Okay, now I'm concerned. I was driving in to work today, minding my own business, listening to my music. I got thru about 4 songs (total empeg power-on time about 20 minutes), and the empeg just.... stopped playing.
The display was fine, and unresponsive to any input. The icon on the bottom left (play/pause/etc) was showing play.

Thinking that the particular song I was somehow freaking out the player, I did a 'hard reset' by pulling it out of the dash, counting to 10, and plugging it back in. I thought -perhaps in vain - that catching the song before it started to play and hitting pause would le me skip past it. Not so.

Several repeated attempts show the same pattern: Boot, init, show song, show "playing", freeze. Attempts to hit the "playlist" button 4 times to randomize all of the playlists got me as far the last big triangle symbol for play. Then freeze.

Getting home, I decided to re-upgrade the player - I had put developer 1.03 on, so I thought I'd put consumer 1.03 on. I reloaded the image, let it do it's thing, and this time... I was rewarded of a display of the first song in my playlist. Repeated attempts to press buttons caused the unit to skip to song 546 - where it had originally frozen, and do no more.

I re-upgraded back to developer 1.03 and started to watch the serial output. It gets all the way down to "empeg-car 1.03.", the display locks, and after several button presses, I see...

Restored terminal settings

Remounting first music partition read-only

Remounting second music partition read-only

No secondary hard disk

Player exited normally: 1

Switching to shell-player loop

Starting bash.

empeg:/empeg/bin#

And it's not responsive to hyper-term at 115K, 8N1, no flow control.

I'm truly at a loss. It's hard to tshoot an os-level problem when the machine hangs.

I've never opened the unit, and aside from the remote display hack, never really mucked about that much.

Um, help?

Very strange! Dropping to the shell at boot up.

Definitely send an e-mail to support about it. It might be that rare database corruption bug that's been reported elsewhere on the BBS, but I'm not sure.

I'm sure we'd all like to know what the resolution ends up being, so if support can help you out, please post the results here.

___________
Tony Fabris

Greetings!

Are you running any third party software, or just the clean developer 1.03 that you reinstalled? Were there any unusual messages in the rest of the boot cycle? Have you tried performing a sync - that should wipe / rebuild the database? Do any of your front buttons appear to be sticking, flooding input?

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (96GB Smoke)

It does sound like you have got an mp3 file on there which is upsetting the player - that's the usual explaination for a lock.

Clear the playlist:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda3 bs=512 count=1

Get it to ignore the current state:

/empeg/bin/player -i

...and it should run again. Connect with emplode and remove the offending song. If you have a copy of it, support would probably like it so we can ensure that 2.0 (which already has better rejection of corrupt/damaged files) deals with it correctly.

Hugo

Very strange! Dropping to the shell at boot up.

Actually, not strange at all. I find that when I make modifications to the init file, if I don't chmod 755 the file, the player won't start and defaultly drops to shell during boot up. The other side effect is it leaves the custom icon on.

As asked before, did you install 3rd party software which might have modified your init file? Are the permissions on the init set properly? Did you load a program that launches from the playlist? (i.e. emptris, timed, etc) I would suspect you are either running a bad MP3 (Bad MP3, BAD! Go on the paper like you're supposed to) or you are launching some 3rd party software by accident.

Greg

Hmm.... To answer the posts that have been put up so far...

Tony - I did fire off a mail to support, and they suggested trying to skip past the offending song. I've tried that with little success, but I'll, um, try harder. He did also suggest sending a ctrl-c on bootup to interrupt the startup scripts. I don't have much hope in that working.

Paul / Greg : It's a clean load of the developer image with no freaky stuff. :-) Don't think that it's a sticky button issues. How (aside from tactile feedback) would I check?

Hugo: Ok, I'll zap the playlist and see what happens, but the player usually hangs prior to getting anything useful done.

Support did mentinon that the 2.0 version should be able to handle corrupted files better. I asked if I could get a copy to see if it resolved my issue, but he didn't respond... (hint hint hint)

Thanks for your input guys - it's really appreciated. I will be able to do more troubleshooting from home tonight.

Dan

Empeg Mk II, 12GB Blue, #106

All better now. Thanks for all the help. For those interested, the fix:
a) Boot player, repeatedly press ctrl-c until dropping to a shell prompt. (Caught the unit prior to the player starting).
b) Followed Hugo's dd suggestion for zeroing out the playlist and restarting the player.
c) Noted that everything worked again. Yay!
d) Started Emplode to delete the offending track - doublechecked some options, hit sync, walked away for a smoke...
e) Come back to find "Sync failed" message, error code 0xFFFFFFFFFF......
f) Fume.
g) Re-upgrade, loading developer 1.03 image.
h) Sweat profusely whilst using empeg to delete offending song and resync.
i) Smile and order tuner as Empeg now restored to full functionality.

Thanks again to all who posted, and my humble apologies to David Moss @ Empeg support whom I doubted publicly. ;-)


Dan Gentry
Empeg Mk II, 12GB Blue, #106
dan-gentry1@home.com

You don't want to go around doubting David - the fabric of the universe could collapse.

Rob

:)

--
David
// I'm probably not speaking on behalf of empeg/SONICblue here...

Did you hang on to a copy of the offending file?

If so, make sure to send it to the empeg guys to make sure that 2.0 handles the error correctly.

Also, peek at the offending file in MP3Trim and see if it reports any errors (make sure not to "save", though, as that will correct the error and you don't want to send a corrected file to the empeg guys).

___________
Tony Fabris

I just had the same problem described here (Although I didn't know it at first with my custom init). I restored a default 1.03 setup, and would watch the empeg boot, load the player, then appear to freeze. I plugged in a serial cable and saw it dumped to the shell. I did the above procedure with dd then running the player with -i, and it fixed it.

Now here is the odd thing. The song the empeg was hung on didn't have a problem when I played it again. Also, when the problem started, my custom init would keep reloading the player. Sometimes it would dump out when it loaded all the way and displayed the song info, other times it would lock on "Loading visuals" and other times, it would lock on the song from the previous shutdown.

I've notice some gaps in playback as well recently when starting up the player. (Usually only lasting a short time after it boots, 30 or so seconds, and it dosen't happen all the time) Ram tests do pass fine though, even when I ran it when the player was locking. I'm not sure if this problem affected the lock or not.

I'm just glad I was able to pull all the music back off via FTP, even though it did lock a few times doing that as well.