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dzm
12-11-2008, 12:29 PM
Howdy!

My venerable Philips DSR 6000 has, in the last few weeks, begun randomly restarting itself. Yesterday, after a random restart, the unit now gets stuck on the "Acquiring information from the satellite" screen at 0%. No amount of waiting lets it progress further.

When on this screen I can hit the Tivo button and advance into the Tivo interface to watch programs already recorded, but no new content can be recorded (and, obviously, live TV doesn't work).

A satellite check told me that things are good on Tuner 1 and nothing is detected on Tuner 2. Connecting coax cables one at a time to an older DTV receiver and checking signal strength, both cables show a >88% signal, so I don't believe there is any problem with the LNB, dish, or cabling.

Based on advice I read elsewhere here, I disconnected the coax from Tuner 2 and initiated the Satellite Setup process again, but this time telling it I want to use only Tuner 1. This starts a process of verifying the Sat (it indicates a 90% signal strength and that three sats are "OK"). Then it goes to the "acquiring information from the sat" step of the guided setup and sits at 0%.

Unfortunately I'm now worse off than I was before. Now when I reboot to break out of the 0% screen, it starts the Guided Setup rather than following the normal boot process. Now I can't watch my recorded programs.

Note: This unit has a CacheCard in it and has been working fine with it. Removal of the CacheCard does not make the bad behavior go away.

So - Questions to Those That Know:

1) How do I at least get back to the stage where I can watch my already recorded programming? How do I force the unit not to waste time with the guided setup on reboot?

2) Any idea how I can get past this 0% problem?

I've been trying to make this unit last until next Summer when the mythical DTivo HD unit is supposed to happen.

dzm
12-11-2008, 08:44 PM
Hmm. I found the original drive from the unit (the drive has been in storage for over five years). With the original drive in place the unit boots up, grabs Sat, and happily starts watching live TV. It's a shining picture of health.

My new pet theory is that the database that holds whatever info is being pulled from the sat (guide data maybe?) is horked. It may be on a bad sector, or it may just be corrupt through entirely other means.

So - The big question - Anyone know how to tell the DTV unit to rebuild its (evidently) horked database? I can telnet into this thing and issue commands. Anything I can do from a shell?

JimSpence
12-12-2008, 11:02 AM
You probably need to use InstantCake to reload the drive.

dzm
12-12-2008, 12:08 PM
Thanks for the pointer. I may end up resorting to this.

Unfortunately InstantCake seems to wipe the drive. This would cause me to lose the ~1 year of recorded programs (I've been lazy about spooling them off). Are there any utilities that will just force the DTV database to be wiped and rebuilt?

JimSpence
12-12-2008, 01:20 PM
Check in the Upgrade Center and/or Underground Forums for the Hinsdale Utilities.

dzm
12-12-2008, 06:17 PM
Solved!

Evidently the/a database was corrupt. The fix ended up being:

1) Telnet into the DTivo
2) mfsassert --please
3) Wait 40 minutes for Green Screen O' Death (GSOD)

After this the guided setup concluded properly, the "Acquiring data from sat" actually progressed past 0%, and Live TV showed up. Yay!

Thanks much for the advice.