My R5F27 upgrade had been working fine for over a month when this problem started. Starting about 1 1/2 weeks ago I get a black screen in any of the menus. If I navigate to the recorded programs screen by dead reconing, I can see that screen. I can also watch recordings fine*. I ctrl-alt-shift-f1 and get the text console just fine. I've searched a lot of log files for some kind of error messages that might indicate what's going on, but I've found nothing that looks relevant maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

I tried connecting via vnc on the assumption that it might be a TV-out problem. VNC shows a black screen in the same places tho.

I also tried changing the theme using these instructions on the assumption that my theme bitmaps got corrupted. No difference except that the theme has changed on the screens that I can get to.

I suspect that my kids somehow got into the settings menu and changed some setting that made menus not work anymore. I haven't been able to get to the settings menu area, either because I miss it by dead reconing or because it is also blank, so I have no easy way to experiment with what setting might have caused this. I have looked at the settings table in mysql, but I can't see any setting that looks like is could have caused this.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Does anyone know what settings could cause this? If you do I can just jam the right value into the settings table.

* One other thing: around the same time this happen all my recorded shows started having no audio. I assume this is another thing that my kids got into that is not related but I'm mentioning it here just in case it is related.

_________________
R5F27 on:
Athlon 1800+
Asus A7N8X-VM 400, 512mb
Onboard video through Asus dongle
80G Hitachi HD
Hauppauge! WinTV 401

If you were to rename the settings table in the database, would it create a new one with the defaults?

If it does, you could try that and see if the menus come back.

Sounds interesting... Do you know for sure that if the settings table isn't there, that myth resets it with the defaults? Could this make things worse?

_________________
R5F27 on:
Athlon 1800+
Asus A7N8X-VM 400, 512mb
Onboard video through Asus dongle
80G Hitachi HD
Hauppauge! WinTV 401

Don't do that. It'll cause other problems. However you can try reapplying the KnoppMyth standard setup stuff.

If you don't cut and paste that be _VERY_ careful about the quotes used. Single quotes _around_ the grep string, backquotes inside of it to match what is in the mysql statements, and doublequotes around the sed string.

If that doesn't cure your problem, I'd guess that you're missing theme and menu XML files. Doing a good backup and auto-upgrade as described in the R5F27 hints is probably indicated.

BTW - You can lock down the setup menus with a pin code to keep this kind of thing from happening...

Pretty crafty shell calisthenics there tjc! Thanks - I'll give that a try when I get back from work today.

_________________
R5F27 on:
Athlon 1800+
Asus A7N8X-VM 400, 512mb
Onboard video through Asus dongle
80G Hitachi HD
Hauppauge! WinTV 401

Let me also recommend doing regular backups using the built-in script so that if something like this happens again you restore your settings from that. Between the regular use of the configuration backup script and keeping a copy of the install CD handy the average user should be able to recover anything but deleted content. I'm not talking about anything strenuous, just using the backup option in the GUI whenever you think of it and the box has 10-15 minutes of idle time.

"Taking advantage of the enhanced backup and restore scripts"

Yep that brought back my menus. Thanks!

_________________
R5F27 on:
Athlon 1800+
Asus A7N8X-VM 400, 512mb
Onboard video through Asus dongle
80G Hitachi HD
Hauppauge! WinTV 401

Hey - I've been meaning to follow up, but I've just been crazy busy lately. tjc the mysql settings reset fixed the menu problem but now I'm seeing another problem that seems related. When I hit my mythbox with a web browser, the main index page comes up fine, but when I go into MythWeb, I get the following:



It looks like mythweb thinks this is a new instalation and it needs to create that table.

_________________
R5F27 on:
Athlon 1800+
Asus A7N8X-VM 400, 512mb
Onboard video through Asus dongle
80G Hitachi HD
Hauppauge! WinTV 401