[Space]

I think my ReplayTV 3060 is dead.


I have it and my 5040 hooked up with a video switch and when I turned my TV on today I could hear a constant sound repeating every half second.


I used the A/V switcher to change to other inputs and I could still hear the sound on all inputs! But the sound on the 3060 input was much louder.


Neither of my Replays were working, but I was able to reboot my 5040 and it was working again (but I could still hear the 1/2 second sound in the background). Not so for the 3060.


It had no lights, so I disconnected the power (the 1/2 second sound stopped) and waited a few minutes and reconnected, nothing. Except for that loud sound every 1/2 second started up again. This sound starts up as soon as I plug it in.


Does anyone have any advice as to what the problem could be? Does it sound like the power supply? Then main board?


Any help is appreciated.


Thanks

 

[wrlwnd]

I have had that type sound when the drive in one of my 5040s died.

 

[hdonzis]

If you need any help with it, I would certainly recommend you talk to Mikeyboy ...


Henry

 

[Space]

The hard drive? For some reason I thought I would at least see the power light on the Replay go on if it was a hard drive issue, but I guess not.


I mean afterall, it is the original hard drive, spinning pretty much non-stop since I got it 7 1/2 years ago.


I guess I have some troubleshooting ahead of me.


Thanks for the quick reply and the reference to Mikeyboy!




Just one small question. I was fortunate enough to pick up two Showstoppers about two months ago for dirt cheap (free ;-) in preparation for the day when my 3060 kicked the bucket.


If the problem turns out to not be the hard drive, I should be able to just put the drive from my 3060 in to one of the two ShowStoppers without a problem, correct?


Thanks again

 

[adone36]

Not if the drive is bad. Disconnect the drive, plug in the 3060 and see if you get normal output on the A/V line outs.

 

[blacknoi]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Space /forum/post/14214747



If the problem turns out to not be the hard drive, I should be able to just put the drive from my 3060 in to one of the two ShowStoppers without a problem, correct?


Thanks again

I seem to remember the OSs are slightly different (at least the images are different) of a showstopper versus a 3xxx unit.


Someone correct me if I'm wrong.


Then again, you could always try it. Worst case is it wont boot. Then just put the showstopper's original drive back in.


Or you could find a 120GB drive on ebay or something and stick that in there (as what, the showstoppers had the 137GB limitation I believe).

 

[adone36]

No difference.

 

[Space]

Well, I was able to mess around with this a little today and I've discovered that the drive is fine, it is the 3060 that is bad.


I removed the drive from the 3060 and put it in to one of my spare Showstoppers and the Showstopper came up fine, all my shows are still there.


I've also discovered that the sound I was hearing every half a second was the same sound that the 30xx/Showstopper makes on it's audio outputs when you first turn it on. So I guess it was cycling over and over again turning on and off.


For now I will just use the Showstopper with my 3060 drive. I guess I will have to get used to the low-quality recordings being called "extended" instead of "standard"


I am wondering what is wrong with the 3060, I am guessing maybe power supply (is that easy to replace?) or perhaps the motherboard is bad.


Turns out that my other ShowStopper is not working correctly either (when I go in to one of the options in "Setup" or on the "Manual Record" screen I am able to make changes (and progess to the next screen), but I can not see the actual changes being made on the screen, really weird), so maybe I can get one of them working using parts from both.


Thanks for everyones help!

 

[adone36]

There is no difference between a Replay 3K and Showstopper. Originally the SS had Panasonic logos and support for Macrovision. Later software was identical.


All settings and options are stored on the drive. If you have trouble in the menus, there is no indication of a system failure.

 

[Space]

I put the drive from my 3060 in to the ShowStopper that had menu issues and it still had the same problem (this drive works fine in the other ShowStopper I am using currently), so if it is not a disk issue or a system issue, what else could it be?

 

[rm -rf *.*]



Quote:
Originally Posted by adone36 /forum/post/14217721


There is no difference between a Replay 3K and Showstopper. Originally the SS had Panasonic logos and support for Macrovision. Later software was identical.

Set-top showstoppers that is: PVHS-1000, PVHS-2000 & PVHS-3000


The Showstopper PVHS-2270 (integrated 27" TV) is a different animal and does use a different (and older) version of the OS.

 

[Space]

Oh boy...


Woke up this morning to find my replacement ShowStopper's power light blinking on and off.


Turning on the TV showed that the video was all freaky. Just random patterns on and off. Occationally I'd see the "Please wait" message for a couple seconds, but then it just went back to the freaky patterns.


I unpluged the box, waited and then replugged. Problem went away. Everything seems fine now.


This problem is very similar to what happened on the 3060, only this time the power light was blinking on and off and there was no sound, just freaky video. Also this time I was able to "fix" it with an unplug-replug.


I am beginning to think that there IS a problem with the hard drive. Just that it is sporatic.


I think I will try my old 3060 with a different hard drive (never did try that) to see it it is OK, if that works than I think the problem really is the old 3060 hard drive, which I will then replace.


Any other suggestions?


Thanks




OK, just tested my old 3060 with a different drive, no change, still has the 1/2 second repeating sound as soon as I plug it in. It doesn't even spin up the hard drive. Now I don't know what is going on...




I removed the power connecter from the hard drive and plugged in the 3060 again, the "Please wait a Few Moments..." screen comes up.


So then I got ANOTHER hard drive, hooked it up, and BANG everything comes up good. So looks like it had a problem with that hard drive.


So my old 3060 is up again and working on a different hard drive, and one of my ShowStoppers is up and working with the old 3060 drive which would not work in the 3060 anymore. So it is looking more and more to me like my original 3060 drive is flakey and I should probably just replace it.


Thanks again!




OK, the old 3060 drive is now just totally flaking out while in the ShowStopper, so it is bad.


I would like to get any existing recorded shows off this drive, I know there are tools to do this, but I never used them, any advice as to how to get the shows off this drive before it goes totally dead?


It looks like using extract_rtv5 with RTVExplorer is the best option. I want to put them on my PC so I can watch them with DVArchive. Will they stream correctly to my 5040 using DVArchive?


Looks like all the tools I'll need to extract my shows and also to swap in a brand new hard drive are located at http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=17245 so I think I am good.


Thanks

 

[rm -rf *.*]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Space /forum/post/14236503


It looks like using extract_rtv5 with RTVExplorer is the best option. I want to put them on my PC so I can watch them with DVArchive. Will they stream correctly to my 5040 using DVArchive?

Not without converting them to a 5k fileset. IIRC, you will have to convert them to a 5k compliant mpeg, then run them through RTV_Tools to generate the 5k specific files.


I don't remember offhand if the copy shows (copy mpeg partition) in RTV_Patch works for RTV-O/S 3.02 or not. You could try it to clone the drive to a new, larger replacement drive and therefore keep the shows on the RTV.


Of course, if your source hard disk is corrupted, you will be copying the corruption over with this undertaking.

 

[Space]

Thanks for the reply.


I did try to copy to a bigger hard drive today.


When it tried to read the first partition it had to do several read retries for several sectors, and one sector it had to skip entirely. However, when I had it copy the MPEG (second) partition it did not seem to have any problems.


Since it had problems copying the first partition, I just downloaded the 30XX image from http://www.replaytvupgrade.com/ and copied that over to the new drive before copying over the MPEG partition as well.


However, after the final step of applying the patch and putting the drive in to the ShowStopper, none of my shows were there, just 139h 29m of free space (is that the correct amount of free space? It's a 200 GB drive, and I know the limitation of the ShowStopper is 127 GB, so 139 hours seems high)


So it looks like the "copy MPEG partition" option of RTV_Patch does not work for ShowStoppers. Oh well....


Will I at least be able to extract the shows with the information (show name, date, episode title, replay channel, etc) intact? It will make it much easier to tell what each recording is rather than just having a cryptic mpeg file name.


I see that extract_rtv5 is able to create XML files, but I am not sure if it works on ShowStopper MPEGs so that they can be imported in to DVArchive.


The plan is to import them in to DVArchive with at least the show and episode name and then either view them on the DVArchive PC or stream them to my laptop. This will allow me to skip the conversion process that would be needed if I wanted to watch them on my ReplayTV 5040.


Thanks

 

[hdonzis]

First, the list of shows is stored on the system partition, so when you put a new image on a Replay hard drive, the list of shows is lost whether you've copied them to the MPEG partition or not (it's not a problem of RTVPatch copying the MPEG on a SS). So, if you're going to put a new image on a Replay hard drive, then there's no point in bothering to copy the MPEG partition. And, there's no way to get the list of shows back onto the new image...


Second, if there's anything wrong with the current Replay hard drive booting, the you shouldn't try to copy it to a new hard drive. Especially if you are getting read errors from the original drive. You will just copy the problems over from the original drive to the new drive...


You can use extract_rtv5 either alone or with RTVExplorer or Extract GUI. It should work fine with the SS. HOWEVER, I never envisioned using the shows extract from a SS with DVArchive because DVArchive doesn't support the ShowStoppers, so extract_rtv5 doesn't support creating the DVArchive XML files when extracting from a SS. BUT, RTVExplorer doesn't use extract_rtv5 to create the DVArchive XML files, it creates them itself. I don't remember when it creates the files, I think it is if you extract all four files that go with a show (because it is for the 5000 series) then it creates the XML file. But, maybe it creates it when you extract the MPG file. Extract GUI works best with the SS because that was what it was designed for, but RTVExplorer should work fine as well. You might just have to decide which one you like better and if RTVExplorer will create the DVArchive XML files for you or not...


Henry

 

[adone36]

Again, you cannot copy the OS partition and MPEG partitions from DIFFERENT sources. The OS has the file tables and settings, the 2nd partition the shows. RTVPatch allows you to UPGRADE a good condition Replay disk to a larger one and keep all channels and shows. You cannot upgrade a bad disk. Extract will extract the shows. I don't know if Henry has bothered to apply some of the great stuff he has done to the old extract that he has with the extract for the 5K, some you might just wind up with numeric names. You can watch them in many players but they are not compatible with 5K files which are much closer to the DVD std. To stream to a 5K, you would have to convert to DVD mpeg2 and then run the 5K tools to generate the ndx and evt files the 5K looks for.

 

[Space]

I am able to see the files on both partitions using RTV Explorer, but when I extract the *.mpg and *.ndx files, no XML is created (those are the only two files for each show on the second partition).


Anyway, does anyone know where on the first partition is the episode info for each MPEG file on the second partition? Maybe I can extract those files and use them to get some idea of which MPEG file is which episode.


I tried using Extract GUI "Get Program Descriptions" but it gave an error "Could not find ReplayTV drive" (however the command window for extract_rtv does pop up and say it detected a ReplayTV drive right before that). So maybe this means the files with the descriptions are damaged.


When I use "extract_rtv5 -d" to display programs I get a read error/permission denied, so I am assuming that is in the part of the disk that is bad.

 

[hdonzis]

When you run RTVExplorer, does it display the show description information? It uses "extract_rtv5 -d -x", so if it is displaying the show descriptions, then the -d option is working. You need to be sure that you are running extract_rtv5 with admin permissions in a command prompt...


If you want to use Extract GUI, then you should copy extract_rtv5.exe into the folder with extract.exe and rename extract_rtv5.exe as extract_rtv.exe. It really should work fine on a ShowStopper with the original extract_rtv.exe, but try this to see if it makes any difference or not...


The episode information is store in /user/ReplayChannels/2/ReplayChannels on the first partition if you want to see what files you can find and/or extract from that directory...


If you just want to get episode information, then you should try using RTVPatch to "Backup Source Drive". This will allow you to save the first partition as an image file on your PC which you can then use extract_rtv5 to read. You can watch the RTVPatch display to see if you can get a good backup...


It's possible if you're not getting the description information then that's why RTVExplorer isn't creating the XML files. But, I'm really not sure how it works. I know I have played with it with a ReplayTV 5000 hard drive and created the XML files, but I think that I selected all three files that exist on a ReplayTV 5000. I can't remember if it created the XML file if I only selected just the .mpg file. And, unfortunately, the source for RTVExplorer isn't available...


If you can manage to get a good 1st partition image file, then you can use that to get the show information. If necessary, you can send me the image file and I can get the show information for you...


Henry

 

[Space]

I did not see any show descriptions in RTV Explorer, but maybe I just didn't look in the right place, I didn't even know that it would display the descriptions, so I'll take a closer look next time I can hook up the drive (I am doing some other disk testing at the moment).


I had already tried replacing extract_rtv.exe with extract_rtv5.exe when using Extract GUI and still had no luck.


I will have to check /user/ReplayChannels/2/ReplayChannels to see if there is anything there, I don't recall seeing a directory called "2", so that may be the problem.


I've already tried saving the first partition as an image, it created the image file, but during it's creation I got those read errors mentioned in my prior post. Some of the sectors it said it was retying for 3 times in a row, for others it tried 5 times, still others it tried 9 times. I assume it eventually got a good read on these, only for the last sector did it say it was skipped after the 9th retry.


I will try looking for the "2" directory, but if not there, then I guess I can just live with what I have. It looks like the MPEG files are numbered chronologically, so at least I know their chronological order, which should help greatly when I watch a series of episodes.


Thanks again for the help.




OK, I took another look at the disk in RTV Explorer, the list of MPEG files shows only the first three fields; file name, size, and type. The others are blank.


Also, the entire /user/ReplayChannels directory does not exist at all in the first partition.


So it looks like the data it needs to get the show information is gone (or at least the directory pointer to it is gone).


Oh well, no big deal, thanks again for you help.




Wow, just as a last thought I broke out the old "SpinRite" program I had, ran it on the disk and now I have my /user/ReplayChannels directory back!


Looks like all programs now work to get show info, and when I extract the shows off the drive, it creates an XML file with show information. Cool!


I am unable to import them in to DVArchive however, it gives me an "unable to import" error. I guess either the XML is not in the right format or it just does not allow import of ShowStopper formatted MPEG files.


I just want to use DVArchive to display a nicely sorted list of shows so that I can watch them locally (or if I'm lucky stream to my laptop).


Anyway, I am better off now then before, and I'll fool around some more with it tomorrow. In fact I might just try to put the repaired drive back in the ReplayTV 3060 and see how it goes.

 

[hdonzis]

Well, I was going to suggest that you try some tricks on your hard drive, like putting it in a baggie in the freezer to see if you couldn't at least pull a good image off the drive. Once you get the image off the drive then you can just work off the image and will only need the drive connected to get the shows themselves. Anyway, since you were able to repair the drive I would certainly still suggest you save the "good" image in case you need some more show details...


As Gerry has told me many times, DVArchive does not care about the MPEG file format AT ALL. And, I don't think that it's going to be a problem with the XML file either. But, as several others have posted, those files aren't ready for use for the Replay 5000's, and RTVExplorer is going to mark the files as Replay 5000 files. So, at the very least you are going to have to use rtvtools to create the .evt file to make everyone happy (which is probably what is upsetting DVArchive). Or, you could edit the XML files to say that they are Replay 4000 shows so that DVArchive won't be expecting .evt files...


The file names are the exact time the show was recorded. So, a file name like 1215475197.mpg was recorded:


# date -s 1215475197

Mon Jul 07 18:59:57 CDT 2008


So, if you know what the date and time a show was recorded, then you can find that show pretty easily...


Anyway, if you want to be able to stream the shows to Replay 5000's, then you'll need to follow the previously posted advice and convert the files into Replay 5000 files. Again, DVArchive doesn't care at all and will simply stream whatever data is stored int he files, but DVArchive at least requires that the appropriate support files are present (.ndx and .evt for a Replay 5000)...


Henry