Serious 721 bug - too many timers

[rjenkins]

I've encountered a really serious bug with the new 1.07 software on my 721. I was adding a bunch of timers and I suddenly hit the max limit. I got a nice screen saying that I had too many timers and that one would have to be deleted before a new one could be added. The problem is that the timer list refused to come up so that I could delete one. After trying a couple different ways, and the timer screen would always seem to 'crash' whenever I would try to access it, I decided to reboot my receiver. (Hold power button for 10 seconds.) But now the 721 can't even reboot. It gets to the blue information screen that says to please wait, and then 10 seconds later, I get a white/black stippled background with the X windows cursor in the middle, and it reboots itself all over again!

Anyone know of a way to do a NVM reset when the receiver can't boot itself like this?

[rjenkins]

Well, since I basically had a $500 brick on my hands after the above timer issue, and the RMA'd replacement would take awhile to get here (and hearing horror stories about the state of 'refurbished' replacement receivers), I wondered if I could fix mine myself by forcing a NVM reset...

I remembered a thread here about people exploring under the hood of their 721 and how the 721 was Self Healing (http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6558). So, I found a Linux Rescue CD distribution that had XFS support, and burned it onto a CD. And by following the hints, I was able to mount the 721 drive in one of my PCs, and after booting with the Linux CD, was able to find the correct active partition and delete the main Linux kernel. After rehooking up the drive and booting the 721, it couldn't boot because of the missing kernel, so it went into a text-only, limited funtionality mode. (really funky). Then when I rebooted the receiver, it automatically healed itself, did a NVM reset, reinstalled the latest software, etc... Viola!! Perfectly working receiver again. No timers or recordings anymore, but that's 100% better than a receiver that wouldn't even reboot.

Very cool, but not something everyone can do. I seriously recommend that everyone be very careful and not max out the number of timers with software version 1.07... :)

[FlyingDiver]

Or make sure you always have at least one "once" timer set for the fairly near future. That way, as soon as it does fire, you've under the limit again.

I reported this bug on this forum a couple weeks ago, but I never managed to get it into the same state that rjenkins did. Probably because I never tried to reboot it when the timers were maxed out. I just waited until one of the timers dropped off the list.

joe

[Bodger]

I had this exact bug on my new 721 about a week ago. Advance Tech at Dish finally declared my unit to be beyond help and shipped me another. They maintained that there was no known issue with this.
My new unit is already having problems, similar to some I was having with the first one. Is anyone else experiencing the total loss of sound and picture when using both tuners at the same time? In some cases going to the guide and changing channels will trigger this.
Sometimes turning the unit off and on several times will recover it, sometimes a reboot is required. It's getting damned annoying.

[greylar]

I'm sure that several people would like to know.

Thanks,
Greylar

[scoco]

I had the too many recorded events bug happen to me twice around the New Year (Twilight zone marathon on Sci-Fi). Luckily, almost all of the events were one time only so I was soon able to access the PTV menu. It sounds like it's a good thing I didn't reboot! Thanks for the info rjenkins!

[bunkers]

So what is the limit on the 721? I know the 501 has a 50 timer limit.

I find this to be incredibly STUPID limitation. Some lazy programmer created an array of size 50 -- "oh, they'll never create that many timers!!!". Just plain stupid, because we have all that hard disk space, and the 50 timers probably takes about 100k or less! Hard to believe you could create a PVR with such a limitation -- PLEASE !!!!

[FlyingDiver]

As far as I can tell, the limit is 64 timers. What I can't remember is if 64 worked, and 65 locked it up, or if 64 locked it up. It's easy enough to tell, just keep adding timers until you hit the bug. Just make sure at least one of them is a "once" timer that's going to go off real soon, because until it does, the machine is doing nothing. And don't try and force reboot it - that just makes it worse. Wait for the timer to clear itself.

And yes, it's a bone-headed programming limitation.

joe

[bunkers]

Yeah, thats just inexcusable, considering the fact that your have a 120GB hard drive in the 721 and your limiting yourself to 64 timers! I mean, even if the timers took 1MB of space each (which they definately do not), your talking about 65MB/120000MB for timers.

One of my biggest problems is my wife filling up all the 50 timers on our 501. What a huge reason not to get a 721, considering I was banking on this limitation being much higher (sigh)...

I would love to see this topic brought up in a tech forum or charlie chat...

Feels strangely like a jumbo jet with 350 seats which is limited to carrying 3 passengers kind of thing. Bone-headed, for sure!

[rjenkins]

The size of the harddrive really has nothing to do with the max number of timers, since they have to be in memory at all times. The 721 has 29megs of RAM, however, and should be able to store a TON of timers in memory. My bet is that they are still storing timers in NVM, however. (Which is much smaller, and thus the limitation.) Also, the more timers, the more efficient the search algorithm probably has to be to see which timer needs to fire off. (Although, I'd just keep it sorted in memory with the next one to fire at the top of the stack, etc.) But who knows what logic really is used.

Bottom line, though... I'd like to see a much larger timer list, and of course it's possible. :)

[FlyingDiver]

Originally posted by rjenkins
The size of the harddrive really has nothing to do with the max number of timers, since they have to be in memory at all times.

No they don't. Only the next two timers need to be in memory (one for each tuner). As soon as it fires a timer, it could search through the list on disk to figure out which one needs to go into the queue next. Unless you're scheduling lots of one-minute timers, the resources required to do that are negligible.

Of course, you would also need to refresh the queue anytime a new timer was created. But it needs to do that anyway to detect conflicts.

It's just a stupid bug.

joe

[Bob Haller]

Well this one gotr me good. :(

Hopeflly the new software will fix it. Wish I had seen this thread before calling E for advanced exchange and havuing a bad time with ....

[chris_h]

I hope you all will forgive me for dredging up this old thread, but it is still relevant today since the software to fix it has not yet been released. With the free-view weekend coming up, I said to my hard drive "fill er up!" I got the 64 timer limit warning and could not access my PVR events or timers. I called dish advanced tech support and they had me reboot. Then all the 721 would do is reboot, over and over. He said it was probably a signal issue and suggested I swap out the 721 with my 301 to check the cabling and switch DP34.

Before I went thru that hassle, here is what I did to get my 721 from "brick mode" into usable mode. Perhaps this will be helpful to others who do not want to do the "self heal" ritual given above.

1. Unplug unit and wait 1 minute for hard drive to spin down.
2. Unplug smart card
3. Plug unit back in
4. I left the room for about 30 minutes here, so I do not know how long it really took, but when I returned the "system info" screen was up.
5. Plug back in smart card.
6. In out 3 minutes it booted okay, but shut off.
7. Turn unit back on and delete a timer.

I hope this helps.

[Jacob S]

I am sick of problems with the 721. I pretty well dont pay attention to bugs or they are nearly meaningless when your signal pixellates. I think I will get my 721 replaced and sell it and get a computer based pvr device.

[BigDee]

I have this same problem, although I got to it in a slightly different way:

I had just added several timers. After adding the timers, I tried the PVR button on the remote. The PVR screen started to come up, but disappeared. After trying this several times, the unit booted and got stuck in the same "endless loop" that you mentioned.

I called Dish and they are sending a new unit.

I can't believe that there isn't a button (or code) that issues a HARD reset, forcing the unit to factory defaults and forcing a software download upon power-up.

[rjenkins]

BTW, I've since discovered an easier way to force the 721 to reset to factory defaults (erasing all timers, all recordings, etc.).

Simply unplug your 721, open it up and unplug the ribbon cable to the harddrive (carefully). Then turn back on the 721 and it'll detect a harddrive failure. Unplug it again, and re-attach the ribbon cable. Then when you turn on the 721 again, it will do a NVRAM reset, reformat, and re-install the software. (Takes awhile for it to do all this, but when it's done you have a working PVR once again.)

[music_beans]

Does anyone have a screen cap of that 721 X Bug?

And are 721s really buggy?

[Karl Foster]

Originally posted by Jacob S
I am sick of problems with the 721. I pretty well dont pay attention to bugs or they are nearly meaningless when your signal pixellates. I think I will get my 721 replaced and sell it and get a computer based pvr device.

You don't have to get a computer-based PVR. There is another option out there (I know you all don't want to hear it). None of the D* PVR's have timer limitations. In fact, I have on one of my PVR's 113 upcoming recordings, and 83 on one. I can't believe there is only a 64-timer limit on a 90-hour PVR. That to me would be a show-stopper. The sad thing is there is no real incentive to fix the problem. You have already paid for the unit lock, stock, and barrel. They have made all of the profit up-front. There is not a continual stream of money for them that they will lose if you cancel service, therefore no incentive exists to make serious improvements.

[Big Bob]

Originally posted by music_beans
Does anyone have a screen cap of that 721 X Bug?

And are 721s really buggy?

In a word, No.

There are about a half a dozen bugs that have been reported on this forum, a couple of them could be considered serious.

SOME people have had some trouble with pixelation in one of their tuners after a time. But there have only been a few people talking about it here and they have been very vocal. Most people have not had this problem.

[BigDee]

BTW:

The 721 healed itself (after two days), once a single PVR event expired... When I went into Timers, there were 63 listed.

All is well, although we missed two days of TV. God, I need to get a life!

[Mike D-CO5]

I thought T.V. was my life , at least on this message board -satellite is a hobby that becomes your life.

[Mike D-CO5]

Well today at around 11:30 in the morning I tried to set to many timers on my 721 and the screen popped up that I had reached the maximum amount at 65. When I tried to delete a couple the screen went into a reboot. I waited and it kept rebooting and rebooting. I did a smart card reset and then a power button hold down for 5 seconds and still a constant reboot continued. I called Dish and they suggested leaving the box unplugged till the timer I had set finished. This one timer I thought was causing the problem. Every time it would reach the screen that said the receiver was in reboot, the timer would fire and it would start the reboot over again.

After waiting over an hour with the set uplugged till the timer would have been over , I plugged it back in. Still the rebooting continued. While waiting for the advanced tech to come on the line I tried something. When the screen got to the point when it said the receiver was in reboot , I pulled the smart card out and waited for 20 seconds and put it back in. This fixed it . It broke the cycle and the receiver came back.

The tech said that sometimes you have to do something to stop the cycle and I had gotten lucky when I pulled the smart card at the right time. Maybe this will help anyone in the future if they face the same thing.

[BFHEATH]

BTW, I've since discovered an easier way to force the 721 to reset to factory defaults (erasing all timers, all recordings, etc.).

Simply unplug your 721, open it up and unplug the ribbon cable to the harddrive (carefully). Then turn back on the 721 and it'll detect a harddrive failure. Unplug it again, and re-attach the ribbon cable. Then when you turn on the 721 again, it will do a NVRAM reset, reformat, and re-install the software. (Takes awhile for it to do all this, but when it's done you have a working PVR once again.)

Thanks for this tip. It worked for me. I had the same problem as the original post. The 721 had been good to me until I put too many timers in. It's now fixed again thanks to this tip.

[Adrian_R]

Before I went thru that hassle, here is what I did to get my 721 from "brick mode" into usable mode. Perhaps this will be helpful to others who do not want to do the "self heal" ritual given above.

1. Unplug unit and wait 1 minute for hard drive to spin down.
2. Unplug smart card
3. Plug unit back in
4. I left the room for about 30 minutes here, so I do not know how long it really took, but when I returned the "system info" screen was up.
5. Plug back in smart card.
6. In out 3 minutes it booted okay, but shut off.
7. Turn unit back on and delete a timer.

I hope this helps.

I'm currenly having the same problem, and a refurbished replacement is in the mail.

I'm going to presume that if I open my 721 that it is going to void my DishNetwork warranty? I pay for the monthly warranty.

[BFHEATH]

I'm currenly having the same problem, and a refurbished replacement is in the mail.

I'm going to presume that if I open my 721 that it is going to void my DishNetwork warranty? I pay for the monthly warranty.

I removed 4 screws on the back of the unit and removed the cover. No seal was broken. I noticed that there was a seal on a bracket that the hard drive was in. I was able to remove the cable from the back of the hard drive without having to break the warranty seal. Before I opened the box, I had already tried the other options given (except for the Linux idea) and none of the options worked for me. I just didn't want to go through the hassle of sending a unit back if it was a relatively easy fix. One unexpected thing that occured is that my on screen Caller ID is now working every time. If I had been paying the warranty I probably would have sent it back. (I was sure wishing I had been paying the warrenty for a couple of days)

[Jacob S]

If I am not mistaken I recall hearing on a Charlie Chat that there were unlimited timers on the 721. Do you remember when the 501 had a limit of 10 timers when it first came out then they upped it to 50?

When the 522 comes out are they going to have a 64 timer limit on that as well or 64 timer limit per tuner?

A 721 having a continuous loop of rebooting sounds just as bad if not worse than the virus that hit that caused people's computers to restart.