Can somebody at Rio actually do the firmware properly and make it timeout and shut off if it can't read the HD? At the moment it'll just go tick tick tick until the battery runs flat if you don't happen to have a 6 foot pin handy to reset it with. The backlight doesn't turn off when this happens as well so the entire Karma gets quite warm.

It's exceptionally annoying for it to lock up like this. The crap Hitachi HD inside is incredibly sensitive to any movement and will cause the Karma to lock up frequently. This is in addition to the other failure where it just refuses to start up again unless you smack it particularly hard to unstick the heads/motor/whatever inside the HD.

Everytime mine gets stuck like that hitting it doesnt ever seem to help. Maybe im not hitting hard enough ( ive hit it pretty hard) or maybe its just technique.

As a solution I keep a paper clip in my wallet just in case.

You have to hit it quite hard. In the lower left corner (the volumn button/lock switch side) but at the bottom corner of the player.

It took me 4 days to get my harddrive unlocked, each day i'd hit it harder and on a different corner, of course the it was the last day, last corner that actually fixed the issue.

I was really shocked with exacly how hard I needed to smack it. It would be nice if we'd get some new firmware, or maybe even a karma2. Things have been way to quite on the karma front.