ok. Here is the story of my progessively getting worse problem.

It started last winter when my empeg started to give me "no hard drive found. contact support" messages very often. I took it apart, reseated all the cables and moved the hard drive from the center to the end connector. That seemed to fix that problem.

However, as I started to sync I started to have problems with sytnc erroring out. So, since I had improved things by changing to the end connector, went on and got a new hard drive cable hoping that would fix the problem. Still the same and only getting worse.

Now my current situation is this. When loading songs to the empeg and watching on hyperterminal I start to get hard drive seek and drive not ready errors. It retries and normally comes back. However, eventually it will not and the player software will drop to bash prompt. I have to do an fsck to get things back to normal and restart the player software (get a cannot find tags message). Then when I recorrect with emplode it will have to rebuild the database. In some cases the database comes back up empty and I lose all my songs.

When I do get songs loaded, they play just fine with no problems. It is the loading where the issue seems to occur.

I have reflashed the player and this also does not work properly. I have to reflash multiple times to get it to take. The times it fails I get in an endless loop of "memory violation" errors. I can tell when it is going to fail because "pumping partitions" takes 10 times as long as it does when it works.

I have loaded everything from 1.03 to 2.00. I have also loaded the builder image and rebuilt the drive. Nothing has worked. I am currently running 2.00 with hijack.

Is my drive bad or is there something else I need to look at? I don't mind getting a new drive, I just don't want to spend that money if they is not likely the problem.

Thanks in advance.

It could be a bad drive, but I suspect a dry solder connection on the IDE header. Especially if it is weather dependent, or only started after a batch of really cold or hot weather.

Your situation sounds a lot like mine was several months ago... it turned out to be a dry solder problem (as Paul has mentioned.) The one thing that seems to be consistant is there is no consistancy to a dry solder problem. Trying to find a pattern will drive you batty. Where are you? There may be someone close by that can take a look at it?

Could you post a sharp, close-up photo of the IDE header on the mainboard? In many cases, the soldering on the IDE header pins is so poor, that a dry joint stands out clearly.

There is a good image in the FAQ that would show you what to look for.