This morning, I was greeted to this as I put in the empeg.
I can hear the hard drive spinning up and such, and I hear nothing loose inside. Below is the serial port output.
In the past I had to replace the hard drive cable due to that batch of bad cables, it has been fine otherwise:


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 kerne
l.
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg52 (rob@aphex) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315
(release)) #11 Tue Apr 1 18:49:59 BST 2003
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 10101910)
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 15024k/16M available (964k code, 20k reserved, 372k 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 Universit
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 d0005400).
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:d7:22:07:7
6
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

Greetings!

Probably one of the most Frequently Asked Questions on the board...

Yes I know, Im not a n00b

I'm hoping the diag output was more informative.
I might also add that I upgraded to 2.00 official a couple weeks ago, so I hope that didn't kill it.

Yup. And it doesn't seem to see a hard drive at all. I'd guess that that's likely to mean that the cable has come loose rather than a bad drive. But I could well be wrong.

Greetings!

Well, the faq has some good troubleshooting steps, and rather than try to reproduce it... I agree - it does not seem like a bad drive, unless the drive completely failed. It is not recognizing or responding at all. I suspect the cable or connection most. If you can open the unit, that would be the best check.

The drive cable has come out of the drive several times (2-3) in my unit. It always says "no drive found".

I need to find a hot glue gun to borrow.

I think someone must be laughing somewhere... I had the same issue with my player this afternoon. Ugh. I don't have the time to be opening and fixing drive cables again.

Last night I'm reading about the dicontinuation of Car support, spending more time on the BBS than I have as of late (had a night to myself) and today... On the way to work a hang starting a track - it had been playing about 5 minutes and then just stopped at exactly 0:00 of the next track. Could not seek nor skip, but could enter the menu (player app was not hung). Entered Hijack, rebooted and everytihng was fine.

Get into my car this afternoon at about 4pm and I get the No DIsk message - the trusty message I first saw on my player back in November 2001. Blech. Reboot and all's good. Watched X-Men 2, started the car again and player stops while "Loading Playlists..." Reboot once more and all's fine for the drive home.

Now to find the time to crack it open and check what's up... Fun fun fun during what was already lining up to be a busy weekend.

Bruno