Rio Car Freezes While Playing in Home

Hi! I was one of the lucky people who purchased a 60mb Rio Car during the closeout sale in February. Since I have been loading it up with mp3s of all my CDs it has spent more time at my desk than in my car. One thing I have noticed from time to time is that it will freeze, right in the middle of playing a song. It doesn't respond to the remote or to the buttons on the unit itself. The only way I have discovered to unfreeze it is to unplug it and then restart the system. The nice thing is that it will resume playing the song that was frozen right at the note where it left off. The bad thing is that I don't like having my new Rio Car freeze like that. I have read the FAQ and I don't find anything appropriate, or at least, not that I recognized as appropriate. I am still using the commercial 1.03 release software that came with the unit. Has anyone else experienced this behavior? Hopefully it isn't a symptom that will require shipping it back to the factory. Already I'm not sure if I can bear to be parted my Rio Car/Empeg.

Traci

I had a similar issue with my riocar that was purchased in January. Mine would freeze during operation and had slow boot time. Later it started "clicking" during operation (usually prior to freezing) I had to send mine back to the UK for repair from a "dry ide header" as they told me. Hopefully that's not your problem. Also email tech support as they have mentioned to me about a bad batch of ide cables... maybe that's your hangup.

::chris
return(&my_two_cents);

Just for the heck of it, try installing 2.0 beta 11 upgrade and Mark Lord's Hijack kernel (instructions for doing both of these are in the FAQ).

My friend Tod had his player freeze regularly under 1.03, and when he installed 2.0 beta 11 and the latest Hijack, the freezing stopped.

Just to test to see if it's the Jiffy problem that Mark found, you could try waiting for about twenty minutes after it locks up to see if it will unlock all by itself (during which time you shouldn't remove power by turning off the car or removing it from the dash or any other way). If it does unlock (belatedly recognizing all of the button presses that you made, IIRC), then you can rest assured that it's definitely not a hardware problem.

one mroe thing i had the same problem, i think its a dual drive situation, and a jumper misconfiguration i had my player work fine for 2 months, till it started frezzing and not even booting at one point, i jsut swaped the pins on the drive made the master to slave and the slave to master.

FWIW, I have the same thing on a Mk2a with a single drive. I also have a Mk2 that hasn't yet shown the problem.

I am running 2.0-b11 with an older hijack (~200) on that box. It tends to happen up after about 50 minutes. Tends to happen on the same stretch of road. (Even when the GPS is not connected :-) Seen it three times so far.

Cheers,

Rex.

It took me a little time to get around to it, but, I have now upgraded to 2.0 beta 11 and the matching Hijack kernal. My problem has changed but it hasn't gone away. The new symptom is an improvement, instead of freezing the player now pauses while it reloads the database and then continues to play where it left off. That is happening at about the same frequency the old software used to freeze. This is still an irritating problem. I just get lost in the music and suddenly silence, after a pause that is just too long for my sanity the music starts again. Hopefully the way the symptom changed will help someone remember a similar problem and increase the probability of a solution. Thanks to all of you for your help on this and other issues.

Oh, if it makes a difference. I am just randomly playing tracks from any playlist. I like to get a variety of music rather than sticking with one artist or collection of similar items for very long.

Traci

Okay, it shouldn't do that. It sounds like hardware trouble, like disk drive or IDE cable problems. I'd say contact support.

Hook up the serial port and watch for messages.. If the drive is generating media errors, then it will result in the pauses you see, plus some diagnostic messages from the IDE driver on the serial port.

cheers