ViP 211 Warning 981

[mikew]

Could the problem be your hard drive? Have you tried running with no HD connected?

 

[Foxbat]

Could the problem be your hard drive? Have you tried running with no HD connected?

I have tried it without the Hard Drive. In fact, I read over on the Video Freezes on Playback thread and saw someone else was having issues, so I removed the EHD. The behavior of the video freezing or blacking out when tuning a Satellite channel remains. It's probably bad VRAM or something. Like I said, I was able to play back the video that was in progress when the video froze last night, so it seems to be received, decoded, and stored on the EHD fine. It's somewhere in the decoding and sending to the video output that has a problem. It could be the HDMI, except all the overlays and menus appear fin (just over the frozen or black screen).

 

[Foxbat]

I finally ordered a "new" ViP 211k to replace my flakey 211. So now, at least, all of the AV components I have will be black! The EHD from my current 211 should be compatible with the new 211k since it's tied to my account.

So hopefully it doesn't find out it's being replaced by a newer model and go out on strike, just to spite us!

 

[ChadT41]

Did you order it from Dish or from a retailer?

 

[dishcomm]

After reading the OP's posts, I could have told him that the receiver not completing boot recovery means its a boat anchor.

 

[Foxbat]

Did you order it from Dish or from a retailer?

I ordered it from SolidSignal. They mentioned it may be New or it might be Refurbished/Remanufactued. That's why I said "new".

Considering the New 211 I bought years and years ago got replaced after it died 7 months after I bought it and Dish replaced it with a Remanufactued unit, I guess I'm okay with that.

 

[Foxbat]

After reading the OP's posts, I could have told him that the receiver not completing boot recovery means its a boat anchor.

Oh, it eventually "recovered" to a receiver, but it's part-time at best.

 

[Foxbat]

Wow, talk about good timing! My replacement 211k arrived this morning before I left for work, so it was able to sit inside and warm up. When I went to turn on the old ViP211, it was d-e-a-d. No Video, no response to the remote or front panel.

So I am in the process of activating the new 211k:

I like the smaller footprint, too!

 

[Troch77]

Is that one of them new 4K tvs?

 

[Foxbat]

Is that one of them new 4K tvs?

The math works out closer to .4K, so I'm going to have to say "nope"...

With the old receiver basically scrap, I decided to open it up to see if maybe I could see why it died. My favorite, a bad 2200 uF cap was all puffed up next to the Smart Card socket. I could see that causing flakey decoding of the encryption...

 

[Foxbat]

I just so happened to have a 2,200 uF 10V electrolytic capacitor left over from all the Samsung LCD monitor failures from a few years back. I removed the swollen cap, soldered in the new one, and I appear to have a good ViP211 again!

Of course, I need to connect it to the satellite feed so it can verify its connection so I can go in and pull off the Timers. I try to access the timers and it's telling me that it can't do that.

I was able to watch a program I had recorded on an EHD, though. I can't tune in OTA without a satellite signal, either.

 

[Foxbat]

So now what do I do with an extra ViP 211 receiver? I's not like I need another TV location (although I'm sure my son would beg to differ!) I'd feel kinda bad selling it to someone else, since I'm not 100% sure replacing the capacitor fixes it 100%. Plus, it is fairly old. I mean, the SatelliteGuys 722k I got back in 2010, and I had the 622+211 for a few years before that.

 

[ChadT41]

Sale it to an SG member. Sure someone on here would love to have it.

 

[pattykay]

Sale it to an SG member. Sure someone on here would love to have it.

And if they would rather have one that never had Foxbat's problem, I have a ViP211 (non-k) sitting in a closet not doing anything that I am willing to sell.

 

[ChadT41]

Scott Greczkowski you ok with this, as it's not really the intention of comin here to sale but to help each other out???

 

[Foxbat]

I can't tune in OTA without a satellite signal, either.

This is why I'm a Pack-Rat. I pulled my Dish 300 w/Dish Pro Single LNBf upstairs to the guest bedroom (since it faces East) and set the dish on the hip roof, aiming to the SE. I was able to pull in a signal in the 50s by hand, propping the Dish 300 between the roof and the house siding, keeping it stable by the angle of my hand.

Of course, I couldn't do much with this other than verify reception and my non-DVR timers (switch to a channel at a given time) since I didn't drag the EHD to this location. I need to set this up with the EHD so I can pull the list of programs I want to record.

I realize I'm on borrowed time, though, as I'm not sure what happens when my receiver gets the Deauthorization Hit. Do I lose my ability to access my EHD and the timers? I guess I need to work fast!

Scott Greczkowski you ok with this, as it's not really the intention of comin here to sale but to help each other out???

If I want to sell this, I will go into the Pub Sales area. It was not my intention to look for buyers, more for an opinion as to whether people thought it might sell, given the particular history of my receiver.

 

[pattykay]

I realize I'm on borrowed time, though, as I'm not sure what happens when my receiver gets the Deauthorization Hit. Do I lose my ability to access my EHD and the timers? I guess I need to work fast!

If your receiver gets deauthorized, you can call Dish to reactivate it long enough to check what you wanted to check, then call Dish back to deactivate it. Dish allows you to activate / deactivate purchased receivers as often as you like, without charging any kind of Change of Service fee.

 

[Foxbat]

Here's an update to my ViP 211k and my update to the hard drive: After thinking I had a DoA drive, I realize that the problem was none of my USB adapters would support the 2TB size. I ended up with a SiiG USB 3.0 enclosure that arrived this week. The drive spun up (yay!)(finally!) and better yet, my 211k said it liked it and shut down to format the drive.

On the other side of the reboot, my 211k shows almost 198 hours of HD recording time! Now for the acid test, transferring the contents of the old EHD over to the newly formatted 2TB EHD.

 

[Foxbat]

The transfer went way faster than the last time I tried this. I think taking the drives out of the USB enclosures and mounting them in the Mac Pro's internal SATA bus might have something to do with that, well, and the Ubuntu vs. KNOPPIX factor, too.

In a nutshell, there are three partitions on the ViP 211 EHD. The first is 2 GB Linux ext3 named some long string of hexadecimal characters, the second is a smaller Linux Swap partition, and the rest of the drive's capacity is ext3 formatted named "EHD". This is different from the 622/722 (and I'm assuming the Hoppers) where the capacity of the drive is broken into 512 GB ext3 partitions. This makes moving content a lot easier since you don't need to switch partitions,

I mounted the first partitions of the old drive and the new drive and copied the catalog files and the pvr log files. I did not bother with the nightly log files or crash logs. I used the default Terminal program and the "sudo cp --preserve=all {source} {destination}" command to perform the copy as root. With the actual programming, there are three files associated with each event, named something like "esnnnn" (where nnnn is a zero-filled number). This took the bulk of the time. The esnnnn.bm file contains the Information about the event and is fairly small (under 10 KB) while the esnnnn.ts file is most likely the video stream (multi-GB size). I'm not sure what the last file could be as it is a variable number of MB in size.

So that was pretty simple. I connected the new drive to the ViP 211k, let it be recognized, rebooted, and after the usual satellite acquisition (the program guide was recognized from before and didn't need to be updated) I had all of my previously recorded program events! Yay!

So now I have almost 148 hours of HD capacity for my ViP 211k (almost 600 hours of SD room). I doubt Dish will ever expand the capacity of the 211/211k/411 past the current 2 TB upper limit, so I won't ever need to do this again.

I need to do something about the SiiG enclosure's LED, though. It is very bright blue and I can see it blinking behind the TV stand with the lights on. I can only imagine it with the lights turned off.