First off, the drive problem I described before has been resolved. I think there were really two issues here:

1) Something on the second drive was not quite right and
2) I misunderstood exactly what was going on when I was applying the diskbuilder image to a two drive system.

I initially tried applying diskbuilder with both drives installed since I had everything archived in MP3 format anyway. My intention was to rebuild both drives, reinstall the player software, and then reload my music to see if it might resolve the player rebooting, player lockup, and freqeunt database rebuild issues I seemed to be having. When trying to rebuild both drives with diskbuilder, the formatting of the primary drive went fine but a number of errors were reported when doing the second drive (I kick myself for not saving that particular Hyperterminal session, but the errors were regarding an invalid block structure or something).

So I then tried making the second drive the primary and rebooting to let diskbuilder do it's thing.... which is where my misunderstanding came into play. I was under the impression that rebooting with diskbuilder in flash, the player would try to format any drive I installed... but instead the boot process halted with the no disk found error (although it had been detected per the startup log).

I later realized that the diskbuilder image had to be applied while the primary drive to be formatted was in place so drivebuilder could actually boot and then proceed to do it's thing.

So I was able to format the second drive by installing it as the primary and then reflashing the drivebuilder image. As a test, I put the drives back in the original configuration and reflashed diskbuilder again. Now it was successful in formatting both drives with no errors reported. I don't know if making the secondary drive the primary was the reason it finally worked, or if I just needed to attempt this a number of times to overcome whatever problem the second drive had....

All this work seems to have been worthwhile though (as I knock on wood). The 'player reboots for no reason' problem I have had for some time now is gone. Before, the player would reset itself every 1-3 hours of being on (playing or in standby mode). 3 hours was the longest it ever went while I was monitoring the serial port. In practice, it seemed to usually reboot every hour or so of music playback. After inquiring about the problem here, Mark Lord indicated that entries in the log at the time of rebooting indicated the player was running out of memory, but the actual problem that lead to this state out of memory state could not be discerned.

So I continued by reinstalling the same code release I had before (2b11) and reloading my music on the player. Afterwards, I left the player in standby about 11 hours yesterday while being monitored by Hyperterminal.... and there were no player reboots! It also went through a 5 hour playback session without a single reboot. I am hoping that the player lockups and frequent database rebuild problems are also gone, but only time will tell (so far, so good).

Here is the thread about that rebooting problem I had...

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=empeg_tech&Number=71761&Search=true&Forum=All_Forums&Words=mrmunsell&Match=Username&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=allposts&Main=71761

I'm posting all this just in case anyone else has these problem symptoms. Not too long after that original post about the rebooting problem, I had received some email inquiries from others with similar problem symtoms who were wondering if I had found a solution yet.... for those, this might be worth a try.

Mike