Okay, now I'm concerned. I was driving in to work today, minding my own business, listening to my music. I got thru about 4 songs (total empeg power-on time about 20 minutes), and the empeg just.... stopped playing.
The display was fine, and unresponsive to any input. The icon on the bottom left (play/pause/etc) was showing play.

Thinking that the particular song I was somehow freaking out the player, I did a 'hard reset' by pulling it out of the dash, counting to 10, and plugging it back in. I thought -perhaps in vain - that catching the song before it started to play and hitting pause would le me skip past it. Not so.

Several repeated attempts show the same pattern: Boot, init, show song, show "playing", freeze. Attempts to hit the "playlist" button 4 times to randomize all of the playlists got me as far the last big triangle symbol for play. Then freeze.

Getting home, I decided to re-upgrade the player - I had put developer 1.03 on, so I thought I'd put consumer 1.03 on. I reloaded the image, let it do it's thing, and this time... I was rewarded of a display of the first song in my playlist. Repeated attempts to press buttons caused the unit to skip to song 546 - where it had originally frozen, and do no more.

I re-upgraded back to developer 1.03 and started to watch the serial output. It gets all the way down to "empeg-car 1.03.", the display locks, and after several button presses, I see...

Restored terminal settings

Remounting first music partition read-only

Remounting second music partition read-only

No secondary hard disk

Player exited normally: 1

Switching to shell-player loop

Starting bash.

empeg:/empeg/bin#

And it's not responsive to hyper-term at 115K, 8N1, no flow control.

I'm truly at a loss. It's hard to tshoot an os-level problem when the machine hangs.

I've never opened the unit, and aside from the remote display hack, never really mucked about that much.

Um, help?