Stable for years now hard crashing

[Kimper]

I have been running a stable Win XP Sage box for years.
Last month I upgraded from 6.1.9 to the most recent release because every now and then HD would lock up and crash Sage (soft crash to desktop). I sorta had a rough time with the upgrade and ended up with a totally fresh install of 6.2.10 that appeared to be working fine initially.

Now I am beginning to experience frequent hard crashes (system reboots) from Sage. It almost always does this during HD playback for me, but my wife reports it has been crashing at seemingly random times for her while not doing anything with HD. I tried changing Mpeg 2 decoders, but no luck.

HD is captured via an HDHomerun, SD via a Hauppage card.

Any ideas? How do I enable error logging, and what should I look for in the error log?
I truly fear an XP reinstall.. I did all my Girder programming like 2 years ago, and I don't have the foggiest idea of how to get all that working again, and that all lives on my Sage system...

Thanks!

[Alfiegerner]

I had a similar situation recently and it turned out to be hardware related. One hard drive was going capput and the system was overheating.

As your system has been stable and now is not I would start with hardware diagnosis. Start off with installing motherboard monitor and speedfan to see if you've got anything fishy going on.

[cenwesi]

Nope, i agree with the first poster, something is REALLY wrong with this recent version of sage. I get strange behavior from sage with v6.2. Few minutes ago, i replaced the SageTVplayer.exe and Transcoder with the one posted on this link:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...Transocder.exe

I will keep an eye on it and see what happens.

[White94Cobra]

When the system reboots it's usually memory or a bad power supply.

[Crashless]

How old is the system?

My last server ran 24/7 for 5 years - but I replaced a power supply and CPU on two different occasions before I finally retired it. Unfortunately system components do not last forever - especially when running as much as these systems do.

I'll echo Cobra and guess it's memory or power supply as well.

[Kimper]

Hmm, system is about 2.5-3years old. The power supply did give out about 7 months ago so that is new.

I'll do a little further hardware digging. There is a 1 year old 750meg harddrive that I have noticed is a tad noisy under heavy load (think HD).. I will try switching recording directories to the other harddrive to see if that helps. I use high quality memory in all my system builds and have never had a memory chip "die", but there is always a first time..
Really to be fair I need to run something demanding on the box that is not Sage and see if it still crashes.. maybe I will try to play a FPS game on it or something.

Thanks for the ideas guys, now if I can jsut find the time to diagnose. I swear I think I would switch to TimeWarner's DVR if the HTPC didn't control like everything in the house plus all the MVP's in various rooms. Setting up that system was alot of fun, but now when it goes haywire it isn't fun at all

[stevech]

I had a crashy Sage server that I knew was hardware - by the symptoms. Hindsight said it was a crappy design ECS motherboard. It had no margins to deal with higher room ambient temperatures, was very picky about power supplies, memory speed/quality. That ECS was several years old.

It went to the round file, along with memory that was not high-quality, name brand.

Before that ECS, and ever since, I've used ASUS (AMDs only).


But my symptoms were blue-screen or a dead freeze.

[DrP]

i had a quite instable sagetv runing on a server 2003 (with no active directory) and two Hauppauge MCE500 cards until the day, i updated to 6.2.10.
I had to restart sage service once a day to keep it running.

Since 6.2.10 there is no such problem any more - and i did NOT change any hardware..

What annoys me is the colors - blue on blue, the active bar does not have the yellow frame anymore, the folders nice blue on blue background..

I would appreciate any device to return to a USEFUL color theme ...

DrP

[lotusvball]

I have to agree with the first poster also. I had a very stable system until the recent Sage update. Now my system is crashing, locking up and other strange issues. I have motherboard monitor installed and everything seems to be fine. I feel that there definitely is something in the recent upgrade. If I can't figure it out I am going back to the previous version.

[cenwesi]

Yep something fishy in this build. I might go back to previous version. I have also noticed that when i start watching recorded shows, sometimes it just fast forwards by itself. Other times the picture is still but i hear audio and then it catches up few seconds later.

[matterw]

I agree with the first poster -- I have had to reboot my Sage Client quite a few times. Also getting other problems like I can't FF the show because it starts back at the beginning of the show.

Not feeling to warm and fuzzy with this version.

Matt

[scavenge]

Hi

My Sage has been driving me crazy recently too. I finally had some time to investigate and looking over my system I realized that Sun's JRE auto install had installed several versions of v5 and several of v6.

I cleaned out all the v5 entries using add and remove progs and thus far it seems to have helped the random problems I was encountering.