I'm getting the "No Hard Disk Found Contact Support" syndrome, but it happened in a weird way... (sorry for the long winded description, but I figured I'd try to give as much information as I can.)

Background: I've had my empeg running 2.00beta11 for months now. I also have HiJack ver254 installed. Both have been running for a long time and I havn't sync'd in ages (ran out of room on my player) but I listen to this in my car all the time. So, other than sending a custom logo.raw or two a few weeks back, I havn't been making any changes to it. Maybe related: I've had the "Check File System on Sync" disabled... but like I mentioned, I haven't snyc'd in a long time so it wouldn't matter?

This is a RioCar Mk2a with a Fuji 30GB drive (slave) and IBM 30GB drive (master). The player was bought in Dec. of 2001 and the drives are from my older empeg Mk2. I swapped the drives while replacing the drive cable (had a bad cable on shipment) - so I already have a new cable.

Last night, I was getting ready for a party at my house (in which the empeg was going to be the music source). A buddy was bringing over a little ethernet hub, so instead of having my notebook sit next to my entertainment rack (with a 10ft. crossover cable), I ran CAT5 cable through the ceiling to behind my bar. As the music was playing, I plugged one end of the 100 ft. cable into the empeg and began running the cable through the drop ceiling...

Eventually, I realized that the music stopped playing at some point. I walked over to the empeg and it was stuck at 0:00 on a song. I skipped ahead to the next song and it played fine. Curious, I tried playing the bad song (assuming it was a corrupt file) by FF and RWD'ing into into it, but it would usually get stuck. Then the player started to react to the front panel commands very slowly. I eventually skipped ahead to another song (it skipped ahead several songs as it caught up to me hitting the ">" button several times.) Unfortunately, this time it got to a file that was certainly corrupt.. I got the "Invalid File Format" error.. It hung on this error message for over 20 seconds. Impatient, I unplugged the power and rebooted the player. As it displayed the custom boot logo for longer than normal, I began to worry. Finally I got the dreaded "No Hard Disk Found Contact Support" message.

At this point, I wasn't too worried. I know that this has happened to others on the empeg BBS recently. However most people experience this in cold weather. And if anything, my player was warm from being on top of the entertainment rack. I unplugged it and let it sit for about 10 minutes. Still no luck. Then I let is sit for an hour - still no luck. Thinking that maybe the cable came loose, I opened the player and double checked the connections. Pressing them down, I reapplied power (taking all precautions in the unofficial Drive Upgrade FAQ) but no luck. Then I removed the cable and reseaded it - nope. Then I ran upstairs and got my other replacement cable (still fresh in the envelope - unopened). STILL NO LUCK!

Stressed out, I packed up the empeg for the night and popped in some CD's. This morning, I try it again, but no dice.... Below is my boot log:

In reply to:

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empeg-car bootstrap v1.02 20001106 (hugo@empeg.com)
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 kern
el.
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg50-hijack-v254 (root@tbird.localnet) (gcc ve
rsion 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #2 Sat Apr 13 12:22:05 EDT 2002
Processor: Intel StrongARM-1100 revision 11
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.94.1 (c) 1998 Corel Computer Corp.
empeg-car player (hardware revision 9, serial number 10101689)
Command line: mem=16m
Calibrating delay loop... 207.67 BogoMIPS
Memory: 14984k/16M available (1012k code, 20k reserved, 364k 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 University Computer Society NET3.039
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)
Linux-IrDA: IrCOMM protocol ( revision:Tue May 18 03:11:39 1999 )
ircomm_tty: virtual tty driver for IrCOMM ( revision:Wed May 26 00:49:11 1999 )
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 0x9b734
Scheduling custom logo.
empeg display initialised.
empeg dsp audio initialised
empeg dsp mixer initialised
empeg dsp initialised
Could not find CS4231A (version=20)
empeg remote control/panel button initialised.
empeg usb initialised, PDIUSBD12 id 1012
empeg state support initialised 0089/88c1 (save to d0005a00).
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...
Probing primary interface...
empeg-flash driver initialized
smc chip id/revision 0x0003
smc_init couldn't find card
RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 320 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
empeg-pump v0.03 (19980601)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...VFS: Cannot open root device 03:05
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05

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This is really weird because I have tried 2 new cables and I'm not getting anywhere.... could I maybe have created a short while running that cable and having one end plugged into the empeg?

The symptoms you describe are consistent with one of the two disk drives going bad.

Tony, don't say that.

I forgot to mention that I also tried connecting the cable to both of the drives seperately. (Trying to boot from just one drive). Each has the player software installed, but neither worked.

I've also sent an email to support.

EDIT: Just to give as much information as I can: I tried connecting each of the drivees seperately on each of the cable connectors (4 combinations) and each time the drive can be heard spinning up, but no drive/connector combination results in the player finding the drives..

Is it possible to reflash the kernal to the player without the player being able to find the drives?

I'm going to go dig my original empeg out of retirement and pop the drives into there...

ATTN: I dug out my old Mk2, installed 2.00beta11 (but not HiJack) on it and its 10GB drive. The cable on this old player is one of the bad ones that only has a good connector on the end possition. Once that was done, I tested each of my 2 newer drives from the Rio - they both booted up right away.

>That means that the Hard Drives are good. So, either the Rio is bad, or both replacement cables that I tried in the above post were bad. (right?)

So, I disconnected the bad cable from the empeg and put in one of the replacement cables. Then I put the jumper back on the slave drive and hooked both drives up (in the older empeg player using one of the newer cables.) : IT BOOTED UP.

>That leads me to believe that the problem is the Rio. Note: I also said that now I am not running any HiJack... Is it possible that the Kernal is messed in the Flash? It has to be that or a hardware problem right?

I think that this finding may be of interest to other people experienceing "No Hard Disk Found" problems even after getting a replacement cable. We keep telling them to double check the cable - and they insist they do.

Final Note: the newer replacement cables are far less snug than the ones that ship with the Rio... so maybe they can come loose easier... That Hotglue thing is a good idea..

Hi Brad.

Actually, your boot log looks exactly like mine looked before I sent my MkIIa in for repair. Like in your boot log, the kernel was unable to find the CS4132A chip. I hope he doesn't mind that I quote the following part from an email he sent me:

The CS4231A chip was indeed faulty. Apparently if this chip fails it can
affect other systems, such as IDE - although I'm not quite sure of exactly
how.

So, in my opinion, you should contact him. I don't think your drives are failing.
And yes, you can reflash the kernel even if the linux kernel doesn't find any harddisc. Remember that the (serial port) flash process is controlled by the boot loader which happens to be the same piece of software that loads the kernel and starts it. So flashing the kernel via RS232 isn't affected by any kernel troubles.

cu,
sven

Interesting.

Should I put that in the FAQ entry as well?

You should probably ask David if this is a more common problem or not. If it was just Brad and me who had this problem, I would think it isn't worth the hassle. But considering the amount of (seldomly used(*)) information that already is in the FAQ, you might as well put it in there.

cu,
sven

(*)Don't take this personal, I like the FAQ just like it is, I just think that the "F" isn't that correct, at least not in the "frequently" meaning.

I also found that the replacement cable still gave me the errors. For some reason the way that the cable lays flat over the drives seems to affect it. I don't know whether this is physical or a possible emi problem, but I played with the creases in the cable so that the cable is kinda wedged against the display board and I haven't seen the problem since.

/me goes to touch every piece of wood in sight.

Interesting... Interesting...

Genexia, your problem sounds like a kinked cable or something (possibily unrelated to the common "bad connector on cable" problem?).

Smu, this makes sense... I sent an email to support within a minute of creating this thread and even included the URL of the thread in the email. What was odd in my case was that the player was playing fine, then started acting odd, then failed to find my hard drives within a spam of a minute. If I only had 1 hard drive, it would have been harder to trouble shoot this. Having a "spare" empeg lying around was pretty handy too!

BTW: In the above post, I stated that one mp3 got "stuck" at 0:00. I have downloaded this from the player and have not been able to find anything wrong with the file. Winamp, Irfanview and MusicMatch all play it fine. Winamp will play just about anything you throw at it (even a .mp3 with a wrong file extension) but MusicMatch can be finicky...)

I don't have the stock kernal, so I flashed the latest HiJack to the faulty player and it didn't help.

Thanks for all your input guys! (If this does make it to the FAQ, I think I may be personally responsible for at least 5 entries now! ).

It's 1:20 in Michigan now... I havn't heard from support yet (wrote them on Sat.)...

Does anyone know their hours?

Monday, May 6, 2002, is a holiday in the UK according to my calendar. So David will get back to you on Tuesday.

Cool! I didn't want to send an email unneccessarily (as opposed to an unneccessary post! ). I also know that David is part time now, so wasn't sure if that was a factor.

hey brad, i had the exact same error, sicne u said u replced the cables and no dice, try swapping the master to slave and the slave to master, thats what i did and havent had the error for month, i was alost certain the drives were toast, i freaked. i dont know why the jumpeds make a differnce like that but they do, also if that dosnt work change the location of the drives as far as the cabling goes, i just messed with all the possiblitys for an hour and get hr running again.

I'll give that a try while I wait... I did try all of the drives individually (and even a 3rd drive I have with player software on it) on each cable position though...

One interesting point - I mentioned that right before the "crash" the player was stumbleing on "corrupt" files. Well, both of those files are playing fine now... so if Smu is right and it is maybe a bad chip on the board this might be a symptom?

David contacted me yesterday and it looks like it is a bad chip. He said that the chip handles part of the audio processing and can result in IDE problems as well.

Adding that one to the FAQ, thanks.