Follow up:

No coaxing or black magic of any kind would allow that disk drive to boot. Something was seriously mechanically wrong with that disk drive. It made some of the worst noises I've ever heard a disk drive make.

I don't think I'll ever know what caused the drive to fail, I have no way of analyzing it. For now, it's a small paperweight.

Fortunately, I have all my MP3 files organized on my PC's hard disk, so all I had to do was put my secondary disk drive onto the primary controller, install the latest player software, and upload my songs again. The secondary disk drive has enough space to hold my current collection, and I'll go shopping for a new secondary disk drive next month.

This actually had the benefit of allowing me to test the latest 1.01 release candidate on a huge upload. Suffice it to say that Empeg is going through the USB driver with a fine-toothed comb once more before releasing it.

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Tony Fabris