Hello, I have a Play Network c400 hard drive player. Pictures here:
http://tinyurl.com/7ythk4k
http://tinyurl.com/7hwg3da
This machine costs $500 from Play Network and is required for all Starbucks stores nationwide. I had mine for 1 year before it stopped working. The extent of the technical support that Play Network gave me once it stopped working was "turn it off and then back on again" and when that didn't solve the problem, they insisted I purchase another machine for $500...
As you can see from the images, the machine is more than just a music player, even though that is all it's used for in my store. It is actually a full-fledged PC. I hooked up a monitor and booted it and it turns out it is running Red Hat Linux.
It boots through lots of stuff but then eventually gives a bunch of file system errors (something about allocating blocks), says kernel panic, and then changes to read only mode and just hangs there...So it seems the machine is fine, minus the IDE hard drive. Play Network refused to sell me just a hard drive and insisted I purchase the entire machine for the full price.
The BIOS is password protected and the USB / mouse / keyboard modules are missing during the Red Hat boot, so while they work in the BIOS screen, they are disabled starting with the GRUB and on through the boot sequence. I am attempting to reset the BIOS password by removing the CMOS battery (jumpers method didn't work), but an initial 30-minute attempt failed, so now I'll leave it out for an hour...
Is there anything I can do? How can I repair the hard drive? If I purchase/download Red Hat, could I create a recovery CD? Is there some way to slave the HD to a functioning PC and then inspect/repair the file system that way?
I am 100% new to Linux and would appreciate any help you can offer.
Thanks.