HR10-250 Forgetting Account Information

JohnTSmith said:

Another thing I am going to check, based on http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=210343 that I found, is to get a ladder out and check the connections at my dish, to make sure everything is clean and water proof

It just MAY be that my problem with intermittent lost information is due to a (going?) bad LNB and/or outside coax connection

Click to expand...

Be very careful, but that is always good advice. A temp suckout of a short center-conductor can affect the DC circuit or info sent from the DVR to the switch (telling it where to switch to) because as the CC sucks out, the DC circuit is fully broken. The RF signal can still be active in this case because that can actually still radiate across the short divide. Levels will go down, but signal will still be there, especially at L-band frequencies.

That said, I doubt that is what is at the root of your problem. It is more likely that CMOS battery, which backs up volatile info like JBv said. They are typically good for 5-7 years. Replacing it is a cheap fix, but they also often last longer than the DVR itself. Just not always. I took one of those out of a failed 2004 HR10 and have been using it in a HDMI switch box remote control for the last year. Not sure, but I think having the box sitting unpowered shortens the CMOS battery life, which would explain why two old boxes are showing the same thing. If we have a MB design expert on the thread they could probably verify that. On the other hand, the one I took the battery out of and am still using sat for about 3 years.

The card slot is a reader, not a writer, meaning that new user info is not written to the access card. Instead, the info, which lives in the sat stream but is cached in volatile memory in the STB once the stream rehits it, is verified against the access card on occasion. The card only contains the ESN of the box, but the stream and cached info contains that as well as your package info and a TTL reset. That makes a good CMOS battery important. If it does not hold the memory long enough for the next stream hit, it has no user info to verify against the card and will throw that exact error.

After all, in dog years your DVR is about 108. If you and I ever get that old we'll probably have memory issues as well.

An update
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My 1st HR10-250 would forget that it had a valid account AND it would restart
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My 2nd HR10-250 (from closet reserve) never lost the account, but it DID restart
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My R10 (final closet reserve) never lost the account, but it DOES restart
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I was actually looking for information on the THR22 DTivo, when I found the message thread about "all over" restarts with SD equipment
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Since my two HR23 receivers have not had any problems, I am now concluding that the problem is not with my equipment... but is a problem with a malformed data stream from DTV (I don't remember it, but the 210256 message mentions a similar SD problem a few years ago)
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If DTV is not able, or willing, to fix the current problem, I may just have to find out if they have a "special" to replace my HR10-250 with an HD DVR... when I upgraded to HD service almost 3 years ago, I got new dish and two HR23 boxes at no cost because DTV had a special going on... I did, of course, have to commit to the usual 2 years of service, but since I've been a customer since 1995 and have NO interest in leaving DTV, another 2 years was a "no price" deal for me to get HD service
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Anyway, I no longer think the problem is at my end, due to the 210256 discussion