hmmm, well I'm not sure what all changed, here's a list of the events leading up to when I knew it was screwed.

it was in the car, everything was good, took it inside put on another new boot animation (I don't remember if it fully booted or if I pulled the power after I saw the boot animation) then took it to the car, while walking to the car, the strap on my case broke and fell to the ground, only from my hip into the grass, I think that the laptop hit first, the empeg didn't actually physically hit the ground, only the G shock. put it in the car, then it was stuck at boot logo.

took it iside got the shell messages, re-applied the beta-11 upgrade hoping to fix it, upgrade went ok, didn't fix it though. also, as you can imagine I am unable to get to a shell prompt within the empeg either, it's really no big deal for me to format and wipe the disks to rebuild the partitions correctly (it's only time) but I wanted to make sure that I couldn't just replace the cable if that was the problem so I wouldn't have to go through all the hassle.

still waiting on support though.

seems to me that it probably isn't the cable since it does recognize the drives alright, it just can't see the partitions or read the superblock on hda.

is it possible that I made the boot animation too long and it overwrote something? I don't remember how many frames it was exactly but I could figure out if that was even a remote possibility.

if a disk builder to wipe out the disks and a re-upgrade and re-sync would fix it, then I'll start tonight, but I would have rather avoided it if it was only the cable, doesn't sound like it though.

eli

EDIT: yeah the two drives are not identical, I did the drive upgrade as per the instructions, and everything has been running great for a long while with both drives in there, slave/masters are proper. maybe some of the steps I listed up to the fault will help.