Hey guys, once again having some problems here.

My question is what can I do to check if my hard drive is bad? In short, diskbuilder (car2-builder-20011022.upgrade) fails when trying to format the second drive with a 'no hard disk found contact support' message, even though the log indicates a drive was detected (log is below).

And the details:

I have a MKIIa with dual OE IBM 20GB drives. With both drives installed, the player seems to work, although I seem to have had a number of little problems I have asked about on different occasions (like the occasional 'no hard disk found during startup', player restarts itself every hour or so, player lockups occasionaly, occasional instances of fairly long bootup time, etc)..... I noticed this in the log file, which may or may not be an issue:

"Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19"
(full log file is attached)

This is occuring consistantly every time I boot the player. Looking at some archived termial sessions from a few months ago, this was present then as well.... so not sure what to make of it.

I have another player (my spare, single 10GB) which doesn't have any of these symptoms in the same environment, so I am convinced there is something wrong here. With all the little problems I have, I was starting to think either something is corrupt on the player (DB, config, etc). I tried reflasing 2b11 w/out hijack and the default ini file, with no improvement. I then followed the directions in the faq to rebuild the database (since I sometimes have those symptoms as well). That made things a little worse in that regard.... as everytime I rebooted after that, the player would pause for a long time while rebuilding the database.... everytime. I tried repeating the procedure as well, no help.

Since I have all my music archived on my PC, I decided to try to format both disks and rebuild everything from scratch. I used disk builder to format both drives. I was able to format the primary drive successfully (with secondary removed from the player) , but it fails when I try to format the the secondary drive installed as the primary (with jumped removed, etc). I have tried using the secondary drive on both cable positions with the same result. As mentioned before, the failure mode is 'no hard disk contact support' on the display even though the drives seems to have been detected in the startup log....

This seems to indicate that the drive is somehow bad.... I just wondered if there is anything else I can do before writing it off as trash....

As usual, thanks!

On the bright side, I would be glad to find out that replacing this drive solved all the weird little problems I have had.

It would be very odd if it were related.... but I also had the display fuse blow recently as well on this same player (blew while starting the car).... although I have had the other symptoms for months. related? coincidence? I sure don't seem to be having the best luck with this particlar player .

Here is the startup log when booting with diskbuilder and only the secondary hard drive (setup as the primary). At the last line it just stops and the display indicates the 'no hd found contact support' message.

And the attachment is the startup log earlier today before I started this troubleshooting.

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 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg49 (mac@aphex.internal.empeg.com) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #130 Mon Oct 22 18:52:07 BST 2001
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 11
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 7, serial number 90001020)
Command line: mem=12m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 10968k/12M available (964k code, 20k reserved, 332k 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 636f6972 'rioc'
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 d0005480).
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: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, 19077MB w/1874kB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63
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:d7:12:03:fc

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...

try a few things as i did, in a troubleshooting situastions first swap out the ide cable, contact david, second mess with the jumpers on the drives, the jumpers were key on my player working right

I have the basic stuff that comes to mind already.... both ports on the IDE cable work using the good drive, tried all possible drive combinations/jumper settings (& 2nd drive always has problems). The player fails to boot using diskbuilder when the second drive is used alone or as the master. And the player boots with diskbuilder when the second drive is slaved to the good drive, but diskbuilder still fails rebuilding the second drive.

Sounds like it's time to contact support now since I am out of ideas....

Thanks, Mike.

First off, the drive problem I described before has been resolved. I think there were really two issues here:

1) Something on the second drive was not quite right and
2) I misunderstood exactly what was going on when I was applying the diskbuilder image to a two drive system.

I initially tried applying diskbuilder with both drives installed since I had everything archived in MP3 format anyway. My intention was to rebuild both drives, reinstall the player software, and then reload my music to see if it might resolve the player rebooting, player lockup, and freqeunt database rebuild issues I seemed to be having. When trying to rebuild both drives with diskbuilder, the formatting of the primary drive went fine but a number of errors were reported when doing the second drive (I kick myself for not saving that particular Hyperterminal session, but the errors were regarding an invalid block structure or something).

So I then tried making the second drive the primary and rebooting to let diskbuilder do it's thing.... which is where my misunderstanding came into play. I was under the impression that rebooting with diskbuilder in flash, the player would try to format any drive I installed... but instead the boot process halted with the no disk found error (although it had been detected per the startup log).

I later realized that the diskbuilder image had to be applied while the primary drive to be formatted was in place so drivebuilder could actually boot and then proceed to do it's thing.

So I was able to format the second drive by installing it as the primary and then reflashing the drivebuilder image. As a test, I put the drives back in the original configuration and reflashed diskbuilder again. Now it was successful in formatting both drives with no errors reported. I don't know if making the secondary drive the primary was the reason it finally worked, or if I just needed to attempt this a number of times to overcome whatever problem the second drive had....

All this work seems to have been worthwhile though (as I knock on wood). The 'player reboots for no reason' problem I have had for some time now is gone. Before, the player would reset itself every 1-3 hours of being on (playing or in standby mode). 3 hours was the longest it ever went while I was monitoring the serial port. In practice, it seemed to usually reboot every hour or so of music playback. After inquiring about the problem here, Mark Lord indicated that entries in the log at the time of rebooting indicated the player was running out of memory, but the actual problem that lead to this state out of memory state could not be discerned.

So I continued by reinstalling the same code release I had before (2b11) and reloading my music on the player. Afterwards, I left the player in standby about 11 hours yesterday while being monitored by Hyperterminal.... and there were no player reboots! It also went through a 5 hour playback session without a single reboot. I am hoping that the player lockups and frequent database rebuild problems are also gone, but only time will tell (so far, so good).

Here is the thread about that rebooting problem I had...

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=empeg_tech&Number=71761&Search=true&Forum=All_Forums&Words=mrmunsell&Match=Username&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=allposts&Main=71761

I'm posting all this just in case anyone else has these problem symptoms. Not too long after that original post about the rebooting problem, I had received some email inquiries from others with similar problem symtoms who were wondering if I had found a solution yet.... for those, this might be worth a try.

Mike