Yeah, that's a lotta cache.

To think it has been working (or has appeared to be working) all this time, no problems playing any tracks (it's a nearly full install - two 20GB disks), I bring it indoors and - I confess, I didn't tell the whole story. Here's the whole enchilada:

First, I upgraded to the latest Hijack (ohhh, but that never causes any problems ... no really!).

After that I kicked off Emplode and went in via serial (had to change the player config to use DHCP). Went to sync and - got a sync error (the player had also rebooted).

Went into hyperterminal, dropped to shell, did a rwm, edited config.ini and made the necessary changes (instead of DHCP, I just changed the IP instead). Did a rom and rebooted.

Tried emplode again with TCP/IP - no problems. Went to remove an artist entry (and all associated tracks), synced ... again, same problem - sync error.

Back into hyperterminal, back to shell. Looked around - tried looking at /disk0 and /disk1 - uh oh, no disk1. Nothing there.

Tried mounting /disk1 - nothing. Rebooted player ... THAT'S when I noticed the garbled mess.