Help New EMPEG...

Hi,

I just got my empeg installed, and I am having problems with it. It will play one song, and then if I choose a play list it will display each song on the play list, but not play them. After I get it to do that a few times, it will lock up completely, and all I can get it to do is display the Rio logo, unless I pull it out of the car and let it sit for 5 or so minutes, then it starts the process over....

Any ideas?

Thanks,

-Dan

Ok, Sorry I should have red the FAQ.

It sounds to me like this is the infamous lose IDE cable issue, is that what everyone else thinks?

Thanks

Ok,

I tried taking the thing apart according to the directions in the FAQ. As far as I could tell there where no loose cables or anything....

The FAQ mentions a jumper on the HD, there are no jumpers on the HD, and I couldn't find any floating around in the case, so I don't there there ever was one. Anyone have any ideas? This unit worked for a couple of days before I installed it while I was installing music on it with emplode.

You are correct that you probably have a problem with your IDE cable. It's probably the "badly crimped cable" issue. Contact support and have them send you a new cable. You can install it yourself without voiding your warranty.
About the jumpers : if your mk2a only got ONE drive, there's no need for jumpers. If there are TWO drives the slave drive has to have a jumper on it to configure it to slave. (at least this is so with IBM drives, bu tI suspect it is the same with other brands)

Anybody?

I'm getting pretty distresed that I just bought this thing, and spent a bunch of money on an install, and the damn thing breaks five minutes after I pull out of the installers parking lot.

The ide cable looked fine when I opened up the case, no crimp or anything in it, plus like I said the player worked fine for a couple of days, until I got it installed.

There is another ribbon cable that is coming off of the mother board. It has been crimped over a bit from the HD sled. That could possibly be what the problem is???

The problem is probably not noticable with the bare eye. I've had the problem too and putting in a new cable fixed it. Though, looking at the old cable I could see nothing wrong with it.
It is possible that the unit worked at first just because it hadn't been used yet. You see, using the player causes it to heat up, and the cable to expand. It is possible now that the cable got out of alignment one fraction of a mm, but just enough to become a problem.
Again, contact support. You're not alone in this. I've ordered six players and three of them showed this problem.

You arent going to notice the bad IDE cable mine had the same issue so as a temporary solution until I get my new cable from SB you can always connect the HD to the end connector.

You are probably correct.

I'll give that a try here in a bit. Here is the message I am getting from Hyptereminal

Probing primary interface...
Probing primary interface...
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:d7:26:0b:7
2
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
EXT2-fs warning: checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended
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 o

This is correct. The middle connector on the cable seems to be the culprit. (too bad -or a blessing, depending how you look at it- this is the connector where the master HD is connected to, so even people with only one HD in their player experience this problem)

This is the same error message I got when I experienced this problem. Now I'm 99.9% sure it's the same for you.

That seems to have been it.

I got the cable swapped, and it seems to be working fine now.

Thanks for the help.

BTW, Who do I need to talk to about getting a replacement cable?

email [email protected] with your postal address and serial number and ask for a replacement cable.

BTW, by ``crimp'' they don't mean that the cable was bent too much in shipment, but, rather, that the plastic connector was not attached to the ribbon cable properly. The act of attaching this sort of connector is called crimping.