Well I rw and rwm'd the empeg.

mke2fs -m0 /dev/hda4

ro
rom

reboot, quit to shell

rw
rwm
cd /drive0
mkdir fids
mkdir var
created a 0 byte config.ini in /drive0/var

ro
rom

and reboot. Less errors this time and emplode didn't die when it re-mounted the disks. Weirdly enough, there is a less space available with nothing on the player than what my Mk2a reported, 72GB vs. 75GB with the single 80GB drive but it seems to be syncronizing now.

The link to Rodgers page with the instructions for manually building the drives are broken, or his site is down. I haven't found explicit instructions for building drives anywhere, so I muddled through with what I could find.

I'll let everyone know if this syncronization works tomorrow night as I'm uploading 40MB of stuff at the moment.

Cheers,

Clarke