You say that when you boot the 40 solo, it boots fine, but you cannot break into a shell. Can you see anything through emplode in that case? Are any of your audio files on the drive? Can you show a boot log of that case?

If you do this, bear in mind that synchronising with just the 40 in will write a blank fid 0x100, i.e. a blank root playlist. Subsequent synchronisations, or database rebuilds, will use this root playlist and not the populated one from the 18 (if the file exists on both /drive0 and /drive1, then the /drive0 one gets used).

Once you do solve your problem and get to a shell prompt, you should delete the contents of /drive0/fids (probably just 100 and 101) before the copy operation.

Peter