I'm having issues with a 60 gig empeg I bought recently. I've had a 30 gig installed in my truck and all I'm doing is switching the units. I just pulled one out and put the other in. The 30 gig is a Mark 2a and works great. The 60 gig is a Mark 2 and uh, doesn't work so great.

I've read a bunch of the faq entries on the negative spike bug as well as a bunch of previous posts about the topic and the player seems like it has that issue. It doesn't seem to save the state each time I turn the key. It reverts back to the same position for a while, and then randomly changes. Or it'll keep starting on the wrong source or something. It NEVER saves the volume setting, always starts very low. Okay, so maybe its the negative spike bug.

But then on top of that I noticed that often, when its booting up, it'll get stuck on either "Building Player Database", or the step that says "Audio something or other". It'll just get stuck there, and then I pull it out and put it back in and it will either do the same thing, or boot up properly. It does this frequently. Other times it freezes on the bootup animation. The player only has about 30 gigs on it right now and synchs up with Emplode just fine.

So how screwed am I?

I have about 200 of the proper diode you need to fix the negative spike bug.

Does the Mk2 go into standby at all? If it doesn't, the negative spike bug is likely affecting you.

There may be more than one thing wrong with that Mark 2. If it's freezing up on the audio driver initialization, then there might be something wrong with it internally.

Getting stuck on Bulding Music Databases might be related to the usual problems: disk drive trouble which often leads to file system corruption which often leads to database errors.

It's possible that the problem you're having is related to the CS4231A chip, can anyone else verify that this might cause the player to freeze during boot up on the audio driver message?

First step here should be to give us a proper boot log.

It doesn't really go into standby randomly or anything. I'm not really having a problem with standby.

When you say that you have the proper diodes to fix the problem, is this the piece that is soldered inline in the ignition sense wire (from the FAQ entry)? If so, I have no idea how to do this.

I could probably eventually get used to the negative spike bug issues, but the empeg locking up frequently when turning on is troubling.

Here is the boot log:

empeg-car bootstrap v1.00 20000601 ([email protected])
If there is anyone present who wants to upgrade the flash, let them speak now,
or forever hold their peace...it seems not. Let fly the Penguins of Linux!

e000 v1.04
Copying kernel...
Calling linux kernel...
Uncompressing Linux..................................... done, booting the kerne
l.
Linux version 2.2.17-rmk5-np17-empeg52-hijack-v383 (root@ibbm) (gcc version 2.95
.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Fri Apr 16 11:15:10 EDT 2004
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revis
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 7, serial number 90000896)
Command line: mem=12m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 10960k/12M available (980k code, 20k reserved, 324k data, 4k init)
Dentry hash table entries: 2048 (order 2, 16k)
Buffer cache hash table entries: 16384 (order 4, 64k)
Page cache hash table entries: 4096 (order 2, 16k)
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea Universit
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP
TCP: Hash tables configured (ehash 16384 bhash 16384)
IrDA (tm) Protocols for Linux-2.2 (Dag Brattli)
Starting kswapd v 1.5
SA1100 serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0xf8010000 (irq = 15) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS01 at 0xf8050000 (irq = 17) is a SA1100 UART
ttyS02 at 0xf8030000 (irq = 16) is a SA1100 UART
Signature is 67706d65 'empg'
Found custom animation at offset 0x9877c
Tuner: loopback=0, ID=-1
Scheduling custom logo.
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
Could not find CS4231A (version=80)
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 1012
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0004480).
empeg RDS driver initialised
empeg power-pic driver initialised (first boot)
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hdb: IBM-DJSA-230, ATA DISK drive
hda: IBM-DJSA-230, ATA DISK drive
hdb: IBM-DJSA-230, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: IBM-DJSA-230, 28615MB w/1874kB Cache, CHS=58140/16/63
hdb: IBM-DJSA-230, 28615MB w/1874kB Cache, CHS=58140/16/63
empeg-flash driver initialized
smc chip id/revision 0x3349
smc9194.c:v0.12 03/06/96 by Erik Stahlman ([email protected])

SMC9194: SMC91C94(r:9) at 0x4008000 IRQ:7 INTF:TP MEM:6144b MAC 00:02:d7:12:03:8
0
Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
hdb: hdb1 < hdb5 hdb6 > hdb2 hdb3 hdb4
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Timezone: /usr/share/zoneinfo
empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 4k initempeg init 0.8
I see this is a developer image!
Mounting proc
Mounting first music partition
Tried to mount /dev/hda4 as reiserfs but got error 19
Mounting second music partition
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Press 'q' now to go into development mode. You Have Zero Seconds To Comply...
Starting player
Timezone: /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Pacific
Hijack: intercepting config.ini

/bin/sh: /var/empegreceiver/rioplay: No such file or directory
/bin/sh: exec: /var/empegreceiverhijack_exec("", "exec /var/empegreceiver/riopla
y"), rc=126 (ERROR)
/rioplay: canhijack: removed menu entry: "Hard Disk Detection"
not execuhijack: removed menu entry: "Serial Port Assignment"
te: No such fkhttpd: listening on port 80
ile or dikftpd: listening on port 21
rectory
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00 2003/04/01.
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Mar 26 2003
Vcb: 0x40579000

Yup. As I suspected:

Quote:
Could not find CS4231A (version=80)

Player needs repair.

If you're in the US, another thread reported that Stu (Eutronix) is on vacation for a week or so, you might not get an email reply from him until after that period.

Upgrade the Hijack version and see if it fixes your problem.

The old version you have (v383) does not have the workaround for the chip failure noted in the boot log. The latest Hijack versions work around this, saving one from an expensive and risky chip replacement in many cases.

Cheers

Ah, right. I should have checked his hijack version. :-)

Do you think that the negative spike bug and thump symptoms, as well as the database errors, will also be solved by this, too?

Hey thanks, I will try this and hopefully it will take care of that issue.

SO,

I updated to the latest Hijack and I'm still having the problem. Actually, it seems like it got worse. I installed it yesterday and it seemed to work fine. First time it booted okay, but then the next time it got stuck on the boot logo. And again, and again when I retried. Then it was stuck on the boot logo screen with the message "Sigfault error". I gave up and the next time I got in my car I tried it again, same thing. This time I got "Sigbus error" and then "Sigill error". Gave up again. Tried again several hours later, booted just fine.

Tried again this morning, booted up just fine. It still forgets where to start, but it booted. When it chooses to boot seems to be random at this point. I have no idea.

I'm also noticing really awful sounding scrambling during some songs. For a couple of seconds, the sound will be all scrambled and torture to the ears. This doesn't happen that often, but it definitely happens. Its not the mp3.

Finally, sometimes when it does play, it'll just get stuck and stop responding. Sometimes this happens randomly, other times it happens when I switch sources. None of the buttons respond and I have to pull it out.

I imagine I'm really screwed?