When I plug in my MK2 30 gig, (running 2.0), it takes much longer to boot (while displaying AC Power image (Home) on the display (currently have no car to test this in) ...the hard drive's making funny noises on me, "whrrr, click-click, whrrr, click-click," etc. Once it's done, it displays "End of playlist" and shows -None- when I go to the dropdown menu for playlists. When I try to synchronize while loading Emplode, it gets to "Checking media...Checking disc integrity" and briefly displays "Waiting..." then the program suddenly closes. The player has close to 30 gigs on it. What other information do you guys need to help me out?

In other words, it can do everything up to the point of finding the music without the use of the hard drive?

Hard disk trouble can be "partial". Clearly some of the hard disk is working because it can load the player software. But it's clearly not working properly because of the noise it's making.

I took it apart, and it appears to be none of the above. At first it looked like it could be the crimping on the IDE cable, but no luck. The unit sat for a few months while I had my stuff in storage between spring and fall semester, but the box was clearly not dropped or mishandled (it worked last time it was plugged in). If the hard drive is, in fact, damaged, any chance that my music may be salvageable?

Can you post a boot log (to see if you are having disk trouble at boot) and how comfortable at troubleshooting on the command line?

I'll post a boot log as soon as I can find a serial cable that works, I used the FAQ and searching these forums to find instructions. I'm code-illiterate, though, so someone here'll have to help me source the problem from that point.

Temperatures were mild this summer and couldn't have been much above 80 degrees on any occasion. As for the music, most of it is directly off of friends' computers, in true p2p fashion. It would be a serious headache to upload the music again, as this summer was the year that most of my friends packed up their computers and left for college.

In the boot log, it pauses at "Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k init"

Here is the boot log, in its entirety:


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)) #12 Tue Apr 1 18:51:41 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 30102965)
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 636f6972 'rioc'
Scheduling custom logo.
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
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, 28615MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=58140/16/63
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:d7:26:0b:9
5
Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
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: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k inithda: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
ide0: reset: success
hda: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
ide0: reset: success
hda: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:04 (hda), sector 4
EXT2-fs: Couldn't read superblock on 2nd try.
hda: status timeout: status=0xd0Busy hda: drive not ready for command
ide0: reset: success
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00 2003/04/01.
! tags.cpp : 61:Failed to open tags (0xc0041002).
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Mar 26 2003
Vcb: 0x4086d000

Thank you guys for the help, this is the most helpful forum I have ever been a member of.

Many thanks
-Joe

What does it mean? Call me a pessimist, but it sounds like you have bad news for me about my hard drive?

Hmm, isn't the player software on the root partition, ie in flash?

My money is on the IDE header.

Take a very close look at the IDE connector on the main board itself. You might see pins of the header pulled away. Although you may need a zoom camera or magnifier to see it, those dry solder joints are very common and would need a bit of soldering to touch them up.

They're referring to this problem:



Make sure you carefully check all the contacts, and not just the pictured ones.

I found a magnifying glass today and checked these connections more closely (9x more closely, to be specific). Could not see any broken connections at the base, even while gently "wiggling" the connector. The solder joints actually look very good in my Riocar.

I found similar hard drive error messages here , here , and here. I'll try doing a RAM test, and hopefully Sunday someone will be touching up the solders and professionally re-crimping the cables for me or possibly even making new ones (I spent most of this week making friends with the local computer tech geniuses). Is anyone local to the DC area and willing to lend me an IDE cable that they know is in working order? Or possibly an Empeg to test out my drive in?

Well it turned out to be the hard drive after all. I have a 2gb unit on loan to me while I anxiously await my birthday party (there's a rumor that someone bought me an 80gb unit a few months back, I still haven't had a party yet).

Hoping it's just one sector with damage that stopped the music from loading, a geek friend is setting up a Linux box in an attempt to salvage 30gb of my old music.

Thank you all for your help! It's apparent the hard drive has been replaced at least once before, so I'm investigating anything that could cause repeated hard drive failure.

Well, left the player sitting for a while (since moving last April) and when I started it up, makes whooshy crashy noises and "No hard disk found."

I don't have a serial port on my computer, but I'll see if tomorrow I can take it to someone who does so I can post a bootlog.

This will have been the player's third hard drive...are there any known issues that cause repeat hard drive failure?

Heat.

That's the trouble with you, Mark. You go into these long, wordy, elaborate discourses that are so full of technicalitites and polysyllabifications that you have to be an engineer* to understand them.



tanstaafl.

*Two MIT engineering students meet on the quad, and one of them has a shiny new bicycle. "Hey, where'd you get the bike?" the second one asks. "You'd never believe it", the first one says, "But the other day this beautiful woman came riding up to me, threw the bike down, tore off all her clothes, and said to me, 'Take anything you want!'" The second student says, "Good choice. Her clothes never would have fit you."