Alright, the serial issue is solved. "Something" is up with my HTPC, but my powerhouse is back up and running, and those COM ports work fine.

I'll attach what I saw, but before I do I want to make an observation: There's NO sound at all from the pleyer when it tries to boot up. IIRC, I could normally hear the hard drives spin. Today, nothing. They do get power through the cable, right? I believe so but just to check...

Here's what came through hyperterminal (And I'm seeing the "CS4231A" thing, which looks familiar):



ÿIf 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 kerne
l.
Linux version 2.2.17-rmk5-np17-empeg52-hijack-v347 (root@ibbm) (gcc version 2.95
.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Sun Nov 23 12:29:03 EST 2003
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 11
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c)
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 40103953)
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 15016k/16M available (980k code, 20k reserved, 364k 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 636f6972 'rioc'
Tuner: loopback=0, ID=-1
Scheduling custom logo.
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
Could not find CS4231A (version=01)
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 0000
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0005080).
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...
Probing primary interface...
empeg-flash driver initialized
smc chip id/revision 0x0001
smc_init couldn't find card
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...Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05