Unit said it was doing an upgrade!!!

Uh Oh, one of my units (my fav too ) was on a screen saying don't turn off the unit, it was doing an upgrade.

I know it can't do one over the phone, and the phone line was not busy anyway, so what's going on. I pulled the plug as I don't want any more upgrades anyway.

Anyone else seen this lately? It was 2 am pacific time and the progress showed it was a few percent done.

I know there's 2 copies of the system area, so I figured it would be safe to pull the plug. I powered it up and it seemed ok and nothing lost or changed. No upgrades are scheduled. Is this the beginning of the end for my disk drive? I know it's been running for nearly 5 years or more non-stop.

Hmmm, this could screw up my backup plan where I have the 3.7 utv image in a file in case I need to winhex it to a new drive.

I have vonage and that won't work with upgrades once the sat feed is gone.

Wonder why it only affected one of my units.

AFAIK there has been no 3.7 in the stream for years. That's why I bought a CD with a copy of 3.7 off of ebay some years ago. I've used that to replace a bad drive on 2 occasions instead of trying to get it by phone line. Of course, this requires some PC expertise and the software to do the update. But I had invested since I thought there'd be no more utv upgrades, ever.

There are so-called "image-begging" internet sites where you could find a 3.7, but if there's another update about to happen, then I would think you'd get 3.7+ like the rest of us and that this would be in the stream.

I remember 3.5 and 3.7 is far better. In fact, if we'd only have had 3.5 all these years, I'd probably be looking at moving to something else.

On another board, it was stated that this upgrade might be like one that was required on the tivos having to do with a new guide data format.

I guess if mine starts updating again, I'll let it complete, if it can.

Well, this does sound like they didn't add any features, but only provided us with compatibility with current DTV signals.

This should indicate that rumors of the UTV demise has been greatly exaggerated.

Ok, my first unit upgraded to 3.8. The only indication was that it was on the tv-home page, which is where it goes after a powerup.

No, there's no credits in current shows that I can see.

My unit says the current upgrade was at 1:42 am earlier today. 28230.

I have vonage, and the utv site mentions that voip will probably not work. I can confirm that one.

Good question about getting the image off the drive, as I don't really know how to do that myself and it required some hot cable switching as I recall. I have a spare utv and maybe I'll have to hook it up for a while and switch in my card to get the upgrade.

The ! in a red ball has been in 3.7 and I don't have any shows scheduled to record that would indicate that has changed. The rest of the help is the 3.7 help. At least the item latest features has not changed (I can view both 3.7 and 3.8 on my 2 units).


I did verify that the runaway FF/REW is still there

Good news is that it doesn't seem to have messed up anything. My oldest kept show is a PPV Lord of the Rings, and it is still there, so it's not deleting any old shows.

Hmm, the somewhat transparent progress might help as it often covered the time left in a basketball game making it hard to skip to the last 5 minutes. Maybe this will help. But I wonder why they changed this at all. I wanted to see a two color progress guide, with one color to show how much buffering ahead you have when viewing something that's still recording. Oh well, guess I'll just have to wait 4 more years.

Ah, yes, you have to unplug a running utv's ide cable and plug this into your computer.

I wonder, though, since winhex will work with a usb drive, I wonder if a safer technique is to use a usb enclosure. Then you could pull the ide cable, plug in the one with the enclosure - with the power off to be safe - and then when you plug in the usb and turn on the power, it should be recognized. I've never tried this however.

I've only ever seen that on a power fail, but even then it starts re-recording after it comes up. And power fail is also what they call a crash/reboot.

Check your history. It usually explains why something like that would happen.