Stuttering, then locking up

My riocar has been freaking out lately. I think it is a hardware issue, as it was working fine, and I haven't update the firmware lately. After working fine for about 15 minutes, it will start to stutter. It seems like it will play about a half second of audio, then pause for a second, over and over. At this point, the unit is locked up. It will not respond to any buttons, and the only way to shut it up, is to take the unit out. When I stick the unit back in, it displays the "No Hard Disc Found" message. I then need to wait about a hour before it will boot up normally. I upgraded the hard drive from a 10 gig, to a 30 gig Toshiba. I am going to try the old drive in it to see if that makes a difference. So this brings up two questions. Has anyone had these symptomes, and if so, what was the problem? Since I upgraded the hard drive, am I out of luck as far as warranty, even if it's a non-hard drive hardware issue? Thanks.

I'd check that the IDE connectors are firmly attached before going back to the little drive...

Armin

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I've had similar symptoms to these. I thought it might be the drive cable. After contacting support, I received a replacement which seemed to improve things for a while. Soon the problem returned though.

I double checked that the cable was securely connected paying particular attention to the connector on the motherboard which can be pulled loose when you are putting the drive tray back in place. Again this seemed to fix it for a while.

Eventually the problem returned and with nothing left to try I contacted David at support again. He said to send the unit in for investigation.

It turned out that there were 3 dry solder joints between the IDE connector and the motherboard. I guess that it was managing to load up data from the drives every now and again which enabled it to play for about 10-15 minutes from the RAM before it ran out. Less if I skipped tracks (thus emptying the RAM buffer and causing it to need to access the drive again).

After David's repairs it now works perfectly. Hats off to David by the way. As many have said before, the Empeg support is the best I've ever experienced. When you consider that the player has been EOL'd and that I bought it from someone else who had bought it at a huge discount, it makes the standard of service even more remarkable. Thanks David.

Andy.