# BUG REPORT L224: Can't search, daily schedule stuck, no future events



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

After getting the Voom channels added this morning, I can no longer use the "Search" feature on the 942. If I press the search button and enter in text to search for and press the search button, I instantly get the Search Results screen with no items listed. Normally in the upper left of the results box, it will show the number of items found. On my screen it simply says "Error'. Search worked fine last night.

In a possibly related issue, after the Voom channels were added I could not use channel up or down on the remote to access them. I had to go through the Guide or type in the channel number. A soft-boot restored channel up/down.

I spent about an hour on the phone with tech support this afternoon and we tried many things - soft boot, hard boot, reset to defaults, check switch, unpowering the switch, etc. My issue has been referred to engineering.

This is probably isolated to me. A corrupted file or something, but here's a bug report in case anyone else has this issue.

*MORE:* I didn't try this earlier, but Themes don't work either. Same results as above.

_EDIT: For some reason I wasn't presented with the option to post this as a poll, and I can't seem to edit to add it. _


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

I'd confirm with you Mike, but my 942 doesn't have the voom channels authorized yet. I'm hoping for tomorrow...


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

I really don't think it's Voom related. Maybe a cache file got corrupted when I rebooted or something. What's the holdup on Voom for you? I thought you'd have it by now. Nice temporary dish install, by the way.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

I have them just fine on my 921, but my 942 is on a different account.


----------



## M492A (Nov 18, 2004)

Voom channels? Am I living under a rock?


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Mike - check out the General Dish discussion forum. If you haven't been online all weekend, then yes, you have been living under a rock...


----------



## M492A (Nov 18, 2004)

Mark Lamutt said:


> Mike - check out the General Dish discussion forum. If you haven't been online all weekend, then yes, you have been living under a rock...


Wow - cool news!! I guess I have been under a rock! Thanks!


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

I spent about an hour on the phone this morning with Engineering on my "Search" problem.

My problem could not be corrected or replicated in the lab. The hope is that this is a corrupted file and it will be overwritten or purged when the next software load comes. (There is no way to force a reload of the software.) If that doesn't fix it, or if I get tired of not being able to search, they will swap out my 942 and take a look at mine in the lab.


----------



## Pat A (May 29, 2002)

Mike, this sounds like a problem that I had a couple of weeks ago. See the discussion here:

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=40836

The work around that Dish techs gave me was to delete the timers and reenter them with the "protected" option. This seemed to snap my machine into working, and I have not had a problem since, even when entering timers without protection.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

Pat A - Thanks for the suggestion. I read through the thread and tried deleting my timers, power cycling and re-entering timers in protected mode. No luck, I still can't search or use themes.

Also of interest. The timers I created as "all episodes" or "new episodes" are not finding any programs in the guide except the ones I selected. (The timers can't "search" either.) I'm going to try the recommended procedures again...


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

OK, this does seem to be the same issue that is posted here.

Most of my timers were protected before running into this problem, so Pat's suggestion of protecting my timers is not fixing this problem for me.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Mike - if they are protected now, go in and unprotect them. Then re-protect them again. That operation does something to reinitialize the timer in the database record.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

Sorry, Mark. That isn't doing anything on my system.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Alrighty...did you try to delete all of your timers, reset factory defaults, power cord reboot, then add back your timers? That process helped me out of this situation once, but not another time.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

Yep, we tried that a couple times yesterday. 

At what point do you toggle the protection on the timers? When they are created or later? Also, only some of timers were protected when this problem started. Maybe I'm not hitting the right combo of protected/not protected. Maybe it's too late for that to work.

For review - I lost my search function Sunday, but at that time my timers created before Sunday were functioning fine. On Monday, I blew away all the timers, reset all the prefs to factory defaults and did a power cord reset then a check switch. Since then I've had the timer problem, too.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

If you toggle the protection of the created timers now, it should do it. Or, try this - go through, toggle the protection of today's timers, do a checkswitch which will force a guide data update, which will in turn force a reinitialization of the timer database, which should make today's timers show up in the daily schedule. Try that. 

This is the single most frustrating problem with the 942 right now because it's not consistent. It's happened to me twice, and both times the engineers had my 942 completely torn apart working on it to figure out what's causing the problem. I know that fixes have come from both times that it's happened to me, but obviously, there's still something else that can trigger it.


----------



## vettem (May 2, 2005)

I,m also having this problem you are describing about search, timers, & Dish pass.
I tried your suggestion to do a checkswitch to force a guide data update and it worked. I do hope this issue gets resolved soon.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

vettem - :welcome_s Sorry that you're having trouble, too, but I glad Mark's suggestion worked for you.

Mark, Tonight is a heavy timer night for me, but after they pass, I'll try the protection toggle and guide update again. Maybe it will work once today's timers pass.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Mike, mine's now happening to me again tonight as well. I was screwing around with my satellite dishes when I got home from work, and after a checkswitch, lost all my future timers and searches are erroring out now as well.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

At least I'm not alone! :grin:


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Well, I'm, strange in that I'm happy when this happens to me, because that gets us one definite step closer to getting it fixed. Especially, as they have full access to mine to see what's going on.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

mike_johnson said:


> I'll try the protection toggle and guide update again. Maybe it will work once today's timers pass.


Nope. It doesn't.  Argh!


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

In addition to this, I'm also now having the same problem that Allen posted the other day about the duplicate timer events being created for each timer you create. This is getting exciting...


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

After having none of the suggestions work to restore my search ability last night, I put my 942 in standby and went to bed. This morning, search is working! :hurah: I deleted and re-entered my timers and they populated the schedule as they should. :lol: 

The only thing that isn't working is the Theme Search for Movies. It returns zero matches.  The rest of the Theme Searches bring up expected results. 

I think I'll stay away from the Check Switch test for awhile.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Congratulations! Mine's going from bad to worse at the moment... I'm hoping to hit bottom here soon, and start coming back to the surface.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

Theme Search for Movies works today. I think everything is back to normal. 

Mark, have you ever tried to fix this by changing the daily update time, instead of forcing a guide update by doing a check switch? Just a thought I didn't get to try since mine seemed to "heal" itself.


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Mine started working for me again this morning as well, probably after the guide update last night. I'm beginning to wonder if there's some garbage data that's being transmitted in the guide data from the satellite that's cauing the 942 corrupt the stored data.

I've changed the guide update time several times. It hasn't helped me, personally. I'd gone through 3 nights of guide updates before last night's which apparently made things start working again.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

Hmmm - Mine also cleared up after three nights of guide updates.....Maybe that's important.


----------



## BillM (Apr 27, 2005)

I'm seeing the timers come and go repeatly as well. Strangely, I've done the check switch a couple of times and still had the timers not return, although the check switch worked oddly in that the two counters for running test N of 38 were running out of sync with each other. Power cycleing, and then running check switch and getting a new guide load fixed it.

Today we started to see strange bars across both live TV and playback events. Again, running the check switch and guide reload didn't help, but power cycling and then doing same did clear things up.

The Wife Acceptance Factor is in serious decline over these problems, so hopefully we'll some some fixes soon..


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

My search and timer problem came back again. I haven't figured out the magic combo to bring it back.....


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

So, 6 days of working for you Mike, and it failed again. It was 3 days of guide updates to get it working before. Let's see if the pattern holds (assuming that a new software version doesn't download today, and/or doesn't fix the problem)...you should be working again after Saturday night's update. Or, try and speed it up by resetting the guide update time three times today. Worth a shot, if you haven't tried it already.

I've got two 942s at the moment, one at L224 and one on a later beta, and both were still working normally as of this morning.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

Mark, I'm not sure what triggered it. It was gone this morning when I turned it on. I haven't done any check switches lately, although we did have heavy rain overnight which could have caused a loss of signal.

I think I'll try changing the guide update time X3 and see what happens. I'm stuck here at home recovering from hand surgery, so I've got time to kill.


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

Ok, I went into the preferences and changed the daily update time to 08:30 PM. Waited for the update to complete, and changed the time to 8:40 PM. Waited for that update to complete, and then changed the time to 8:50 PM. After the 8:50 update was finished, my search is back to normal, and my timers are populating again. I did NOT check between updates to see if things were functional.

Interesting. Beats waiting 3 days!


----------



## Mike Johnson (Jan 16, 2005)

Mark Lamutt said:


> Or, try and speed it up by resetting the guide update time three times today.


 Mark - Just in case you missed my post, this actually worked.
Mike J


----------



## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

I definitely saw it, Mike.


----------



## normang (Nov 14, 2002)

Well, I posted this in the L226 thread, and I cannot manaully search for anything (it did work, I have history on the list) and I have not tried it with new or dish pass, but may just for grins. I guess the question is, because of the seeming randomness of this issue, do I call Dish and get them involved at this point, or do I try and get it replaced?? Decisions, Decisions...


----------

