I have a 60 GB Rio Car that has been acting up lately. A few months ago, I received the "no disk drive, contact support message." The support team kindly sent me a new IDE cable, which I installed per instructions and it seemed to fix the problem.

Then, about 2 weeeks ago, I went out to start my car in the morning and the car player didn't turn on. The LED light in the front control did not turn on at all. I wiggled the player in its docking sled and that didn't appear to have any effect. I drove for several hours like this. Then I removed the player and gave it a good "thump" on the top. Then I slid the player back into the docking sled. The "physical agitation" mysteriously fixed whatever hardware gremlin was preventing it from responding when electrical power was applied. It was only about 40 degree out, nothing unusual and that temperature never caused problems last winter.

Fast-forward to last night. I left the player on all night, synchronzing a fresh copy of my 25 GB of MP3s (I recently re-ripped everything). Mid-way through the night, the player apparently turned itself off again. As before, the LED power light in front was off. Also, the blue LED communication link in back (by the USB port) was off. Pressing the buttons had no effect. The power cord was securely inserted. I had to unplug the player and then plug it back in before it showed any signs of life. I was synchronizing using the latest v43 JEmplode and Ethernet (I have an iMac) -- I don't think this has anything to do with it.

Any ideas? Right now I am suspicious of some kind of intermittent hardware failure, possibly with one or both of the disk drives, or another fundamental component. Last night th player was *very* warm before I went to bed, but not hot to the touch. I don't think this malfunction was caused by overheating. Right now the playlists are empty even though it appears that ~15 GB of MP3s were copied -- I'll probably need to manually delete the music off the player and try syncing again. Thank you,