S3 stopped talking to CableCARDS until reboot

[morac]

I don't remember ever reading of anything like what happened to my S3 today.

I came home and turned my TV on and saw a signal missing message. I figured their might be an outage, but my cable box could tune channels just fine. I then looked in my S3's info screen and saw that one S-Card (firmware 4.21) was in "initializing" and the other was in "error". I went to the CableCARD menus, but while it showed both cards were inserted, it said they were not working. Here's the weird part. I popped both cards out and the cableCARD config menu still showed both as being inserted.

Finally as a last resort I pulled the plug in the box, waited 30 seconds and plugged it back in. The S3 booted up and all was well. The cableCARDs showed as "active" and all my pairing info was intact and I could still get my encrypted channels.

Based on my recordings in my Now Playing list, the problem cropped up at about 4:05 AM EST this morning. What's weirder is that at around 7:30 AM, my S3 recorded 1.5 hours of MSNBC (looked to be analog) when it thought it was recording HBO-HD.

The whole thing was as if the S3 just stopped talking to the cards since it couldn't even detect when I pulled them out. Has anyone ever experienced something like this?

[lethcoeb]

Yes, I've had my cablecards basically stop working (evidenced by gray screen on HD channels), fixed by reboot...

[astrohip]

Something similar happened to me today, with Comcast in Houston. Long story very short . . . This morning my bedroom S3 was stuck on MSNBC when it should have been NBC-HD. Could NOT get it to change channels. Flipped to the other tuner; it would only get certain channels, not all of them. Ran to my main S3--fine. Ran to the Comcast DVR--fine. So I rebooted the S3... and it worked perfect. All channels come in.

Tonight, my main S3 goes thru a similar blip. One channel was stuck recording "no signal". Couldn't get anything to work. It finally locked up when I went to diagnostics. Pulled the plug, rebooted... all is fine.

Toxic signals? I have not had ANY problems in months and months. ????? :confused::confused:

I rec'd a PM from another Houston Comcast user (with S3s) and he had a similar problem. What the h*ll is going on?

[morac]

Yes, I've had my cablecards basically stop working (evidenced by gray screen on HD channels), fixed by reboot...

Well I know SA cards have had problems in the past, but I have Motorola cards and this is the first time in over a year (since I got my S3) that I've had an issue with the cards.

The real sticking point is that I physically popped the cards out and the TiVo still thought they were inserted. Since a reboot fixed everything I'd have to say it's probably a software or driver issue rather than a hardware one. Whatever it was, it seems pretty rare, assuming it doesn't happen again.

As for the MSNBC tuning. The TiVo was tuning the analog versions of channels since the digital overlay wasn't working because the cableCARDs weren't responding.

[tiviholic]

I've had it happen twice in the last couple of months, and when it did it happened at the same time on both of the cards in both of my TiVo's (ie, four cards). So I'm sure it's some kind of reset signal Comcast is sending that knocks out the cards.

I wish the TiVo would display an error indicator or light on the front panel when something like this happens, or at least put up an error message screen, instead of silently logging failure messages in the recording history.

[morac]

I've had it happen twice in the last couple of months, and when it did it happened at the same time on both of the cards in both of my TiVo's (ie, four cards). So I'm sure it's some kind of reset signal Comcast is sending that knocks out the cards.

Well it makes sense that they might send some kind of signal, but I don't think it takes out the cards. The cards seem fine, it's the TiVo that seems to have some kind of problem since the TiVo still reports the cards as being installed even after removing them. It's possible that it could cause the TiVo to lose sync with the cards, but that would be a TiVo bug I would think.

Fortunately I was home, if this happened when I was away I would have missed a large number of recordings.

[mrdazzo7]

I've had this problem for a while, using Cablevision in NY / NDS cards. Check out this thread, seems there are a lot of people with similar problems for a while now. Mine will work fine for a day or two, then i'll tune to an HD or pay channel and get nothing but a grey screen. I've missed a lot of recordings because of this, which is especially frustrating since my other CC seems to work fine. I don't get why the show doesn't just record on the good card if one is out. Its not like my season passes are assigned to a specific card. Anyway, hopefully you'll find this thread intersting

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=373746

[morac]

It might be the same problem, but the specifics of the problem don't match up.

I didn't see a gray screen. I saw a "no signal" error message. I don't have CableVision or NDS cards and in my case both cards failed (one "error" and one stuck in "init") at the same time until a restart. Also pulling the cards out and putting them back in did nothing.

In any case I hope it was just a fluke.

[morac]

This happened again, but this time when I rebooted one of my cableCARDS lost it's pairing information. Unfortunately getting them repaired is a major issue since most of the time I call Comcast, I'm either told it can't be done without a truck roll or that they don't know how to do it.

I'm wondering if the card is starting to bad since this is twice in a month this has happened?

Update: I finally got it paired. The person on the phone kept entering the number and sending hits, but it wouldn't go through so finally I pulled the plug on the TiVo, popped the cards out, put them back in, and plugged the TiVo in.
The cableCARD menu screen listed an unknown state for both cards, but when I tuned a channel both finally worked.

I still have no idea why this happens.

[morac]

I kept a log of when this happened last:

1st time: Feb 6, 2008 at 4:05 AM
2nd time: Mar 6, 2008 a little after 4:30 AM

This can't be a coincidence.

[gguillot]

I kept a log of when this happened last:

1st time: Feb 6, 2008 at 4:05 AM
2nd time: Mar 6, 2008 a little after 4:30 AM

This can't be a coincidence.

Did the nightly update occur right before the outage? My Tivo is doing the same thing, except it doesn't wait for 4am - it does it at totally random times.

[morac]

Did the nightly update occur right before the outage? My Tivo is doing the same thing, except it doesn't wait for 4am - it does it at totally random times.

Not immediately before no. It was a few hours earlier, at least on the one from yesterday.