One of the problems are getting older is that one's memory often lets one down in an infuriating manner frown A little while ago I recalled that in 2016 I had experienced a similar problem when the system wouldn't recognise my MD600. This was accompanied by a noise from one of the hard drives. At that time I was being assisted by the dealer who had originally supplied the equipment. He was very helpful but, for one reason or another (and possibly unnecessarily) he recommended that my MD600 should be returned to Meridian. This was done and Meridian reported that the problem was because one of the hard drives had become corrupted and this had affected the control software.

Following that, and based on helpful recommendations from people at this forum, I purchased an Icy Box Docking and Clone Station, and two spare disk drives as backups (I had already been backing up to a NAS). I've just taken the two spare drives, inserted them in the MD600 and everything works just fine. It's busy at the moment going through the comparison procedure between the two drives and once that is done I will establish which of the original drives is at fault.

I'm still slightly at a loss as to why something as simple as temporarily disconnecting the ethernet cable from my MS600 should have triggered this situation.

Many thanks to everyone here for your helpful comments and, particularly, to Russ (Ratbert) who PM’d me suggesting that the problem was almost certainly a disk failure even though the MD600 appears on the network. He offered to help me via a telephone call but, thank you very much Russ, I won't need to do that now. It's worth saying that in 2017 when I had another problem, Russ spent a considerable amount of time helping me to sort things out.

Thanks to all. Jeremy

Control:PC, MS600 & MD600, Audio Note M5 pre-amp, Conquest power amps, Magnum Dynalab MD108 tuner, Duevel Bella Luna speakers. Approx 2000 albums on Sooloos - wide range of genres.