Circle of Death

[Owen Brent]

I am running the latest Beta on both the computer and hd200. When I try to watch a recorded program the circle of death shows up and will spin forever. When I go to the computer, the same thing will happen. Closing the program on the computer will close the program but it will not start up again when I click on the shortcut and every time I click on the shortcut another instance of SageTV.exe will show up in the task manager under processes. The only way to get things working again is to reboot the computer. The computer also stopped shutting down properly. I had to hold in the power button for 10 seconds in order to shut it down.

Thinking my kids did something to corrupt the system, I started from scratch and formatted the hard drive. Now with a brand new install of SageTV7 I am having the same issues. The only files that are old are the wis.bin, wis.bak, and the properties files. Could it be any plug-ins I added (can't remember them all)?

I will try to remove any plug-ins that I have added and see what happens.

Also, I have taken an image of my hard drive after reinstalling the operating system and all of the updates so that the process of starting over will take minutes instead of days.

[phantomii]

I just put up another post regarding issues with my tuner audio. In trying to troubleshoot that issue I have seen behavior a lot like you are describing. It seems since around 7.0.12 things have been getting progressively less stable and more problems are creeping up with each release.

[Owen Brent]

I just uninstalled the plug-ins and the problem still exists. Anybody else have this problem?

[sic0048]

I get it occationally. It actually just happened yesterday. Extenders show spinning circle of death, Web interface cannot connect, etc, etc.

Restarting the SageService doesn't work. Only a full reboot will bring Sage back.

It happens so infrequently that I haven't worried about it. I'm running Sage7 on a WHS machine, but I'm not on the latest beta (which is another reason I haven't worried about it). I guess I need to upgrade since there is a new beta out.

[Flips]

I am getting this same issue. It seems to be happening more often in the later betas as well. I'm running a windows client, not an extender.

It is happening on both on recordings and imported video. I will post some of the logs tonight when I get home.

flips

[sic0048]

Just an update to my last post. I've actually had freezes the last three days running. Stopping and restarting the service does not do anything. I must reboot for it to work again.

I updated to the latest beta version this morning....

I had not made any changes on the server prior to getting these lockups. It had been running for months without any regular problems.

[Peter_h]

Can all of you guys check your CPU usage when this happens?

I am seeing the same slowdowns you guys are seeing and when I check the CPU usage it is close to 100% usage. If I restart, it goes back to normal and everything runs fine again. After a couple of days it will slowly creep back up to 100%.

[Owen Brent]

I will check it more closely, but I have seen it cycling up to 100% and down repeatedly.

[Owen Brent]

I think I have solved my problem, but it doesn't explain any of your issues.

One of my WinTV HVR 950Q tuners is causing my problem. I noticed that everything works fine until SageTV is recording something. I would come home from work and find my kids watching SageTV and I would be wondering why is it working for them. Usually by the time I sit down to watch something, a show would be recording, and it would lock up. I also noticed that the show would not be recorded. I never tried watching live TV.

I went through a lot of pain trying to figure out what was going on. I formatted my hard drive and reinstalled the operating system at least three times. The first time was really painful because I had to upgrade from service pack 2 and all the security upgrades from 2005 etc. I highly recommend making an image of a fully up to date operating system using UBCD and DriveImage XML. After all the software is installed and working, make another image. Very simple system to use and takes me about 30 minutes to recover the drive now. I even reinstalled Sage from scratch without using a backup wiz.bin or sage properties file. Starting from scratch is no fun when using OTA and trying to get US and Canadian channels and the correct guide data. I kept having trouble scanning channels with both tuners connected to the computer. I just thought I was doing something wrong and kept trying different things.

Finally, I just installed the software that came with my tuner (WinTV). The latest update to this software was impossible to install because it kept asking for files from the Service pack 3 disk. I directed it to the Windows location and managed to get some of the files but near the end of the installation it would ask for another file but I could not enter the location for it because the pop up screen was behind the WinTV installation display. I could not bring that screen to the front no matter what I did. I ended up just using the old program and tested each tuner separately. I was finally able to determine that one of the tuners was bad.

All along I thought it was a software thing because I started having the problem after I installed some plug-ins. Completely unrelated.

So now its time to talk to Hauppauge and discuss the two year warranty

[Flips]

A quick update from my side....

After my post I did two things and it has been rock stable since then. On my server I did a scan disk on both the C drive and the recording drives. It found a couple of things and fixed them. Also, I uninstalled the sage movie wall plugin. I had the plugins installed and the software installed for it to connect to, but I never added any movies.

Of course now I don't really know what fixed it, but I'm leaning towards the errors on the hard drive more than smw.

flips