Ok... first off, I have a MKIIa running 3a11 with Hijack 439. No extra software installed and a 60GB hard drive. I've also tried reverting to 2.0 and nothing changes.

Now... on to the description of issue. For some time I've been having issues when trying to add new songs where the player would lock... Almost always after the first transfer. It would never recover. I have at times ran a serial dump and nothing shows there... Well, this started when I had gotten a new router so I attributed it to that. But at one point, I had reinstalled the image file and started over in loading tracks. When I did this, I never had a single failure... until the drive started to get full. At that point, it would fail after the first track and I'd have to unplug it and go through the fsck and database rebuild and then try loading again. Once this was done, it usually was happy and all loaded to the player and it worked great until the next time I tried to add songs. Well, when you have to figure in at least one fsck cycle to any changes, is a bit daunting to add songs. I had kept the size of the music on the disc small until recently... and the reason being that EVERY time I've tried to make any changes to the database other than adding songs, it crashes... and doing the fsck and database rebuild first still doesn't allow it to delete. If I try again to delete items, it crashes again and it's a constant cycle. This past Friday, I added like 1GB of music and it took me to like 394kb free... I tried to delete things and it crashed... kept trying to delete fewer and fewer things but it crashed every time. I tried at one point to only delete one song and it crashed. So now, until I redo the image, I can't add many songs...

And of course, the router is the first choice. It was changed 2 weeks ago because of another issue. Went from a D-link (which I had a lot of issues with - mostly wireless issues) to a Linksys. This improved the ability to add songs as the only crash I then was getting seems to be a 3a11 bug and that's the database crashing on rebuild after everything has gone on the player. The deleting issue wasn't resolved.

I've read nowhere about this issue and thought at first it was a Jemplode thing. I found out that is not the issue (or doesn't appear to be the issue) this past weekend when I tried most of the versions from 70 to 65 and it still crashed on delete every time. It does the same thing with Emplode but Emplode doesn't have the recovery features Jemplode has as far as rebuilding the database.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what the problem might be? Is this a known issue that I just haven't seen posted anywhere? Is it a hardware problem (hard disk?) on my end? Anyone even seen this before

The first thing is to do a FSCK and a database rebuild by hand, see what's up.

I've done that... doesn't reveal any clues. See, I've done all of the things in the FAQ and then my own research to try to solve the problem and I'm at a loss now...

For that matter, one should not assume that the FAQ is the answer for everything nor should one assume that people with lower post numbers are computer/Rio illiterate. That happens a lot on this forum and there are genuine times when it applies... but not to me and not in this situation. I have tried all things and am now at a loss... Being an engineer (like most on this forum it seems), I've done all of the basic troubleshooting I can do... now I'm looking to the in depth experts to get ideas

I'm sorry. I completely missed the part in your post where you said that you already did the FSCK and database rebuild.

I posted that, not because I thought you were a newbie, but because I genuinely missed seeing the part where you said you'd already tried it.

I'll look over your initial post again and see if there's anything left that we haven't tried yet.

Okay, next thing. You said you had a 60gb drive.

How many total tracks are there on your player? Perhaps it's hit one of its database limits.

Actually, can you try uploading a few tracks via USB? I would like to completely eliminate (or narrow it down to) your ethernet environment.

I forgot to mention... I had tried USB also... same outcome.

Total tracks are under 15,000. I've tried fidsift also AFTER it started failing and it made no difference

Hmmm. Under 15,000 - you might still be bumping into the FID limit. Try using Mark's player patch for adjusting the maximum FID count.

Additional: Also, if your player is that extremely full, you might be running into trouble where there is not enough space to rebuild the database files. Neat trick, but I know that there are strange things that happen when you completely (and I mean completely) fill the drives. You may need to even clean off a bit of space manually until you can get to a point where you can work on it with emplode or jemplode.

hmm... that is one thing I've not tried... the max FID thing... I'll try that tonight if I can.

I at one point had 2 drives in there totalling 100GB and had like 28,000 songs and had no rebuild issues... but the 2 drives may have helped that.

And I've had the delete problem for some time... I mean, I had 6GB free and it was still doing it. So it doesn't appear to be an issue with the free space and database rebuild

You are right, 6GB would not cause that kind of problem.

I do not know about jemplode, but I do know that emplode would cause you trouble (inability to sync files) from the moment you cross that magic FID line. Even if you remove files afterward, you will still have trouble. One or two drives should not have mattered.

The symptoms I remember were that I could sync, loading lots of files, but that emplode would crash when it attempted to rebuild the database. This forced a manual database rebuild each time, but not necessarily a full fsck.

I am not convinced this is your problem, but it could not hurt and it is similar enough that it might be. Another thought is to sync with emplode / jemplode, but leave a console link open via serial and watch for any console messages or errors.

I will try these tonight when home from work (Well, when home from taking my daughter to Brownie meeting)... I've not looked at the Jemplode console at all and only looked at the serial port output... The serial port output showed nothing... no signs of a problem or anything (even on the database rebuild crash AFTER loading songs).

Well... I updated Hijack to 440 and ran the set max FID (I thought I'd run this before... but apparently not as it wasn't on my drive). I have deleted items now successfully twice just to check... And it even rebuilt the database right! Seems like problem is no more... at least not right now. Thanks for your help

No worries. I am glad it worked out.

One thing to keep in mind is that this program patches the player binary, so if you reload the player software, the changes are lost. You may have done this previously, but then loaded the latest alpha and lost the changes.

That is EXACTLY what happened... I was confused as to where the program had gone because I knew I'd ran the Max FID since I'd last cleared the disk... but I have installed the alphas and that did it I bet... Thanks again for the help

Jemmi