I have a Mark2a 60gb empeg. It has two 30gb Fujitsu (original) drives in it. I am at about 45gb at this point w/ music. The other day, I went to add another album to it, I went in my room for a bit and came out to see Emplode crashed. My player was playing but there were no playlists. I tried to sync a few times w/ emplode but it would crash each time it finished reading from the player. I gave up for the day.

The next day, I decided to try it again. This time, emplode didn't crash, and it started to add all my playlists very quickly into the player, and started to do the rest of the synchronise process. After it finished, emplode crashed and alas, I had no playlists.

I then proceeded to follow the FAQ entry to delete the databases/playlists/tags to let it rebuild. It seemed to have worked, I had playlists once again; however they are all over the place, with alot of them empty/missing entries. I've tried to rebuild about 3 times and get the same exact results each time.

Prior to this, about a week or so ago, one of the drives started clicking and then the player would say no harddisk found. I flicked the drives w/ my finger and it started back up. I'm thinking these old drives are starting to bite the dust. I'm having no errors upon bootup, it finds both drives and goes right into the player software.

Is there any way to get back to where I was? Or is this it... It's so bad i'm going to have to reload everything i'm thinking. This might be a good time to get a single 100gb drive and start over.

Thanks! (good job on the FAQ tony, it's saved me a few times)

Boot log, please.

Your described behavior resembles something that happened to me when I was trying out one of the V3 Alpha builds. Are you running 2.0 final or V3 alpha?

Probably a moot point, though, because you've got hard disk trouble. In terms of the unit keeping its playlist data, very little can be counted on once you've started having disk trouble. Sure you could reload everything, but if you're having disk trouble the problems would just come back.

As Mark said, a boot log would be very helpful.

Bootlog: (w/ hijack ir translate errors i've been too lazy to fix)

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 2.2.17-rmk5-np17-empeg52-hijack-v345 (root@ibbm) (gcc version 2.95
.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Thu Oct 16 17:41:00 EDT 2003
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revis
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 40103852)
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 15016k/16M available (980k code, 20k reserved, 364k 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)
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 67706d65 'empg'
Found custom animation at offset 0x9c388
Tuner: loopback=0, ID=-1
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 d0005300).
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...
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA
hdb: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, 28615MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=58140/16/63
hdb: 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:d7:28:0f:0
c
Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
hdb: hdb1 < hdb5 hdb6 > hdb2 hdb3 hdb4
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 initempeg init 0.8
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
Mounting second music partition
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To Comply...
Starting player
Hijack: intercepting config.ini

[hijack] ERROR: "80B800CE=20DF10"
[hijack] ERROR: "80B800CF=20DF11"
[hijack] ERROR: "80B800C9=20DF16"
[hijack] ERROR: "80B80006=20DF0C"
[hijack] ERROR: "80B800CB=20DF12"
hijack: removed menu entry: "Hard Disk Detection"
hijack: removed menu entry: "Serial Port Assignment"
khttpd: listening on port 80
kftpd: listening on port 21
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00 2003/04/01.
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Mar 26 2003
Vcb: 0x4086d000

Mmm.. thanks.

I had thought that perhaps one of the two drives might be misbehaving, but the boot log shows no problems there. And you are running v2.00 software, so that part is also fine.

Odds are good that you're going to have to reupload it all..
Unless Tony has any other ideas.

Cheers

Maybe try the smartctl to see if the drives themselves have something to report?

Stig

Could you elaborate please?

Read this and possibly this for getting and using smartctl.

[Edit] And here is the inevitable FAQ entry...[/Edit]

Stig