All of that "garbage" is something crashing. For that to happen you've got dodgy hardware somewhere.

Quote:
Also, if an upgrade is taking forever, I wanted to know if it is SAFE (with 100% certainty) to just pull the power on the empeg, to reseat cables, etc and start all over? Or could that render my empeg inoperable? (Meaning I should just wait it out and then try again 4 hours later... Just seems like a long time to wait for nothing...)

The empeg should handle this fine. Absolute worse case could be corrupting the harddrives if they were read/write when you pull the plug. And worst case result of that would be reformatting the drives and reloading your music.

Basically you can't render it inoperable since the bootloader will always let you recover. I would have no problem doing it myself.

If you can get to a shell prompt (and it would seem you can't), I'd suggest an fsck of the drives
_________________________
Christian
#40104192 120Gb (no longer in my E36 M3, won't fit the E46 M3)