So I came back from classes, started up my car and the empeg booted fine and then right on the screen where its supposed to resume the song, it's just frozen. None of the buttons work nor the knob, except when you hold down the knob and the Hijack menu appears. So I rebooted it. It still boots up fine and comes back to the same exact point in the song that was last playing but nothign plays and the song isn't moving forward. It appears the player is hard frozen but like I said you are able to access the Hijack menu.

I brought it inside and grabbed a dump:

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-v439 (hijack@rtr.ca) (gcc version
2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Thu Jul 28 13:21:31 EDT 2005
Processor: Intel StrongA
Checking for extra DRAM:
c1000000: wrote ffffffff, read e91ba9f0
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 30103111) 16MB DRAM
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 15008k/16M available (984k code, 20k reserved, 368k 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)
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 '
Found custom animation at offset 0x9a38c
Tuner: loopback=0, ID=-1
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 d0005b80).
empeg RDS driver initialised
empeg power-pic driver initialised (first boot)
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks o
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hdb: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hda: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
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 00:0
7
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.
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 <---- i assume this is the culprit and guessing it means a bad drive
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
Timezone: Atlantic/South_Georgia
Hijack: intercepting config.ini

/bin/sh: /usr/local/bin/telnetd: hijack: removed menu entry: "Hard Disk Detectio
n"
No such file hijack: removed menu entry: "Serial Port Assignment"
khttpd: listening on port 80

/bin/sh:kftpd: listening on port 21
exec: /usr/local/bin/telnetd: cannot execute: No such file or directory
Using non-standard cache size 68 (bonus 0Mb, adjustment 32)
player.cpp : 587:empeg-car 3.00-alpha11 2005/07/25.
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1485 Jul 25 2005
Vcb: 0x4053a000


If it is a bad drive, obviously I'll have to replace it. Is there an easy way to salvage the music thats on the other drive?

Have you tried feeding it a "player -i" to have it start with an empty playlist?

That line you pointed out is normal. Don't worry about it. Write down the song that it's stuck on, first. Then reboot the player and just hammer on the skip button as it's coming up. Chances are you'll skip past what I'm thinking is a bad track and it'll start playing again. Make sure it's okay, then play that song again. Chances are something went wrong with that track and you'll just need to delete and replace it.

Well, you might have had a block go bad where that track was stored. It probably means that that track is now corrupt, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the disk is failing.

I think I would delete that track using emplode and then force an FSCK of the disk from the command line to see what's going on.

Or maybe it's not that song at all, but another one it's trying to read-ahead-cache a portion of.