Possible explanation for HR2x intermittent problems

1259 Views 18 Replies 14 Participants Last post by houskamp, Jul 21, 2008

n6nfg

Discussion Starter · Jul 18, 2008

I wanted to offer up a possible explanation for some of the problems being reported on the HR2x DVR's. I recently experienced a problem with one or our home PC's running XP, and the situation may apply to the HR2x's also. It involved a failing disk drive.

Background info:
Gateway PC running XP for over 2 years with no problems at all. My son decides he wants to start playing "Age of Conan". From the beginning there is lots of problems with this game not working properly, eventually leading to a completely corrupted XP installation. Won't boot anymore, real early into the boot process a basic driver program is screwed up. We repair the installation, machine works great again until this game is reloaded and he starts playing it. After a few days, machine corrupted again in identical fashion. This fix/play/corrupt cycle goes on for a few weeks. My son investigates some forums for this game, and finds others experiencing the same thing. I chalk it up to Microsoft or the game maker having bugs in their code. We decide to check the system log for errors, and low and behold we find an error from the Disk S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics that claims the drive in imminent failure and should be replaced immediately. I downloaded diagnostics from the drive manufacturer (Western Digital) and they confirmed the drive it toast, many bad sectors, and a huge unrecoverable error rate being experienced. Now recall that this PC runs everything great with this drive "as is" except for this one game. There are never any warnings or crashes with anything else. I was a bit skeptical, but replaced the drive anyway, and low and behold, the game now runs reliable for 2 weeks now.

It could be that those with "good" DVR's also have a "good" drive, and those that are experiencing many problems may have a "bad" disk. I am not saying this will explain all the problems, but it seems reasonable that is could explain some of them.

Too bad there isn't a way (without opening up the box) to get access to the SMART results and try and correlate them to "bad" DVR's.

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romulox

· #2 · Jul 18, 2008

Sounds reasonable and I often wondered about this. One of my dumb workarounds for any frozen recording problems was to keep that bad recording to prevent that section of the drive from being used. But that really didn't do anything. I'm sure these files are continually moved around.

I'm not sure what kind of housekeeping is done behind the scenes with respect to disk management. I would assume something like fsck is run after a reboot and fsck can identify bad blocks, but I don't know if it can fix them or hide them.

anyway, some sort of SMART status could be nice. There could be a popup message like: "While you can continue to use your DVR, the drive status check failed: please call directv asap".

n6nfg

Discussion Starter · #3 · Jul 18, 2008

I remember reading a thread on here several days ago about allowing SMART status to be reported to the user, and how this may cause a large problem for D* and people wanting their units replaced.

It would seem that your point of producing a message when a certain SMART error was present would be a good compromise. Only alert the user (and then the user alerts D*) when a problem is "real".

Maybe we can add this to the wish list?

My 3 month old HR20 is so far one of the "good" ones, with very few problems in at least 3 updates.

DogLover

· #4 · Jul 19, 2008

I suppose that one way to test if this is causing any of people's problems is to add a new eSATA drive to their system. The internal drive still spins, but would not be written to/read from. I people having problems are using eSATA, going back to the internal would be the test.

carsonius

· #5 · Jul 19, 2008

I've had my HR20 since 1/08 and have had very few problems. I've kept up with the threads here about freezes/lockups/rbr's etc and counted myself as lucky it wasn't happening to me. Until last week.

I've had a FAP 750 since the first week I got the dvr and have been pretty good about keeping some free headroom on the drive. I went on vacation for five days and when I got back I had 2% free disk space. Almost immediately the HR20 froze after a pause in a recorded program, froze after a pause in a live broadcast, froze after a rewind in a recorded program, and so on. Multiple rbr's, unplugging it to settle things down, waiting impatiently to regain control did no good.

Calming into my logical problem solving persona, I asked myself, "What changed?" Equipment is in the same place, house is the same temperature, cats haven't hocked up a hairball on anything... Aha! I deleted programs till I'm back to 5% free disk space and everything's fine.

Maybe it has to do with the larger capacity ESATA drives not playing nice with the programming in the box. It could be an obscure bit of programming deep in the guts of it that makes an assumption about how to calculate needed free space that worked with smaller drives but doesn't with larger drives.

I don't know. What I do know is what worked for me and I'm curious if others that have had all these problems are also running ESATA drives with very little free space.

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runner26

· #6 · Jul 19, 2008

carsonius said:
I've had my HR20 since 1/08 and have had very few problems. I've kept up with the threads here about freezes/lockups/rbr's etc and counted myself as lucky it wasn't happening to me. Until last week.

I've had a FAP 750 since the first week I got the dvr and have been pretty good about keeping some free headroom on the drive. I went on vacation for five days and when I got back I had 2% free disk space. Almost immediately the HR20 froze after a pause in a recorded program, froze after a pause in a live broadcast, froze after a rewind in a recorded program, and so on. Multiple rbr's, unplugging it to settle things down, waiting impatiently to regain control did no good.

Calming into my logical problem solving persona, I asked myself, "What changed?" Equipment is in the same place, house is the same temperature, cats haven't hocked up a hairball on anything... Aha! I deleted programs till I'm back to 5% free disk space and everything's fine.

Maybe it has to do with the larger capacity ESATA drives not playing nice with the programming in the box. It could be an obscure bit of programming deep in the guts of it that makes an assumption about how to calculate needed free space that worked with smaller drives but doesn't with larger drives.

I don't know. What I do know is what worked for me and I'm curious if others that have had all these problems are also running ESATA drives with very little free space.

One thing to remember: the mortality rate for hard drives is 100%. Maybe it dies in five minutes or maybe five years but sooner or late it WILL quite on you. I personally think a lot of the problems reported here are due to bad installations, poor alignment of the dish, etc.

bobnielsen

· #7 · Jul 19, 2008

I haven't had a lot of problems, but my HR21-700 has been experiencing brief freezes when playing recordings recently. I did a complete system reset from the setup menu yesterday. This wipes out all of the data on the hard drive and you need to repeat the setup from scratch (it doesn't change the O/S, which is in firmware). I have only watched one recording since then, but it didn't have the problem. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Doug Brott

· #8 · Jul 19, 2008

There were some problems earlier this week that would result in what you folks are seeing. This will be present in recordings that you may have made at that time. However, you should no longer be seeing these issues (on Live TV or newer recordings) as the problem has been fixed.

jlancaster

· #9 · Jul 19, 2008

Are you saying that there was something in the sat stream that might have caused the pause/freeze problem?

GregLee

· #10 · Jul 20, 2008

n6nfg said:
I wanted to offer up a possible explanation for some of the problems being reported on the HR2x DVR's. ... a failing disk drive.

This is my current favorite theory, also. And in principle, it should be fairly easy to test, since we can in effect replace our disk drives by using esata drives. Or we could simply poll here to try to find out whether those with esata drives have fewer problems.

lejordan

· #11 · Jul 20, 2008

GregLee said:
This is my current favorite theory, also. And in principle, it should be fairly easy to test, since we can in effect replace our disk drives by using esata drives. Or we could simply poll here to try to find out whether those with esata drives have fewer problems.

i agree
start a poll

n6nfg
where are you?

n6nfg

Discussion Starter · #12 · Jul 21, 2008

As I understand it, an external SATA drive will become the target for storage of newly acquired shows, but the base Linux code will still be stored and executed off of the internal drive. If this internal drive is "bad" then moving to an external drive may or may not solve the problem. Consider that any swapping or paging is probably still being performed on the internal drive, and if a bad spot happens to be located in this swapping area, all sorts of interesting things could happen...

Can anyone confirm that an external SATA drive really replaces ALL uses of the internal drive?

poppo

· #13 · Jul 21, 2008

n6nfg said:
Can anyone confirm that an external SATA drive really replaces ALL uses of the internal drive?

Yep it does. On all 3 of my HR20s, I attached my eSATA drive and unplugged the internal one to save power/heat and it booted as normal. all you loose are your SLs, favorites etc. and of course any recordings.

houskamp

· #14 · Jul 21, 2008

n6nfg said:
As I understand it, an external SATA drive will become the target for storage of newly acquired shows, but the base Linux code will still be stored and executed off of the internal drive. If this internal drive is "bad" then moving to an external drive may or may not solve the problem. Consider that any swapping or paging is probably still being performed on the internal drive, and if a bad spot happens to be located in this swapping area, all sorts of interesting things could happen...

Can anyone confirm that an external SATA drive really replaces ALL uses of the internal drive?

It definately replaces the internal drive.. all software is stored in flash ram on HR series DVRs..

n6nfg

Discussion Starter · #15 · Jul 21, 2008

Ok, then if the internal drive isn't used any more, then those with external drives should in theory experience a "better" DVR if their internal drive was going "bad".

Of course this assumes that the external drive is "compatible" with what ever the DVR is looking for in an external drive. From what I have read, there are some that just don't work, and others that do. I really haven't followed this aspect, but I can imagine that there might to issues connecting a drive to the DVR with hardware that hasn't been "sanctioned" by D* (external case power supply, maybe a converter from ESATA to some other interface the actual drive is using, etc).

That is another risk you take by attaching devices not supplied by the DVR manufacturer/supplier

I am all for modifying things to suit your own needs, just be aware that you are introducing other potential interactions with a DRV that isn't completely stable to begin with! A poll trying to track external drives and the DVR becoming more stable might be meaningless with all the new variables it introduces...

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schneid

· #16 · Jul 21, 2008

n6nfg said:
I wanted to offer up a possible explanation for some of the problems being reported on the HR2x DVR's. I recently experienced a problem with one or our home PC's running XP, and the situation may apply to the HR2x's also. It involved a failing disk drive.

It could be that those with "good" DVR's also have a "good" drive, and those that are experiencing many problems may have a "bad" disk. I am not saying this will explain all the problems, but it seems reasonable that is could explain some of them.

Too bad there isn't a way (without opening up the box) to get access to the SMART results and try and correlate them to "bad" DVR's.

I absolutely agree. I had a solid HR20-100 until I added a crappo Cavalry 1TB eSATA drive. Started getting all the issues, stuttering, blank recordings, and IKDs. Ditched the Cavalry and put a WD 1TB GP into and Antec MX-1 case. All is solid again.

In further agreement, I accidentally unplugged my eSATA power so the drive was not spinning. It merrily went about its business without giving any indication there was effectively no hard drive in the system. When I tried to play the recordings they were all IKDs. I discovered the problem, plugged the drive back in, rebooted, and all is well again.

t_h

· #17 · Jul 21, 2008

runner26 said:
One thing to remember: the mortality rate for hard drives is 100%. Maybe it dies in five minutes or maybe five years but sooner or late it WILL quite on you. I personally think a lot of the problems reported here are due to bad installations, poor alignment of the dish, etc.

One thing that has me wondering. It seems fairly mundane and straightforward when someone reports what turns out to be an installation/equipment/alignment issue for a handful of people through an internet discussion medium to diagnose and help them resolve the issue.

So why doesnt the dang box use the same set of logic to identify and report problems directly to directv?

Cant the box test signal levels for improper signal levels? Cant it notice that sometimes a channel can be received and sometimes its getting 771's? Cant it detect that its not recording a signal but is recording a black screen when it shouldnt be?

It seems to me that having done my own directv problem diagnosis and watching people diagnose the more complex HD/DVR systems that it isnt something that couldnt be worked in to the operating system.

Box self diagnosis reception issue, box issues, recording issues, reported SMART failures, and since the dang thing calls directv up on a regular basis, reports an existing or impending fault directly to the company, or at least pops up a message in the message folder saying that a problem or possible problem has been detected and please call 800-directv to solve it.

The argument that it'll just cause more people to want to get their box replaced doesnt make any sense to me. If the install is wrong or the box is bad, the customer is going to have problems. You're just going to have to try to solve them over the phone with less information.

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GregLee

· #18 · Jul 21, 2008

t_h said:
The argument that it'll just cause more people to want to get their box replaced doesnt make any sense to me. If the install is wrong or the box is bad, the customer is going to have problems.

It doesn't follow that the customer is going to experience problems. It depends on what he tries to do. Suppose the dish is misaligned, but the spot beams with his local channels happen to be okay, he's only interested in his local channels, so he never notices he can't get anything from 3 of the satellites. Or maybe he does notice problems, but assumes there's a problem with his TV, and it never occurs to him to complain to D*.

Clarity is not necessarily in D*'s best interest.

houskamp

· #19 · Jul 21, 2008

Actualy if they had it reporting in, they could keep it in a database and when the coustomer calls in to complain they could quickly look it up and go "looks like you have ____ problem"..

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