Something went seriously wrong today...

[jsteele]

My EPG is configured to update at 11AM EST --- no one would normally be using the TV at the time.

This morning the EPG update apparently ran at 11:00 EST and the system crashed about 11:10 to 11:12 or so. I'd guess this is about when the update would have ended. Now it will no longer boot to XP! When I got home this afternoon it was in a 'boot loop'; it boots, XP starts loading then it reboots, XP starts loading, it reboots, etc. It just keeps on doing this and will not even start in Safe Mode now. Running the boot log shows that the last thing it loads before crashing is MUP.SYS but I think other things are going on after this before the crash.

I'm fairly confident that it must be related to the EPG update as the system was just sitting idle --- no one was home at the time the problem started and the only thing that should have occurred at the time is the EPG update.

I'm reasonably confident I'm going to have to reinstall Windows XP and GB but I'm curious if anyone had ever seen this behavior before.

[Dubya]

This happened to me as well about two weeks ago... I reformated. Dubya

[jsteele]

Aw, I was afraid someone was going to say that :-)

Do you have any idea if the EPG had just run?

I was unable to get a restart under any circumstances, even Safe Mode. So I tried repairing XP and even that failed with "Stop" errors, all sorts of different ones but primarily Stop 0x0000008E. According the MicroSqish KB this error during XP install is "usually" due to a problem with the memory.

[sub]

To be honest, you've probably just found a general instability on your machine if anything.

Updating the EPG doesnt really do anything that affects system stability. It reads some data from the net using standard Windows APIs, then writes to the database use ADO.NET. It can be quite disk intensive, so may triggered some disk problem that was lurking on your machine. This was possibly a delayed-write or similar problem which left your database in an inconsistent state.

There is hundreds of people using GB-PVR, with these the first reports of problems. Myself, I've probably updated the EPG about 10000 times. The EPG updating process hasn't really changed much in the last year. The last change, which was fairly minor, occurred in November last year to copy with minor changes in the zap2it data format.

I think you've just been unlucky.

[Dubya]

Sub, it is entirely possible that my computer was just wacked out and died... I totally buy that... Having said that, the last two releases, I've had tons o trouble with GBPVR.

Live TV for example... everytime I go in it sets itself to stop and I have to push play to get the video going again. Then, the info bar at the top of the screen when watching a video does not update on the mediamvp. And when watching a show that was recorded it shows the time of the total show as one second. If watching live tv it will show whatever time it was when you jumped into the channel at. Things seem to work fine on my computer with all of the above stuff... but on the media mvp everything is all wacked out... any ideas? It's killing me trying to figure out what's up...

Thanks,

Dubya

[sub]

Having said that, the last two releases, I've had tons o trouble with GBPVR.

Maybe you should put it back in the box and send it back to the manufacturer for a refund.

Seriously, none of the bugs you describe there constitue GB-PVR destroying a Windows installation. There is plenty of bugs in GB-PVR. I know that. Thats just what you get when someone tries to take on a project this big in their spare time, but it wont destroy your windows installation.

I generally know what bugs are in the GB-PVR, but I'm sure this last release is the best yet overall.

[Dubya]

Yeah sub I know... it might be purely coincidence... And I think your doing a great job with the software...

I'm just frustrated cause I had to reformat my computer and I still can't get GBPVR working perfectly like it was before I upgraded.

Having said that would it be possible to have links to prior versions on the web page... You know kinda like they do on some SourceForge projects? ie.) http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/

[jsteele]

sub

My original comment was intended to raise the possibility that the EPG update might be writing outside its space and corrupting something --- I've written a lot of software and anything is possible.

If you say yours has run thousands of times without a problem I accept that it isn't a code problem but more likely some proiblem lurking in my hardware. After trying to repair XP and running into the Stop error I am coming to the conclusion that it is actually failing hardware --- most likely memory. I will get a new memory module and keep trying.

The level of frustration I've had thus far with GB is a fraction of what I went through with MP before giving up so I've a way to go :-)

[betlit]

i'm pretty sure its a memory problem. i had the same problem once (not related to gb-pvr).
it was a 'standard' winxp machine. all of a sudden it began to stop early at the boot sequence, complaining about acpi.sys ('could not load aspi.sys. the file is corrupt' or something) and kept rebooting.

rebooting or trying to repair/reinstall winxp did not work (booting from the xp-cd brought the same error-msg).

the problem was a corrupt memory-module. after removing/replacing it everything worked fine.