I got my unit yesterday and just plugged it in. Windows 2000 handles it fine, emplode sees it, everything was great. So I took the 60 directories (4.08 gigs) of music CDs I've encoded onto my computer and dragged them onto emplode. It started doing it's thing, "preparing up upload" came up and then it said "waiting for response from player". It then timed out and the rio "syncronizing" screen stopped moving. I tried all the buttons but nothing worked so I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Now it hangs on the blue "Rio" screen. I was using ethernet to transfer the files. I'm trying to boot up with both ethernet in and not and usb in and not. any ideas?

Here is what the unit says at bootup (after hyperterminaling in):


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 v1.03
Copying kernel...
Calling linux kernel...
Uncompressing Linux.................................... done, booting the kernel
.
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg41 (mac@aphex.internal.empeg.com) (gcc versi
on 2.95.2 19991024 (release)) #132 Wed Jan 10 13:49:24 GMT 2001
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 40103941)
Command line: mem=16m temp=49
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 15048k/16M available (972k code, 20k reserved, 336k data, 8k 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 '
Logo type is 1
empeg display initialised.
empeg dspaudio driver initialized
empeg audio-in initialised, CS4231A revision a0
empeg infra-red support initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 1012
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0004700).
empeg power-pic driver initialised (first boot)
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hdb: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hdb: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hdb: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hdb: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hdb: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
hdb: FUJITSU MHL2300AT, ATA DISK drive
ide0: unexpected interrupt, status=0xff, count=1
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
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:6
5
Partition check:
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: Cannot open root device 03:05
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all.

Congratulations on your new player! Sorry it stopped working. Fortunately, it's likely to be a simple problem. Please read this FAQ entry.

It's doing this with AC power on my desk

It's doing this with AC power on my desk

I don't understand why you said this? The FAQ entry I linked doesn't mention AC or DC power. The drive cable problem will manifest itself intermittently regardless of which power supply it's running off of.

What FAQ entry did you get when you clicked on my link? You should have gotten a link describing, in detail, the problems that some players have with their internal IDE disk drive cables.

Weird, one time I clicked on it I got the "Why doesn't my Rio Car work in my Mark 2 docking sled?" FAQ entry, another time I got the one about the fauly IDE cable, another time I got the "Why doesn't my Rio Car work in my Mark 2 docking sled?" again....

Thanks though, I sent an email off to the empeg support unit. What's weird is it will intermitently work. I checked the connections into the drives and they seem solid... they are glued on and everything. I had to check it by unscrewing the screen and moving it out of the way though, I couldn't get the side screws for the shock plate unscrewed.

Yeah the cable wont be loose itll just quit working. Youll need to get those cradle screws out though to replace the drive cable

Yeah, you shouldn't be unscrewing the display board.

In order to undo the side screws holding the drive cradle in place, you need a screwdriver of the correct size, but it also needs to have a pretty decent amount of force to back it up. Sometimes I have to use a pair of pliers around the shaft of a small jewler's screwdriver to apply the correct amount of non-slipping torque.

What Tony says.

I've had better luck with a large screwdriver with exchangeable bits though (and the proper size bit is surprisingly large, butI don't recall exactly what size it was), just make sure that the bit is nice and sharp and not rounded. The larger handle IMO gives better control than a jewelers screwdriver. Keep the pressure up when loosening the screw - slipping can round both the bit and screw...

/Michael

Oh, I agree completely, a large driver with exchangeable bits is better. I've just been stuck in situations where the only available tool was a Jewler's screwdriver, and I've had to do this sometimes.

Ok so I got really angry and managed to get the screws out, even without stripping the heads! So I got the shock tray out, pushed on all the connections, they all didn't budge. I plug in the unit and it comes on. So I try it a few more times and the unit powers up. Then I slide the shock tray back in and it still works. I load up emplode and deleted everything off the drive and am currently trasfering 573 megs over USB. I also have hyperterminal up over COM1 and I'm getting the following errors as the songs transfer:

hda: no DRQ after issuing WRITE
ide0: reset: success
hda: set_geometry_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: set_geometry_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, CHS=257/1/1, sector=113
6176
hda: recal_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: recal_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=16843009, sector=11361
76
hda: recal_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: recal_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=16843009, sector=11361
76
hda: status error: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hda: status error: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=18079713, sector=113
6176
hda: no DRQ after issuing WRITE
ide0: reset: success
hda: set_geometry_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: set_geometry_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, CHS=16383/15/63, sector
=1136176
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:04 (hda), sector 1136176
hda: recal_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: recal_intr: error=0x00 { }
hda: write_intr error1: nr_sectors=31, stat=0x59
hda: write_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hda: write_intr: error=0x00 { }
ide0: reset: success
hda: write_intr error1: nr_sectors=53, stat=0x59
hda: write_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hda: write_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=18162469, sector=12189
31
ide0: reset: success
hda: write_intr error1: nr_sectors=101, stat=0x59
hda: write_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hda: write_intr: error=0x00 { }
ide0: reset: success
hda: write_intr error1: nr_sectors=86, stat=0x59
hda: write_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hda: write_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=18175307, sector=12315
14
ide0: reset: success

there are quite a few more but they are generally like that. Does it still look like a bad cable or could it be a hard drive(s)?

Yes, it still looks like cable trouble.

That's good to hear... I guess... better than a bad hard drive at least Do you know a telephone # where I can reach someone to send me a new cable?

carsupport@sonicblue.com

Rob

I had the same thing happen to mine, I though tit didn't survive the trip to Aus from the UK via US...

I thought I would open it and fix myself (costs me too much to send it back) and I pushed the wires, etc, and it sort of came good.

Then I realised there is like silicon/hot glue put on the connectors, take this all off first then undo the cables from the drive(s) and then I used electrical contact cleaner and sprayed them, then re-sat them.

After that it came good, I seated the cabling nicely with some zip ties to keep it secure but easy to remove if I ever need to in the future.

Good luck with your unit, sounds very similar to what I had to do this afternoon.

Des.

Note that the common problem with hard disk cables on recent players relates to the crimping of the connectors - not the connection between the cable and the drive.

Rob

Actually, very true, one thing I did leave out was that I did "squeeze" the connectors in a bit more on the IDE connectors on the cable, there was a little gap where I could see the silver things that cut into the right cable.

I do that by habit anyway with each new pc I build, so I did leave that out of what I had just written.

Good point though Rob, hopefully that will help a few others.

How did you remove the hot glue stuff from the connector? I just don't want to break anything

I carefully pick it off with my fingers. Painstaking work.

It usually peels off very easily, in one or two pieces.

Rob

Must be that English air . The couple of times I've done it, it comes off in one or two dozen pieces, and not completely. I just get enough off to allow for comfortable plugging and unplugging without putting stress on the cable crimp.

Great, now the cable just needs to get here.... the suspense is killing me!

when I was waiting on mine I did what other people have suggested by just making sure it was crimped tight, I got it to work for a while, but it would go out every once in a while...
then i got the cable and had no problems since

How long did it take for the cable to get to you?

I'm in Michigan...
I think just about a week I think...
don't remember exactly been having too much fun since then :-)

Yeah so I get an email today and the guy is like "we don't have any cables, we'll have them maybe this week or next week, I'll send one when we get them"... that's a bunch of crap... considering this is a known problem and has been for sometime, they should have them available to please their already failed customers...... GRRRRR

sorry to hear that man...
but give them a little break, they do a really good job with support of an EOL'd product. Most companys don't do that at all. Maybe with the sudden growth of owners they weren't able to keep up the supply with the demand.
in the mean time...I re-read the thread and you said you did open you case and asked about the hot glue...Did you try making sure it was crimped tight? That kept mine running till I got the new cable. And mine didn't stop wroking again with the bad cable until I was transfering it between home and work...when i didn't move it much it was fine.

Yeah, I understand your frustration. My guess is they got caught by surprise by the number of people suddenly experiencing this problem. If the board here is any indication, a lot of people got hit by this recently, me included.

I got the same email too, did you try his suggestion to switch which connector your drive is plugged into?

Amthar, they did get a bunch of cables to replace the defective ones, and did have them ready. Unfortunately, the people responsible for support (the team in England) was not adequately warned when the people responsible for sales (the US division) decided to drop the price of the player to "absolute steal" levels. As a result, the sudden surge of player sales caused a sudden and unexpected need for more cables than originally planned. You can't blame them for briefly running out.

The support for this player is essentially being handled by one guy, and he's doing a fantastic job, considering. When David says he will get you a cable as soon as possible, he means it, and he will live up to his promise.

If your player is a single-drive player, there is a published work-around for the cable problem here (moving the drive to the other spot). If you can't wait for the replacement cable, you can do that instead.

First, my unit is a 2 drive unit, so the workaround is not possible.

Second, I don't really care what the excuses are, they should have cables ready for their customers. I work in the IT services field and I know that excuses are just that, excuses, and the bottom line is to be ready to meet your customer's needs. What's really bad about the whole thing is as I said before, it's not like this is a surprise problem. Now they have failed their customers TWICE. I feel bad for David, I truely do, it's a sucky situation to be in, but that is completely seperate from being pleased as a customer. So now for possibly 2 weeks my unit is an expensive piece of metal collecting dust.

I don't think Tony or anyone else is defending SonicBlues customer service. Instead, he is trying to tell you that despite what has happened, you can take some comfort in the fact that David is in no way connected with it and has an excellent track record for taking care of customers.

SonicBlue is just the company I bought my 2nd player from. I couldn't care less about them as a whole. But the division that is comprised of former empeg employees gets my full respect. Yeah, I'm pissed that my 2nd player was shipped in a huge box with about 10 styrofoam peanuts in it (would have been better to just ship it in the original box) and was knocked around. But the empeg guys have nothing to do with that.

Many of us longer standing members have followed the product development and know that the empeg company was bought by Sonicblue. The original team handles everything related to the player except for the actual sale and I'm very confidant in them. We aren't providing excuses - just diferentiating between the empeg guys and the rest of SonicBlue and hoping you find some comfort in it. With luck, the integrity of the empeg staff will rub off on the rest of SB.

Ok well I'm a little more complacent now, I ripped off that hot glue and took a pair of plyers and really cranked down on the connectors and it's transferred about 4 gigs fine now. A far cry from the 50 gigs I have to transfer, but it's progress If it tolds out till I get my cable I'll be happy. If it wasn't for the shortness of the cable, I would buy a replacement somewhere around here. I just don't think I could find a feasible/quality replacement easily.

if you do try and buy one, make sure it's a IDE cable for laptops, not a standard IDE cable...

really? damn, I've been cutting this DMA100 desktop IDE cable down to size for the last day or so for nothing? MAN, this SUCKS! j/k.... thanks for the advice

The problem with cables running out is that they are custom made, and there is a long lead time on them (about 3 weeks, if I remember rightly). We ran out of spares when there was the price drop, and again ran out of spares when we had to ship a large number in one go to carplayer.com to cover units they had bought.

We do try and stay ahead of demand, though. The next lot are due any day now.

Hugo

Tell you what, email me your details and I'll arrange a refund.

Rob

Did he return his "worthless piece of metal" for a refund?

Actually he said it was an expensive piece of metal. He's right as well - the parts cost a hell of a lot more than $199.

Rob

oops, I did misquote him.

"He's right as well - the parts cost a hell of a lot more than $199."

Not to mention the labor, rent, and other costs that went into it.

I apologize if I offended anyone, I'm just very anxious/frustrated with the unit right now. I _really_ am looking forward to using it, and I've been able to temporarily use it (half disassembled) at my desk after I crimped the cable connectors down harder. But I know that it's just a temporary fix. At the same time, the remote control doesn't work, so I'm going to go get a new battery in hopes that it will fix it (according to the FAQ and posts, this probably will do it). Until the unit functions as an mp3 player in my car and in my house, it is not doing what it was designed to do. Hence my comment about it being an expensive piece of metal. I'm also hoping beyond hope that the cable will hold out through this weekend. I'm going on a 2 hour trip to the beach and it would be the perfect time to use it. We'll see.

I understand your frustration. When I got mine, I had to ship it back because it had bad ram and rebooted continuously as soon as it warmed up. Theres nothing like paying all that money and then having to ship it back for repair. The turnaround time was short, and after a few days, I had my player back in working condition. Then on top of that, I had to wait a few more months to have enough money to buy an amp and have it installed in my truck. (I had been carefully saving money for the previous year and a half to have enough to buy one and found I didnt have enough leftover for a decent amp and install.) All the units were inspected and tested at the factory at the time of manufacture. They werent selling too well and most of the units sat in the warehouse for a year before the blowout. They were probably banged up pretty good during shipment and mishandled by the incompetent SB warehouse employees as well. I dont think they knew the extent of the bad hard drive cable problems since there werent many units being sold. If you havent loaded up much music, you could disconnect the other drive and just use one drive and the good connector on the cable temporarily.

Sean

I faced exactly the same 'hang on boot up' problem today. My log from hyperterminal looks the same so I guess there is no use posting it. However, unlike Amthar, I have been using the player for about 2 weeks already with no problems except for today's

I recently upgraded to 1.3 and did a couple of syncs with it no problem. I dont' know if this is worth mentioning, but today I had 2 other errors during sync before the player simply froze. First, while synching emplode gave me an error message about something going wrong during STAGE 10 or the sync process. I rebooted emplode and the player and everying seemed back to normal with the songs successfully transferred. On the next sync, again, I received an error about something going wrong during STAGE 5 of the sync. The next thing I know the player just hangs at boot up and does not want to start. I tried upgrading with firmware and that's when I got the 'BADPUMP' error.

I read the 2 FAQ entries related to this issue, as well as this thread, and it looks like it can be narrowed down to either a loose cable OR a bad hard drive. I read in other posts as well as this one that the loose cable problems usually occur only within a few hours of getting the player (because it was banged around during shipping). But my unit worked fine for two weeks, as well as today just before I took it home (btw, in a pelican case). So, it it hard for me to imagine that the cable came loose just in that short period of time, what do you think, could that be the cause of it?

Also, you said that in case the unit has two drives (like mine) one could be taken out so that the connector could be used with the first drive. In this case, how do I know which drive to take out, and which one stores my music (approx only 2 gigs now)? Thanks.

Well, I'd say that I wouldn't rule out a bad cable because it's been working for two weeks - the bad crimp can show up sooner or later...

Some people have reported (at least temporary) success in squeezing the connector with pliers, assisting the failed crimp... This might be the first thing to try, as it's easy and might hold you over until you get a new cable from the empeg guys.

Also, you said that in case the unit has two drives (like mine) one could be taken out so that the connector could be used with the first drive. In this case, how do I know which drive to take out, and which one stores my music (approx only 2 gigs now)?

The bad crimp seems to be limited to the middle connector, which in the empeg connects to the first drive (the one on the right if you look from infront of the empeg) which also normally is the master drive.

The music, when uploaded, is stored on whatever drive that happens to have most free space at the time, so for a player with two likesized drives the music will be spread over both drives.

You can copy any music from the master drive to the secondary with a command like the this:

rwm
cp -ax /drive0/fids/* /drive1/fids
rom

(also check out the Drive Upgrade FAQ, Step 7, as this is a thing sometimes needed to be undertaken in a drive upgrade).

In this case you could also copy the files in /drive0/var/ to /drive1/var/
with

rwm
cp /drive0/var/* /drive1/var/
rom

to copy the database etc (if you don't, when you start the player with only one drive, it'll take a minute or two to rebuild the database - and will do so every time until you sync with emplode.

Note: you'll also need to remove the jumper that designates the left drive as slave.
You can instead place it on the right drive, and it'll turn up as the slave drive when you later reconnect it with a good cable.

Also, be aware of the hot melt glue that is applied to the IDE connector (at the underside as the sit in the cradle. Remove the glue with a scewdriver or similar before trying to remove the IDE cable connector.



/Michael