I've noticed on my 60GB RioCar [Mk2A] that a 'rwm' from the bash prompt takes AGES to complete, compared with a rwm on the 12 or 10GB unit.

I wonder if this is due to some kind of buffering being done by the kernel - it rattles away at the disk, but not like a fsck does, more like a scan through the inode table or something.

Interestingly all my units have lateish Hijack kernels installed (i.e. V157 at last count).

And in all cases I'd stopped theplayer to get the bash prompt on serial, so if it was a low memory issue then presumably the player not running would fix that (unless the memory freed wasn't enough).

I wonder if your symptoms are related to this. If so, the try repeating a simple 'rw' and/or 'rwm' from the bash prompt and see if this take ages - this would definately make Emplode timeout I think if it happened to occur.