I've been having some troubles lately with my Rio...I fired off the following email to support, but from what I've been hearing support is not getting back to anyone - I really need to fix this problem so any help would be appreciated...

Hello,

Let me start with some preliminary information. I have had my Rio/Empeg Car now for over a year and it has been great. Starting about 4-5 months ago I began to experience intermittent pops/clicks along with slight glitches in playback when using my unit in the car. In the last month or so, it has been doing this alot more consistently. Now about 60% of the time when I slide the Rio into the car sled and it powers up and starts to play music, I get nothing but the aforementioned pops and clicks....along with no music. However, the player appears to be operating perfectly ie. I can use all the functions on it, just no output. When I pull the unit out and push it back in (sometimes doing this multiple times) it will usually start to operate normally after that. I tried my friends unit in my car sled and it works perfectly, so I think we can eliminate any problems with the docking sled. Next we tried swapping wiring harnesses internally - but the same thing was still happening - and all the wires and connections on my harness and connector seem intact. We also tried my unit in his car and it does the same thing. I've tried reloading the original 1.00 software as well as many other versions to no success. It would be nice to be able to just replace a part on my own, but I'm not sure that's going to possible because I'm not sure what to replace. I would like to send my unit in for you to diagnose and fix if possible as this thing is irreplaceable (I'm sure you know that!). Please get back to me on what my options are as far as repair and/or further diagnosing.

Thanks

Rio Car #010101299

Greetings!

The problem you describe sounds like it might be a hard drive cable or a dry solder joint on the hard drive header. These were symptoms that I saw when mine began to go. You might want to check out The FAQ for diagnosing / repairing these types of errors.

But wouldn't a problem with the HD cable or dry solder joint be causing the problems to appear all the time? Sometimes the output on the player is perfect and will stay that way for a day or two at a time....then it will resurface itself...

Don't overlook the effects of vibration and expansion/contraction on failing connections.

Stu

Agreed. Mine was intermittent at first also. I would only see it in the car, and only occasionally. Eventually, it would not work in the house either. The car environment is more extreme with temperature and vibration, both of which would force this error more often. Do you notice the elapsed time counter pause when the song is glitching?

Plus, it is a very quick thing to check. The cable connection and header is a known common problem and a (relatively) easy fix.

Paul, are you certain that the pops/clicks/skipping were a direct result of IDE header/cable trouble? Currently, the FAQ doesn't list that as one of the symptoms. I'll add it as long as you're sure.

Greetings!

It wasn't as much popping. The audio symptoms I heard were more of a skip / stutter, as though the disk was trying to find the next audio segment and could not keep up due to disk errors. But, in my case it was the IDE header and a rather severe case of it as well. (Based on the fact of how visible it was in the photo.) There were some other threads around documenting pops and clicks and that a cable replacement or recrimp made the symptoms vanish.

Well, I just took apart my Rio and checked the IDE cable. It looked similar to what is in this discussion. Anyways, I put my conectors into a vice clamp and applied some pressure. Before I could see small gaps and the metal showing through the connectors - after reclamping the connectors the gaps are gone and I cannot see the metal connectors. I just tried it in my car pulling it out a couple of times to recheck and everything seems OK....but after a couple of days I will know for sure if this fixed it. I will keep everyone posted

Greetings!

Cool! I hope it was as simple as that. Was your cable the "pink edged" version?

Tony, since this question has been coming up quite a bit recently, can it be moved up to the top of the troubleshooting FAQ, or made a bit more visible?

Also, here's some pics I took of the cable beforehand....if you look closely you can see the slight gap as well as the bare metal connectors.

And another one.....

Renumbering the FAQ entries is a bit of a pain. Tom has given me the facility to do it, but I hate doing it on that page in particular because I have to scroll through 72 entries, one at a time, hand-entering a sequence number into a box for each one.

Hey, great pics, Slammed. Mind if I steal one of them for the FAQ?

I had also a faulty IDE-cable.
I made a closer look at my old bad cable.
It's the same type: Light grey with a red/pink stripe.
See the attachment.
It looks very similar to slammed2001sc2 cable.

That's what my cable looked like before I recrimped it. As I said, my ASCII art skills weren't that brilliant

- Trevor

That's what my cable looked like before I recrimped it. As I said, my ASCII art skills weren't that brilliant

Oh, your ASCII art skills were fine, I just didn't want to put ASCII art into the FAQ.

Tony, while on the topic of bad cables, I was going to see if you mentioned this rare cause of that error message, but it looks like you did!

Damn, I had the same problem a few weeks ago. Player hung once in the morning. That afternoon, a song stopped at 0:00. Next song played fine. Then crash. I then manually rebooted with Hijack and no drives found while starting up. Pull player, put it back and it's worked since then. I haven't popped it open to check the cables. This is a new cable I received from support back in November 2001 and it's been working fine since then. I have a couple of spare cables and one spare empeg to test with (no spare drives, just the two in my daily empeg).

I'll keep my fingers crossed until the next sign of a problem before I open it up. Or at least until I have some free time. I know I definitely need to make the capacitor mod to fix the dimmer problem in cold temperatures, so it's got to come apart again sooner or later. That one drives me nuts in the winter.

Bruno

Well, bad news. After working perfectly for the last 3 days, I went to start my car this morning and what do I hear...the infamous pops/cracks! I'm still convinced that the IDE cable is at fault here. I may have squeezed the connectors in a vice and got rid of that gap, but I'm thinking that once I reinstalled the cable in the Rio with all the crazy bends it may have loosened the crimps again. Does anyone know if support still has some replacement cables laying around - or better yet does someone know where I can get a replacement cable? I'm still convinced that the cable is at fault, and that if I replace it it will get rid of the problem entirely....

Greetings!

Hm... You might also want to check for a dry solder joint on the IDE header. It is unusual that a recrimp would become loose again. At least, yours would be the first case of it I have heard of. You can contact support for the cable (they are technically standard laptop IDE connectors, but the bends and lengths are custom), but the quick fix (if you only have one hard drive) would be to move the hard drive to the other physical connector and see if that helps.

Unless you really pulled and twisted the cable when installing you shouldn't go bad that quickly if at all. Another possiblity is that the cable is totally bad in some other fashion.
You may have a bad solder joint on the board itself unfortunately.

- Trevor

Support should sell/give you a cable, if you can get ahold of them. The end of offical support is near, however. I would doubt that a connection that was bad enough to cause constant popping would be good enough to boot and not get a no hard drive found error.

Are you sure you're slidiing your player in all the way and locking it into the sled with the handle? Occasionally when I have a friend put my empeg in, they just let it slide in by itself, without pushing it in the last bit and closing the handle manually. This can lead to poping/thumping every time I go over a bump as the connections get severed and reconnected. This probably isn't your poblem, but I thought I'd mention it.

Matthew