Hi all. Well, the other day I was merrily using the central, when it just stopped. As I pulled it out from where it was housed (in retrospect a very bad place), I feared the worst. It was stationed on top of my Onkyo amplifier, and was approximately 3 zillion degrees between the amp and the bottom of the central.

I've experienced a bad drive before, and just replaced it and went on living. This time I replaced the drive, but got no love.
Old drive: Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 80Gb ATA/133
New drive: Maxtor Diamonmax 10 100Gb PATA/133

Drive is configured as master, I have tried two IDE cables.

What I get when I try to "Restore as new" is the progress bar simply stopping at various points, depending on when I try it. It has even gotten to the end before, but then reported a read error, which I failed to copy. Rarely, I get another error which reported a hex error code, also failed to copy.

To me, it looks like either a bad IDE bus, but could be bad memory as well.

Questions: Do these symptoms ring any bells? Is anyone doing troubleshooting and repairs of Centrals? Is it worth it (time, money, hassle) to get it fixed, or should I just go the HTPC route?

Regards,
Chris

There are people with the skills to fix it, try searching the empeg-car forum for people who fix those. They should be able to also fix a central. Good luck. BTW, if you didn't know there are maybe 200-300 of these boxes in existence. If you don't get it fixed, don't toss it, at least post it in the for-sale forum so someone can pick it up for parts.