Well, I hope for everybody here that they do not have to rely on Rio Customer Support. I've sent them an email asking for assistance and they told me to press the RESET button on the player. I've asked them where it's located on a Rio Central and they are probably still looking - haven't heard from them since...

Meanwhile I've been doing some more investigation - I've drawn a schematic of the IDE bus part of the player and hooked up my scope. What I found is that one of the 3.3/5V transceivers on the board (LVX3245's) that provide the bridge between the 5V peripheral section and the 3.3V internal logic (which the ARM processor uses) is not behaving properly. Pin 4 of the middle transceiver (of which the B-side is hooked to DATA1 on the IDE bus) shows no signal when the device is transferring data. On any other DATA channel on the A-side I can see the bits streaming past. I can also see the bitstream on the B-side at DATA1 of the chip (pin 20).

On pin 4 I DO see data when the IDE interface is initializing and also see this data back a pin 20. Apparently the chip's B1->A1 logic is fried.

I'll get a new one and replace it later this week - I'll let you all know what the results are.

Jeroen