You did re-set the jumpers again when you changed configuration those couple of times? I remember some drives have 3 positions; single, master, slave. What are the exact models of drives you have?

I currently only have the original drive (IBM Travelstar DARA-212000) installed and jumpered correctly. The second drive works well if installed as a single drive, but I currently don't have the appropriate jumpers to set the two drives up as master and slave (or even both to cable select)

To my opinion you took a very drastic method (builder.upgrade) to revive your initial drive... Hope you still got your MP3s backed-up somewhere?
What else should I have done? I was unable to get to a shell to fix it manually. And yes, I have my MP3s backed up somewhere else (backed it all up only two days ago - That was a close call).
Anyways, install the builder.upgrade with the first drive connected (and jumpered accordingly). That prepares it for use in the empeg.
Sure, I just applied it and am currently waiting for it to finish bulding the filesystem.

(...waiting some couple of minutes...)

Capture the stress test log and post it. Do the same for your second drive.

I skip that for the second drive, however the stress test doesn't show anything interesiting (see attachment), appart from the start of the log, just after mke2fs was finished:


done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

real 0m43.729s
user 0m0.280s
sys 0m1.970s
set_blocksize: b_count 1, dev ide0(3,4), block 1!
EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,4)): ext2_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 64 not in group (block 2)!
EXT2-fs: group descriptors corrupted !
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda4,
or too many mounted file systems

What does that mean? I suppose it pretty much says that the filesystem (though just built) is corrupted, right? Does this mean the drive itself might be damaged?

Then you could install the developer 1.03 upgrade with or without any drive connected. After that, jumper the drives again, attach them and boot the empeg. Capture the bootlog and post.
Alright, ignoring the above error, I just rebooted my empeg (with the builder image still active) and the log (available at http://www.incase.de/empeg_builder_bootlog.txt) shows what happened (basically the disc was prepared again, this time without any error as it seems). After installing the 1.03developer image, the old disk works again. Problem solved.

Now I only need to find the right jumpers and I will be able to fill it all up again.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

cu,
sven
(proud owner of a MkII 12GB blue now green, #080000113)