Ok...I tried going back to the 3.0 alpha flash and it works now! but my player has been locking up due to bad mp3's and I have to reboot every time it happens which is a pain in the rear so I decided to go back to the stable version but it didn't work. Anyone have an explanation? Or better yet why does this version lock up when the prior versions just give a invalid file error and allow you to go to the next track....could someone fix this?

You said that you got a "Pump" error when you tried to apply the firmware upgrade.

A pump error usually means a problem with the hard disk. This would also explain your problems with the player locking up due to "bad" MP3 files.

I think you've got a hardware problem that needs to be solved before you can go any further.

Well it only gave me a pump error that one time. Every other time the upgrade has been applied just fine....no errors. I just put a new cable in from Eutronix and it's a segate 100g drive which has had no problems as well as the mp3 files that lock it up are the same over and over again....so I don't think it's a hardware issue just yet. Again when I switched back to 3.0 it works fine....for some reason it didn't want me to downgrade! In Hijack is the menu item the "Kill/pause player" option? it still reboots the player instead of skipping to the next track but I guess it beats a hard reboot. If anyone can figure out why I couldn't downgrade that would be awesome! Also...anyone have any extra memory chips? I was thinking of upgrading. Thanks guys.....you're the magic!

What size disk(s) do you have in the player? I think when it was wedged at the boot logo, it may have been performing a disk check followed by a database rebuild, which (if you have large disks) would take a while and give the impression of a wedged player. I had something like this going back from V3 to V2.

I am using a 100g drive and it wasn't checking anything...according to the hyperterminal it just froze when it tried to load the os. I did use the big disk builder before installing 3.0 but when I tried to downgrade I went straight from the 3.0....I didn't want to erase all my music and have to reload everything.

When you downgraded from 3.0 to 2.01, did you use Mark's BigDisk version of the 2.01 installer? If not, try that.

http://rtr.ca/bigdisk/

Not to sound like a noob but this wont erase my mp3's will it? thanks Tony and Mark.....you guys ARE the magic!

No.

There is a difference between the "Disk builder" upgrade file and the "Player Firmware" upgrade file.

The disk builder partitions and formats the disks. Any file with "builder" in its name *will* erase your MP3s.

The player firwmare upgrade overwrites just flash RAM and the software partition. The software partition doesn't contain music. Music is on its own separate partition.

Beautiful! Thank you Tony....I will try that right now!

Ok...I must mention I just got a fujistu 40g hdd that I just installed after these problems. I applied the 2.01 final on the new drive then as Tony suggested I used the big disk 2.01 installer and everything went fine until I reboot my machine. Now it wants to rebuild the music database....no problem....it did it once so I rebooted to make everything was kosher then it did it again! What am I screwing up now? Should I manually rebuild in hyperterminal?

Switching between version 2.0 and version 3.0 (in either direction) is known to require a manual database rebuild.

If that's what you did, and you didn't manually rebuild the databases after changing the version, then then having it get stuck on "rebuilding music databases" is normal, and you just need to do the procedure that Doug linked.

If you're getting the stuck-on-database-rebuild thing on a system which did not switch between 2.0 and 3.0, then something else has gone wrong. Try rebuilding anyway, but keep an eye out for other errors.