Yes, my unit is working. Through the info from this board, plus Tony's FAQ as well as David Moss' email support I now have it working.
Like you said however, I was not able to see the connection on the motherboard unless I broke the seals. I have not done that yet. I only wiggled the tray and pushed a bit on the connector at the drive. David is sending me a new cable however, because the problem is probably that this one is bad. I roginally got it to spin the drive up by lifting the tray a little while I had the case open. So then I power off, wiggled and powered on. Perfect booting ever since.
I've only put on some downloaded test tracks that aren't as good as the ones I've ripped from my own collection. I haven't tried any type of organising yet nor advanced playlist and track properties. I will do some of that over the next week or two. While I only have 10GB installed I will probably keep this to a minimum.
Is there any way to back-up, off the empeg, the database entries? To make it easy to restore your structure if you accidentally wipe the drive. Or to make it possible to replace all the music on the unit and then go back to the old selections. I did see an comma-delimited text export feature, but I didn't notice any way to allow for importing such a file to use as the new databse definition.
I'm quite happy with the unit so far. I'll wait on upgrading to 2.0 till at least the next beta is uploaded however. And I'm already very interested in mlord's hijack as well as Display Server (forgive me but I can't remember the author's name right now - though I'm sure everyone else already knows who it is :)
Bruno