Two Nova-S cards crash Vista Media Center. Help!

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madad

75 posts

Master Geek

Topic # 17143 14-Nov-2007 11:46

Hi there, I recently replaced my Hauppauge PVR500 with a couple of Nova-S cards and had a guy install a 90cm dish so I can receive the new Freeview channels in NZ.

All went smooth, got the hacks required to watch DVB-S and tuned the channels.

Only problem is, occassionaly (maybe immediately, maybe a few hours in) it crashes. Seems to be when it tries to record two channels.

So I have disabled one of the tuners in the control panel and all is well. In fact with only one tuner enabled its been rock solid for weeks. So the issue is definitely to do with two tuners. I also notice the time taken to change channels is much quicker when there's only one tuner enabled.

Someone suggested I have an IRQ problem so I've disabled as mu8sh as I can in the BIOs, but to no avail.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Adam.

Regs

Infrastructure Geek
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Microsoft NZ

Subscriber

Reply # 95273 15-Nov-2007 00:12

perhaps you could try changing the slots you have the cards in... e.g. if they are in adjacent slots, try moving one over to the next slot.

you could always try the hwclear app from hauppauge and then install the latest drivers from www.hauppauge.co.uk

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madad

75 posts

Master Geek

Reply # 95305 15-Nov-2007 09:36

Thanks for the suggestions. HWClear shouldnt have any effect, since as part of my trying to fix the problem I rebuilt the machine from scratch.

I have tried to disable as much as possible in the BIOS in an attempt to reduce IRQ conflicts but to no avail. I'll try putting one of the cards in a different slot tonight, although this may not be an option since I'm using a riser card in a low profile case..

madad

75 posts

Master Geek

Reply # 95484 16-Nov-2007 09:53

OK a little progress.. the riser card does indeed only have two slots on it, so i left the cover off the case and used one of the other PCI slots for one of the nova-s cards. After rebooting the machine detected a new card and I went thru and configured it then tuned channels, etc. Didn't seem to have a huge effect (still locked up occasionally, seemed eratic) so I went back to the normal configuration and reconfigured everything as normal.

Now, when the machine starts up, the ehshell or rcvr or some other service crashes. Once I kill the processes they fire up again and everything works fine. So it's been running now for about 12 hours and recording two channels fine and operating as expected. But every time I reboot I get this lock up situation happening.

Weirdness!! Anyway I guess the moral of the story is, don't reboot!

We'll see how we go. Is there any one else out there using 2 nova-s cards in a vista machine?