Sorry to hijack this thread, but my buddies empeg is doing the exact same thing. It didn't help when his stereo rack fell over and the empeg got crushed by a 40 pound hafler pro 2400 amp. Anyways, his IDE cable has a black strip and smaller connectors. Nothing seemed to be loose, I can still hear the hard drive spin up, and I can't see any broken headers (I've spotted them before). I tried putting another 20gb hdd from my spare empeg into his unit, and it doesn't even boot correctly. It gets stuck on the empeg screen and the tux doesn't walk into the picture. Should I just run the builder on my spare 20gb to see if he broke the hdd or his empeg?