Well, I thought I was out of the woods with my problem, but it looks like I am not. Jemplode crashed while I was trying to sync, and now my player is hanging at the infamous Building music databases... step for a long period of time each boot. Here is what I tried to do to fix my problem:

* deleted /drive0/var/database, playlist and fids as per this FAQ entry
* deleted /drive1/var/database, playlist and fids on a hunch
* fscked my partitions again
* tried to sync with Emplode, but Emplode restarts the player, and does not wait indefinately for the player to re-start, resulting in an application crash (on Win2k)

The error messages I'm getting in my boot log look like this:

Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Mar 26 2003

Vcb: 0x4086d000

Adding Swap: 16028k swap-space (priority -2)

e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09

e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09

! playerdb.cpp      : 182:Failed to build dynamic database (status=0xc004401a).

Restored terminal settings

Remounting first music partition read-only

Remounting second music partition read-only

Restart code received

Starting player

Hijack: intercepting config.ini



  player.cpp        : 385:empeg-car 2.00 2003/04/01.

! tags.cpp          :  61:Failed to open tags (0xc0041002).

I see that error 0xc004401a means "Text file busy" (Player error) (from this page. So what does that mean? I hope I don't have to rebuild my drives.