After almost 3 years of perfect operation... and I think the cold winters may have had something to do with this...

I started getting "failed to unmask IDE" messages about once every two weeks. I took the player apart and checked the cables...they were hooked up fine. Then I was worried the drives weren't getting enough power so I tried hooking it up in the house on the ac adapter, same thing... Today it said, "no hard disc found, contact support".

If I plug the unit in three or four times, it powers up and works ok, anyone think I will be able to clone it using either the empeg software or jemplode?

Should I replace both hard drives or investigate something else? Anyone know where some good deals are right now or can anyone recommend a good drive that they know works with the player?? I would want to put in two 30 gig drives (or higher).

It might be the IDE header on the motherboard which is giving you problems with an intermittant connection. Another possibility is the IDE cable itself not being crimped properly. Have a look in the FAQ for pictures of a bad cable. You can either try to recrimp it yourself or order one off Eutronix.

well, i doubt the cable went bad after three years of fine service. I took it apart and checked all the connections. its glued to the drives and it was attached just fine to the board. i don't know what an ide header is, or if i would be able to check it. what i do know is that i can hear the drive spin up and then it tries to spin up a second time and it just cant so it shuts off and the player locks up. sometimes it just wont boot at all. i think one of the drives is going bad, but im not sure which... i just hope there is enough left in the little guy to do a clone to another unit...

i don't know what an ide header is, or if i would be able to check it.

It is all detailed right here, and it's important for you to check and try every single step in that list to solve the problem.

My cable started giving me problems after a year so it can happen at any time. I took it out and recrimped it and it's been fine ever since.

Do you get random crackles and pops when listening to the music? That's usually what happens if you've got an intermittant contact in the cable itself or the IDE header (the pins on the motherboard that the cable is plugged into)

No, no random crackle or pop.

Sometimes i get "failed to unmask ide" on boot up.

Sometimes while it's playing and i fast forward to the next song, it locks up when the hard disc spins up. It tries to spin up twice, then it just sits.

Sometimes I get "contact support", at start up.

Sound quality is always fine. It does it both in the car and in the house so I know it's not the power connectors in the sled.

I think I'm going to try the serial log to see if one or both of the drives is bad... I live in the northeastern U.S. and my drives have spun up in some seriously cold weather, that could be the cause...

hmmmmmmmmm

part of my boot says someting about an "error 19"

Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
hdb: hdb1 < hdb5 hdb6 > hdb2 hdb3 hdb4
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
EXT2-fs warning: checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k initempeg init 0.8
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
Mounting second music partition


BUT, thats when it boots, i guess i should see what it says when it doesnt boot successfully...

That's normal and you can ignore it. It just means that it tried to mount the music partition as ReiserFS but couldn't as they're actually Ext2.

AND...

it looks like i got an error while it was "changing from one track to the next"...

Vcb: 0x4086d000
hda: status error: status=0x58
hda: drive not ready for command
hda: status error: status=0x58
hda: drive not ready for command
hda: status timeout: status=0xd0
hda: drive not ready for command
ide0: reset: success

Oh i see, but what about the erros i just posted while changing tracks??

Just go through the FAQ. It's most likely that it's the cable or the header pins on the motherboard. It's not unknown for the actual HDs to fail as well though but it's less likely.

Greetings!

I recommend going through the FAQ also, but the symptoms you are posting could very well point to a bad drive. Back to your original point, if there is any way you can back up your music & data onto your PC, I would recommend you do so as soon as possible (if you do not have a backup already).

When you see errors like that, do they always point to the same hard drive? That would narrow the problem down to one connector on the ribbon cable or one drive going bad. And because the errors you posted were for hda, that is your boot drive and will cause the player not to boot. (Had it been hdc going bad, you would have been able to boot, but had problems when trying to access data from that drive.)

I've had these same types of problems twice. Once it was due to bad solder joints on the ide header. The other was due to a dodgy disk drive that was slowly failing. My best advice would be to check out ide header the player mainboard with a magnifying glass. Gently put pressure on the header and see if any pins separate from the board (one of mine you could not see the separation until this was done.) Then, if all is well there, try using the player with only one drive at a time plugged in. You should be able to tell fairly quickly if one of the drives is dying.

Checking the pins sounds like a good idea under a magnifying glass. As for running it with one drive at a time, since it was suggested in the previous message that there is a "boot drive", will my player still work if I run it without the boot drive??

Thats the first time I had my empeg hooked up while it failed while changing songs so I don't know it it's always the same drive that does it. This might sound stupid, but it hasn't done it since I updated to the newest Hijack kernal. I was running V325. I'm sure it's just a coincidence and that it will fail again in my car. It seems to do it most when the weather is humid. At least I have it narrowed down to, the ide connector, the cable or one (or both) of the drives). At most, two new drives would cost about $200 and if I upgrade about $275 (or more)...

You can use the current secondary drive as a primary drive, but you will have to reconfigure the drive's jumpers. You may also need to upgrade the empeg player software, though Hijack won't get deleted.

Thanks

Ah, or just RMA the drives. Maybe they are still in warranty. I was able to RMA the drive in my backup empeg after it showed up on my doorstep crashed, possibly from bad handling with USPS. Yeah, and might as well throw an 80 in there anyway.

I checked with the RMA department last night and they told me that they aren't under warranty because the were manufactured 2001-04. I missed it by two months. The lady told me she might be able to override it if I showed her paperwork that I didn't receive the Empeg player until after the manufactur date of the drives. I might have the invoice somwhere though...

Anyway, I wound up figuring out which drive it was, and then copied everything to the working drive. THANK GOD FOR THE FAQ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Tony, I feel the need to give a donation since the FAQ was there for me at 3 in the morning!

The last question I have on this issue, and it may be an odd one... When I have two drives installed, one is jumpered and considered device ONE and the other device ZERO. When I had BOTH drives installed Device ONE was "hda" (boot drive???) and Device ZERO was "hdc". Now it seems that under a single drive configuration, Device ZERO is "hda". Does this sound correct or am I crazy??? What happens when I add another drive back to the system, will that flip flop the HDA and HDC status???

If I understand my Linux-fu correctly, HDA and HDC are not drives. I think they are partitions within drives. I could be wrong about that, though, maybe they're the physical drives and drive0/drive1 are the logical drives within them. I forget. But I do know that the empeg has several partitions for various things.

But even more to the point...

There is an interesting trick they do to make the Mark2s and the Mark1s seem to have the same partitioning scheme. See, the Mark1 had two IDE headers so both drives were always primaries. The Mark2 has one IDE header with master and slave. So there's some trickery in the boot scheme that makes the partitions behave the same on both models, and I think the HDA/HDB/HDC naming scheme enters into it. Unfortunately I don't know the details of this.

In any case, if you swap drives, all the partitions and such move around to where the new drive is. They don't magically keep their names and positions. If you move the jumper, everything changes.

The disk upgrade guide has all the procedures you need to know in order to copy files and such between drives so that you can change the number of drives in the player. Just follow those steps and you'll be fine.

If I understand my Linux-fu correctly, HDA and HDC are not drives. I think they are partitions within drives.

No, /dev/hda and /dev/hdc are drives (master on first and second IDE channel, the MkIIs fake it by playing with the major and minor device numbers - you could create /dev/foobar that points to what's normally referred to as /dev/hda by using the proper numbers when creating it [/dev/foobar]).
/dev/hda1 etc are partitions on the drive (1-4 primary partitions and 5 and up are logical(?) partitions in one of the primary ones. /drive0 and /drive1 are AFAIK just mount points (normal directory entries) on which the main partitions are mounted.

Hope I got that right... If not, I'm sure someone will correct me.

/Michael

Okay, so I had it backwards, drive0 and drive1 are logical constructs within the physical drives of HDA/HDB/HDC. Gotcha.

Anyway, the answer to his question is: If you change the jumper, you change what HDA, HDC, drive0, drive1, etc., are.

Yeah. And you can blame Linus for hda/hdb, and me for hdc onwards.

Cheers

Thanks to everyone for all of your input. I copied everything to one drive using FPT (and the FAQ) and I am sending the other drive out for RMA for free. Couldn't have worked out any better , I didn't even lose any eq or tuner settings