well, an hour of Hells Bells and it's still running. I think I'll use Jemplode to dump the whole thing to my computer and see how that goes. if it works, i could then dump it right back. I've done a lot of tweaking to the id3 tags from within emplode, so i prefer that version to the copy i still have on my hard drive.

but if that fails, i guess i can scrub and start over. are you thinking it may be a software issue that could be overcome, or more likely physical damage? couldn't i run fsck with a parameter to check for bad sectors?