Concurrent record/playback lockup

[ellweber]

I am experiencing a strange lockup that seems to occur only while I am watching a previously recorded program at the same time Sage TV is recording another program. I has happened 4 or 5 times and takes from 10 minutes to an hour to occur after the start of playback.

When this happens, I get a message as shown in the attached: "Microsoft Windows detected and recovered from a device faiulure. Please save your work and reboot to restore full functionality." The computer does not respond to anything but ctrl-alt-del and the Task Manager shows SageTV.exe still running as a process. The display has been forced to 640 X 480 mode (from 800 X 600) and the keyboard/mouse is not functional in anything but the Task Manager window, in fact there is no cursor visible anywhere else! If I force end the SageTV.exe process the rest of the computer recovers but I cannot restart Sage without a reboot. No other applications are running but Girder and PowerStrip are running as processes. I have found that it also happens without PowerStrip running.

Recording is set to Great-2GB/hr and the system is as follows:

PVR-250 tuner card
Athlon 1800+ processor
Asus A7V8X-MX motherboard
2 * 80 GB Seagate Baraccuda IV
512 MB RAM
ATI 9200 video card, S-Video to TV
Win XP Pro SP1
Sage TV v. 1.4.10
Elcard/Descaler for video decode, Intervideo for audio decode
Girder v. 3.29
PowerStrip v. 3.47

Any ideas on what might be causing this would certainly be appreciated. My wife is not very favorably impressed when it crashes in the middle of watching soemthing!

[mikbro]

Couple of things... the elecard/dscaler combo can be very cpu intensive depending on your settings... what is your average CPU utilization when you are watching video?

Along the same lines does the problem occur when you are using the Intervideo NonCSS decoders that shipped with the PVR-250?

Also what verion of ATI drivers are you using? If you are not using the most current, you may want to upgrade.

[ellweber]

Thanks for the ideas. CPU usage seems to be about 60%, under the conditions described above. I believe that this problem also occured with the Intervideo driver but I will go back and try that again to be sure.

I have what I believe are the latest ATI drivers, 6.14.10.6343, downloaded from the web site in the last two weeks.

[mikbro]

I saw that type of instability on machines where I had the elecard/dscaler codec and was pushing the limit of the CPU. I also saw a/v sync issues as well.

You may want to verify you are using the latest motherboard chipset drivers as well, and download a copy of Powerstrip. Powerstrip among other things, allows you to change the PCI latency for the cards on your PVI bus... it is possible you have some issues there.

Also, if I am not mistaken when you receive this message "Microsoft Windows detected and recovered from a device faiulure. Please save your work and reboot to restore full functionality" it should give you a "more info" or "advanced" button to get more information about what caused the problem. If you can find the dll at fault, you can trace it back to the software/hardware it belongs to. If you don't see any info on the error message yourself, check the event log and see what it wrote about the error there.

[stanger89]

Actually the motherboard drivers are the first thing I would check, especially since it seems to be related to heavy I/O across the PCI bus.

[ellweber]

No "more info" on the error message but I did find it in the error log. It says:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: ati2mtag
Event Category: None
Event ID: 108
Date: 12/9/2003
Time: 10:10:17 PM
User: N/A
Computer: PVR
Description:
The driver ati2dvag for the display device \Device\Video0 got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your hardware device vendor for any driver updates.

So, I think you are correct that it is a problem in the ATI drivers. Thanks for the lead, I'll proceed accordingly!

[mikbro]

ATI drivers have a feature called VPU Recovery which is there for just that reason, it resets the card when the hardware stops responding. You might want to look into whether or not you have it enabled. Go to your display properties, click Advanced then the VPU Recovery tab.

[ellweber]

Thanks for all of the help. Unfortunately, I am still experiencing this problem. I have tried to eliminate as many of the variables as possible.

I have removed Power Strip.
I am using the InterVideo NonCSS... decoders for video and audio.
CPU load is 10-15 % total per Windows Task manager.
I have found and installed the latest Catalyst 3.9 drivers for the 9200 and enabled VPU recovery.
I have the most current (non beta) BIOS and drivers for the motherboard.

The symptoms remain the same in that this only seems ot happen when I am playing back a previously recorded program at the same time I am recording another program off the air.

Any other ideas what this could be?

[ellweber]

I'm still looking for some help debugging this problem. Some more observations may help point someone in the right direction.

When the system fails (while trying to record and palyback at the same time) the Sage process that runs in the background to manage the recording continues to operate and the resulting recorded program is not compromised. However, the Sage playback process is totally crashed. The monitor/video card gets reset to 640X480 from 800X600 and Sage will not restart without a reboot.

This all seems to be independent of processor load and decoders, the symptoms don't change with any permutation that I have tried.

Is there any way this could be a hardware problem with these symptoms?


Thanks,

Lynn

[Cayars]

If you have a card in the PCI slot next to your video card try and move it so that the PCI slot next to your video card in empty. This solves a lot of problems with ATI AGP cards like the problem you are describing.

Carlo

[ellweber]

Thanks for the suggestion. The adjacent slot is empty then comes the Hauppauge PVR-250 tuner card and a firewire card in the last of the three PCI slots.

Latest experiment was to set the AGP to 4x but it still has the problem as it did at 8x.

Lynn

[mikbro]

Try turning "Fast Write" in the Smargart settings to false or off.

[robogeek]

Lynn,

I did a search on Google for the error:

ati2dvag for the display device \Device\Video0 got stuck in an infinite loop

and it appears there are some serious issues with the AGP ATI video cards with some brand name motherboards like Asus and Gigabyte. Several models of the ATI Radeon cards suffer from this error which would indicate that either there is a serious design flaw in the ATI hardware or the ATI programmers can't write XP device drivers for their hardware There is the possibility that there may be a design flaw with the AGP chipset on these motherboards, but given the track records of Asus, Gigabyte, and ATI...well, I would lean towards the problem being with ATI

I suggest plugging that error message into Google and browsing through some of the results and try any suggestions that you haven't tried yet. It looks like very few people have had success with bios tweaks and bios/driver updates while the majority haven't had any success at all short of swapping motherboards or video cards.

Besides the suggestions already given, the only things I can think of would be to: First, make sure the card is staying cool. If you modified the stock heatsink/fan on the ATI card then you might want to put the stock heatsink/fan back on or do something to give the card some more cool air to see if that helps. Second, a long shot, but make sure you've got the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers (http://www.asus.com.tw/support/downl...lName=A7V8X-MX). Third, try a different non-ATI AGP graphics card in the system and see if it fails too. If a different non-ATI card works, that should narrow the problem to either ATI drivers or the ATI graphics card. If a non-ATI fails also, that should narrow the problem to the motherboard. Fourth, if another card works in your system but the ATI card still fails, then you should be entitled a refund or replacement of your flaky ATI card.

Unfortunately it doesn't look good for you. You'll probably have to decide on whether you want to keep the motherboard or the ATI card and replace the other. If you can't get the error resolved, you'll probably save yourself some grief and minimize your losses if you ditch the ATI card now and go with a good Matrox card. If you MUST have ATI, then you might want to check out other brands like the Visiontek cards with the ATI chips instead of using an ATI manufactured card.

Good luck.

[ellweber]

Thanks for the tips. This gives me a path to follow and I am off to investigate.

Lynn