Hmmm.... noted the following reported on the serial port during startup after resyncing today... is this what would be expected when the IDE HD detection problem occurs (the one described in this thread)?

ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/hda4 is mounted.
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/hdc4 is mounted.
empeg-car 2.00-beta3 2001/10/17.

Unfortunately, I had rebooted the player before I went back and checked the startup log so I don't know what state the player was in (normal, or displaying IDE/no HD message)... After a number of restarts, I could not get this error again on the serial port (at least not yet).