Both 50x0 units lost channel guide

Here's a weird one.

My wife tells me that our upstairs unit has lost the channel guide. When I go to check it out the channels are still listed but have no data. I assumed this was a dying hard drive since we'd had a few spontaneous reboots lately.

I tried a "Connect to ReplayTV service now" but it hung (well, technically it timed out at some point, but after an hour I went to bed). I rebooted and tried again but it still hung.

I then did a 243-Zones to clear the channel guide (twice, which rebooted after each instance) and then tried to force a net connect. The net connect still hung. I then tried changing the Zip code to a different locale but when it tried to download service providers for that Zip code it returned with "Unexpected result code. (84420005)"

My best guess was that the sectors containing the channel guide info went bad and we were screwed. I ran RTVPatch on a spare drive and got ready to install it. Just then my wife tells me that the downstairs unit also has no guide!

I'm guessing that the guide data from RTV was corrupt somehow and the units barfed on it. Everything I tried on the upstairs unit I tried again on the downstairs unit and got the same results. This time, however, I toggled the network meter and watched what was happening.

When I forced a net connect after clearing the channel guide twice it appeared to get stuck at "Checking for new channels..." but the network meter showed sporadic activity every 2-3 seconds (Rec'd .570KB/s Sent .640KB/s). As of now this is continuing and the new channel check is up to 30% but it's going REALLY slow. I don't think anything's wrong with my network since DVArchive can still download it's 2 weeks of guide data in under 1 minute.

Any ideas for how I should proceed other than a factory reset? I really don't want to do this as I'd have to grab all the shows off to DVArchive and there's a lot of shows on both units.

I know, it does sound like a network problem. I rebooted everything (cable modem, router and then the Replay units) but it had no effect.

The strange thing is that I can stream to/from both Replay units (watch shows from PC using DVArchive as well as viewing shows remotely from both Replay units) so I know the local network is OK. It's weird that it just bogs down when connecting to the mothership.

As an aside, nothing has changed on my internal network configuration in years (literally).

I'm quickly running out of ideas.

Scott

p.s. the very slow download of channel info mentioned in my 1st post eventually died.

Yup, I tried that right after I posted my last message. Works fine.

Now I'm trying to figure out what happend. I thought that my router (Linksys WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware) suddenly decided to stop working but after connecting each Replay directly to the cable modem and updating the guide, I put everything back to the way it was and it's all working again. Very strange.

All I can suggest is try bypassing the router and plugging the Replay unit directly into the cable/DSL modem. In my case, that was at least enough to get a guide update to buy me some time to work with it more without losing the ability to record new shows.

I had thought that after I bypassed the router and then put it back that everything else was working but it turned out that the problem came back the next day and net connects starting timing out and failing.

I assumed that it was an issue with my router's firmware (Sveasoft's Alchemy) settings which I have configured with QoS for setting the Replay packets to Bulk priority (BTW it's always been set this way, I haven't changed anything in a long time). I had a spare unit that I put newer firmware on (Sveasoft's Talisman) and skipped setting any QoS settings for the Replay units and it's working fine so far. But now that somebody else is having the same exact problem I'm not so certain that the problem was with my router.

Very strange.