I'm getting the "No Hard Disk Found Contact Support" syndrome, but it happened in a weird way... (sorry for the long winded description, but I figured I'd try to give as much information as I can.)

Background: I've had my empeg running 2.00beta11 for months now. I also have HiJack ver254 installed. Both have been running for a long time and I havn't sync'd in ages (ran out of room on my player) but I listen to this in my car all the time. So, other than sending a custom logo.raw or two a few weeks back, I havn't been making any changes to it. Maybe related: I've had the "Check File System on Sync" disabled... but like I mentioned, I haven't snyc'd in a long time so it wouldn't matter?

This is a RioCar Mk2a with a Fuji 30GB drive (slave) and IBM 30GB drive (master). The player was bought in Dec. of 2001 and the drives are from my older empeg Mk2. I swapped the drives while replacing the drive cable (had a bad cable on shipment) - so I already have a new cable.

Last night, I was getting ready for a party at my house (in which the empeg was going to be the music source). A buddy was bringing over a little ethernet hub, so instead of having my notebook sit next to my entertainment rack (with a 10ft. crossover cable), I ran CAT5 cable through the ceiling to behind my bar. As the music was playing, I plugged one end of the 100 ft. cable into the empeg and began running the cable through the drop ceiling...

Eventually, I realized that the music stopped playing at some point. I walked over to the empeg and it was stuck at 0:00 on a song. I skipped ahead to the next song and it played fine. Curious, I tried playing the bad song (assuming it was a corrupt file) by FF and RWD'ing into into it, but it would usually get stuck. Then the player started to react to the front panel commands very slowly. I eventually skipped ahead to another song (it skipped ahead several songs as it caught up to me hitting the ">" button several times.) Unfortunately, this time it got to a file that was certainly corrupt.. I got the "Invalid File Format" error.. It hung on this error message for over 20 seconds. Impatient, I unplugged the power and rebooted the player. As it displayed the custom boot logo for longer than normal, I began to worry. Finally I got the dreaded "No Hard Disk Found Contact Support" message.

At this point, I wasn't too worried. I know that this has happened to others on the empeg BBS recently. However most people experience this in cold weather. And if anything, my player was warm from being on top of the entertainment rack. I unplugged it and let it sit for about 10 minutes. Still no luck. Then I let is sit for an hour - still no luck. Thinking that maybe the cable came loose, I opened the player and double checked the connections. Pressing them down, I reapplied power (taking all precautions in the unofficial Drive Upgrade FAQ) but no luck. Then I removed the cable and reseaded it - nope. Then I ran upstairs and got my other replacement cable (still fresh in the envelope - unopened). STILL NO LUCK!

Stressed out, I packed up the empeg for the night and popped in some CD's. This morning, I try it again, but no dice.... Below is my boot log:

In reply to:

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empeg-car bootstrap v1.02 20001106 ([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 kern
el.
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg50-hijack-v254 ([email protected]) (gcc ve
rsion 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Sat Apr 13 12:22:05 EDT 2002
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 11
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 10101689)
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 14984k/16M available (1012k 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)
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 67706d65 'empg'
Found custom animation at offset 0x9b734
Scheduling custom logo.
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
Could not find CS4231A (version=20)
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 1012
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0005a00).
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 0x0003
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...VFS: Cannot open root device 03:05
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05

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This is really weird because I have tried 2 new cables and I'm not getting anywhere.... could I maybe have created a short while running that cable and having one end plugged into the empeg?