Help, Continual Freeze's / Reboots

[ke6guj]

I had 2pvr-500's with ah pvr-150 running on a AMD VIA board and then transferred it over to an nForce board. No issues on either board, just needed more PCI slots for more tuners

The only thing I could mention is maybe updating Sage to V2.2 or trying out the new V3 betas.

[bluenote]

SYL,

It sounds like your problem is more general (ie: with using the 500 at all, rather than having 2 recordings going at once). All I can suggest to you (and I've had to do it myself a couple of times when changing h/w) is to try your best to eliminate or reduce IRQ sharing, and liberally apply
a) from the ground up re-install (Windows on up)
b) spice with system restore
c) latest drivers

You should contact support though, they might be able to save you all that trouble. It's worth noting that you might want to try disabling one of the tuners in device manager and see if that makes a difference. If that doesn't work, detach your USB-UIRT and anything else you can reasonably remove while testing.

Cory

[roofus]

I've got the same rebooting problem, and I’ve tried everything and anything, no solutions as of yet.

Just ordered an nf7 s2, having it overnighted, this Friday should either confirm or lay to rest this via chipset conflict. I'm assuming it's the via problem, I know what hardware conflicts look like. I knew it was a hardware conflict, but i couldn't figure out what, and my steadfast motherboard was the last thing I wanted it to be. It's never given me any trouble, but I guess the via chipset had to catch up with me sometime. I'll post and update as soon as I get my board installed.

[TJLeeland]

Originally Posted by roofus

I've got the same rebooting problem, and I’ve tried everything and anything, no solutions as of yet.

Just ordered an nf7 s2, having it overnighted, this Friday should either confirm or lay to rest this via chipset conflict. I'm assuming it's the via problem, I know what hardware conflicts look like. I knew it was a hardware conflict, but i couldn't figure out what, and my steadfast motherboard was the last thing I wanted it to be. It's never given me any trouble, but I guess the via chipset had to catch up with me sometime. I'll post and update as soon as I get my board installed.

I don't know if this help anyone, but I had daily, sometimes hourly reboots for a while. The system would reboot before the memory dump finished and I couldn't figure it out. One day the computer actually froze with the BSOD displayed (it was normally gone in a fraction of a second) and I could actually read it. It was an ATI error. I put in a new nVidia and never had the problem again.

My 2.0 is rock stable, but I have a test 2.2 that freezes all the time (no reboots though). I haven't been able to get either 2.1 or 2.2 working with it. It could be hardware related though - I can't test 2.0 because it's using a PVR-150, and 2.0 can't see it.

[roofus]

It was the VIA chipset! My new MB fixed the problem, it's beatiful. The quality is amazing, no judders, reboots, or lockups. If you're having the reboot problem with a 500mce and your motherboard has a VIA chipset, I suggest you upgrade, the NF7-S boards are pretty inexpensive, only about $60 american. Works like a charm, and it was a welcome upgrade!

Before this i tried multiple softwares, multiple versions of sage, multiple sound cards, multiple video cards and a fresh install of windows. The new motherboard is the only thing that FIXed the problem, some things increased the length of time between reboots but the MB is the only thing that fixed it.

Hope this helps all of you.

[blade]

It's very well known that the 500's have issues with certain via, ali, and sis chipsets. They range from random reboots to tuners not being recognized. I'm still a little suprised that there's not a sticky in the hardware section about the problems. I imagine quite a few complaints about Sage and the 500's can be traced back to motherboard incompatibility.

[rlb2]

Hi, I am running a machine that has an ECS MB, (K7VTA1/K333 V5.0) which has a KT333 Northbridge, a VT8235 Via Northbridge and a VT6306 1394A chips. And ofcourse a Happauge 500 tuner/encoder setup.

Has anyone found a route to fix the LiveTV-reboot issue?
Like everyone else I have loaded the latest drivers, BIOS upgrades, etc with no luck in fixing the reboot issue.

Has anyone narrowed it down to specific chipsets we should avoid?

Thanks for your help!

[stanger89]

Avoid anything not from Intel or nVidia.

[Scott5]

Originally Posted by blade

It's very well known that the 500's have issues with certain via, ali, and sis chipsets. They range from random reboots to tuners not being recognized. I'm still a little suprised that there's not a sticky in the hardware section about the problems. I imagine quite a few complaints about Sage and the 500's can be traced back to motherboard incompatibility.

Probably a good idea - I've been having non-stop problems for almost a year with a pvr 150 and a Soyo SY-P4RC350 mother board. I'm not sure which chipset this motherboard uses, but someone else mentioned soyo boards having problems. Is the Sy-p4rc350 one of the boards with issues?

[Scott5]

continued from above: My soyo board is a mATX Pentium 4 Motherboard based on the ATi Radeon 9100 IGP chipset architecture.

Is motherboard the the cause of my constant re-boot problems ???

[roofus]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Avoid anything not from Intel or nVidia.

I do believe the icon has it right. Just avoid anything that is not Intel or nVidia. Besides, the haupauge cards aren't the only things that have issues with VIA chipsets. I noticed an overall increase in stability and speed when I upgraded from a VIA based board.

[spence]

Let me toss my hat into the ring also... Just instaled the PVR-500 and SageTV 4.0 and my system crashes also... have a e-machine s1862 with and single cpu Athlon @ ~1.5GHz and 512K, xp pro (up to date)...

I will be trying it on another machine at work tommorrow...

PS SageTV was working fine with a WinTV 44210, exchanged with the 500 and crashing started!!!

All drivers up to date.

Spence

[galtigor]

I'm running a ATI 550 Pro in an NVIDIA NFORCE 4 Ultra board and I'm getting exactly the same problems described in this thread... anyone else with that combination? Interestingly only since the 4.0 release did I have this problem.. earlier betas ran fine.

Greg

[spence]

Well the PC's (3) at work are all pent4 and via chipsets - EXACT same problems. All are very stable machines, 2 are 3GHz and one 2.?GHz XP's... One was a new just out of the box as of Monday without nothing being done

[stanger89]

Did I catch that correctly, further confirmation that VIA sucks and can't design a PCI interface correctly

[red_five]

The problem with VIA doesn't really surprise me at all. I used to use an ASUS MB with the KT133 chipset (P3-800), long before I tried any PVR stuff at all. I just wanted to play games with my NV GF2 card, and any game using DirectX (particularly Unreal Tournament) would hard lock the system within 2 minutes of starting play. I replaced it with another ASUS board, KT333 chipset, and that went away; relegated the old one to Linux server duty, no trouble out of that one since.

Only problem with this board now is that it's an older revision that doesn't support full speed on my AMD XP3200 CPU; I have to clock it down to about 2100-2200 level. Maybe I'll eventually replace it with an NForce board, get a couple PCI slots freed up.