Can anyone tell me what might have happened to my setup?

[mskitty666]

I don't need a fix since I have SageTV up and running, but am curious as to what may have caused my problem. I want to avoid this happening again. This is what happened. I have had no end of problems with HD playback since I built my HTPC over a year ago. Finally after trying many suggestions and still not getting smooth playback, I had only one thing left to try. Buy a graphics card. I had avoided this like the plague, because I bought an HTPC motherboard with integrated graphics that supposedly plays HD. Yeah right! I bought an EVGA 9800GT 1GB card. I have an 8800GTX in my pc and figured the 9800 absolutely should solve the problem if it was graphics.

I uninstalled the graphics driver and shut down my HTPC. I installed the card and booted. That was the start of the most painful and frustrating hardware upgrade I've ever done. It just would not work at all. Black screen. I kept having to hard reset my HTPC because I couldn't see anything. Every time I removed the card it booted fine. Until it didn't.

I decided enough is enough. Maybe there was some conflict with this card and my mobo, but until I did more research, time to pull it and get Sage back up. But Windows just would not boot. I would get to the screen that asks if I wanted to boot normally or in safe mode, make a selection and nothing would happen. I left it for nearly ten minutes at one point. Ok, I must have corrupted the MBR with so many hard resets. No problem. I gathered my XP installation cd, my XP reference book and entered the recovery console. This has always worked for me before. But, not this time.

I tried repairing the MBR and a few other things. Nothing in recovery console would work. Time to try recovery from the installation option. Usually that's where it detects you already have Windows installed, but this time it didn't. So I have no choice but to do a fresh install. When I chose to continue it warned me that "another operating system" was installed on that partition and installing to the same partition could break the other OS. ???? It knew an OS was there but couldn't recognize it as Windows. That is a new one for me and I have no Idea what could have caused this or even what is the problem.

I install XP to a new folder. Just for one last chance before returning the graphics card, I had installed it. Everything booted perfectly fine, I installed my lan drivers and began downloading the latest copy of everything right off the net. Within a few minutes SageTV was up, perfectly configured and recognizing all of my recorded shows and immediately began recording. No troubles at all, except for that damned DST.

What is really weird is that as far as I can tell my previous XP install is still there. All of my data was intact. So why wouldn't it boot or allow recovery?

[jdamore]

Sorry, couldn't tell you what happened when trying to recover..

My question: After all this, can you play HD now?

[mskitty666]

Yes Finally. I still need to do more testing but lesson learned. All integrated graphics are junk! If this had been a regular pc, I would never even have considered allowing an on board gpu. Still wondering what the heck happened to Windows. I've had problems before, but never anything like this.

[GKusnick]

I can't explain the specifics of your Windows recovery snafu. But I'd be willing to bet that the initial black-screen boot failure was a power supply issue. If your power supply is marginal, the added load of the 9800GT could have put it over the edge. Even if the PSU is adequate, many newer graphics cards have an additional 6-pin power plug that must be connected to function properly. Perhaps you forget to connect that the first time around, or it wasn't properly seated or something.

Once your power supply is compromised, all sorts of weird issues are possible downstream. (Just last week I had a PSU failure that smoked two of my hard disks -- as in actual smoke coming out of the drives. Took me about three days to get Sage up and running again with new PSU & drives.)

[jdamore]

Is there a setting in the Bios to disable the "onboard" video?

[mskitty666]

My bios doesn't give the option to disable on board gpu it's either enable or auto. The default setting for priority is pcie which was selected. I also did recheck all of my connections. The card has 1 six pin power connector, but I even looked all over and on their web site to make sure there wasn't another. I have a 600 watt psu that has two six pin connectors and it's running perfectly fine now. I don't think that was it. I'm just glad everything is working. Do you think a solid state drive would be less susceptible to file corruption? Thinking about using one for os and programs in the near future.

(Just last week I had a PSU failure that smoked two of my hard disks -- as in actual smoke coming out of the drives. Took me about three days to get Sage up and running again with new PSU & drives.)

I feel for you! Three days without SageTV. How did you survive? I actually had a psu blow up on me a few years ago. Drives were ok but the motherboard was fried. That really hurt.