Hello everyone:

I have just purchased a used Empeg Mark-II, and I'm having a problem using either Emplode or Jemplode on it. Currently, I have firmware version 2.01 Developer installed with Hijack installed from v476.hijack.mk2.zImage, and Emplode version 2.0 installed on my Windows XP pc. I have also followed the directions on the empeg FAQ about replacing the hard drive, and I have replaced the stock hard drive with a 120GB drive. When initializing this drive, I used the builder_bigdisk.upgrade file.

When I start Emplode, it searches for my Empeg, and is always able to find it (I have tried connecting 3 different ways - COM port, USB port, and crossover cable, which is what I would prefer to use, since it is supposedly faster.) Once I select my Empeg on the Select Player screen, I see messages that read "Remounting Disks" then "Waiting". Once it says "Waiting", the details show that it is processing the "Rebuilding Database" task, with a status of "Executing". Once Emplode reaches this stage, it crashes, and gives me the dreaded "Rio emplode has encountered a problem and needs to close" message. I get this result no matter how I hook up my Empeg.

When I try the same thing using Jemplode v69, my device is listed (as long as it's hooked up via either Ethernet or USB), and it looks like it's working fine, until it gets to the Rebooting Player stage. When this happens, the Empeg reboots, but Jemplode doesn't seem to acknowledge the fact that the Empeg has rebooted. When Jemplode gets stuck at this stage, I have tried rebooting several times via my Hijack menu, but with no luck.

I have also repeated all of these steps using version 2.0 of the firmware, but I still get all the same results.

I have also attached my Hyperterminal bootlog at the bottom of this post, in case that helps.

Does anyone know what I can do to get music onto my Empeg?

Thanks in advance!





Boot Log:


empeg-car bootstrap v1.00 20000601 (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 2.2.17-rmk5-np17-empeg52-hijack-v464 (hijack@rtr.ca) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Fri Oct 27 01:00:29 EDT 2006

Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 11

Checking for extra DRAM:

c0c00000: wrote ffffffff, read e28cc001

NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.

empeg-car player (hardware revision 7, serial number 80000399) 12MB DRAM

Command line: mem=12m

Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS

Memory: 10952k/12M available (988k code, 20k reserved, 324k 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 20736f62 'bos '

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 d0005200).

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...

ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0xff80

ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0xff80

ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0xaa80

ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0x5580

ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0xff80

ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0xff80

ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0xaa80

ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0x5580

ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0xffff

ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0xffff

ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0xffff

ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0xffff

ide_data_test: wrote 0x0000 read 0xffff

ide_data_test: wrote 0xffff read 0xffff

ide_data_test: wrote 0xaaaa read 0xffff

ide_data_test: wrote 0x5555 read 0xffff

hda: TOSHIBA MK1234GAX, ATA DISK drive

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

hda: TOSHIBA MK1234GAX, 114473MB w/0kB Cache, CHS=14593/255/63

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:d7:10:01:8f

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.

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).

empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...ot: old root haokay

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
Tried to mount /dev/hdc4 but got error 6
Error mounting partitions (possibly already mounted)
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
No secondary hard disk
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To Comply...
Starting player
Timezone: Atlantic/South_Georgia

player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.01 2004/07/06.
! tags.cpp : 61:Failed to open tags (0xc0041002).
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Jul 5 2004
Vcb: 0x4054d000

Try rebuilding the music database manually.

Note: the ide_data_test lines look a little screwy, but I seem to recall Mark saying to ignore them unless you're definitely having disk problems.

Oh: unless you've actually got extra RAM installed in the player, stick with firmware v2.0. v2.01 only adds support for the extra RAM, but it's not as well tested as v2.0.

If you're using emplode, stick with v2.0

I replaced the firmware with version 2, and rebuilt the music database manually, and now Emplode seems to work fine - as long as the Empeg is plugged into my serial port. When I connect my Empeg via a crossover cable, it is not detected by Emplode. Is there any special setup I need to do to on either the Empeg or on my PC for this crossover cable to work (so that I don't have to use my serial cable for large data transfers)?

I just needed to set both my pc & the empeg to static ip addresses, and now I can successfully copy music to my empeg. One last question - is there any way to stop empeg from running the "Verifying Disk Integrity" check on every sync, since it takes anywhere from 10-15 minutes to run each time? Or could there be some problem with my hard drive that would prompt this check to be run each time?

During the first sync, Emplode did crash, so that's probably why I'm having this problem now. Thank you to everyone who helped me get my Empeg up and running, it's so much better than my old Omnifi mp3 player!

Hello,
I just bought an empeg MK2 with 64MB RAM. And installed Button lights, yee-ha!!!

However this player doesn't always connect to emplode or jEmplode not even with Serial support! Sometimes I'll "see" it but when trying to connect it states something like is not a valid player or player not available anymore. Same if I use static IP's and furthermore Serial should always work... (Right now, I am not even able to make it appear)

Also wierd, the player sometimes stucks for a millisecond while playing MP3 files. And at last it doesn't seem to re-boot properly after any update or forced re-boot in the HiJack menu. Only the light is pulsating, it then starts when I un- and re-plug it to AC.

-I ran Mark Lord's Bigdisk.upgrade.(1x40GB HD)
-Installed 2.01 Developer Image
-Installed Hijack v476.hijack.mk2.zImage using logoedit1.7

First I thought that there might be a problem with the HD, downloaded all MP3's to my Computer and checked whetever they where corrupt or not. Then I've installed another 30GB IBM HD.
Same issue here, so this narrows it down to the firmware or the player. -is there any way I can check the additional RAM?

I also tried the 2.0 dev. Image. With this version I don't seem to have any issues connecting to Emplode or jEmplode however the player has sudden lockups whilst playing MP3's, but it continous to play normaly when pushing the "next song" button. (Ofcourse this happens randomly so I don't think this is an issue with the used MP3 files.) -and again re-boot doesn't work as supposed too.

Any suggestions? 2.0 doesn't support 64ram, may I still use it and just don't have the add memory or will it cause trouble? Eg. are those lockups caused by the extra RAM?
Would it be easy to remove those extra RAM (it's on the back of the MB and I can't see how it has been soldered on) Or is that just a stupid notion on my side and I should be slapt of even thinking about solving the problem this way?!


Thanks for your input!

I haven't had any problem connecting to Emplode once I switched over to version 2.0 of he firmware, but I'm not sure how it works with the extra ram. Also, when I try to follow the steps here, (I have the "EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended" message), I get an error when I try to run the line "swapon /swapfile" saying that /swapfile is not a valid switch. Is there anything else I can try?

It always worked before when I tried it. Why would that have changed?

Is it possible that Deface's problem is that the disk never got "built" ?

The builder formats each partition separately. Linux needs its swap partitions pre-formatted in some way. It might be that the builder failed to format the swap partition. "/swapfile" is just a "shortcut" to the partition.

Okay, back to the original question.

Deface, did you put a new disk drive into the player without running the "builder"?

The disk builder did run, and I didn't reboot my Empeg until the builder had run the stress tests for about 2 hours. I've been away for a couple of days, so when I get home tonight, I'll try those commands again, and I'll post my results.

Ok, I tried running those commands, and the swapon /swapfile command ran successfully. Now, when I get to the fsck -fay /dev/hda4 command, here's the error I see now:


empeg:/empeg/bin# fsck -fay /dev/hda4
Parallelizing fsck version 1.19 (13-Jul-2000)
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/
hda4 is mounted.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary informationo room for private writable mapping
n
error: -12
fsck.ext2: Memory allocation failed while retrying to read bitmaps for /dev/hda4

empeg:/empeg/bin#


All the other commands run successfully, and now I'm getting the exact same results every time I try this. What else can I do to fix this?

Run "fdisk -l /dev/hda" and post the output here.

Here's the results:


Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 5 40131 5 Extended
/dev/hda2 6 10 40162+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 11 13 24097+ 10 OPUS
/dev/hda4 14 14593 117113850 83 Linux
/dev/hda5 1 3 24034+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 4 5 16033+ 82 Linux swap

Okay, that's about 12MB worth of swap, which sounds about right. After running the swapon command, run "free". (Hopefully it's installed.) It should show you that 12MB of swap space.

What I'm getting at is that running out of memory sounds like a swap-less condition, but you've turned on the swap, so that shouldn't be a problem. But it is, so we need to find out what's wrong with it.

Well, "fsck.ext2: Memory allocation failed while retrying to read bitmaps for /dev/hda4" sounds like that to me. He has a single 120GB hard drive, so I don't think he should be running out of memory trying to check that filesystem -- other people have bigger drives and don't have this problem, IIRC -- but I could be wrong.

Edit: GB, not MB

I tried running the command "free" after the swapon /swapfile line, but I get:

bash: free: command not found

Nuts. How about "cat /proc/meminfo"?

Is there anything else i can try to fix this problem?

Here's what I get when I use cat /proc/meminfo:

empeg:/empeg/bin# cat /proc/meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 11161600 3391488 7770112 1269760 520192 1552384
Swap: 16412672 0 16412672
MemTotal: 10900 kB
MemFree: 7588 kB
MemShared: 1240 kB
Buffers: 508 kB
Cached: 1516 kB
SwapTotal: 16028 kB
SwapFree: 16028 kB

After running
ls -lF /
swapon /dev/hda6
cat /proc/meminfo

here's what I get:


empeg:/empeg/bin# ls -lF /
total 23
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Apr 1 2003 bin/
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Jul 4 2000 dev/
drwxr-xr-x 5 0 0 1024 Oct 12 07:30 drive0/
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Jun 2 1999 drive1/
drwxr-xr-x 4 0 0 1024 Apr 1 2003 empeg/
drwxr-xr-x 3 0 0 1024 Sep 15 1999 etc/
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Feb 9 2000 lib/
drwx------ 2 0 0 12288 Apr 1 2003 lost+found/
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Jun 2 1999 mnt/
dr-xr-xr-x 21 0 0 0 Oct 23 15:13 proc/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 0 0 3 Apr 1 2003 sbin -> bin/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 0 0 10 Apr 1 2003 swapfile -> ./dev/hda6
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Apr 13 1999 tmp/
drwxr-xr-x 4 0 0 1024 Feb 6 2000 usr/
drwxr-xr-x 3 0 0 1024 Aug 28 1999 var/

empeg:/empeg/bin# swapon /dev/hda6
Adding Swap: 16028k swap-space (priority -2)

empeg:/empeg/bin# cat /proc/meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 11169792 9031680 2138112 1265664 3768320 3538944
Swap: 16412672 0 16412672
MemTotal: 10908 kB
MemFree: 2088 kB
MemShared: 1236 kB
Buffers: 3680 kB
Cached: 3456 kB
SwapTotal: 16028 kB
SwapFree: 16028 kB

empeg:/empeg/bin#

Okay, that all looks good.

And the filesystem check still fails if run immediately after the swapon /dev/hda6 command ?

When I run the swapon /dev/hda6 command, i see this:

Adding Swap: 16028k swap-space (priority -1)



Then when I get to fsck -fay /dev/hda4, I see this:

Parallelizing fsck version 1.19 (13-Jul-2000)
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/
hda4 is mounted.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
no room for private writable mapping
error: -12
fsck.ext2: Memory allocation failed while retrying to read bitmaps for /dev/hda4

It looks like this has happened a couple of times before, with "large" drives of the time. I bet that there's something more than usually wrong with the hard drive and fsck needs more memory than usual. Let's try adding more swap space and see what happens:

Code:

---

mkswap /dev/hda2
swapon /dev/hda2
fsck -fay /dev/hda4

---

ISTR that you don't have a second drive, but if you do, and those steps didn't work, also try this:

Code:

---

mkswap /dev/hdb6
mkswap /dev/hdb2
swapon /dev/hdb6
swapon /dev/hdb2
fsck -fay /dev/hda4

---

That should add more swap space than I could possibly imagine that you need.

After running these commands, after "Pass 5: Checking group summary information", here's what I see:

Block bitmap differences: -7911454 -7911455 -7911456 -7911457 -7911458 -7925896
-15136748 -15136749 -15136750 -15136751 -15136752
Fix? yes

Free blocks count wrong for group #965 (0, counted=5).
Fix? yes

Free blocks count wrong for group #967 (0, counted=1).
Fix? yes

Free blocks count wrong for group #1847 (0, counted=5).
Fix? yes

Free blocks count wrong (94744107, counted=94744108).
Fix? yes


/dev/hda4: *****FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED*****
/dev/hda4: 13891/915008 files (25.5% non-contiguous), 22369732/117113850 blocks
empeg:/empeg/bin#



I tried a sync after this, and it no longer hangs up at the "Verifying Disk Integrity" step anymore.

Thank you!

Wow, nice work puzzling through that one, Bitt!

I suppose I ought to modify the bigdisk builder to create a larger swap partition than merely 16MB. Maybe have it do 32MB by default instead.

Cheers

Well, the error message was pretty straightforward. I'd just never seen a report of fsck running out of memory with the swap enabled, so I figured the swap had merely not been enabled properly. Apparently it can run out of memory with the swap enabled, though. I don't think losing 16MB is a big deal, but this has apparently only happened three times, including this one. Eh. Do it anyway. 16MB is like four tracks.

Hi there,

last month the harddisk of my beloved MK2 crashed. I had to replace it with a new one. Experienced the same issues as in 2007. Searched Google, as I could not remember the solution. And guess what, I found my own post LOOOOOOL!


BTW: The solution in my case is to load the empeg 2.00 dev. Image. The extra custom RAM of my MK2 causes constant problems. Therefore the v2.00 seems to ignore the additional Memory.
Now with 2.00dev. and resent hijack, it runs stable as it used to for the last years! I love my empeg MK2 and my Panasonic HD1 combo more than my turbo charged subaru legacy.


Cheers

Mmm. sounds like flaky wiring on the extra RAM.
Easy enough to ignore (as you are doing) if you stick to the older releases.

Cheers