My friend left his empeg in the center armrest in his Jeep on a hot day. When he came back and plugged in the empeg, he got the dead Tux logo and the empeg hasn't worked since. I assumed the hard drive just died due to the heat.

He had a 40GB drive around, so without doing anything else, I put that in there and tried to flash with the disk builder. The process failed at "finding pump." The hard drive never turned on. That's when we hooked up his original hard drive to a PC and it worked fine.

Now my assumption was that the cable went bad somehow since the IDE header looks to be in fine condition. I just replaced the cable with a brand new one, and the drive still doesn't power up.

I suppose that since I have been unable to flash this thing, this is all I get from the serial port now:
Code:

---

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!ý5jj¤T
peg-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!ý5jj¤T
peg-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!ý5jj¤T
peg-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!ý5jj¤T
peg-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!ý5jj¤T
peg-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!ý5jj¤T
peg-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!ý5jj¤T
peg-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...

---

Any ideas?

Okay. My recommendation for a starting point would be to unplug all drives and try to reflash a developer edition kernel. The drives being removed will eliminate them as a possible problem and get you back to a known starting point. Make sure you have the firmware loader running and ready (I usually use upload.exe from logoedit) before you plug the player in.

Did that, and the thing works now. I don't know what's going on. Here's the boot log. The empeg is playing fine right now!

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 kernel.

Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg51 (mac@aphex) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #16 Wed Jul 24 18:19:54 BST 2002

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 30102571)

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 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)

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 d0005680).

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: IC25N080ATMR04-0, ATA DISK drive

hda: IC25N080ATMR04-0, ATA DISK drive

hda: IC25N080ATMR04-0, ATA DISK drive

hda: IC25N080ATMR04-0, ATA DISK drive

hda: IC25N080ATMR04-0, ATA DISK drive

hda: IC25N080ATMR04-0, ATA DISK drive

ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6

hda: IC25N080ATMR04-0, 76319MB w/7884kB Cache, CHS=9729/255/63

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:d7:26:0a:0b

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...

I'd bet the flash dropped a bit or two somewhere. Reprogramming it fixed it.

We've have flash chips do similar things and then come good once reprogrammed. We've had them sometimes give a 1 and sometimes a 0. Once reprogrammed they worked fine for a while (years). The manufacturer did finally acknowledge a problem with these particular once. Maybe the heat just made it a bit worse. Remember flash memory is technically not non-volatile. It has the potential to lose bits over time. Normally we are talking tens of years, but heat is very likely to accelerate that.

Doesn't explain why the disk builder wouldn't go on though.

I can only guess that the timing was off and that the player had already passed the flash load test. Glad it is working now, though!!!