I recently upgraded my Thomson DHD4000 with a 120Gb disc using information from this site (thanks guys). I have been very pleased with the results up to now, but noticed an increased number of software crashes. The usual symptoms are the box freezes up and does not respond to any user input, either from the remote or the front panel. Normally, the way to correct this is by cycling the power off and on again. This usually restores it to life with all recordings and program guide intact.

In the past few days the problem has got much worse. I originally thought there was a hardware failure, as the box would not work at all. However, when I tried it on the workbench I discovered that it is something in the signal from the aerial that is causing the problem.

If you power up the box with the aerial connected it fails to power up correctly. The lights flash a bit but then it freezes with either the orange or red light on and no picture on the TV. Nothing you do with the buttons will make it come on fully.

However, if you power up with the aerial disconnected, it works fine. The box goes through the normal power up sequence, the red light comes on, and then the green light comes on when you take it out of standby. In this state, you can use all the menus and playback any recordings. BUT, as soon as you reconnect the aerial, everything freezes up again.

At the moment the fault is absolutely consistent and repeatable. Whenever you connect the aerial, the box locks up immediately, whether you are looking at the menu or playing back a recording. The hard disc itself seems to be OK, since you can play recordings provided that you leave the aerial disconnected.

Has anyone else noticed anything similar and can anyone suggest a cure? It seems to be a software bug, so I suppose the only proper cure is for Thomson to correct the software.

I have had exactly the same problem twice now
It happened the first time back in August at which time I found that if I wiped the drive in my PC the problem went away.
The second time it happened, I found that starting up with the aerial disconnected and reverting the software. Then powering down, reconnecting the aerial and starting up again solved the problem. I then spent several weeks waiting for the software update to download again before I realised that I had to use the menu option to re-upgrade the firmware.
However, I did loose the contents of my drive, in the process.
I have been working in Africa for the last 2 months and my wife phoned me to say that the box had gone into limbo again. I talked her through reverting the firmware and it came back to life again. But yet again we lost the contents of the drive includig all the shows I was going to catch up on when I got back

My best guess is that some of the files are getting corrupted, probably some of the channel guide ones, which is why it has a problem starting with the aerial connected.

I hope this helps you out.

This week I have had four days where, in the morning, the box develops slug-like responses and eventually becomes completely refractory to signals from the remote control. Thankfully a power cycle restores the normal activity and it works fine thereafter with no loss of previous recordings.

My superficial interpretation is that it seems to be a phase where the overnight download is mucking things up again - whether it's a prelude to the arrival of an update, goodness only knows.

Perhaps avoiding the overnight EPG update might be a solution. Try switching off the box at the mains overnight and see what happens (unless you really want that programming schedule for one day, 2 weeks ahead).

I have thankfully (so far) escaped from this problem but it has affected quite a few people. It's been caled the YLD - yellow light of death - and the recovery method is the pedrovski method. From what I've read here it's totally recoverable from so long as you only connect the aerial after the hard drive has spun down and don't touch the thing until it has downloaded overnight.

Thanks to everyone for your help. It's now working again.

It turns out I had the classic Yellow Light of Death (YLD) problem described elsewhere on this forum. This made the box totally unusable since it would not power up at all with the aerial connected. The Pedrovski method recommended by slimgym completely cured it.

Although the box is still prone to crashing, we now have the technology to fix it.

Note to Cotman. It may not always be necessary to revert the software to an earlier version. It may be that the Pedrovski method is sufficient by itself.

Interesting - I upgraded my HDD this week and have had several of these freezes - I'd put it down to the upgraded disk.

It did seem to happen much more with BBC1 - I wonder if there is some interactive stuff going on, or other MHEG issues, which might be contributing to this? Of course, it could be the new HDD too....

Matt

Its only happened to me once, and I was able to rescue it following the same method, and kept the latest software and my recordings.

That was ages ago. The box works "near perfect" at the moment. About 1 crash (not YLD) every month on average at the moment.

Dave

Just to let you know - I've now taken out the 120Gb disk and put back the original Thomson 40Gb one.

I had so many crashes and YLD problems with the larger disk that I decided to cut my losses. It's a real shame, as the extra storage was so useful.

I don't think the 120Gb disk is faulty per se. It seems as if there is a software bug that is more likely to occur with bigger drives.

Just to add my observations to this tale of woe.

I've owned a DHD4000 since October 2005 and have also upgraded to a 120Gb Samsung 1203n hard drive. I think I too have been experiencing more random lock ups and unresponsiveness to the remote control since this upgrade. Up to now these have all been fixed by cycling the power off and on. It's difficult to know if I'm getting more lock ups now than with the 40 Gb drive because that was only in for about a month (couldn't wait to get my screwdrivers out!) and I definately power cycled at least twice with the 40Gb drive to resolve freezes.

The box then locked 0ver the Xmas weekend whist receiving BBC2 (unable to change channel, no access to menu's, unable to turn off via remote) and power cycling with the aerial in led to a Yellow Light of Death. Power cycling without the aerial allows the box to boot and it will happily play recordings. This is also completly consistent and repeatable.

I've since been able to retrieve the box by unplugging the aerial, booting the box to red light standby, waiting half an hour and replacing the aerial, then leaving the box overnight for its next EPG update as suggested in the 'Pedrovski Method' above.

Other details which may be pertinent are: I'm receiving from Crystal Palace with a signal strength of 6 and a quality of 9. I was wondering if there was any relationship between signal strength/quality as measured by the Thomson and its propensity to crash?
Some of the lock ups on the box have occured when moving through the calendar menu and finding channels with no programme information which should have (eg BBC1).
Finally I was wondering whether the channels both tuners are tuned prior to its downloading the EPG may be relevant. I'm going to endeavor to leave the box tuned to non BBC channels (as it was tuned to BBC 2 when it developed YLD) and will post again if it's of interest.

I have owned a dhd 4000 since the first week they came to the shops - I think it was Oct 2004 (I have had no real problems until now)

I have followed this forum since then and have had some great information from it.

A couple of months ago, my thompson was out of warranty so i decided to replace the hd with a samsung - again following all the guidelines from this forum.
This worked great for 3 or 4 weeks and then behaviour, such as described in the last few posts, started.
(The unit starts to run slowly and locks up entirely - to get it to work again the unit needs to be powered off then on again.)

I immediately put this down to the new drive. After thinking about it, I wasn't sure - why would it have worked fine for a couple of weeks and then played up? Also, it would have long periods of working fine - a few days at a time.

At the moment I am having to power-cycle it approx every 2-3 days, sometimes twice in one go.

Regardless of new hard drives - everyone that is commenting on this problem seems to have encountered it starting round about the same time - a short while before Christmas! I think it is something that has changed in the firmware and not the drive replacement! It just looks that way on this forum because most of the people here HAVE replaced their drives anyway. I think if not everyone is experiencing the same problem it must be due to some other trend.

My drive is now over 50% full and that seems to have coincided with an increase in the problem.

Finally, my dad - who bought his unit about 4 months ago - AND HAS NOT CHANGED HIS DRIVE - is getting exactly the SAME symptoms.

A call to thompson i think!

Hi

I have not plucked up the courage to upgrade my disc yet;however, I have experienced some of the above problems since the week before Xmas.It appears to be linked to the overnight EPG download in my case.The Pedrovski recovery has worked its magic every time.[Magic].

I've swapped my drive for a 120GB and my dads unit is as it came out of the box, and neither of us have these problems. I'd maybe put it down to EPG corruption and remove the partition on a PC then re-fit it, but I don't believe they are currently transmitting 1.7.7 so you might have a wait for the code to come back.

Please let us know what Thomson support say though, I don't want to suffer from this either!

Slimgym said, "I don't believe they are currently transmitting 1.7.7".

I'm very interested in this statement, because I bought a DHD-4000 form Comet on Friday 30th December, and can't get it to update (it's running 0.31.0 software, and a revert changes it to 0.30.5. I get 7-day EPG updates and the Hits channel fine, although at a signal strength of 5-6).

The man on the Thomson helpline last Tuesday told me that the 1.7.7 updates were still being transmitted ("every Saturday and Tuesday night"), and I must have a faulty box. An exchange will be difficult because it was Comet's last box (off the display)!

Of course, if the 1.77 software is no longer being transmitted, then my box isn't "faulty" anyway. Slimgym, what makes you think the 1.7.7 update is no longer being transmitted?

Only someone at work did a disk swap and hasn't had it updated in the last few weeks. I suggested she went through the restore software exercise just to see if it had made itself dormant but didn't hear back whether this had given her back 1.7.7. I would like to think they were transmitting it but it seems odd both you and her are not getting updated..

Unlike the Fusion, the Thomson does not keep its software on disk so once you have 1.7.7 you have it until you do a 'revert software'. It's burnt into flash memory somewhere off-disk. Those that have never had it have to wait until it's broadcast again. Those that have reverted it (or had it factory pre-installed but reverted as happened to many who bought the box just after 1.7.7 was first transmitted) have to do another 'revert software' to get it back. The "reverted" copy may be kept on disk, I'm not sure about its location - so if you change the disk then you may lose the ability to revert to the alternate software. The software is transmitted on channel 300 which is on MUX D so you need to have decent reception from this MUX to be able to receive the update. Check some of the other channels that reside on MUX D (http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/terrestrial/mux) to make sure that you have adequate reception. You can 'revert' between the two alternating versions as many times as you like (until the flash memory wears out!).

Er, yes it does. The system stores the new firmware image on disk during the OTA download. It checks for an on-disk image newer than it's current firmware when booting and if there is one, updates itself.

From what I remember when 1.7.7 was released the on-disk image (run.bin) is removed a few days later.

This seems to be common to all 4TV based PVRs.

On another note, it does seem that the 4TV EPG and firmware updates have been suffering problems (or are undergoing some changes) in recent weeks. Typical symptoms are weird EPG problems, no firmware downloads and incorrect EPG data. The latter has been happening a lot since some time before xmas and is becoming a real nuisance. I have missed so many programmes (because the EPG said one thing but an entirely different program was broadcast) that I am double checking against the standard freeview EPG to make sure I don't miss anything else.

Hi pedrovski

So if you use the data extractor tool written by another member we can grab the firmware on our own Thomson? Thanks

Apparently, I have not tried either of the extractor tools as I do not use MS Windows.

Check the data extraction thread in the digifusion forum.

You can use either Karl Eccleson's 'Syphon' or Daniel Hope's 'Fusion Viewer' to try and extract recordings from the Thomson HDD, but there are problems with some Thomson recordings not transferring properly (even with the newer program versions). This is probably due to minor differences in the way that Thomson file information is stored, and not a fault of the software code which was really written to work on the Fusion.

Some of us are on the case, but as with these spare-time projects I'm afraid it will take some time to adapt things.

Yes, but the point I was making is that unlike the Fusion, removing the hard disk from the DHD4000 does not automatically downgrade your software.

Maybe it is but it's already flashed it by then and it's then permanent.

I tried both pieces of software on my original drive (which I think had 1.7.7 when I took it out) and neither showed up a run.bin.