Seems to be a popular thread topic these days.

Initial symptom: On my Mk2a, a track I've listened to many times turned to white noise part way through. Then I noticed that a few tracks were doing it. Then it would hang during boot.

Knowing how helpful the empeg devs are, I've never been worried about having the drive die (unlike in a TiVo where you can't install on a blank drive). And with all the community support and great FAQs, it's been a mostly smooth process.

So I figured I'd just replace the drive and run the disk builder (thanks to all who contributed to that FAQ entry). But that ended with the pump error, and sure enough, I can hear that the drive isn't spinning. Following more FAQ directions, I quit using the 12v @ 1A power supply and spliced the connector onto an old ATX PSU that can do 12v @ 8A (shouldn't be any shortage of power there).

But the drive (I only have 1) still doesn't spin up. I've tried 3 drives (including the original) none of them spin in the empeg, but all spin in my laptop. When I put my original empeg drive in my laptop and boot Knoppix, I'm able to copy some files off, but get read errors on others, so it seems that this drive really did fail... so perhaps my current problem is unrelated and coincidental in timing.

Now I'm at a loss and have to ask for suggestions of what to try next... any ideas?

Oh, and if it matters, there's a red LED on the mobo that stays lit... about half way between the power plug and the volume knob. But maybe that's on all the time and I've just never power the empeg with the lid off before.