100% cpu lockup

[batorok]

I'm really questioning my purchase about now...
I have a two tuner (-16) setup on the hardware below, and just did a fresh install of EVERYTHING, xp home this time, no other software besides the latest microsoft updates, hauppauge and nvidia drivers, NOTHING ELSE, installed sagetv/java, and after setting up my two tuners, sage sputtered watching tv and seized, and now every time I start up it stops at "Priming seeker" and sage is at 99% cpu utilization.

The only problem I can see with my setup is that the pvr's are both assigned automatically by winxp to irq 16. The only way I can change that is a total (again) reinstall, which I'm not thrilled about.

[Mike Young]

I have had ALL KINDS of trouble with the PVR being assigned to anything other than its own IRQ. Other folks have not had the same problem. I think you should be able to manually overide
the pin for that card on your MB. I was able to do that...or just maybe uninstall every piece of hardware (on the MB) serial ports ect and let it find its own place windows should automatically assign cards to diiferent IRQS until all of them are used.
Then go in and re-enable, doing this way I have never had anything get assigned on the same IRQ as the PVR.

mike/

[batorok]

what os are you running? xp, at least by default, doesn't allow any modifications of irq stuff, the APIC/ACPI hardware abstraction layer ignores the bios and assigns things appropriately.

As an update, I've disabled the second pvr for now, deleted by sage properties and wizbin files, started over, and lost audio. And it still crashes.

[EncoderHouse]

Did you install the cards one-at-a-time or did you put them in together and install the drivers.

I had this problem onece before. i fixed it by installing the card on different PCI slots one at a time while installoing the drivers each time i installed the card.

this worked for me.

[Mike Young]

You can change the IRQs in XP but you have to disable ESCD on you MB.
you still cant do anything in XP, at least I cant, but you can 'PIN" them in Bios

mike/

[Mike Young]

When you check in Devices by resource IRQs is there more than one thing assigned to the IRQ your PVR is on ?

This can be a tricky thing to troubleshoot. I think you definitley want to get one working first.

Sometimes if your BIOS cant do what I described in previous post, you will have to completely remove the card from the system and reboot, to clear up that position. then as I said, temporarily disable everything not absolutely needed in your bios, usb, parallel, serial, etc anything that takes an IRQ and get your primary devices installed (video, sound, pvr) .


mike/

[SHS]

batorok you try moving the card around to diff PCI Slot beeing you said it on IRQ 16 I take it that your motherboard support upper 16 thur IRQ23 it just matter moving things a round

[batorok]

thanks for the suggestions. I am now convinced I must have a faulty motherboard, cpu, or memory, I've been having stability problems long before the second pvr, and this weekend tried 4 times to reinstall windows and get sage functioning (with only one pvr 250) and the latest try resulted in a machine that reboots every few seconds. the install is obviously corrupt, but how it got that way is beyond me. Now to figure out how to trouble shoot the main components(cpu, motherboard, memory) without spare one's to swap out? I tell ya, I thought tivo was a ripoff, but at this point I think there's something to be said for buying things that "just work" out of the box.

[Mike Young]

My motherboard will do exactly the thing you describe if I put it int 'TURBO' mode or pick 'Optimized Defaults" in order to get it to work correctly I have to pick "Fail Safe" defaults and go from there, I forget exactly what setting was causing the problem, but it runs great now - its a P4 Celeron 2.4GHZ but I'm overclocking the cpu to 3 GHZ. Very stable.
Your issue may very well be a hardware problem, but this is much more rare than are incorrect BIOS settings. (thats the #1 cause of instability)
I would start by "Clearing your CMOS" pick the very minimum options in the BIOS and see if that stabilizes your system.
also make sure your MB is flashed with the latest BIOS. I had one MB that was very unstable until I did that.

Also if your machine is rebooting once it starts to load XP, you might want to boot with your CD, go into repair mode and do
a chkdsk C: /f
all those lockups likely produced bad clusters on your HD.



mike/

[batorok]

just wanted to thank everyone for their help trying to trouble shoot, sometimes it's the simple things. I disable fast post in the bios, and I discovered one of my two memory dimms is faulty. I pulled it and everything so far is going smoothly, and crucial.com is shipping me a fresh one as we speak.
thanks
Brad