I just installed a PVR-500 in my KnoppMyth box. I decided I wanted to get rid of some of the things I screwed up during my last installation, so I rebuilt the machine from scratch.

Hardware is a Pentium III 933, 128 MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive on the onboard controller, 320 GB hard drive connected to a PCI controller card, 10/100 ethernet on a PCI card, and, of course, the PVR-500. The machine has no sound card and a really crappy video card, but it runs as a dedicated backend. The frontends are my and my roommates' laptops (two Apple PowerBooks, one IBM ThinkPad running Gentoo).

I'm running R5A16, as all the docs seem to suggest not using R5A22, and a number of people are complaining about issues with R5A26 and remote frontends. I installed ivtv-0.3.5f and got all the drivers as described in another post here in the forums, and the card appears to be working... kind of...

The problem is that after recording (or watching live TV) for about 30 seconds, the computer spontaneously reboots. Nothing on the console, nothing in /var/log/messages... Nothing. One second it's working flawlessly, the next second it stops and I hear a *beep* from my server room as the machine POSTs.

I'm not really a Linux guru (I use FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and MacOS mostly (and Windows at work, only because I have to)), so troubleshooting isn't going too well... A friend suggested playing with the BIOS to reconfigure IRQs, but that doesn't seem to have helped the situation.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, one other thing...

I'm relatively sure it's not a cooling issue. The system has plenty of fans. At one point I popped open the system and went to see if anything was hot. Most components were actually cool to the touch, and the CPU heat sink was slightly warm, but not hot by any means.

are you sure there's nothing in /var/log/messages? or /var/log/syslog ? as anything that would reboot the machine generally will show up there, however it usually gets buried by the bootup logs from the next reboot. You could try running tail -f /var/log/messages from an ssh session, which should allow you to see whatever messages happen just before the reboot.

also you can check in /home/mythtv/.xsession-errors

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Xsecrets

There's nothing in any of the logs that's useful... There's a line from the driver showing that encoding is starting, and the very next line is the syslog daemon restarting after the system starts to boot again.

Whatever is happening, it's happening at a level below the OS, triggering the hardware to reboot.

I forgot to check /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log.

The last lines before the reboot are as follows...



Note: I replaced the name of my remote frontend with "****"

What is VBI, and should I be concerned about it not working?

I had the same problem with a pvr-500 on an AMD based system. it was a hardware problem as the same problem happened in that "other os".

In my case the processor was WAY underclocked by about half. It was a gimmy computer from someone who replaced theirs. The fix was to properly set the clock speed and every thing worked.

In your case i would guess some sort of DMA issue. Can you boot to that "other OS" and reproduce the problem? If you pull the 320 drive and controller card does it still happen?
is the computer over/underclocked. are the RAM/CAS settings right? is your bios up to date? Is the tuner card in the top slot?

Best of luck!

It turns out that this particular machine had a VIA chipset. I was not aware of this until yesterday. I swapped the hard drives and capture card into another box I have, which uses an Intel chipset and everything's working flawlessly.

Moral of the story: Don't use a Hauppage card in a machine with a VIA chipset.