I'm having a bit of a problem. My empeg seems unable to talk to any hard drives. It's not a case of a bad hard drive, it's simply unable to see the drive device itself on the IDE bus.

RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
Probing primary interface...
empeg-flash driver initialized

(should actually start displaying the drive manufacturer, etc)

I used to have a similar problem, until I recrimped the IDE cable, things were fine for several months afterwards. But no such luck this time, and I've even used a different IDE cable. Same symptoms. I've tried swapping drives, still same symptoms (forget the fact that there's not an empeg build on that drive, the IDE bus will still see it, even if there's no OS on it) I've tried combinations of both, including setting master/slave/cable select and using the other end of the IDE cable. The drives themselves spin up, but they just don't show up on the bus. I've checked all of the solder points for the IDE cable, all fine. It's not the drive and not the cable, and at this point, I'm out of ideas. I've done my best searching the forums, but they all were mainly due to faulty connections that doing a reseat or recrimp would fix the issue. And it actually did boot up once, but when I re-assembled it, no love.

So any suggestions that may be hidden in the forums that I haven't found?

What're the chances of actually getting someone (Rio?) to check it out and fix it?