It IS sitting in your TiVo, waiting to be activated. It just isn't being told yet to activate it when it calls home. Have you signed up on the priority list?



That doesn't sound at all like the same problems as everyone else, if you are referring to the everyone else who is/was suffering from the 3.1.0c loss of video bug that this thread is about.

Your problem sounds hardware related (probably a dying harddrive)... Stick the drive(s) in a PC and test it/them with the drive manufacturer's drive diagnostics bootdisk.

I knew mine was dying before C1 killed it. And before I knew of any C1 bugs. I concur with jsharper... run the diagnostics before it's too late - you might be able to do a complete dd backup, saving recordings and WLs and SP and thumbs.

hope the diags catch it, i was told sometimes they don't but the drive is too bad for tivo to use...but good enough for a PC

>That doesn't sound at all like the same problems as everyone else, if you are referring to the >everyone else who is/was suffering from the 3.1.0c loss of video bug that this thread is about.

Yes, the loss of video bug.


>Your problem sounds hardware related (probably a dying harddrive)

Yes, there is that chance, but it would be quite a coincidence (a probability of well less than one percent) for a hard drive failure to coincide with the installation of this software unless the software has some role in the problem.

Anyone else notice that the 3.1.0c2 is scheduling phone calls only two days apart? My series 2 schedules calls about every eight days.

Gary

When a software upgrade occurs, the old software remains where it was and the new software is installed on a different partition. Therefore, an update will be using different locations on the hard drive, thus may now be trying to use a part of the disk that is unreliable.

My SAT-T60 always scheduled calls 2 days apart as far as I know. At least it has for the last month as I've been checking on 3.1.0c.

If the software is already loaded via satellite, then why is the rollout being done in stages? Other than some people testing it out, why can't I immediately force the call and have it activated? (forget the priority list for the moment) It isn't like there will be any extra load on the servers...or would there?

-Mike

well, they did roll out 3.1.0c pretty quickly and look at the lesson they learned from that.. if they had done it more slowly, they would have discovered the big bug before everyone had been upgraded.

Also, perhaps their call centers get more calls when an update is rolled out (for various reasons) so they like to do it relatively slowly to make sure they don't get a huge peak in call volume.

The reason to stage a rollout is in case there is a problem with a software release. If the problem is detected earily in a rollout the rollout can be stop and much fewer people will be effected by the new "bug".

The 3.1.1c release for series 2 sets up phone calls every eight days. I just wonder why the series 1 units are calling more frequently.

My T60's had been scheduling calls 2-3 days apart when they were running the software prior to the C download. Then, after the C download, they went to every 8 days. I was quite pleased about this, because I have two units making calls, and they tend to eat up a good chunk of my monthly allotment of free outgoing calls.

Since the two units updated to C2 last week, they've both gone back to calls every two days. Huh.

BTW, I'm quite certain that this download did NOT come from the satellite, but over the phone line. I forced the downloads on both of my machines. The call duration for a normal mothership call is something less than a minute. These calls were connected for about 10 minutes, as far as I could tell. Clearly, something was going on there that was out of the ordinary. I'm assuming these were just small software "patches," instead of whole new OS downloads. Whenever I've gotten significant revisions (like 2.5 to 3.0), the download has taken several hours on each machine.

Both 3.1.0c and 3.1.0c2 did in fact come down via the satellite. This was proven by people receiving and installing c and c2 (via hacking methods) without a phone line connected at all.

For many people (all?), a new set of logos was downloaded at the same time as the "go ahead and install 3.1.0c2 that you already downloaded via the sat" message came over the phone call. That probably accounts for your 10 minute call. The logo download did not contain the actual 3.1.0c2 software. Many people saw the very short <1min phone calls when 3.1.0c was installed.

Huh. Well, I stand corrected then.

Hope I can get this updated tonight.

Contrary to the earlier posts, DTV stills sends updates via the phone line. If you read far enough into the original thread you will see a list of folks that were leaving their phone lines unplugged in order to avoid the corrupted update. I forced my update by filling out the formal request, then forcing a call the next day. It downloaded the update, as I watched, then was pending a restart, which I also forced. And voila! New and improved software. I even watched the entire process as it informed me of it's every move.
DTV hasn't moved their software updates to the satellite yet, still via the phone.

The software update did come over the satellite. The phone line only "activated" the software image that was downloaded from the satellite. See http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...313#post2121313 and http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...390#post2121390

Nope, the phone call just downloaded some code to activate the code that was already downloaded from the satellite. Even though the software is distributed by the satellite, it won't get installed until the phone call is made.

Got it! Thanks, team TiVo!

I got the upgrade fix on Monday after I forced the phone so that it would activate the satellite download. I also got the NEW LOGOS. One other thing. We had some heavy rain here on Tuesday & I noticed that there was no rain fade at all, which surprised me. On the 3.1.0c I seemed to get rain fade everytime we got almost any kind of slightly heavy rain shower. To me it seems that the fix has helped the receiver's ability to not loose the signal as quickly, during rainstorms, as it was with the 3.1.0c upgrade.

That's a nice theory. But in reality DTV and/or TiVo don't seem to have any mechanism of quickly reacting to a problem.

For example, weeks after the problems with 3.1.0c were reported here, by me and countless other people, the DTV CSRs were still completely clueless and useless. They kept denying that any problems even existed. They had no way to correlate multiple problem reports, even when they were provided with tracking numbers.

With a corporate culture like that in place, it doesn't matter how quickly or slowly a roll out happens.

So, then, what happens if you put some Series 1 that has been sitting in a closet for the last 12 months into the datastream, say, a year from now? With the phone line downloads, the system would sense on a daily call if you were using old software, and would upgrade you straightaway. How would that work when updates are coming via bird? I can't believe they're just streaming that software out there forever, jut in case there are a few S1's that may have been out of the datastream when the update was originally sent.

Hmmm I still have B and have your described rain fade problem. If this fixes that problem,and doesn't introduce new ones, I may have to plug in the phone line some day. But I still want to read a few more pages of problem free updates before I do that. I can't lose 200 hours of stuff

Here's one to add to your tally. Our T-60 has been working flawlessly since receiving the c2 update a few days ago.

I assume there's a fallback mode allowing an update to be downloaded over the modem if it wasn't received from the satellite for whatever reason. That's the only way to handle some stragglers, and they used to do it for all systems. If they now can have the vast majority of the download occur via satellite (as appears to be happening now), it saves most of the cost of downloading the update -- the few stragglers who still need to download via the modem wouldn't matter.

If anyone has a pre-3.1.0c2 Series 1 machine that hasn't had access to the satellite stream for the past month, maybe they could force a daily call on it to see if it upgrades over the modem as a fallback, but I expect that it would...

Between my SAT-T60 and DSR6000, I have 300 hours of stuff I don't want to lose. I've upgraded both to 3.1.0c2, and they've been working perfectly since then. (But I only saw the bug once under 3.1.0c, so that doesn't prove anything.)

However, if you look at the files in the 3.1.0c2 release, it's not really surprising that it works. The "boot299.btl" file containing code for the 5055 chip was hugely different for 3.1.0c and it seemed very likely that this code was causing the notorious video freeze bug in 3.1.0c. This theory seems to be confirmed by 3.1.0c2, since the previous version of "boot299.btl" from 3.1.0b was restored for 3.1.0c2. I believe the tuners should be as reliable under 3.1.0c2 as they were under 3.1.0b -- and I've yet to hear any reports to the contrary. Rain fade could certainly occur under 3.1.0b, and it should be equally likely under 3.1.0c2, but it shouldn't trigger the video freeze bug from 3.1.0c.

I should also point out that the 200 hours of stuff you have already recorded never would have been affected by the 3.1.0c bug anyhow -- only new recordings were damaged by that bug. Even when I experienced the bug, my older recordings would still play back perfectly, even before rebooting to workaround the bug. Conversely, after rebooting, the tuners were working again, but the damaged recordings were still playing back audio-only. The problem occured in handling the tuners during the recording process, so your 200 hours of old recordings weren't at risk even under 3.1.0c.

If I were you, I'd upgrade to 3.1.0c2 (which does fix the "acquiring data" bug) as soon as possible -- before a 3.1.0d rolls out with some brand-new bug!

The latest software will ALWAYS be available for download. It is not too difficult to have a flag in the datastream that indicates what the current release number is, and then trigger a download if the TiVo in question is running an earlier release. This might only be made available once a day, or once every several days, but it can be fit in between showings on a PPV channel so that the bandwidth used is easily available.

Since I recently had to restore an old image, I can tell you exactly what the sequence of events is (this all happened just after the TiVo in question had first upgraed to 3.1.0c):

I reloaded a 3.1.0 (no a, b or c) image onto one of my TiVos. On the first call out it downloaded, via modem, 3.1.0b. After 3.1.0b was running, on its next call (which I forced the next day) it spent less than 3 minutes online and then declared it was "pending restart" - so 3.1.0c had downloaded, via satellite, overnight. After 3.1.0c2 was released, I put the unit on the priority list, and a few hours later forced a call. This call took a few minutes (but still much less than the 35 to 40 minutes a software download takes) and again, I was "pending restart".

So, no matter how old the software you have on the TiVo, it will download 3.1.0b (which it would seem is the first release capable of satellite download) via modem on its first (or second) call, after which it will download the latest software version via satellite and install it on the NEXT call.

I put myself on the priority list early last night.

As of 11:00pm or so, a force call didn't get me anything.

I'll try tonight. I'm getting this bug more and more (doesn't help that we're in the rainy season here in Florida and that it's been raining every stinkin day )

-Mike

I already deactivated the unit becuase I thought it had a faulty tunner are they going to charge me to put an additional unit on my system while I get it to upgrade so I can get it fixed.. please give me the phone number of someone to talk too so I can reactivate the bad unit and get it fixed ...

thanks