Been searching for it with no luck my words are too general to find it if it already exists.
Can you swap drives among two different players that already have music on them?
I have two players (1 is a MkII, 1 is MkIIa) and one of the drives died in the MkII so I took a drive from the MkIIa and installed it in the MkII (it already had a drive in it). Emplode shows only shows the storage cap. of the original drive but I can hear the replacement drive spin up and will boot, the player boots into the playlist screen but says -none-, when I try to sync with Emplode using only the swapped drive installedthe player quickly restarts at the point Emplode is performing the 'check media' stage, player is finished rebooting into playlist screen then Emplode crashes. If I hook the players original drive up by itself Emplode works normally.
I've tried swapping master/slave positions tried each drive separately as both master and slave.

I'm a bit confused about which drives went into which players. Which one was the primary, which was the secondary, did both players have two drives, did you take only one of the drives with the swap, which one was it, etc.... I can't really understand where the red ball is in the shell game you described. We'll need a more careful accounting of it, to get to the bottom of the issues here.

But before that, please understand that it's not as simple as just plugging in the drive. You've got to follow the procedure carefully. If you didn't do any of that stuff, "well there's your problem".

In a two-drive empeg player, the first drive holds the player software, the database files, and some of the music/playlists, and the second drive holds the rest of the music/playlists. The music/playlist files and their associated metadata files are all mixed together. And because of the way the files are organized, if you repurpose only one drive of a matched pair without formatting it first, you're not going to magically get a nicely organized set of additional songs, but rather, you'll mangle the database and get a messed up system. (See FIDs for more information.)

OK thanks, then that's my problem and I didn't write to that effect but one of my questions was if both drives had the software to run independently if swapped from other players. I had a hard time writing exactly what I wanted to ask and it shows I edited it a lot. I actually read that FAQ about upgrade but 'assumed' since the drive was already working another player it didn't need it.
Unfortunately I didn't pay attention when I took out the drive from the MkIIa, to put a larger drive, if it was a Master or Slave and it had actually been sitting on the bench for awhile before I decided to install it into the MkII b/c it's slave drive went bad (clicking).
From what your saying the drive I'm trying to use was/is a slave then and that's why it doesn't want to show up or work in Emplode.
OK thanks at least I know where to start, I'll look at the FAQ pages again.

Many thanks tfabris

"If you didn't do any of that stuff, "well there's your problem"."

If I put the slave drive that I had problems with back into the original player it came from will I be able to downlaod the music to my PC? or is the music db on it hosed now?

If you didn't try to add or remove any songs from either player during the "troubled times", it's possible that all the song files are more or less intact. The database might need to be rebuilt by hand, but remember, if you put any songs onto a pair of drives, those songs need to stay in that matched set of drives; that drive pair has gotta stay together as a pair if you want to preserve the songs and be able to re-download them later. As soon as you move a single unmatched one of those drives over to a different player, you've gotta format it if you want it to work.

If you tried to add songs to the player after moving only half the drives around, then you may have toasted some of the songs on BOTH drives. The worst situation would be that now you've got metadata and actual songfile mismatched. For instance, one drive might have FID BF91 which is the metadata for "Rush: Tom Sawyer" and shows that way in Emplode, whereas the other drive might have corresponding FID BF90 which is actual songfile for "Terry Jacks: Seasons in the Sun". So now you try to go re-download that file and actually get the wrong song.

Of course all of the above assumes you can solve any problems with the actual drives or IDE connections themselves, which it sounds like you're still having troubles there.