Firmware hung

Community Archives WD TV Live Hub Firmware
1

Hi, I wonder if anyone can help with this.  I’ve done a search and can’t see a similar problem described here.

I’m running the latest firmware and everything has been fine with it for a few days - a little slugish starting up maybe, but nothing too bad.   Today, the remote became unresponsive whilst viewing one of the video directories, the ‘back’ button wouldn’t work - in fact the only button on the remote that worked was the power off button.   When the box was powered up again, the screen was corrupted with just corrupt lines displaying on the TV (like pink and green colours) - even after a full power off with the power plug removed for a few hours hasn’t cured it… as soon as it’s powered up again, the corrupt lines display straight away.

I’ve had something similar before, but with the power pulled totally out for a few hours freed up the firmware and it was fine afterwards.   This time it seems to be taking a lot longer with no power to free the firmware.

I’m quite used to laptops and phones and such locking the firmware and needed to discharge all power from the capacitors before it frees up - I’ve seen it a few times cause i’m an IT manager -  but i’m only guessing that this is a similar problem to that because leaving the power out overnight worked last time it happened… so my questions are 

a)  has anyone else got this problem with the new firmware (or earlier)?  Is it indeed just a crashed firmware issue?

b)  does anyone know other than leaving it with the power plug completely out overnight  that I can try to bring it back sooner?  There aren’t any video files on the hub itself because i hold them all on external drives rather than the internal 1tb one…so is there a full reset sequence that would restore it?

Thanks in advance for any useful replies…

2

The “Unplug for a few hours” thing is pretty much a myth.

If unplugging for a few hours does something different than unplugging for a few seconds, it’s not capacitor discharge – it’s heat related – solder joints / etc.

Restarting with the power plug is sufficient.  If you see the boot screen, then everything else is initialized to a known state.

The firmware boot image actually resides in FLASH, so pulling the plug doesn’t “Clear” the firmware.  It only clears RAM, which is re-initialized anyway at reboot.

But anyway, I think what you’ve got is a hardware failure.

You can try hooking it up with Composite Video cables, or try a new HDMI cable, etc to see if they’re involved.

3

Thanks for the reply.   I don’t think it’s  heat releated as the unti had only been on for a few minutes when it froze up and wasn’t warm at all to the touch.   leaving it for 3 hours didn’t work,  so if it was heat related you’d think it had cooled in 3hrs… however i’ve now left it 4 and a half hours since checking it that time and it’s booting and working fine again.   Again, it’s not going to have cooled any more in 4.5 hours than it did in 3hrs.

You say the firmware is held in RAM, which I didn’t know so thanks… that actually may explain something.

Anyway… it’s working again, so the missus can carry on watching her TV leaving me free to watch the footy… hooray.  :-)

thanks again for the reply.