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 ([email protected])
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 ([email protected]) (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 ([email protected])

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...