Here is some food for thought for everyone who has experienced the hard drive not found message.

I live in Houston, Texas. Cold weather is usually not a real issue for us. I have never had any problems with my Empeg (MkIIa 60GB both are Fujitsu drives). I am currently on vacation. I loaded up the family into the caddy and we drove to Toronto to visit some friends. The player was fine all the way up. It is the ONLY way to take an extended trip in the car.

Once in Toronto I have noticed some strange things however. Monday it was actually snowing here. We went to the CN tower and knocked around the area for a while. The player was in my wife's purse tucked into the bottom of the baby stroller. We were out and about for around 4 hours. When I put the player back into the car and tried to use it I saw for the first time, the infamous hard drive not found error. After a few cycles of taking it out and putting it back in the player finally booted.

Tuesday we went to Nigara Falls for the whole day. It was a nice day but was still colder than home. When we got back into the car and put the player in it's place we got the same message. I have tried several times but to no avail. The player does not want to boot. I will try again tomorrow after making sure the player is good and warm.

The point of the story is that the player always worked fine at home in the warm weather. In the cold weather it has been a little flaky. I hope I can get it stabilized as I can't imagine driving without it.

PS. It is running 2.0 Beta11 and Hijack258

I mentioned this in a previous post a while back. I have done many tests and found that is a proven fact that it will not boot if it is too cold. Once it has been warmed up, either by leaving it plugged in for a bit and running the car, or even sitting on it for a bit, it will work just fine. The last time I said this, people shot me down mentioning temperature thresholds and such saying there is some other problem. I don't know about any of the technical specs ot thresholds or any of that, but I have proven on many occasions that this thing will not boot if it is too cold. So now I leave it plugged in at home so it's warmed up and ready for use when I take it out to my car.

It makes sense to me. Up until this trip it has never been turned off for more than 1 hours since I have had it. It runs all day at work and on the commute to and from work. At home it is always hooked up to the network and on the stereo.

HI,

I live just 10 minutes north of Toronto and my empeg does get chilly when I leave in the car for a few hours while parked.

I have found a quick way to get it going again, once the car has some heat coming out of the registers, I simply hold the bottom of the empeg up to the warm/hot air. It only takes me a couple of minutes to get her all warmed up again.

Enjoy!

I live in Houston also and it happens here when it is warm as well. I have 2 48GB IBM drives. It has not happened in a few weeks though.

Steve

We just got back last night. The unit has warmed up considerably since we were in Toronto. I still have the same problem. David at Empeg told me he thinks it might be the IDE cable. He is going to send one and I will try that. It was one very long drive from Toronto to Houston without a functioning Empeg.

All I could do was look at it with the two dead x eyes on Tux. Very disturbing...

I broke my 10Gb spare out this morning to get me by until the other one is up and running again.

Well you could have temporarily fixed it. Just move the IDE cable from the middle position to the end connector and walah it works

I live in WA and it is still cold here ( down to 35 at night) and i get the HARD DISK NOT FOUND all the time but i have found that a combination of turning the hijack temp threshold to OFF and then when my truck is warmed up turn the heat on so it comes out of the front vent then kinda warm the player up with the dirrect warm air. I know its kinda silly but its worked 100% of the time ......im going to tap into my front vent work and route a little tube to the rio chassy to blow the warm air dirrectly on the rio whenever i have my enviromental controls on in the truck. That way my rio is able to have the same temperature comfort have.........

When driving during the winter, you don't want a heater blowing on the player 100 percent of the time. You'll cook it.

i should have clarified that the tube isn't goind directly to just the player but to the cavitey in the dash that the player sits in so that there is a larger volume of air to server as a kind of buffer for extrem heat but when i use my heat as i'm sure most people do i will turn the temp down after a few minutes or i will fry from the heat

I have two hard drives in my player. If I move the cable like this what will happen? It will obviously only see the drive that is still connected. What impact would this have on the database and file pointers?