My Empeg Mk2 got very pissed at me today when I went for a little trip on an offroad trail. has anyone else manage to get thier Empeg to croak by driving in VERY bumpy condiditons? Also, has anyone tried to hook up a cooling fan? It seems to me that the heat inside the unit could be dispersed quite well with a little CPU cooling fan.

No, and Yes in that order.

I have heard that dispite a bad accident involving two cars, the empeg kept playing.

I hooked up a fan and it does make a difference. You need a quiet one however or it will drive you nuts. put in a switch or something and all will be good.
I think that you might get as good results by mounting the fan to blow on the underside of the chassis anyhow.

How exactly did it croak? Something got unplugged, or more serious than that?

I've never done any serious off-roading, like conditions where you would actually need proper mud tyres, or the good approach/departure angles of a big 4WD.

But i have done allot of driving on bumpy unsealed roads and ski field access roads where the rough conditions cause other drivers to slow down. The sort of bumpyness i'm talking about is where the ash tray keeps sliding out of the dash, the radar detector falls off the windscreen, hub caps fall off, portable CD players with "20 sec anti skip prebuffers" skip, and every thing in the car generally shakes and rattles and makes a huge racket.

I'm pleased to say that after almost 3 winters of this the empeg has never died on me, in fact it's never even skipped during those conditions.

In reply to:

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You need a quiet one however or it will drive you nuts. put in a switch or something and all will be good....

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Or a resistor to slow down the fan and make it quieter.

It stopped playing, and when I reset it, it said, hard disk not found, contact support. It seems to be o.k. now though. It got kinda hot too.

I know it can handle strong lateral Gs yesterday I took my Acura Integra up to the mountains. I have a full coilover suspension so my car can pull in excess of 1.0 g probably alot higher than that and the empeg never complained once.

30GB TravelStar specs say 150g operating, 700g non-operating - or was it 170g and 800g (OK, OK, sinusoidal shock, not continuous, but stil...)

However, cables seem to be somewhat less resilient

Check the cabling, and make sure the shock mounts have not come undone from the tray. If the shock mounts did come undone, glue them in with RTV Silicone glue. That might be the only problem.

Details of how to open the player and check/repair the shock mounts are in the drive upgrade guide.

Yeah lose IDE cable is the first thing i'd check.

It stopped playing, and when I reset it, it said, hard disk not found, contact support. It seems to be o.k. now though. It got kinda hot too.

Some IBM drives are smart enough to shut themselves down when they get too hot. Perhaps the terrain had nothing to do with the problem.

Peter

I have my empeg in a ski boat and later in the day the bay gets very choppy. Well to make this short, the boat takes way harder hits than my jeep ever did; i am happy to report no trouble (where's some wood?).

I had that thought too. When I have gotten that hard disk not found message, I can hear the drive spin up and it sounds like it is booting. Is it possible that the message really is a bit misleading? I think I'm gonna try two things...first is Tony's shock mount suggestion, second is installing a small cpu fan to ventilate the thing...it always seems to me to run hotter than I think it should. Has anyone with Hijack monitored thier operating temps?

Hi,

Mine survived a carcrash at 130 km/h, not even a skip. The car wasn't pretty, though. You could say it ended sort of "off road" :-)

Just thought I'd add my $.02 to this...

From my experience, the empeg has done *extremely* well. I have never once had the unit falter because of rough driving.

And when I say "Rough Driving", I mean it. I abuse the hell out of my car, taking it offroad at high speeds on a regular basis. My first aftermarket purchase was a large front skid plate, which has several large dents in it now, if that's any indication. Hell, a week after I bought the car, I un-beaded a tire off the rim, hitting some ruts sideways at about 45mph. Yeah, I'm a nut.

So anyway, I am completely and utterly impressed with the empeg. Somehow, it has lived through over a year of my driving the car, and it has never failed me. Hats off to the empeg guys for making the unit burly.

As far as your unit goes, that sucks. It could be a freak occurrence I suppose, but it could also mean that something is loose inside the unit. If that happened to me, I would most likely take it apart, and make sure that every connection was nice and tight. I might even rig some kind of clips on the IDE connections, if they didn't seem to be tight enough. But that's just me. I tend to go overboard when it comes to attaching things. Lots of nylock nuts, locktight, that sort of thing...