johnw248

[johnw248]

Interesting about the drives. I have 5 of those Seagate 1.5s in a Sans Digital tower running on a Sil3132 card as JOBD without issue, I have another 5 in another Sans Digital tower running on a RR644 card as JOBD without issue, the 644 also has three other 5 bay towers one with 5 Hitachi 7200 2Tb, one with 5 mixed 2Tb (2 WD, 2 Samsung and 1 Hitachi) and a fourth 5 bay tower running 5 Hitachi 7200 3Tb 6gb Sata3 drives.

Since I replaced the raid controller on the Dell there have been no stalling issues and there were none on the HP.

It would really be interesting to just put on that USB drive you have and set it up as a source in Media Center (so the folder is properly defined) and then copy a couple of shows you know you had trouble with onto the USB drive.

That will show you rather quickly if you have a recording issue or not and if they play ok that will limit your detective work to your controller and how it works with your drives.

Do you have the ability to check any of the drive settings such a read ahead and write back cache?

John

[johnw248]

[quote=SJMaye]

External drive-  In fact I do have an old external USB drive. It is a PATA drive in an external case.  I can try.

[/quote]

That’ll work for the test, I’ve used USB 2.0 and Firewire drives as recording destinations in Vista without issue. If they playback fine then it’s issue with the controller on the Mobo. Another driver card such as the Silicon Image or the RocketRaid (you can get those with a Sans Digital Tower) will give you eSata performance that will work without the stall issue. Just stay away from the RocketRaid 2314. The RR622 and the Sil3132 run in a PCIex1 slot and recognize the port multiplier in the Sans Digital tower so the two ports on the card (each has two eSata ports) will give you access to 8 to 10 drives. (Sans Digital has 4, and 5 drive towers that can be set as JBOD, Raid 0 to Raid 5.)

[johnw248]

From my experience, the recordings are usually fine, it’s just the controller that has trouble with playback. Don’t know why since there should be plenty of space for a buffer with all current drives but changing the controller fixed my problem.

If you don’t have an external USB, try and borrow one from a friend for a test and make a recording of an hour program. Play it back and it’ll probably be fine, then move the recording to your internal drive and when you play it you’ll see the pauses and stalls again.

I don’t know if its the driver/fw/or chip related but I just changed the controller card and it fixed it.

John

[johnw248]

I ran into a similar problem which turned out to be a raid control (Hightpoint RR2314) for some reason the controller card kept resetting the drives at random during playback. Recording were fine, it was just playback and at random. I could never tack it to a service or application.

I would suggest that you try attaching an external FW or USB drive and setting it as the recording drive and see if the problem disappears. If it does, an excellent solution would be one of the Sans Digital eSata towers which ship with either a SilImage 3132 or a RocketRaid 622 card. Both of these have worked without issue for me and I now have a RocketRaid 644 in the Dell replacing the 2314 card and it’s running 20 drives without issues.

Getting the SilImage java based contol system to work for the 3132 is problematic, but the RocketRaid Web GUI or Management Console both seem to work well.

But first just try an external drive rather than fighting an onboard controller.

John

[johnw248]

The most common problem I’m seeing now is cablecos that aren’t provisioning or staging cableCARDS before sending them out. They have the Serial Number in their database but they haven’t tied the customer’s service levels to the card. When the card gets authorized it doesn’t get any of the tiers or premium channels because the card hasn’t gotten tied to the account properly.

Hopefully they’ll learn that they need to do this before mass mailing of cableCARDS.

John

[johnw248]

You can actually pair the cableCARD to the tuners with the Ceton Diagnostic Utility so you don’t have to do it in MC Tv Set-up. Just make sure you’ve run the DCA before you start, pair the cable card and then run MC & TV set-up. If it’s the first cableCARD you’ll also install playready and some more cableCARD files that are downloaded from MS during the install along with the channel guide. The the pairing goes as it should and the cablecompany has staged the card to your account, you’ll be all set for all the channels you subscribe to.

The TA is an automatic discovery process, but it’ll take 15 minutes or more if it has to download the F.1402 update first. But as soon as it’s done, open the web interface and click on tuning adapter and you’ll see that’s it’s ready and supports four tuners.

John

[johnw248]

What will happen to your TA is that when you connect it to the Coax and the computer it will seem like it’ll take forever to boot up. It’s actually getting the update on first start-up (I just had to exchange a TA and the replacement had to go through this and I thought at first it was defective).

For this to work, it has to have a valid cableCARD to pair with. So install the Ceton card and then the cableCARD and go through the pairing (and you can run the full Media Center TV Set-up) and THEN plug in the TA and go for coffee. when you get back, it should have updated and booted.

John

[johnw248]

Media Center allows you full editing of channel numbers and call signs. Just go to the guide and right click on a channel number and you’ll be presented with many choices. If you want you can remove the SD channels and just have HD channels and assign whatever number you want. Take a look at your options and than ask questions if anything isn’t clear to you.

John

[johnw248]

To help plot the roll out, would you please add your cable company and geographic location?

 

John

[johnw248]

let us know how the replacement card works. If your cable company pairs cards, then your new card will have a new host ID and you’ll have to go through pairing again and then re-run tv set-up in media center. The good new is you won’t have to re-install the drivers! You’ll probably want to click the tab in the diagnostics to dump the tuner data and then re-discover so that the old setting in media center are cleared.

The fact you were losing the card may have been an indication of a HW failure starting and the rest you know ….

John

[johnw248]

Just tried the command on both the Compaq laptop and the Dell. On both machines mcupdate started but no pop up with status.

Just the little glow under the MC icon in the notification area when hovering, right click gets the usual menu Open Media Center, Start Update, Cancel Update, Enable Automatic Updates (checked).

Checking the logs on both the Compaq laptop and the Dell, the command runs the schedule update and then runs Client Mantainence.

John

[johnw248]

Anyone come up with any registry keys, ideas, …..?

 

John

[johnw248]

It sure sounds like the tuner part of the card might have died. The other other suggestion would be to take out the cableCARD to just remove that variable and see if you can open the web interface at 192.168.200.1. A shorted or bad cableCARD could hang it as well, but otherwise it looks like it needs Ceton to solve the problem. (if you’re on the beta program there is a new driver 1.2.0.5 if you haven’t tried it.)

John

[johnw248]

If you open network and sharing and click on change adapter settings do you see the Ceton there? I’d guess not, is the led on the card red or blue? If it isn’t on then there is a problem with the card or the PCIe bus seeing the card.

John

[johnw248]

After you re-installed windows did you run the Digital Cable Advisor again? If not, that might be your problem.

John

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