The other issue is that the music partition wasn't mounting properly, hence the missing fids folders /empeg/fids0 tries to point to. *edit* Also, hda and hdc should have been identical in fdisk. The block boundaries were weirdly out of place, probably a gparted failure that it didn't report well.

I could have dug deeper, but I just didn't trust the state of things any more. I can't remember every little thing I did to this unit, some of it dating back to my hacks I carried over from the Mark 1 in 99.

If I do want to revisit the "classic" empeg I used in the past, the data is still saved off, both on the drives I replaced, and as a backup I took.