Ok. Right off, thanks for all your help guys. I was getting a little frantic, but lucky for me the Empeg guys and the Empeg community have always kicked much bootie. I really appreciate it. (esp. since I'm not to terribly linux savy.)

(Note: If you are just interested in the terminal log, I snagged a good chunk and pasted it at the bottom of this message.) Here's the basic dialog I've had going with Rob so far:


> 1. I added lots of music to my Empeg when it was in beta 11. Hit
sync and watched it die. > (Nothing was uploaded.)

Sounds like the duff cable problem, this is typical.

> 2. Tried to resync a few times but emplode wouldn't or couldn't
connect to my Empeg. I couldn't > find it's IP Address in the about
> menu. (I wasn't sure if it was still displayed there or not.) I
tried USB and Serial as well. > Neither worked.

Was the "stand by" LED flashing?

>I don't think so.

>4. During the first stage of the first partition pumping, I heard a
nice click click click click > click click for about 8 seconds before
it
> got on with it and finished flashing.

Doesn't really say anything, to be honest - this could be standard disk
activity.

>Ok. (I know some clicking is normal, but I've always had bad luck with drives that make that rhythmic clicking. Maybe I'm just unlucky.)

> 5. I still can't connect. Empload likes to lock up on me a lot when
it's searching for players. > Esp. when I change the options
> while it's searching. And sometimes it'll stop responding at the same
time my player > spontaneously reboots itself. (Which is very
> annoying since it has to rebuild it's database each time.)

This is not normal. Can you check your control panel to see if the
empeg/Riocar
USB device is functioning correctly? If you need help doing this, please
mail
me.

>USB device working fine.

> As of now, the player has been running without a random reboot for
about 10 minutes while empload > has tried over and over to find

This is also abnormal. Can you get a serial log of the boot sequence
across to
me? Again, if you need help to do this, mail me. Refer to the online FAQ
at:

http://www.riocar.org/

- and look in the troubleshooting section. There is a topic something
like "How
do I connect to my player using Hyperterminal" which describes what to
do.

>I've attached it at the foot of this message.

> had to send it in under warranty. Could the lack of stand-offs have
shortened the life of the > other drive? (I'm assuming it's the older
> of the 2 that may be having problems.) How quickly are these things
supposed to eat up hard > drives? I'm not using it that heavily.

Ahh - hang on, you didn't tell me stuff like this. Can you let me have
your
personal details so I can look up your repair history in the database?

> Do you think it is a dying hard drive?

Based on my experience, we've had very few hard drive failures. However,
in the
last few weeks I have had a number of 30G disk failures in double disk
installations. Can you tell me something about the configuration of your
player?

>Dual 20 GB drives. (One of the first 40GB models.)

> What options do I have to fix it?

Either I can supply you with parts and you do it yourself (depends on
your
skills, and how the diagnosis goes), or you can send it to me and I can
repair
it for you. We have most parts in stock, and I can turn repairs around
in 7 - 14
days.

> Glad you guys are still around. I was worried you'd disappear there
for a while.

Don't worry about that - the empeg team is healthy and held in high
respect by
the Sonic Blue management. They will be around for some time.....


____
This is the reply I sent in later:

I'm running a two drive model with 20 GB drives. I've had
to send it in twice. Once for a bad diode (if I remember right) and
once for a drive that crashed hard due to lack of stand-offs. (To my
knowledge, they only replaced the one drive. I got my player back with
a large fragment of my original play-list in-tact... sort of. So I
assume the other drive is the original.)

When I synced, I didn't notice the LED flashing. The sound the drive
made wasn't the usual crunchy type clicking... It was a loud, rhythmic
clicking. (Generally, I've had bad luck with hard drives once they
start making that sound.) But you would know much better than I would.

USB driver is functioning. The IP connection was working to until the
sync failed. And serial was working (I flashed over the serial port).
None of these connections were picked up. (Other than the momentary USB
pickup that was immediately dropped.)

The following is a boot, crash, reboot log from the empeg. (I figured
more was better so it's a bit long. I let the thing figure itself out,
get running... It came up paused so I hit play. It tried to access the
drive and got a signal 9? (What's that? Is that along the same line as a Signal 11?)
Rebooted. Came up paused again.) Enjoy! Great reading:

empeg-car bootstrap v1.00 20000601 ([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 kerne
l.
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg51 (mac@aphex) (gcc version 2.95.3
20010315
(release)) #16 Wed Jul 24 18:19:54 BST 2002
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 11
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 7, serial number 90000572)
Command line: mem=12m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 10968k/12M available (964k code, 20k reserved, 332k 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'
Scheduling custom logo.
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
empeg audio-in initialised, CS4231A revision a0
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 1012
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0005b80).
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...
hdb: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
hdb: IBM-DJSA-220, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: IBM-DJSA-220, 19077MB w/1874kB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63
hdb: IBM-DJSA-220, 19077MB w/1874kB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63
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:d7:12:02:3
c
Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
hdb: hdb1 < hdb5 hdb6 > hdb2 hdb3 hdb4
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: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k initempeg init 0.8
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
Mounting second music partition
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To
Comply...
Starting player
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00-beta13 2002/07/24.
! tags.cpp : 61:Failed to open tags (0xc0041002).
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Jul 24 2002
Vcb: 0x4054d000
! mp3_decoder.cpp :1049:Failed to find valid sync after seeking to
offset 1800
73, error=0xc0044000
VM: killing process player
buffermem : 249856
page_cache_size : 301
nr_free_pages : 69
num_physpages : 3072
Restored terminal settings
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Abnormal player termination
Player received signal 9
Starting player
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00-beta13 2002/07/24.
! tags.cpp : 61:Failed to open tags (0xc0041002).
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Jul 24 2002
Vcb: 0x4054d000
! mp3_decoder.cpp :1049:Failed to find valid sync after seeking to
offset 1795
51, error=0xc0044000
Vcb: 0
Vcb: 65536

I've had a chance to play with it a little more since my last email. I
haven't tried re-syncing yet, but I can reproduce a hard lockup of the
empeg quite easily. Some songs will play, and some won't. (Those that
won't will generally lock the player if you don't skip them very
quickly.) If you try to access a new play-list, it reboots 99% of the
time. And some times, it'll be playing just fine and suddenly run out
of cache and churn on the drives for a second... Then lock. (Or
reboot. Depending on what mood it's in.)

_____

That's it. I eagerly await your replies. Thanks, everyone.

-NetworkError