Delete the database files and do a fresh sync. Details somewhere in the FAQ.

The obligatory link is here. Also, another possible problem might be related to this, but I don't know exactly.

I'm concerned that Doug used a soldering iron directly on his 18gb disk drive. Could that possibly have caused a problem?

Also, permanently turning a disk drive into a slave drive is a bad idea, because in the empeg, sometimes when you add a new drive, certain drives refuse to be a slave and will only work as a master. For instance, I had intended for my recent upgrade to be a certain master/slave order, and they refused to work that way. So I had to rethink my process and get the files ordered/copied differenty.