Stuck at "Player Starting"

I'm visiting my parents for the weekend, and their Central has stopped working. They left on vacation for a few weeks, and when they came back the date had frozen at a day after they left. On reseting it, it gets to "Player Starting" and freezes there.

Is this a bad hard drive? I've started downloading the CD image, and I'll try going through the setup to see how far it'll go. Needless to say, there are no backups so a restore is going to be feeding all the CDs in again.

Matthew

Hi Matthew,
You could get lucky and fix the problem just be reloading the software without reformatting the drive. But it could be that the hard drive is bad...If reloading the software doesn't do the trick, then I would try a new hard drive....If there was only a 40GB drive installed, this could be an opportunity to get some more space for your folks....

Let us know what happens....

Randy

Well, a new hard drive did the trick. I didn't mess with the old hard drive, I'll assume it's dead for the time being.

Has anyone gotten the full riocar image to download and unzip? It tied up my mac mini until the unzip died. I suppose it's not the end of the world to have it do all the CDDB lookups online.

Matthew

http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/267505/an/0/page/0#267505

Ok, tried the original CD image, and it still freezes after a few hours of being on. The clock display stops, and you have to flip the switch in back. I'm not sure if it still does the player restart loop or not.

Anyone have any ideas what this could be? The new hard drive doesn't seem likely, but it's the only thing that's changed. Bad IDE cable? Cold solder joint?

Matthew

Matthew,

It's quite hard to tell what the problem is in these circunstances. Possible cause could be thermal issues in which the CPU overheats or a fault memory chip causing a bit to flip and the CPU to crash.

Still, with these issues I'd expect the symtoms to vary - I'd expect kernel panics and-or SIGSEGV's in the player's code (but I don't know how the display is driven by the CPU - a crash of the application might cause just this). Another cause might be spurious interrupts that cause the CPU to halt or at least trap in the kernel.

You might want to try and hook up a keyboard or move the disc to another machine and mount it (if you do not have Linux installed you can download a Knoppix bootable image that is a fully operational Linux system on CD). I would be interested if there is a /var/log directory with system logs and see what's in them. They might (provided that they exist) shed some light on the problem.

As for solder joints - I've taken the board out and I think it has at least 4 layers - the top and bottom are mainly ground shielding and power - the remainder is neatly tucked away and is absolutely unreachable...

If you need any more assistance in getting Linux up, mounting the partitions and/or analyzing the logs just ask.

Jeroen

Thanks for your reply. I never imagined that logging might be enabled, I'll have to check that out next time I'm visiting.

Matthew