Bad drive, good cable, bad empeg produces the same log as the first one I posted. The cable caused "hda: lost interrupt" messages on my good player, so I'm surprised to see them still here, in the bad player, with the cable replaced. The boot log seems to indicate that it mounted the filesystem, so why the continual stream of "lost interrupt" messages?

The i2c errors remain identical with the working drive. Apparently, this player "just stopped working" one day. Sad.