Since a few weeks, my Empeg (Rio) sometimes locks up when it boots (when I start the car). I then simply pull the player and reseat it and then the boot always finishes completely. When it locks up, it always locks up on the "in car" screen.

I'm thinking this has something to do with the winter cold. The car sleeps outside and the problem seems to have started with the outside temperature dropping in the last couple of weeks.

This obviously is not a huge deal. It's not even terribly annoying and it's easily fixed. But I fear it may be the announcement or bigger problems to come... that's why I want to ask: is there anything I can so about this problem, or is this normal under cold (near freezing) temperatures?

Question 1: Is the player running firmware version 2.x?

Question 2: Does just the *car* sleep outside, or does the *player* sleep outside with the car?

If answer 1 is "No, it's running 1.x", and answer 2 is "Yes, the player sleeps outside with the car", then yes, your problem is the player is too cold and the hard disk isn't spinning up. If you were running firmware 2.x, instead of just freezing up you would have seen No Hard Disk Found Contact Support appear on the player screen.

If so, then just take the player inside with you at night.

It's running firmware 2.x. And yes, it sleeps outside with the car (I live in a very quiet rural area) I've (luckily) never seen the "No Hard Disk Found Contact Support" warning though...

I'll take it in with me for a couple of days, see what that gives. It started freezing pretty hard here in the last two days (-7 °C, which is exceptionally cold for the area where I live)

Maybe.

It probably varies considerably from one hard drive to another, but when I was living in Alaska my player wouldn't fail to start until temperatures fell below zero F (about 18 below zero Centigrade).

There was probably a correlation between this abuse and the early demise of one of my 40GB hard drives.

tanstaafl.