arrg - failed synch again

i recently replaced my second hard drive (special thanks to David Moss for taking care of me!) via the FAQ instructions and everything was grand. I had a fresh 50 gigs to upload my mp3s to. I did artists "A thru C" (about 8 gigs) in one swoop without a problem.

I then got greedy and decided to plop the remaining 30 gigs of my collection overnight. It crashed during a "tortoise" album so it did make it to the "t's"

I unplugged the power to the player and it threw some socket error message. I then re-synched with emplode (2.00 b11 on XP) and it did the 'fsck' thing and said certain playlists were not found.

No problem, it was the "Tortoise through Yo La Tengo" (the end of the alphabet).

I deleted those playlists and it re-synched fine.

I then tried to upload the new Flaming Lips album that came out today (amazing BTW) and it crashed. I then installed the developer image and hooked up the hyperterminal and went into the command line and typed:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda3 bs=512 count=128
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/empeg_state bs=128 count=1

per tech supports suggestion when this happened before. apparently this corrects a corrupt DB and has it rebuilt.

I then installed 2.00 b11 and hijack 2.80 and waited through another 'fsck' and it complained about the playlist not matching up so I deleted the offending playlist and re-synched with no problem.

I then tried to upload the flaming lips again and it crashed half way through!

What should I do now? Sorry for the wordy descrip but I want to make sure that I didn't screw up a step.

Thanks for your help.

Check the tags on the flaming lips album. Anything goofy in there by any chance? Like a comments field that's longer than 256 characters or something?

yes, question marks???

is that the culprit?

also, the 'building database' happens everytime the player is turned on. i have to wait about two minutes every time i start my car to listen to music

yes, question marks??? is that the culprit?

If there are question marks in the FILE NAME, then that is definitely the culprit. That's an illegal file name for Windows.

also, the 'building database' happens everytime the player is turned on.

Synching once with emplode (without changing or adding any files) should be enough to fix that.

tony, you are ON IT!

thanks, once again.

Note that I mean FILE NAME not song title. I mean the name of the file itself as it resides on the disk.

Frankly, I don't see how it's possible to get question marks into a file name on a PC unless the file is on a Macintosh volume being mounted remotely or something. Where did this file come from?

it was populated by the CDDB when i ripped the CD earlier today. i remember that there were "?" marks in the list as it was being ripped but the actual file replaced them with an underscore (_)

there is an apostrophe (') in the title that it crashed on.

could that be it? when it crashed before, it was during a song with no illegal characters.

It should not crash on an apostrophe (single one) either, as that's not an illegal character in Windows.

I have found that when my rio crashes on sync it is because that particular mp3 file has a glitch or tic when it plays. I dont know if this helps but thats what I have found. I am using beta 11 with hijack 278 on win98.

I have found that when my rio crashes on sync it is because that particular mp3 file has a glitch or tic when it plays.

Well, in your case, then please click here for tools to diagnose your MP3 problems. But I'm not sure that's the problem Willebear is having.

Thanks Tony, I should have seen that faq before, but I guess I missed it. Those are some nice programs. Some of my mp3s I know do have problems when I first started encoding my cd's I was using music match jukebox, which still works great, but at first I didnt have error corection turned on and well.. it made a mess.

things have gone from bad to worse. I installed a new 20 gig HD and it seemed to go well. While uploading to the player it crashed around the "T's" I haven't been able to successfully upload except for some audio clips from the 'big lebowski'

anything else crashes. during about the third consecutive crash and fsck, it crashed during the fsck!! Now when it boots, it "builds the music database" and then hangs on "starting server"

i have attached a very scary boot log!

i noticed that emplode says that there is 18.6 gigs free which is suspiciously close to the size of the 20 gig drive i installed. is it possible that there is a problem with the new disc? i thought the installation went way too well considering my luck with this frickin thing

If the old drive was giving you trouble, and now the new drive is giving you trouble, I would suspect cabling/IDE issues before assuming two bad drives in a row.

Note that the 18.6 gigs number is correct for a 20 gig drive. There's a detailed entry in the FAQ describing why.

it is possible that I put the jumper on wrong. the cable is a new one sent to me about a month ago so I don't think it's that (unless it is off by one pin)

I can't remember how the jumper went on the slave. I put it vertical on the pins closest to the long row that the cable plugs into

:: :::::::::::::::::::::::::
_^

(jumper is where the carat is pointing)

the charts on the HD make no sense to me:

Device0 / Device1 <jumper> / Cable Sel.

should it be horizontal?

I couldn't find an FAQ entry about the jumper

thanks for your help...i am just about as sick of posting as you probably are seeing my posts

Somtimes it depends on the drive, what kind is it? On my ibm for slave (device 1) it is vertical on this pin:
:: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::
^

I had the jumper on the wrong pins! I have put the jumper on correctly but am still having a problem synching with emplode! it crashed everytime I try to simply open emplode. it runs thru that fsck (which i have really come to *love* in a special kind of way) and then crashes.

any suggestions?

If the jumper was on the wrong pins to begin with, I would recommend wiping the drives from scratch with the builder image again.

I wiped the drives again by applying the 'builder'

things seemed good, I intalled 2.00 b11 and hijack 281 and synched w/ emplode. all seemed well, fresh disks showing 46.4 GB free.

i uploaded my mp3s overnight and it ran successfully for about 12 hours. After about 27.3 GB (the size of my functioning 30 GB drive) it locked up.

So, I conclude that the second drive is still not working right. I found the IBM web site thanks to "mrfixit" and it showed where to put the jumper so I know it's in the right place now.

How can I make this second disk work?

After about 27.3 GB (the size of my functioning 30 GB drive) it locked up. (...) So, I conclude that the second drive is still not working right.

Just because it died after 30 gigs doesn't necessarily mean it was the second drive's fault. As stated here, some of the songs probably went onto the second drive just fine.

It could have been a heat-related thing. The player might have just gotten too hot with both drives spinning for 12 hours straight nonstop-- its normal operating mode has the drives spun down for most of the time and I could easily see it getting too hot after 12 hours, even if it's sitting in the open air on a desk. Perhaps doing your music uploads in smaller batches is the key.

Also, it could have been any number of other errors, such as a Windows error that has no relation to the player. You said "it locked up" but you didn't define it.

now it won't even open in emplode. after running the 'fsck' it crashed during the 'rebuilding database' segment. I've tried three times with the same results.

the error is

"download failed while rebuilding database. connection timed out (error 0x8004003e)"

uggh

Hey, if there was some info on drive0 about drive1 won't you have to do this agian? I'm with Tony I dont think the last crash or hang or ??? was drive related.

it's working now! *rejoice*

i installed v 1.3 on the player and it was able to sych with emplode 1.3

i deleted some of the playlists that were written in the db but had no songs.

i have now had successful uploads, the second hd is working, and it seems to be just fine. thanks to everyone who helped me fight thru this.

<collective sigh of relief>

Cool, glad to help.