Here is what happened with each of these ideas...

Tony, at the moment I currently only have one drive and I'm pretty sure my cable is fine. When I followed the procedure in your last link, the database wasn't rebuilt when I exited out of shell. It just booted up with no playlists.

Brad, refs=0 returned no search results.

Paul, yes, there are files in drive0/fids but still nothing after running player.

and on a semi related note, is it normal to see this when doing the fsck

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
Block bitmap differences: -18912811 -18912812 -18912814 -18912815 -18912816 -18
912817 -18912818 -18912819 -18912820 -18912822 -18912823 -18912824 -18912825 -18
912826 -18912827 -18912828
Fix? yes

Free blocks count wrong for group #2308 (502, counted=518).
Fix? yes

Free blocks count wrong (508718, counted=508734).
Fix? yes


/dev/hda4: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
/dev/hda4: 10144/152000 files (36.7% non-contiguous), 18943146/19451880 blocks
empeg:/empeg/bin#

I dont think I remember ever seeing it say my file system was modified when doing this before.