Damn, I had the same problem a few weeks ago. Player hung once in the morning. That afternoon, a song stopped at 0:00. Next song played fine. Then crash. I then manually rebooted with Hijack and no drives found while starting up. Pull player, put it back and it's worked since then. I haven't popped it open to check the cables. This is a new cable I received from support back in November 2001 and it's been working fine since then. I have a couple of spare cables and one spare empeg to test with (no spare drives, just the two in my daily empeg).
I'll keep my fingers crossed until the next sign of a problem before I open it up. Or at least until I have some free time. I know I definitely need to make the capacitor mod to fix the dimmer problem in cold temperatures, so it's got to come apart again sooner or later. That one drives me nuts in the winter.
Bruno