Here's a weird one... i put in my backup MKIIa empeg to my home docking station, and it showed no hard disk. No biggy, probably a loose cable right? So i open it up to find that BOTH sides BOTH shock mounts had completely come out of their metal bracket:



WTH?? Very strange. This player hasn't been used any differently than my other one. In fact it was only used in the car for the month that i was trying to replace the MkII that got stolen. Anyone had this happen before? I don't recall dropping it or anything forceful happening to it. Weird.

Yeah, well... Supposedly the Mk2's weren't supposed to be plagued by this one, but I've seen it happen as well. RTV Silicone seems to do OK for sticking them in somewhat more permanently. Use caution not to goop it up too much, though, the mounts should still flex.

What i don't get is that it seems like the player would have had to have been dropped while upside down for this to happen... or even for it to have been set down upside down for a long time. Hm. I guess it could have happened. Still weird.

Welp, on top of that.... i put it all back together, and it's doing what it did before. (i failed to mention this in the first post). It just boots up to the Hijack Penguin and sits there. You can use the hijack menu but the player never starts. *sigh* off to Hyperland....


empeg-car bootstrap v1.02 20001106 (hugo@empeg.com)
If there is anyone present who wants to upgrade the flash, let them speak now,
or forever hold their peace...it seems not. Let fly the Penguins of Linux!

e000 v1.04
Copying kernel...
Calling linux kernel...
Uncompressing Linux................................... done, booting the kernel.

Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg51-hijack-v296 (root@tbird.localnet) (gcc ve
rsion 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Thu Sep 26 00:04:46 EDT 2002
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 11
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 10102077)
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 15084k/16M available (924k code, 20k reserved, 352k data, 4k init)
Dentry hash table entries: 2048 (order 2, 16k)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 16384 (order 4, 64k)
Page cache hash table entries: 4096 (order 2, 16k)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
TCP: Hash tables configured (ehash 16384 bhash 16384)
IrDA (tm) Protocols for Linux-2.2 (Dag Brattli)
Linux-IrDA: IrCOMM protocol ( revision:Tue May 18 03:11:39 1999 )
ircomm_tty: virtual tty driver for IrCOMM ( revision:Wed May 26 00:49:11 1999 )
Starting kswapd v 1.5
SA1100 serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0xf8010000 (irq = 15) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS01 at 0xf8050000 (irq = 17) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS02 at 0xf8030000 (irq = 16) is a SA1100 UART
Signature is 206f6972 'rio '
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
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 d0005080).
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:d7:22:08:1
d
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
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

It's not seeing the drives. Nurse, screwdriver STAT!

posting to myself is fun. K, i reseated the drive cable on the board and it's workin' fine now. Phew. I was worried the mount brackets had shorted something out.

Had this happen to me once after a small drop that landed upside down. (~12 inches whilst in a padded case)...

No biggie...easy to fix

Just don't drop the empeg.

I wonder if they don't just work themselves loose over long periods of time with regular vibrations and thermal cycling...

could be. But this one was hardly used. Hm. I'll just chalk it up to me leaving it upside down for a long time or something. =]

Ahh... nothing like taking a romp on the inside of an empeg. It never ceases to amaze at the beautiful engineering encased in that metal box.

...or maybe just thermal cycling...The rubber and metal are going to expand/contract as different rates. Add to the mix the fact that the rubber may still have traces of the release agent from the molding process (read: lubricant), and this is a possibility.

Any tyopoes in this post are not helf by hte author, and can be attributed to Guinness, vofka and Twquila.

In reply to:

---

could be. But this one was hardly used.

---

I would be willing to bet that your empeg was drop kicked once or twice by UPS or whoever shipped it to you which worked those mounts loose. One of mine was loose on my mk2 when I received it.

-Mike

This would be my guess. The empegs I recieved from Sonic Blue sometimes had hardly any foam peanuts and the empeg player boxes were pretty loose in the huge boxes that they were using for shipping. The box was pretty much a oval tube with no square corners when I picked it up off of the porch. I sold the players in this box...

The second box I received from SB even had the taping busted loose and a tuner module was missing from the box but at least the box was not round.

The only empegs I received that were in a intact box were the FexEx overnight packages. This is how I got my 60gb and 30gb players.

BTW, I had to send my 60bgb player off to Cambridge yesterday and I saw the lady behind the counter at FedEx pretty much toss the empeg in the corner with the other boxes. Imagine what they do when you are NOT there... I thought I would mention something but I figured that she would go "postal"...

You should have seen the box I received after making the trip from England to Croatia, back to England and then to Nova Scotia...the cardboard was so supple, I could have wiped my a** with it. Good thing the player is so solidly constructed, it's been working like a champ for almost two years now...

I'd thought of that... thing is i'd added drives and the button hack to that empeg and they definetly weren't off then. But... that one DID come shipped with hardly any padding whatsoever.