mod your gfx card to throttle the fan, then get a hd that makes no noise and last but not least you have to replace main and psu fans (the latter operation should be performed only by a professional). I'm considering modding my shuttle but I have someone who's been working with lethal voltages before take care of the dangerous stuff.

BTW... a good address for sff modding is www.hexus.net

[duartix]

@Scipio:
I'm almost looking as a CF sell man but they do have AGP.
Main features:
Hiper Threading capable (Intel 845GE chipset)
FSB 400/533
DDR 266/333 (2 slots)
ATA 100
1 AGP, 1 PCI
Onboard Video (Geforce2 MX equivalent)
Onboard 5.1 sound (SPDIF In and Out)(Analogue 5.1 too)(Mic in)
Svideo-Out, Composite Out,
Onboard Network adapter,
4 USB 2.0,
2 Firewire,
2 COM, Mouse, Keyboard
150W power source.

People in the US are reporting 299$ plus shipping.
I bought it in Portugal for around 375€.