Hi,

Currently, my Rio Empeg player is frozen. When I plug it in, either in my vehicle or at home, it boots just fine but when it gets to the point of determining the Source, it states, "Source: Player" and freezes. None of the controls function.

This problem began after a long road trip and I had already played over 500 mp3's with no mishaps (and about 6 months of perfect performance) from a single play list it had randomized. It got to song #518, played 1 minute and 18 seconds and suddenly froze.

I rebooted it. It booted fine and froze, as described above. I let it sit for 24 hours, thinking it may have overheated (note my vehicle was always at room tempurature during the trip). Same issue on booting. I opened it up and reseated the IDE drive. Still freezes. It appears to be stuck on that same mp3 at 1:18.

When I try to interface it with my PC with Emplode via USB like I usually do with no problems whatsoever, it initially sees the empeg player then states that it is disconnected from the network or just doesn't see the player at all.

The IDE drive itself I can hear continually spiinning while in this frozen state.

I'm thinking that the hard drive is fried and cannot interface with my PC because of this frozen state; it cannot get to the network portion of the final boot process.

My question to you all: Do I need to just purchase a new IDE drive or is there a tool or technique I can employ for a fix?

Thank you for any help and/or advice!

-Patrick