I am doing about 4-6 syncs a day (these first few days of euphoric empeg ownership), adding more music, changing playlists or file information...and about 80% of the time, it does an integrity check. A real one...it doesn't just flit by as part of the process.

(I set the date and time a few days ago and its within minutes of what my PC is set to. Also, I am running V1.0)

I'll start a sync and then emplode sits on 'Checking disk integrity (this may take some time)' for at least 5 minutes, and the status bar doesn't even begin to move. emplode is so tied up it won't even re-paint its window area if I drag another window across it.

While its sitting there, my empeg has the 'synchronising' animation bouncing around, but there's no head movement at all.

Then, after its sat there, seemingly hung, for 5-10 minutes, it suddenly continues onto the next step and everything is fine, it happily starts sucking down files.

Yah, I can live with it, but I'll not lightly make even little adjustments without having a large batch of other necessary things to do, since I know its got a 60%-80% chance of going into this vegetative state. It usually takes longer for it to do [whatever its doing] than it takes for it to upload a couple discs worth of music.

I know that an integrity check on a 12GB drive should take some non-trivial amount of time, but thats not the point: its checking integrity more than it needs to.

Otherwise, my empeg is wicked and I love it.

Its not THAT big a deal, since I usually leave the room for a big sync anyway, just irritating when all I meant to do was a quick sync (and, say, I am already late for something...)


[new development since I posted this yesterday]

For the first time, after at least 10-15 syncs, today I saw it seem to REALLY do an integrity check. In other words, instead of the progress bar not moving (not starting, more like) and the no head movement on the drive, today I had a moving progress bar and the SOUND of an integrity check (like what checking a desktop drive sounds like) which took about 20s (rough, I didn't noticed it was doing this 'real' check until it was halfway through) or so...a LOT less than its usual "act hung and do nothing with 'integrity check' notifcation up for about 5 minutes" routine.



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Reg #57xx, Ser #080000141, Rec'd Aug.11/00

The integrity check (an ext2 fsck) often *does* sound like it's doing nothing. There *is* head movement, but it's not backwards and forwards, it's a linear scan (of the inodes, I think).

Check the time/date on the unit to see if it looks sensible before you do a sync - there's a bug I've noticed that it appears to wander through the world's timezones, giving a +/- 1 day-ish time (this'll be fixed in the next release!). If this is not set, you're very much more likely to make the fsck kick in - after you set it you'll get another fsck on the next sync, but then it should only do it every 20-30 syncs.

Hugo

i had exactly the same symptoms. after setting the clock to the same time like the computer has (it was 2 hours wronh, don't ask me why) the problem disapeared.

I found a bug last week that could cause this behaviour. It was due to a ten minute timeout before retrying, this has now been reduced so 1.01 should solve your problem when it is released.

--
Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)