Hi,
I have an empeg MKII(not a), which I bought used about a year ago from a guy on this board. He said when he'd sold it that the drive failed and had been replaced under warranty (to explain why the warranty seals were broken, I guess). A few months after I got it the replacement (30gb IBM) died, so I bought a cheap 10gb, also an IBM, locally and replaced it. That drive died this March, and I grabbed the drive out of an old dead laptop a friend had sitting around, a 4gb Toshiba. This drive is now dead too. All were confirmed dead by plugging into a laptop, which won't detect any of them. The 30gb IBM makes a nasty clicking noise, the 10 I threw away a while ago and don't remember what it was doing, and the toshiba is quiet.

Do I just have really really really nasty luck, or could something in my empeg be messed up and killing hard drives? or am I potentially doing something to cause it? It's got the little washers under the mounting screws, they were already there when I took the first dead drive out. I'd like to fix the thing but I'm out of free drives and I'm not all that keen to spend a bunch of money on a new one if it's just going to die in a few months. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm going to assume that with all of the drive replacements you've been doing, that you follow the drive upgrade guide and you're therefore sure to have used the washers to set the drives off from the cradle (you said so), and that you're sure the shock mounts are working correctly.

Given the above, the only other thing I can think of is temperature. Does this player get left in the car all the time, or do you bring it indoors?

Yep, been going by the guide and everything seems to be in order. I used to leave it in the car at home (locked garage) but it started acting up over the winter (very cold winters where I live, fairly regular -30 F ish nights) and I've been bringing it in since. That was while the 10gb drive was in it, so it doesn't really explain the latest one.

so I guess it's technically possible that I messed up that drive and the original replacement one that way, and the toshiba was old to begin with, so I dunno. I just want to make sure I look at everything I can before I buy a new drive.

other thing I thought of: the car is a 22 year old Volvo and the electrics have been a bit funky for a while, I've had the dash apart twice over the last year trying to fix a power lock fuse that blows all the time. The radio circuit hasn't given me trouble and I haven't been getting the battery icon on the empeg so I discounted this, but maybe there's something in it after all?

is there any brand of drive that's particularly robust that I should perhaps look for?

The IBMs you listed should have been fine as far as reliability is concerned.

A question:

You verified that the drives are definitely bad because you plugged them into a laptop. But was it a Windows laptop? Since Windows laptops can't read Linux-formatted drives, you see... Maybe the drives have all been fine and its just the regular cable/ide-header troubles that have been plaguing you all along.

yeah, it's a windows laptop...but it only has one IDE connector accessible, so I have to take its regular drive out to connect one of the others. Nether gets detected by the laptop at bootup like its regular drive does and it doesn't make it to windows this way (durh). so unless I'm missing something and the laptop bios won't detect linux formatted drives... they're dead

Weird. It should at least be detected by the BIOS no matter how you format it. If it doesn't even show up there then there is something seriously wrong with the drive. You'll definately not be able to boot off it.

It's important to make clear... "not detected at bootup" could mean the BIOS didn't detect it, or it could mean the BIOS detected it but it didn't get any farther than that.

The more I think about it...

I can't imagine that even a faulty drive would fail to get detected by the BIOS. I mean, the heads could be completely crashed and the platters totally hosed and it should still at the very least get detected by the BIOS.

Anything more than that, and, well... Plugging it into a Windows laptop as the only disk drive isn't going to be able to detect or diagnose anything at all beyond that. You can't boot from an empeg disk drive, even in Linux. The drive doesn't even have a kernel on it. And even if it did, it'd be an ARM kernel, not an x86 kernel.

So there's two possible options here:

1. The laptop's BIOS doesn't even detect the drives at all. In which case, it means that you've either plugged them in wrong, or they've been fried electronically, indicating something seriously wrong with the player at an electrical level.

2. The laptop's BIOS detects the drives but can't get farther than that. This would be the expected behavior even if the drives were perfectly good. So you may have discarded three perfectly good disk drives based on this information.

So plugging into a laptop probably isn't the best diagnostic method. Anyone else in your vicinity with an empeg you could do some swapping and experimenting with?

I've had a Quantum drive that just acted like it wasn't there at all. I yanked it out in the end and had a look at the controller PCB and found that one of the chips actually had burnt out. The middle was all crumbly and there was a scorch mark where one of the legs was.
I never did work out why it blew but I replaced the drive and it worked fine for a year or so and then oddly that drive also went. This PC had a history of odd behaviour and fried hardware as the video card had died awhile back. In the end I replaced the PSU and it's been working fine ever since.

My Dell normally doesn't show anything at all apart from a big Inspiron splash screen and then it will instantly go to the Windows loading screen. It does however list what drive model it is in the BIOS setup. The only diagnostic test this would show is that the drive electronics are working and the drive isn't totally fried. I do agree that it's not very useful apart from that as the chances of the electronics being totally dead are quite remote if you've got 3 drives.

If you've plugged in the drives wrong then it quite possible that you've fried them. Laptop drives have the power at the end of the connector and if you misalign it or plug it in backwards then you can blow the controller board in the drive. I know somebody who replaced the drive in a caddy but installed it upside down. He powered it up and absolutely nothing happened. Opened it back up, install it properly and it still didn't work.

I've used a laptop IDE -> desktop IDE adapter before to copy my old 20GB to my new 60GB. I use Linux normally so I could mount it.

okay -- I needed to fiddle with the laptop to figure this out. I assumed the BIOS wasn't detecting them, because there wasn't any model info listed in the setup like there is on my desktop machine, but there isn't one with the working drive hooked up either. whoops.

will the empeg do anything different with the potentially-bad drive hooked up vs. one that works but is formatted incorrectly (i.e. the one out of the windows laptop), and would trying this hose the data? different output on the serial port?

I'm still pretty sure the 30g drive is dead, becuase it makes a constant rhythmic click-click-click when powered. I only threw away the 10g one, still have the other two.

unfortunately I don't know of any other players around here.

Yeah, couldn't you use something like this and try to mount it in windows using this driver? I've never tried either before, but it's worth a try.

will the empeg do anything different with the potentially-bad drive hooked up vs. one that works but is formatted incorrectly (i.e. the one out of the windows laptop)

Yes. On the serial port, you will see it detect the disk drive and then complain about it not having the right partions on it.

and would trying this hose the data?

Probably not, unless there's something electrically wrong with the player that's frying the IDE electronics on the disk (one of the theories we've been working with above).

If it's not detected by the BIOS, regardless of how it's formatted, then the drive controller is dead. This implies:

- overvoltage
- shorting electronics against the sled
- overheating
- extremes of low temperature

You mention your car has electrical problems: are they due to overvoltage?

Have you thought about returning the drives under warranty?

I'm still trying to figure out if the laptop's BIOS is detecting the drives or not. this is an old gateway laptop and isn't proving very cooperative -- the only difference I can observe between the dead (or not) drive and the laptop's drive is the latter boots into windows. which doesn't tell me much.

The problems with the car are odd intermittent shorts which just cause blown fuses. even then they've been happening on a different circuit. charging system is fine as far as I can tell. the tape on the drive carrier thing in the empeg is also fine, so if the drive electronics are dead I guess I have to blame the cold. I can pretty much guarantee that 2 of the 3 drives that died have sat out in -30 to -40F nights, and the other one was pretty old and might have been ready to die anyway.

The more I think about it I think this is probably the case. I'm going to try hooking the 30g into the laptop and see if windows will format/install onto it. If it's dead I'll see if IBM will warranty it i suppose.

thanks for the help.

I'm still trying to figure out if the laptop's BIOS is detecting the drives or not

If I were you, I'd forget the laptop route they tend to have very uninformative bios'. Get yourself a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE convertor (only a few £/$) and test the drive on your desktop.

Cheers, Sim