# FROM DISH: Proper Rebooting Procedure (courtesy of DonLandis)



## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

OK- No problem Mark but we're up and working again and in the process learned quite about some things we have been doing as a practice that are bad for the 921.

After spending 2 hours on the phone with Adv tech support who was very familiar with the 921 issues, we got the 921 up and running. 
The problem- The CSR who erroniously shut down my 921 was the one responsible for the trouble. She should not have done that. After doing all sorts of tests the smart card was carefully reconstructed to work again but the 921 still would not activate. After several more tests and a long powerplug reboot the 921 activated as it was before yesterday.

Here are some tips for people with multiple receivers, including a 921.
Be sure your 921 is placed as Primary receiver when you initially activate it. When the 921 is in a secondary or additional receiver position, it can be deactivated if they move anything on your account. Once the 921 is deactivated it seems to be very difficult to reactivated without special hits and procedures from their center.

*New info about how to do a proper reboot of the 921:

Many people have been using the power button to reboot the 921 by holding it down for 7-10 seconds. This is very detrimental to the health of the hard drive. It is OK to do this sparingly, when absoutely necessary but not "prophylactically" as some have stated. IT can cause premature 921 failure. The simple reason for not doing the power button reboot is that it causes the hard drive to spin down and right back up again, jogging the disks off and on rapidly. 
Instead the proper way to do a 921 reboot is to first power button off to standby, then pull the power plug and leave it out for a minimum of 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Longer is fine but they have selected 2 minutes and 20 seconds as minimum for proper and most complete reboot. When the time is up plug back in and if it doesn't come on power button to turn on.

Some had done a smart card out and in but the adv tech person said that is hardly ever needed as the proper reboot is the best to try. He also said that the reason the power button reboot takes so much less time is because it doesn't do a full reboot that is often needed on the 921.*

I was lucky that the 921 wasn't permanently damaged over this screwup. If this last procedure didn't work they were ready to RMA the 921!


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## guruka (Dec 27, 2003)

Thanks for this info, Don. I have decided to try NOT rebooting my 921 every day for a while and see how it goes. I'll report back.

.....G


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## RAD (Aug 5, 2002)

DonLandis said:


> *New info about how to do a proper reboot of the 921:
> 
> Many people have been using the power button to reboot the 921 by holding it down for 7-10 seconds. This is very detrimental to the health of the hard drive. It is OK to do this sparingly, when absoutely necessary but not "prophylactically" as some have stated. IT can cause premature 921 failure. The simple reason for not doing the power button reboot is that it causes the hard drive to spin down and right back up again, jogging the disks off and on rapidly.
> *
> ...


OK, here's the $64,000 question, if the power button reset is so bad for the 921 (and I'd assume any other harddrive based receiver from E*) then why don't the folks rewrite the code to eliminate that as a way to reboot? That sounds like something that should be fairly high on their priority list for a number or years.


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## Slordak (Dec 17, 2003)

This whole discussion is a moot point. If the 921 operates properly, rebooting is completely and totally unnecessary. A real consumer-grade set-top box, functioning properly, should be able to run for a (practically) indefinite period of time without power cycles. If the software works as it should, the correct vs. incorrect way to do a reboot becomes purely theoretical.


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## RAD (Aug 5, 2002)

Slordak said:


> This whole discussion is a moot point. If the 921 operates properly, rebooting is completely and totally unnecessary. A real consumer-grade set-top box, functioning properly, should be able to run for a (practically) indefinite period of time without power cycles. If the software works as it should, the correct vs. incorrect way to do a reboot becomes purely theoretical.


You're just looking to pick a fight aren't you 

I agree with you. But the E* folks will say it's really not that bad, it only does it every now and then, no big deal.


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

DonLandis said:


> OK- No problem Mark but we're up and working again and in the process learned quite about some things we have been doing as a practice that are bad for the 921.
> 
> After spending 2 hours on the phone with Adv tech support who was very familiar with the 921 issues, we got the 921 up and running.
> The problem- The CSR who erroniously shut down my 921 was the one responsible for the trouble. She should not have done that. After doing all sorts of tests the smart card was carefully reconstructed to work again but the 921 still would not activate. After several more tests and a long powerplug reboot the 921 activated as it was before yesterday.
> ...


would this not apply to any hdd box i have long thought that to be bad thats like saying when your done using your pc or whatever just hit the reset button very bad


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

Slordak said:


> This whole discussion is a moot point. If the 921 operates properly, rebooting is completely and totally unnecessary. A real consumer-grade set-top box, functioning properly, should be able to run for a (practically) indefinite period of time without power cycles. If the software works as it should, the correct vs. incorrect way to do a reboot becomes purely theoretical.


whenever you have a hdd that gets used a lot like erasing and recording and dumping a buffer than things can get messed up pretty quick how often have we always had to just restart our pcs


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

I believe this has been discussed before as to PC's vs. the 921 buffer always on recording. 
But in case some of you forgot- here's a review-

Hard drives have two different mechanical operations. spinning disks and swinging pickup arms. The swinging pickup arms are at rest during non- I/O which is most of the time with PC data and fileing. The disks spin all the time. In the 921, the arms never rest as the current active tuner is recording all the time the 921 is not in standby. Yhis is thousands of times tougher mechanical wear than the PC hard drive.
Short periods of drive shutdown through rapid reboot of the 7 second Power button do not give the drive time to recover from a rest state. 

I'm not going to defend the tech's procedure to avoid the powerbutton reboot but, it does make sense, especially with my most recent problem. that is:
power button reboot nearly a dozen times and no result.
Power plug reboot but unplugged for only 30 seconds and- no results. 
Timed power plug reboot for 2 minutes and 30 seconds, 10 seconds longer than their recommended minimum and got resurection! 
As for drive life, yes, I have experienced hard drive failure on a PC right after I was digitizing video in the edit suite and my power supply in the PC became erratically intermittant. Caused the drive to die! 
I find no fault in what the tech said about best way to do the reboot. Bottom line, this is what finaly worked after 24 hours of "coma" for my 921 caused by a CSR screwup.


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## pweezil (Oct 11, 2002)

kwajr said:


> whenever you have a hdd that gets used a lot like erasing and recording and dumping a buffer than things can get messed up pretty quick how often have we always had to just restart our pcs


Any chance I could buy a punctuation mark or two?


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

pweezil said:


> Any chance I could buy a punctuation mark or two?


no


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## Scott Greczkowski (Mar 21, 2002)

DonLandis said:


> Be sure your 921 is placed as Primary receiver when you initially activate it.


The retailers will tell you that this is bad advice. When you replace your current primary receiver with another one the retailer may lose residual payments that they are receiving from your account.

Actually the explanation given does not make much or any sense. Where the receiver is listed on your account should make no difference whatsoever. Sounds like someone told you a good story as they had no other explination.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Scott, in my case the receiver that was primary was my 5000, gone since December but they never took it off my account. The reason for my initial call. It is not where it resides, but rather the desire to not be moving it from additional to primary later on, which was my case. When the 921 was moved to the primary from an "additional" they had to shut down the activation as an "additional" first. At this time the 921 became deactivated. When they added it back to the account again the 921 wouldn't take the activation signal. It needed a long powerplug reboot that the prior 8 CSR's and advanced tech guy failed to ask me to do. The last tech guy used that long off period to get the 921 to accept the reactivate. In the intirim, with all the different CSR's trying, the 921 was in a messed up state of partial function. So, Believe it or not, Ripley, that was his explanation after analizing the long list of entries on my account over the past 24 hours. 
As for protecting dealers, As far as I'm concerned, if a dealer has issues with Dish getting his credits, he needs to take that up with Dish and not burden his customers with these issues. 
As for how we all do things, I guess I'm the type of user who chooses to exhaust all methods before asking for an RMA. At least I am not needing to make a decision of which 921 to return after getting a second one only to discover that the "dead" 921 returned to life, with one last boot after it was off power for 24 hours.


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## Slordak (Dec 17, 2003)

kwajr said:


> whenever you have a hdd that gets used a lot like erasing and recording and dumping a buffer than things can get messed up pretty quick how often have we always had to just restart our pcs


Lets not compare apples to oranges. The 921 is currently very much like a PC, but it shouldn't be; it should be setup as a dedicated set-top box, which includes things like requirements for faster booting and longer uptimes than a Windows PC.

A device being a PVR/DVR doesn't make it inherently unstable or in need of constant reboots. Consider the 501/508/510 receivers in their current state. They're pretty much rock solid and can run for months without needing any sort of explicit reboot.


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## RAD (Aug 5, 2002)

Slordak said:


> Lets not compare apples to oranges. The 921 is currently very much like a PC, but it shouldn't be; it should be setup as a dedicated set-top box, which includes things like requirements for faster booting and longer uptimes than a Windows PC.
> 
> A device being a PVR/DVR doesn't make it inherently unstable or in need of constant reboots. Consider the 501/508/510 receivers in their current state. They're pretty much rock solid and can run for months without needing any sort of explicit reboot.


I don't think he was making that comparison. The point is that a HDD's activity pattern is MUCH different then the pattern in a PVR/DVR. On most PC's the a lot of think time where the system's HDD is doing nothing while the user is entering information or reading what was displayed. So if power get's yanked or reset is hit the chance of the read/write arm moving or data being written is much less then on a PVR/DVR. Those boxes are ALWAYS reading/writing data on the HDD which is causing the arm to be moving all over the place. In that case it's not a good thing to just yank the power away or reset the box in the middle of a write operation.


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## Kagato (Jul 1, 2002)

Okay, this is just plain FUD. Toggling the disc on and off again isn't going to make a difference. It takes miliseconds for the hard drive to dock the drive heads. The heads will automatically dock even in the event of power failure. Now powering off during a disk write can garble data, leave files partially written and create a mess. However, many of those issues are taken care of by using a journal filesystem. Which I'm assuming Dish/Eldon is doing. I suspect the power cord reboot had more to do with fully reseting all the hardware rather than the hard drive. I've certainly seen PC issues that could only be resolved with a cold boot.

It's not like the DVR creates a new issues as far as hard drives go. Server class machines have been dealing with these issues for 20 years. They push just as much data over the same long periods of time.

I'll tell you why the advice is bad though. Letting the hard drive spin completely down is far more risky than a reboot. The longer you use a drive the more likely it is that it won't spin up during power up. A number of factors such as bearings, lubrication, wear and tear on motors, heat, etc come into play.

After a few years you can pretty much bet on a 1% hard drive spin up failure. Back in the day when I managed a 300+ server system we had to plan hard drive failure rates into our upgrade plans. It's just too common of a problem with older hardware.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Kagato: Well written, and in my experience 100% correct.


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

Slordak said:


> Lets not compare apples to oranges. The 921 is currently very much like a PC, but it shouldn't be; it should be setup as a dedicated set-top box, which includes things like requirements for faster booting and longer uptimes than a Windows PC.
> 
> A device being a PVR/DVR doesn't make it inherently unstable or in need of constant reboots. Consider the 501/508/510 receivers in their current state. They're pretty much rock solid and can run for months without needing any sort of explicit reboot.


true but i was refering nto the mass amount sof data that flow on and off the hdd by the way teh 0ne hr buffer is not ram is it is it not just recording for one hr


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Kagato- With all do respect, I'll just continue to do what works. Thanks.

And, btw- some have mistaken the original error I had. It was not the hard drive nor was it the 921 failure. It was the CSR who screwed up my smart card that started it all. Once that was done a series of reconstructs by tech support who knew what they were doing with the smart card were what was needed to do first. THEN, once the smart card was properly reprogrammed, the 921 failed to respond (this could be considered a 921 issue but the tech guy admitted that this happens lots of times with all their receivers if the card get's messed up and causes the receiver to be inactive.) We tried the power button reboot several times to no avail. Card swap several times. "Hits" from the bird several times, no luck. Finally, the last attempt at the suggestion of the supervisor was the full cold long power plug reboot. 2:20 timed. which worked.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

kwajr said:


> true but i was refering nto the mass amount sof data that flow on and off the hdd by the way teh 0ne hr buffer is not ram is it is it not just recording for one hr


Let's see UltraATA-133 has a theoretical max of 133MB/sec (B=Bytes). In reality, effective rates might drop to as low as one-quarter of that - let's call it 30MB/sec. An HDTV feed maxes out at 20Mb/sec b=(bit), or 2.5MB/sec. That means we could have as many as 12 video streams working the disk. Of course, there's other system bus limitations involved, but it should be obvious that with 2 HD streams being written, and 2 HD streams being read (which the decoding hardware in the receivers doesn't support), we're using only 33% of the very conservatively rated bandwidth of the disk.

I think you were asking about the video buffer. No, it is not in RAM. One hour of HD would require about 7GB of RAM. Not likely.


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## jsanders (Jan 21, 2004)

SimpleSimon said:


> Let's see UltraATA-133 has a theoretical max of 133MB/sec (B=Bytes). In reality, effective rates might drop to as low as one-quarter of that - let's call it 30MB/sec. An HDTV feed maxes out at 20Mb/sec b=(bit), or 2.5MB/sec. That means we could have as many as 12 video streams working the disk. Of course, there's other system bus limitations involved, but it should be obvious that with 2 HD streams being written, and 2 HD streams being read (which the decoding hardware in the receivers doesn't support), we're using only 33% of the very conservatively rated bandwidth of the disk.
> 
> I think you were asking about the video buffer. No, it is not in RAM. One hour of HD would require about 7GB of RAM. Not likely.


Good break down SimpleSimon. 1 hour of HD is a bit more than 7GB for 1080i at 19.2Mbps(?) which comes in at about 8.5GB. If I remember I've heard people saying 9.6GB/hr, maybe there is some added overhead in there somehwere. Dish says the 250GB disk has 25 hours of HD (10GB/hr), obviously, they have Linux on there, and the "special" VOD space and such.... Regardless, your point still stands, a $999 box isn't going to have 7GB of ram!


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

thank you for leting us know simon i was trying to find an answer


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## kwajr (Apr 7, 2004)

kwajr said:


> thank you for leting us know simon i was trying to find an answer


someone had mentiond before that the buffer did not move the arms i think they thought it wss like the 2mb buffer on some hdd i was just trying to say that was not so just that the hdd records a 1hr buffer


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Actually, the buffer is 2 hours on the 921, not 1 hour.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Yeah - forgot about that - we can have 14GB of RAM in the box - just not 7 - it's an odd number. ROFLMAO at my own stupid joke.


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## pculley (Dec 23, 2003)

SimpleSimon said:


> Let's see UltraATA-133 has a theoretical max of 133MB/sec (B=Bytes). In reality, effective rates might drop to as low as one-quarter of that - let's call it 30MB/sec. An HDTV feed maxes out at 20Mb/sec b=(bit), or 2.5MB/sec. That means we could have as many as 12 video streams working the disk. Of course, there's other system bus limitations involved, but it should be obvious that with 2 HD streams being written, and 2 HD streams being read (which the decoding hardware in the receivers doesn't support), we're using only 33% of the very conservatively rated bandwidth of the disk.


Your numbers are good for continuous streaming, but when working with multiple streams, the drive must seek back and forth between them. I suspect that each stream accumulates a buffer (few megabytes) before accessing the disk, so as to take a fair advantage of the faster streaming numbers. But when seeking, the arm might have to traverse the whole distance across the disk. Since these drives are deliberately slowed down on the seek to reduce noise, this might take 20+ milliseconds. To prevent dropouts, the designers must take into account the worst case conditions, and arrange the three streams for worst case seeks (the downside of designing for real time systems). I hope that the allocation unit on the disk is the same size as the buffers, otherwise fragmentation would also become an issue. I suspect that 3 streams is all she can do (otherwise we could record all three tuners and watch a show off disk too).


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## Allen Noland (Apr 23, 2002)

Here is a link to a pdf that shows the specs on Maxto'rs QuickVIEW DVR HDD's.

http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/data_sheets/quickview_data_sheet.pdf

I'm not sure how will they will do with mpeg2 HD streams. It says on the second page that it will handle 4 6MB/s HD streams. Isn't true 1080i 14+MB/s? So unless you use WM9 encoding for your data stream your not going to get 4 streams out of these HDD's.

More on topic to this thread, why haven't we heard about this in regards to the rest of the dish DVR's. People have been soft booting (restarting) computers for a long time and knowone has ever said anything about it being hard on the HDD's. If they want us to power the thing off to reboot they should have put an ON/OFF switch on the back.

And don't for get, this thing re-boots its self more than I have to manually re-boot it.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

pculley said:


> Your numbers are good for continuous streaming, but when working with multiple streams, the drive must seek back and forth between them. I suspect that each stream accumulates a buffer (few megabytes) before accessing the disk, so as to take a fair advantage of the faster streaming numbers. But when seeking, the arm might have to traverse the whole distance across the disk. Since these drives are deliberately slowed down on the seek to reduce noise, this might take 20+ milliseconds. To prevent dropouts, the designers must take into account the worst case conditions, and arrange the three streams for worst case seeks (the downside of designing for real time systems). I hope that the allocation unit on the disk is the same size as the buffers, otherwise fragmentation would also become an issue. I suspect that 3 streams is all she can do (otherwise we could record all three tuners and watch a show off disk too).


I understand all that - which is a good part of why I de-spec'd the 133 down to 30. The reality is that I've had no problems recording an HD stream, an SD stream and watching two SD streams (via PIP - yes, it CAN be done).


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

A_Noland said:


> ... the specs on Maxtor's QuickVIEW DVR HDD's ... It says on the second page that it will handle 4 6MB/s HD streams. Isn't true 1080i 14+MB/s?


I think you're confusing MBytes and Mbits.

From an earlier post of mine:
_An HDTV feed maxes out at 20Mb/sec b=(bit), or 2.5MB/sec_

In any event, there is agreement - 4 streams ain't a problem.


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