Serial Cable / Emplode Questions

After almost 10 faithful years, my empeg is having problems. I went through a period of time where the empeg would often fail to find the hard drive. I wouldn't be surprised if the drive is actually bad. I ditched my original 12 gig drive years ago, and the 40 that I'm using now is from an old laptop, so it has many years of service on it.

At this point, the empeg boots up 90% of time, but it never remembers the playlist. It boots up to a blank playlist and I have to manually select something to play.

I am thinking of replacing the drive, but I no longer have the serial cable for installing a new drive. Does my problem sound like a bad drive? Should I bother? If so, what exactly do I need as far as a serial cable goes?

Secondly, my girlfriend is bidding on a used MKII now. Is there some viable version of Emplode that works on a Mac?

Any straight-through serial cable will do, you should be able to get one at a Radio Shack or a computer store.

Your problems could be a bad drive, or they could be something much simpler that can be repaired yourself. It might not even be hardware trouble, it could be this issue.

jEmplode (follow the jEmplode link at the top of this page) will work on the mac.

Thanks Tony! I'll have to take a look through some of that stuff. I don't think the loose IDE cable is the culprit. That happened once years ago, but it seemed to be tight when I checked the last time I was having problems.

Am I correct that either way (new hard drive or erasing the dynamic data partition), I'll need a serial cable?

Yep, serial cable required for issuing commands at the shell prompt.

And, something that's becoming a rarity these days, an actual honest-to-God serial port on your PC for flashing new firmware or disk builder images onto the player. The USB-to-serial dongles that are available for laptops these days are iffy and might not work for that task.

Make sure to go through that whole list, don't just check for a loose IDE cable. There's a lot of items on that list besides a loose IDE cable.

Thanks again for the tips Tony! I managed to find a working serial cable and just replaced the drive with a spare I had laying around. Plenty of space now, but the best news is that she picks up playing again from the same spot as when the car was turned off. I've only had it up and going for a day, but no "No hard disk found" errors yet. I'm thinking the drive I took out was just on its way out. I also had intermittent problems with the player freezing in the middle of playback.

Plus my ebay empeg was delivered today! We even have beautiful weather forecasted for the weekend. I guess that means I'll have to rip my girlfriend's dash apart and start looking into how to install it.