Upon starting my R4V4 KnoppMyth box I sometimes get a two blinking keyboard lights and a frozen boot screen.

I have searched the forums here and the only thing I have seen referenced is a boot time argument. Has anyone gotten to the bottom of this?

Michael

Your system specs might help...

My apologies, I should have placed that here. Though I can't see how it's a hardware problem. It doesn't happen all the time. Very intermittent in nature.

MythTV Box:

Syntax Motherboard - S635MP
Kingston 512MB - 333MHz DDR RAM (Compatible with 266MHz)
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350
Toshiba SD-R5112 4X DVD-R/DVD-RW/CD-RW Combo
160GB Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 7200RPM 8MB Cache

The most frustrating problems are intermittent, when they're easy to reproduce they're usually easy to debug, and the developers are more likley to see and fix them before they ever see the light of day. The now fixed NVidia chipset interrupt/dma problems for example... I'd guess you're either experiencing something similar, and hitting a race condition window, or you've got some kind of hardware instability.

Lets attack the hardware angle first. Open the case up, turn it upside down on some solid colored background, and give it some good thumps and shakes. Next unseat and reseat the various components, blow out and inspect the slots or sockets while you're at it. More shaking and thumping may be in order. Make sure that all the components are all properly seated and have good contact before you're done.

Even If this sounds silly to you, do it anyway. If that solid colored background suddenly has a shiny little flake of metal or a little black fleck of carbon on it, you may have found your problem. Any foreign material, conductive or nonconductive, can cause an issue. Aluminum cases are especially prone to producing nasty conductive metallic crumbs because the metal is relatively soft and the screws are much harder steel. One of those on your motherboard can wreck your whole day.

Next lets attack the firmware. Check the makers website for BIOS updates. Read the release notes but don't trust them to tell 100% of the story. Even if the changes don't sound relevant there may well be some quiet fix for your problem in there.

Finally search the web for issues with you motherboard and chipset under Linux or any other OS, this may be a well known known issue elsewhere.

Good luck!

(Edit - fixed a dumb typo)

Now that you mention this, I think I might be able to shed some more light on this situation. It appears that this only occurs during some time window after the PVR-350 causes the machine to freeze. This is usually by bringing up the EPG while watching live tv. I am about to update to a new version of ivtv today and hopefully start helping on that front.

Maybe that will spark some ideas of someone.

Michael

I get the same thing on my 0.4.3 backend box, on alternate booting, with my system, the numlock and capslock lights flash together.

Did you ever solve this problem? I just don't shut my backend machine down -- that's how I live with it.

My specs:

root@mythtv:/proc # cat cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 9
cpu MHz : 2390.318
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips : 4771.02

root@mythtv:/proc # cat version
Linux version 2.4.25-chw (root@km_dev.mysettopbox.tv) (gcc version 3.3.2 20030812 (Debian prerelease)) #1 Sat Apr 10 15:46:31 PDT 2004

512 Mb DDR Ram
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250
hda: ST3160023A, ATA DISK drive (160Gb)
hdd: LITE-ON DVDRW LDW-851S, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15

I think the problem may be an IRQ conflict with my motherboard-ethernet:

Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:02.6
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:02.7
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: sis900.c: v1.08.06 9/24/2002
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:04.0
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: eth0: VIA 6103 PHY transceiver found at address 1.
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: eth0: Using transceiver found at address 1 as default
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0xcc00, IRQ 10, 00:0a:e6:ed:01:2f.
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 409M
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: agpgart: Detected SiS 650 chipset
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xe0000000
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:02.7
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:02.6
Jun 5 20:14:26 mythtv kernel: intel8x0: clocking to 48000

Any hints would be greatly appreciated, as I otherwise boot until up, then leave it up.

I get this problem too. It happens right around where it states cleaning up /tmp.

I would say 35% of the time on a reboot. The caps and scroll light blink.

My specs:
Celeron 2 gig, 384 megs of pc 133 ram
a sis 305 video card
sound blaster sound card
PVR 250
um don't know what else you would want.

same here....If I disconnect the the network cable it boots up perfectly, with the cable connected....boots (guessing) 20% of the time.

_________________
R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

yes I believe most of these problems have been traced back to the NIC I'm not sure which ones cause the problems, seems like I've heard broadcom, but not sure about that.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

I found it occurs every so often when connecting to the network also...so network card conflict. I disables a bunch of crap like printer port, usb support, etc in bios to free up some resources and now I'm ok.

I'm using a 3com 3c905 nic.

Same problem here. I have:

ECS K7S5APro board and Athlon XP 2400+ w/SIS735 Chipset (latest bios)
512 2100 DDR
ATI TV Wonder VE
NVidia 440MX video
Onboard AC97 Audio
Onboard LAN (RealTek RTL8201BL 10/100Mbps )
R4V4 KnoppMyth

The lockup happens often times right after the NIC initializes, but not always. A few resets later I'm back in business. Seems to be timing related? Strange stuff.

Gonz

I have an onboard nic card also. I belive it's an realtek also. same as the person posting above me. Is there something i can do. The older versions of KnoppMyth didn't have this problem. At least with me. Thanks.

It seems that Realtek based network cards are causing problems. Removing mine clearly improved stability.

Are there recommendations which NICs for 10/100 ethernet do work well?

well not really sure, but the realtek should work fine this is a problem with the kernel on R4V4 it is a bug and should be corrected in R5. I don't know exactly what it is, but I think they just picked a really bad kernel to use for R4V4 or one of the patches really killed its stability, because I had to revert back from all kinds of problems.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Xsecrets what did you revert back to? R4V3? Besides start up is it affecting anything else? Should i revert back?