I ran the disk builder on two brand new IBM Travelstars last night while both connected to the Mk2. The formatting of both drives seems to have worked and the stress testing of 'hda' started. I went to bed letting it run for about 7 hours. It was my intention to wake up in the morning and flip/flop the drives to run the stress test on 'hdb'.

I connected 'hdb' to the empeg alone on the middle drive connector. Yes, I did remove the jumper making it Device 0. The output from Hyperterm looked good (drive detected a couple times) but I got the "sick Tux" message on the VFD and nothing happens. Off hand, I can't remeber the error the serial port threw up. So, I figured I would connect the other drive at the same time (jumpered Device 1). At this point, I have what were originally formatted as master/slave reversed from their formatting position. I still got the sick Tux with the same error.

I have been thinking about it all day at work and I now assume (hope) the drives are okay and they will work when returned to their original position. However, this makes no sense. When I get home I am going to put them back the way they were and load 2.00b11 player software. Hopefully they will work.

I really wanted to stress both drives since the morons that packed it did a worse job than Digital River. Hopefully this is a disk builder issue and not one with the drives. Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? I have only used the builder once before and I remeber it being a fairly mindless process. Thanks