Help Diagnosing Probable Hardware Failure

[reggie14]

I’m having an awful time figuring out what’s wrong with my SageTV system.

Yesterday my girlfriend couldn’t get TV to play consistently. The extender would start up, and it started playing a show (very slowly), then it would freeze, playback would start up, freeze again, etc. So, then she went into the other room and couldn’t even get the Sage extender to turn on at all.

When I got home I tried restarting the Sage server, which only helped for about two minutes. When I switched my TV to the computer input, I noticed that the output from the video card seemed to be corrupted. Then the computer started automatically restarting itself. So, I thought maybe the video card was bad, and replaced it. That solved the video corruption and restart issue.

But, I’m still having problems with Sage starting to playback a show, then freezing intermittingly. It happens on both extenders- an HD200 and an HD300 in a different room. For a while I thought maybe it was network issues. I thought maybe my switch was going back, so I routed all my Sage-TV related stuff through my router’s built-in switch. That didn’t work, so then I tried replacing the wireless router, but that didn’t work either.

I don’t have a good way to test the network adapter on my sage server. But, I thought the next best thing might be a sort of stress test, so I tried transferring a file off my Sage computer to another computer on my network. Sure enough, a minute or so into the transfer the computer started having problems with the network. The transfer intermittingly stopped, then started up again, over and over again.

I’m going to try getting a separate network card, because I really don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up a new Sage server. I’m just trying to hold out another 6 months or so in the hopes of some halfway decent alternative to Sage for multi-room DVR presents itself. But, if the replacement network adapter doesn’t work, is there something else I should try?

[fidget]

It may be a hard drive problem. Can you play videos with a stand-alone video player (Windows Media Player or VLC)?

[panteragstk]

I wonder if you had some sort of power surge? I've seen that happen when people's houses got struck by lightning. I hope that isn't it, but other stuff other than your sage setup would be affected by it so it should be easy to figure out.

Other than that it sounds like it is process of elimination time.

[reggie14]

It turns out it was my switch after all. Even though I had previously unplugged my server and extender from my switch, and plugged them direct to my wifi router, I never unplugged the switch from the wifi router. Once I unplugged my switch things worked fine. So, after one last trip to Microcenter I finally got things working again.

Though, it still seems odd that my video card and switch died at the same time.

[mistergq]

it was probably a power surge or a brown out that caused the problem. Do you have both devices on a UPS? those aren't fool proof, but it helps.

[reggie14]

It could have been, but these components were fairly well protected, being behind one of my nicer battery backups. I have a lot of other electronics in my apartment which just have pretty crappy surge protectors in front of them.

I'm guessing it was just bad luck that they failed at similar times. In hindsight, I kind of wonder if the switch has been slowly failing for a while. A couple weeks ago I started having occasional trouble with some online games. I noticed packet loss rates hit 5% at times, which I attributed to Comcast. Maybe it was just the switch.