Philips dies once a week

[RobK]

I've got three DirecTivo's, one Hughes (fully subbed with Tivo & DTV & phone line) and two Philips that I "play" with. One of the Philips keeps dying on me. It trys to reboot all by itself, about every week, but hangs on the startup screen- I have to remove the drive, write 25xtreme image to it, etc, to get back to normal. Anybody have this happen? I have made no changes to any files except "touching" the one file. I even replaced the drive with another Maxtor 40 gig, same thing. (BTW I hate Maxtor drives). Would I be better off with a larger WD drive (I read that the WD 40 gig won't take the 25xtreme image)?
Thanks
Rob

[FastMark]

RobK

I have a Hughes that I have Xtreme'd and touched. I have never had it hang during boot but I have had it reboot cycling, and most recently stop responding to the remote or front panel buttons.

Unfortunately, I have not found the cause or cure for the lack of remote or button responce, but rebuilding the hard disks fixed the reboot cycling.

FastMark

[T_RJ]

The ribbon cable between the power supply and the MB seems to get loose, partialy unseated from heat over a period of time

Try pulling it out of it's connector and cleanning the contact area and reinsert.

My Phillips did the same thing for a while some times it wouldn't work at all.

I had to poke and prod for a couple of days before I figured out it was the ribbon cable.

[Perplexer]

My standard answer is, ''bad sector on the hard drive."

I had a similar problem on a SA HDR212. I copied the original drive to a 60GB drive and TivoMADdened it. Worked fine with version 1.3 of the software. Worked fine with version 2.0 of the software. When it updated to 2.5.1, the receiver would reboot any time I went into messages and setup or Now Playing. In fact, if I didn't go immediately into "Live TV," it would stick in a continuous reboot. I guess the 2.51 software got written to a bad area on the drive.

Stupid freaking Western Digital drives; I don't buy 'em any more. But to get my system running, I wiped the drive clean, ran SpinRite (GREAT program) on it to remap the bad sectors, and restored a backup image. It has been running flawlessly ever since.

Check out SpinRite from http://www.grc.com/. Be prepared to let it run 24+ hours on large drives. Then reinstall 25xtreme. Let me know how it goes.

[RobK]

Thanks for all your replies. I'll check the connectors and try SpinRite and see if that helps. Very frustrating!
Rob