I've been getting the HDD not found error with an occasional failed to unmask IDE thrown in.

I've already replaced the HDD cable, and the player was in for service once and had the IDE header resoldered. (Thanks David)

This is a 60GB unit with two HDD's, any way to tell which drive is the problem from the boot log which I've posted below?

FWIW, I also tried disconnecting each of the drives as well as swapping their positions, this made no difference. This problem started out intermittently usually first thing in the morning when things were a little cool and has progressed to its present state where more times than not the player won't boot. Deifinitely temperature related though.

And yes, my player has the dreaded Fujitsu drives :-(

TIA,

Jeff

empeg audio-in initialised, CS4231A revision a0
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 1012
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0004c00).
empeg RDS driver initialised
empeg power-pic driver initialised (first boot)
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
Probing primary interface...
empeg-flash driver initialized
smc chip id/revision 0x3349
smc9194.c:v0.12 03/06/96 by Erik Stahlman (erik@vt.edu)

SMC9194: SMC91C94(r:9) at 0x4008000 IRQ:7 INTF:TP MEM:6144b MAC 00:02:d7:28:0f:8
7
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
EXT2-fs warning: checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...VFS: Cannot open root device 03:05
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05

Since it's the root device, it's the master drive. (You can also tell this from the 03:05, which is the device number, which indicates the fifth partition on the first drive on the first IDE controller.)

My riocar, 60 gig with 2 fujitsus has similar problems. Mine seem to happen every 3 to 4 weeks though, and dont seem to be temperature related. Maybe my drives are failing .
After I applied the builder image the drives were being detected but i would still get the kernel panic 3:05 error, after I gave up and reinstalled everything it started to work. Just reloaded all my music and wating to hear from support to see what to do.

I have this same issue, but with a 10 gig single drive unit, with I believe IBM drive. It is random, but I suspect a loose cable since it does rattle a bit in there.

Well, it's bound to rattle. The laptop hard drives themselves rattle quite a bit, plus a single-drive empeg is going to have the end of the IDE cable loose in the case.

They may rattle, but mine seems to rattle more than usual.
I also noticed that if I shake it a tad, the hard drive errors I get go away.