why don't you want to use a spare hd? unplug your original hd when you install and you should be fine. When the setup is finished, you replug it. Then you can select in your bootmanager, from which drive you like to boot. Tell the respective installation how it should handle the respective other drive upon recovery and thats it. LMCE will find the media no matter where it is..should be easy as pie....you don't really need to have two cores running simultaneously...seems a bit like overkill to me..twice the hardware, twice the work, twice the trouble.
but thats just me and my two cents.....  :-)

I finally got my act together and made the updates to the wiki as promised.

Just check it out, if its okay...sorry for the delay

First of all, you should check in your webadmin, if the correct soundcard has been set for your Mediadirector.
I don't know what other steps you have taken so far and what outputs you want to use (analog, digital coax/optical etc) I will go through the steps I did, just to make sure.
Some may frown about it, but the simplest way is to go to the KDE-Desktop of your specific mediadirector.
Open up a terminal and type

Code:

sudo alsamixer

This should give you the mixer for your soundcard, where you can check all the available outputs. On most machines the digital output is IEC958. Make sure this is unmuted and the volume is up. This is so far the situation on my core/hybrid. On the ASROCK Ion330, as you read above, the situation was different.
Here the upgrade was needed. If you still have not done so, go now to your ailing MD, open the KDE-Desktop and open up this page again. Download the attached file and open a terminal session.
Move to the directory, where you have saved the file and

Code:

tar xvf AlsaUpgrade-1.0.21-4

Then

Code:

sudo ./AlsaUpgrade-1.0.21-4.sh

Wait until its finished...about 15 minutes and then reboot
After that, the sound should work instantly, if not check again with alsamixer.
Let me know how it went.

okay, I got one problem solved
I updated Alsa on the MD to 1.0.21...I did a little digging around the net and arrived here:
 

Code:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1046137

They provide a script, that automatically downloads, compiles and updates the drivers, if I understood it right.
(you have to be registered to download the script)
So now I checked with alsamixer and suddenly I got all the controls I needed...sound optical is working nicley now.
I haven't tried hdmi, but right now I don't care that much for it.

Right now I have only two issues remaining here: getting the sound from the core
and getting MythTV to playback TV on the MD. MythTV-stup still claims that there non-exisiting paths for storage, but they are all there.
Interstingly, like I mentioned earlier, TV is working on the core.

I recently revamped my whole network. My core is now running a athlon 7550 x2 on an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe with 2 GB ram. In addition today I received an Asrock Ion 330.
I followed the wiki for setting it up with the nvidia-drivers and so far so good.
The big downside I'm facing is, that I don't get any sound at all from neither machine. I have them both hooked up to my sony receiver. The Core is connected with spdif coax, while the MD is using spdif optical. In the webadmin I've set them both to Nvidia HDA. I checked on the core with the alsamixer, that the iec958 is not muted and I cranked the volume up.
On the md I got no such thing, alsamixer shows me only 2 channels: one for PCM one for Front. Interesingly I found in the restricted drivers, that there is an Intel HDA activated, while aplay -l says its Nvidia HDA.
In addition to this mythtv still doesn't want to let me watch TV. The setup complains about the storage groups and the playback quits with "There was a problem displaying this video".
So currently all I can do is watch movies without sound...
Does anyone have any pointers for me, how I can solve any of those issues?
thanks in advance
[edit] the mythtv problem seems to be limited to the MD, TV works on the core...but still without any sound

I got the visuals sufficiently working, but no audio whatsoever....I need to use the optical out...does anyone have any idea to get this working?

Whenever I open Mythtv on my MD it stops after a few seconds saying, that there was a problem displaying the video.
I checked the Setup many times. So far the only thing I've come up with, is about the storage groups. Whenever I want to leave the setup, it tells me that there are some paths that don't exist. Those are actually the ones from two other disks. I can see them, I can access them, but it seems to me, that Mythtv can't.
The question is, what can I do about it?

I can confirm this. I also have this issue now. Besides, unless I click the update-button in the network section, no client can connect to the internet.

like I said..I got a bit carried away...I went up to the home directory and did a resynchronize there. Thats when those files showed up.
As for the rest, its all working now...I'm setting up the md right now. Also my partitions are showing up again and I can access all my files now. So far I didn't reboot the core, so I don't know if I will have to start that script again. I hope the next update can get a fix on it.

What can I say...your kungfu is strong... :-)
will I have to execute this script everytime I need to restart the core?
------------
okay, I do have one more question....I did get carried away a bit with the resynchronizing business...now I gotall the videos from the wizard showing up in my media...is there a way to get rid of that again, without deleting the data?

I did a fresh install - twice actually- today. I can also confirm, that media is not being discovered so far. I get the partitions mounted, I can access everything with the filemanager , but when I check it in the webadmin->Files&Media->Media Files Synch and  go to videos, I cannot navigate there, because in the left pane, the partitions do not appear. I the right pane I can see the entries fpr them, but thats it. even resynchronising doesn't do anything to change it...I cannot get my media
--------------
update:
I can confirm all of the above...I just tried to setup my MD and I also got "Cannot connect to router, reboot in 5 seconds". I remember from my previous troubles, that the dhcp likes to start giving out leases from the bottom of the range, right after the core, so I checked the dhcp-leases in the webadmin...all the leases given out are taken by the core itself...at least four or five. I will try to change the range fo the dhcp, lets see what will happen then.
-------------------------------------
update 2: changing the dhcp-settings is a no go..the issue remains,
as for the media not showing up, I checked with midnight commander...it seems the symlinks created are not valid anymore. For example they are pointing to "/mnt/device/30/public/data/video" but in /mnt contains only "upnp". So the none of the partitions are properly mounted....what can I do about it?

Thank you very much Andrew,

that does set my mind at ease. Now that will hopefully be my last obstacle...and I can do my final install now.

I just want to make sure what happens, so just don't bite my head off:
I recently added a new harddisk to my core and told it to use linuxmce filestructure. Now I need to reinstall the the whole system. When the new install finds this drive and asks me to use the linuxmce filestructure again, what happens to the existent content on that disk? Will it be wiped off, or does linuxmce recognize the structure and just put it back where it belongs?

Like I said, I just want to make sure....

While I never had this issue with Vista, I'm having it now with Windows 7 RC
I tried the special steps from the wiki, but it isn't working.

Guys, what can I say....break out the champange bottles.
but I must also apologize for the confusion I caused.
Yesterday I had all my new components together and did a total makeover on my server. Since I also had some strange connectivity issues with my n810 and my accesspoint, I decided to deactivate everything and start from scratch there too.
Much to my amazement the eee-box worked nicely, until I switched on my AP. I didn't take long to realize what was up. The eee-box and the AP wanted to use the same IP-address. I didn't have this kind of issue under 7.10, otherwise I would have found out much earlier. I must add, that the ability to see the dhcp-leases in the admin-website helped a lot with this issue. However, I think it would help even more, if we were able to enter static IP's into the dhcp-server, so that problems like that don't occur again. I can imagine several scenarios, where I would need to assign a static IP's, an access-point is only one of them.

The only other issue I have is, that once in a while when booting the eee-box it doesn't start the orbiter, but crashes back to the tty1.