If a definitive answer to this is in the FAQ, I haven't been able to find it.

I've got a MK2a with two drives, a 40GB and a 60GB. last week sometime it started acting very strangely - it was taking forever to boot, and it wouldn't properly sync with Emplode. When I'd sync with Emplode, it would either give me tons of errors about the length of the playlists being wrong, or Emplode would simply crash. Thinking that my problem might be a bad drive as described here, I checked the cable, but it appeared to be fine. Not wanting to give up on a drive yet (and not knowing exactly how to determine which drive was at fault), I deleted everything from the player (using both Emplode and Jemplode, since neither would seem to work properly consistently), reinstalled both the player software and Emplode, and then re-transferred all my music. Everything seemed to transfer fine (70GB transfer, whew), and everything seems to be working just great ever since, until just now. I just noticed that about 260 or so tracks have spontaneously become "marked", and their statistics are nonsense (times played and times skipped incredibly large numbers). Everything else still works great, even those songs with the crazy info on them play fine.

I'm just wondering if this is something that has been noted as happening when there is a hard drive problem? And if so, how does one go about figuring out which drive in a two drive player is going bad? I think one of them might still be under warranty.

Thanks in advance.

Nope, I'm running 2.0 (Developer).

Okay, well, everything you describe points to a problem with the scratch partition. All the errors you're seeing are in data blocks that exist on the scratch partition. Dunno what exactly would be causing those errors.

One school of thought would say that you have no troubles with the song files getting uploaded through emplode, and the problems are only showing after that's done. So it might indicate that the drive itself has a few bad sectors, and those sectors happen to fall in the location of the scratch partition.

Whether that's actually what's happened or not, I have no way of knowing. Perhaps others can chime in with the proper diagnostic procedures.

Well, I reset all the stats so as to get rid of the odd information, and so far there's no sign of a return of the strangeness. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that it was all just some kind of crazy fluke - unless someone can give me a tip as how to determine if a drive actually has a bad sector or something?

Thanks for your help, Tony.

Drive errors could either result from a damaged drive, or due to data being corrupted (GIGO). I would still suggest that you first get the cable checked/changed before you write off the drive (Occam is usually right, as I have just recently discovered for myself).