Seems to be a popular thread topic these days.

Initial symptom: On my Mk2a, a track I've listened to many times turned to white noise part way through. Then I noticed that a few tracks were doing it. Then it would hang during boot.

Knowing how helpful the empeg devs are, I've never been worried about having the drive die (unlike in a TiVo where you can't install on a blank drive). And with all the community support and great FAQs, it's been a mostly smooth process.

So I figured I'd just replace the drive and run the disk builder (thanks to all who contributed to that FAQ entry). But that ended with the pump error, and sure enough, I can hear that the drive isn't spinning. Following more FAQ directions, I quit using the 12v @ 1A power supply and spliced the connector onto an old ATX PSU that can do 12v @ 8A (shouldn't be any shortage of power there).

But the drive (I only have 1) still doesn't spin up. I've tried 3 drives (including the original) none of them spin in the empeg, but all spin in my laptop. When I put my original empeg drive in my laptop and boot Knoppix, I'm able to copy some files off, but get read errors on others, so it seems that this drive really did fail... so perhaps my current problem is unrelated and coincidental in timing.

Now I'm at a loss and have to ask for suggestions of what to try next... any ideas?

Oh, and if it matters, there's a red LED on the mobo that stays lit... about half way between the power plug and the volume knob. But maybe that's on all the time and I've just never power the empeg with the lid off before.

Have you been down the usual route?

I didn't look at the cable very closely, but I did try both connectors.

When I get home, I'll check the cable more closely and take a look at the header's connection.

The cables and mobo header all look fine to my eye, but I tried squeezing the connectors onto the cable anyway... no change

Suggestions on how I might find if there is someone in the Chicago area who can try to repair it?

You should have no problems sending your unit to Stu (Eutronix). Hit the "Repairs" link at the top of this page.

Thanks for (once again) pointing me in the right direction.

Another thing:

Based on your symptom (replaced drive and the new drive doesn't spin up at all)...

Are you sure the IDE cable is plugged in correctly at both ends of the connection? (i.e., it's not plugged in off-by-one-pin in either the X or the Y axis?)

You can often get the thing plugged in and *looking* right, but it can still be off-by-one.

Really really double and triple check this. Both ends of the cable.

Yep, it's plugged in right.

Stu got back to me and asked if I could see +5v on pins 41 & 42. Yep, +5v. But then why do 3 drives fail to spin? I plugged the drive back in.... it spins!

But when I unplug the empeg and plug it back in, the drive doesn't spin. A bit of playing around and I find that it's [grrr... batteries in my cordless keyboard ran out! sorry about the wait, it took me a minute to find new ones ] very consistent. The drive will only spin up if I first power up the empeg, then connect the IDE cable.

Suspecting this is a software issue, I tried loading car2-developer-v3.00-alpha11.upgrade. The drive now spins up when the unit is powered on and it boots (menus work, emplode can see it on the network). But car2-builder never finished (pump error), so I can't sync music to it.

When I re-apply car2-builder.upgrade, I'm back in the drive not spinning state.

Where I'm at now:
- Reapplied developer-v3.00-alpha11
- After boot, press q.
- Appears that the builder partitioned the drive and created most filesystems.
- /dev/hda4 (the music partition) didn't have a filesystem.
- I ran mke2fs on it, so now when it boots, /drive0 is mounted
- Can't sync, emplode fails on the 4th item "Checking database".

So I'm pretty sure it's a software problem, but I'm not sure what to do next...
- Touch a file to get a blank db?
- Try to read the db off my old drive? (dunno which files, or if they're readable)
- Run the builder again, but with my fingers crossed?

[While reading my preview, I clicked submit, but it timed out. It looked like the message board was down for about 2 hours... this has been a long and difficult post ]

Attach a complete log of the boot. Its a bit odd if it is a software error that is making it not spin up the disks. Only reason I know of that it won't spin up the disks is if it is extremely cold.

The only time the disk doesn't spin is when I load the builder image. When that loads, it get far enough to complain about a pump error, then every boot is something like:

Code:

---

empeg-car bootstrap v#####  ([email protected])
If anyone wants to upgrade the flash, let them speak now or forever hold their peace...
it seems not. Let fly the penguins of Linux!ý4

---

(Or something close to that, I'm going by memory until I get home from work)
It pauses for 1 second at the "..." and then repeats ad infinitum.

Re-applying the 3.00a11 image, the drive spins just fine at every power on... sure seems like something's wrong with the builder image or how I'm using it.

Perhaps the problem is simply that you're using the one builder image that's known to be corrupted?

SOMEONE NEEDS TO FIX THAT BY THE WAY...

Have a peek here and see if this helps?

Well, yes, the bigdisk builder doesn't have the same problems as the regular one.

But.... now I'm back to the same place I was before: It boots fine withe 3.00a11 loaded and acts as one might expect it to with no music loaded. Running emplode still fails at "Checking database". Am I missing some option to tell it to make a new one?

On a whim, I tried jEmplode.... it had no trouble. Now I can sync music to my new drive and all seems to be working fine. YAY, I'm a happy camper again!

The two things that failed me were the "official" versions of the builder image and emplode. Having run jEmplode, I now get further with emplode (v2.10), which now fails on the 2nd to last step "Retrieving player configuration". And emplode (v2.0) tries to sync, but gets stuck on "Uploading playlists..." (I have 2 playlists, with 1 track each).

Oh well, as long as jEmplode works, it's not such a big deal.

Just need to reinstall all the 3rd party apps now, that oughta keep me busy for a while.

I think Emplode 2.10 is buggy. At least thats what I remember. Use 2.0 instead.

When you use version 3.0 alpha software, and switch back and forth between it and the 2.0 software, one of the issues is: You need to manually wipe the databases when you switch back and forth between 2.0 and 3.0.

So it seems like the following issues bit you:

- There is a corrupted 2.0 builder image still on the main empeg web site. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, PLEASE PLEASE WON'T SOMEONE FIX THIS?

- When you tried Alpha software (Emplode 2.10 alpha and firmware 3.0 alpha) in an attempt to work around it, which has some issues of its own (such as the database thing) that aren't really documented at all.

Yeah, that's kind of sub-optimal.

A good starting point to sort this out would be if TheAmigo could post the URL of the disk builder he downloaded that is corrupted.

others have had the same problem -- I think it's the main Mk2 disk builder at the empeg.com web site. That's my recollection.

Tony's right (both in elaborating on the cause of my problems and the download location).

The builder image that gave me trouble is: http://empeg.com/downloads/car2-builder.upgrade
linked to from http://empeg.com/support.html and the Drive Upgrade guide at riocar.org.

I've been away from the boards for a while, so it's taking me a bit to catch up... has the topic come up of asking for an open sourced version of 3.0? I know there are a number of members here with the skills to contribute to it if given the opportunity. Without any more official development, it'd be wonderful if we were able to work on it ourselves.