And it was working before your applied the v3a player? Really strange...

I know it's not much use now but you can actually copy the fids directly from the old drives to the new one. It's much faster than doing it over ethernet as you'd be using DMA. You just need to get two laptop -> desktop IDE adapters or a Linux partition to temporarily store everything. I did my upgrade from 20GB to 60GB in a couple of hours that way..