Alrighty, I recently bought a car that has one s RIO installed model number RD100-60 mkII? it has two drives, and I know not absolutely nothing about them. It came with no cables or hardware for my computer. So Ill start from the begining. When I first took the car home the display would say "no hard disk found, contact support" Well I googled that and found you guys and some info on IDE cables and header. I removed the top cover and drives, inspected cables and put back together and bam, it worked. To my surprise it had some 7400 songs on it. The RIO worked for about a month but now is doing a deal where it just flashes between building playlists and building playlist databases. I took the unit to a computer repair place and the only thing they could tell me was the drives where ok. I have played around trying to down load stuff from some a site in the links here but cant get it to work right or communicate with the usb i have. Any help would be awesome. Id love to get it working again. It is super cool

Thanks for your time
Matt

Be patient with your new toy -- it pre-dates iPods and such by a good number of years, yet still outperforms them all when working correctly. But it is a bit clunky when needing fixes and the like.

To do just about anything with it, you will need to acquire two items:

(1) a +12VDC AC-Adaptor, rated for at least 1000mA output. It needs a DC power plug on the end of it, 5.5mm x 2.1mm (the most common size on most good adaptors).

(2) a 9-pin F-F serial null modem cable. Absolutely essential. We cannot help you (much) without this item.

New/complete RioCar packages always have both of those. What serial number is your unit?

Cheers

If you have the AC-Adaptor for a Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS router laying around, then it probably is the right type and will work.

Forget USB, go with Ethernet.



All details are here.



This is fallout from the No Hard Disk Found problem from earlier. Get thyself the serial cable Mark talked about and then, after all the disk problems have been solved, repair the databases.

I know that all sounds kind of complicated and fussy, and it is. But once the player is repaired, it will work like a champ, and you'll see how awesome some of its features are.

Thank you for your responses. I don't know how I would have figured outbwhere to start if it was not for this forum and your expertise. Since I'm not a big computer guy I took it to a friend who is and understands this stuff. He hooked connected it to his computer like you guys recommended and apparently it boots up but crashes right as it starts to load the player programing I think is what he said. Not sure if one of the drives is bad or if it's just corrupted info on the drive. Any ideas?

See Tony's post, above -- in particular, the last paragraph. The databases can sometimes be corrupted, and need to be rebuilt. If that fails, then look at whether or not the disks are bad.

Aha. If it crashes right when it tries to run the player program, you might be running into this problem:

http://riocar.org/modules.php?op=modload...;faqent=218#218

Different thing from database problem.

Also probably fallout from the "no hard disks found" problem.

It's too bad that player crashes don't invoke some kind of song sequestration.

That might be possible in hijack, at least for a player crash. A hijack menu setting to start the player with an empty playlist on next reboot might make the procedure a bit easier, too, but that might require a precious bit of flash space. For the frequency that it occurs, I don't know if the work would be worth it.

Something similar is already there (in Hijack) -- it tries to clear the current playlist entry when the player segfaults.

Also, there's the related "Kill / Pause Player" function on the Hijack menu.

Cheers