Why me?

Well apparently, my average run-of-the-mill update sync screwed me over somehow. I noticed that emplode had locked up, and tried to figure out why.. Next thing I knew, emplode had crashed... So, I pulled the power to the empeg, kissed her a couple times, and plugged it back in.

To my absolute horror, the dead penguin showed up. What's a guy to do? Contact techincal support, I guess? Any suggestions on what might have caused this? Or possible solutions that dont require sending it back to technical support? (since they arent accepting any repairs right now, correct?) and I dont think I could go that long without my baby! :P

Help please!

Okay.. apparently I got a little hasty..

I went out to the car just now to try it in the car, and it booted up fine.. and now its booting up again back on AC power.

Any ideas why that might have happened?

I tried it 5 or 6 times before writing this post.. And now.. voila? Im not complaining.. just curious.. and want to know how i can be extra cautious..

*feels his heart start beating again*

I would try running the Disk Builder software. You will lose all info on your drives, but this is my suggestion. See the Drive upgrade instructions and perform Step 6. You may want to wait and get a second opinion though.

Well.. Would you reccomend that even though it is "quasi-booting" up now? It booted up fine in my car, booted up fine on AC, but when I tried to synchronize with emplode again, it locked again, and now it is freezing up on the "Player starting..." screen.. *sigh*

You may have a harware error. If you don't mind making your empeg a virgin again, it's not going to hurt. I'm just not sure it's going to help though.

If he has a hardware error then rebuilding the disk isn't going to help !

It sounds more like the IDE headers or the cable starting to work lose.

Take a look at the advice here:

http://www.riocar.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=FAQ&file=index&myfaq=yes&id_cat=8&faqent=221#221

Don't run the disk builder.

This does sound like a faulty drive cable (email me your address and serial number for a replacement) or a dry solder joint on the IDE header (you'll need to send the player in for service in the new year).

If you suspect a software problem, get a boot log. If it points to a sotware issue, then a drive rebuild would be the easiest solution.

Drive cables are the culprit in 90% of cases, but the problem only affects about 10% of players.

That sounds reasonable to me that it could be the drive cable. It is a very sparratic problem, I tried four or five times to get it to work while I was in the car, it kept on booting up no hard disk found, and then when I turned the car off all the way and restarted, it worked. And it worked the next 2 times I got in the car.

Could it be Kernel related in any way? The only reason I wonder is because of the lock-ups during synchronizing. That is when the problem started, and when the player seemed to be working fine, and I syncronized it again, the problem started all over again. I was thinking about reflashing the kernel and seeing if that helps.. what do you think?

Wow - this describes the exact same problem I just started having about a week ago with my Rio player. It started out where it would be playing a song and suddenly start stuttering or pausing between songs. At first, I thought I had some improperly encoded MP3 files on the drive that needed to be deleted and redone. But then I got the "no hard disk found" message one morning. Usually, by pulling it out and re-inserting it in the car, it would start worknig again for a while - but eventually get the error again.

The frustrating thing is, every time I used it in the house, it worked perfectly! Just now, it finally started acting up while synching to my PC though, so I'm off to open it up and see if I can find a loose cable. (At least I now know it's not a problem with wiring behind my dash.)

When I had this problem it was the IDE cable. Your mileage may vary, but this is precisely how it manifested to me.