Recently my main Empeg unit (one I have upgraded the disks on) started having problems with the rotary encoder/knob. Luckily I have two empegs and so I just swapped the disks from my main unit to the spare and carried on with my main disks in the spare (now main) unit. All good so far.

I then purchased a new rotary knob and have now replaced it in the faulty unit (fiddly to get at be I think I have done OK).

But when I boot this up I get a "No hard disk found. Contact support" message. I checked the cables and all seems OK and I can hear the disk spin up.

I think this is because this is a old unit (Empeg) that now has a new disk (Rio) stuck in it?

So I now want to reinstall from scratch on this Emppeg - there used to be instructions on how to do this on this board but now I can't find them - lots of dead links. So can anyone point me in the right direction please?

No, the RioCar and the Empeg (with knob) use the same software, so the hard disk is interchangeable between them.

More likely the pins on the motherboard, to which the hard disk cable connects, have broken free of a solder joint or two.

Use a magnifier and tweezers to examine the pins, one by one, to verify this.

-ml

It is a sad, sad thing, but true. The Empeg FAQ and the RioCar.Org site which originally contained all of those instructions is temporarily offline due to having been hacked. The owner of the site hopefully will be able to get it up again soon.

In addition to checking carefully the IDE header on the motherboard to make sure there aren't solder joint problems, also check to make sure you didn't plug in the cable "off-by-one".

Thanks for the super quick replies.

Cable wasn't off by one - but I realised when checking with the magnifier on my phone that the cable wasn't fully pushed down in place. I had reseated the cable a couple of times to check but obviously hadn't applied enough force to get it seated properly.

All booted up now and the replacement knob also appears to be working fine.

Yay!

Awesome!

I'm in the position of needing to replace my rotary encoder (again) as well.

Is there a such thing as a direct-replacement encoder that works optically instead? This is the only part that wears out regularly on the empegs, but it's very difficult to replace.