phatbox skips track, freezes, says eject

[pow3rslave]

i have a hacked 80 gig kenwood phatbox, and i recently moved it from the floor of my car's cabin to the boot mounted vertically on it's side on the side wall, next to an amp, and a decent distance from 2 12" subs.

yesterday it started to play up slightly, when playing a couple of (known working) tracks at high volume it suddenly skipped to the next track on the album, skipping back worked in a few cases, but at least once it froze up, not allowing album, track or any other changes. after a while of which it said 'eject'

today i'll try updating firmware/formatting it, but i'm not sure how i'll go with this, because i paid for the phatnoise voice on tap software and have since formatted my computer, so i don't want to lose it.

any suggestions on the cause of the skipping and what to do to fix it while keeping the software i have?

[judb]

in the position it is in there apparently is too much vibration from bass at high volume causing disk read errors.  this could long term damage your DMS drive.

Just a guess but that seems to be a problem people have had before with bass / bumpy roads and different install locations.

[pow3rslave]

are there any mounts or whatnot i can use to stop this, or am i better off just moving it back to it's former location?

[judb]

I've never experienced this issue so I can't say for sure.  it may be that putting some kind of rubber shock absorber on your mount points might help but it may be a non optimal operating orientation for the drive you are using and just wont work right.

Then again, there are some people who turn the bass up so loud (one of my co workers) that everything rattles loose over time.  he has to screw his amp rack back together every few months because things start coming loose and rattling.  I don't imagine a hard drive would last long in his truck.  And I wont ride with him either. heh.

[S80_UK]

I've never experienced this issue so I can't say for sure.  it may be that putting some kind of rubber shock absorber on your mount points might help but it may be a non optimal operating orientation for the drive you are using and just wont work right.

This may work.  But there can sometimes be a problem if mounts are added in that they make things worse by changing the natural resonant frequency of the unit, causing the hard drive to have more trouble operating.  My Phatbox is pretty well hard mounted to the bodywork (as recommended by Volvo).  I guess the theory is that the resonant frequency of a tank is pretty low...    Certainly I have had no trouble.  But it can also depend on the tyres, the suspension, the roads that you drive on, etc.

[pow3rslave]

ok, so i moved the unit back into the cabin, where it originally was and worked fine, formatted/diskchecked the hdd and am not firmwaring it as we speak.

given i had VIOT and but have since formatted my computer and now the DMS too, what does that mean for me? how do i get it back?

[judb]

its files in the plugin directory..do you have a copy of that directory from the backupdms script or on the old DMS by chance?

[pow3rslave]

i know i still have the hdd from the old dms, but i'm not sure if i bought VIOT before or after the swap. ill look into it.

failing that, i still have the hdd that the old install of windows was on on my pc, is there somewhere on ther that the plugins get stored (don't think i did a backup onto there tho)

any help would be awesome, cos i hear the phat support ain't great.