I installed the first pvr500 card, ran the installation, configured the system, and the dual tuners on the card works perfectly.

I swapped the pvr500 for the other card and the dual tuners on that card work perfectly also.

At this point, a single pvr500 card doesn't prevent the linux desktop from appearing.

I put both pvr500 cards in and the boot process seems to be stuck trying to access the nvidia card.

Debian GNU/linux 4.0 Bigdog ttyl (I gave it the hostname bigdog because I already have a mythtv box on the network)

Checking nVidia video card installation

Then it flashes the screen on and off for a bit before displaying the following message and just sitting there.

Init: Id "c7" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes.

Right now I have 5 of that last Init message sitting there. It just doesn't seem to be able to load up the GUI.

The backend does seem to be running. I can access the mythweb services on that box from another machine.

If I pull one pvr500 card out, it loads the GUI rather than staying in text mode. It *did* seem to detect all 4 tuners on the system on bootup too.

I'm guessing there's some kind of conflict with having both cards in there and the video card.

Any ideas anyone?




knoppmyth R5E50
2 hauppage pvr-500 cards (analog, not digital or hd)
AMD 64 1800 mhz
1 mb ram
nVidia e-GeForce 7600 GS PCI-E using the PCI-E slot
320 meg wd hd (IDE)
ide dvd


EDIT:
I redid my search with just "respawning" and it's giving me some results.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... d++minutes

However, the driver works fine unless both cards are in the machine. So I don't think this is it.

Not sure about the "respawning too rapidly", but I would guess you are running into a udev issue. See bruce_s01's posts here http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13520 for tips on how to "anchor" the cards. Also see tjc's Hints and Hazards http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13108 for other things that udev may affect.

Thanks. It will probably take me some time to read it and absorb it.

Ok. I'm pretty much lost on this stuff.

It seems to be a problem that not extremely rare either. Some kind of issue with the current debian release.

I'm gonna just install the D7 release of mythtv on it. I still have the cd somewhere. Maybe I'll install the patch to get the new .20 stuff too, but the new version of Debian seems to be broken.

It's definitely not udev, unless the previous R5D1 had the same version of Debian.

I'm not getting the same error message, but the same thing is happening. It won't load xwindows with both pvr500 cards and the nvidia video card in there. Just one pvr500 works ok.

I played around with the bios settings, even turning off apci, but nothing is working. Something about the second card is conflicting with the video card, so that it doesn't find video on any of the /dev/video0 through /dev/videoX.

I'll keep hunting.

I had this problem right after I upgraded my nvidia drivers to the latest version in R5E50. What I had to do was remove the install-nvidia-debian script and re-install the drivers. The commands are:



I got this info from: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... highlight=

I don't know if this is related or not, but I hope this helps.

Thanks. It couldn't hurt.

borgednow,

I encountered the same symptoms when adding a PVR500 to my existing setup (MSI Neo2 Platinum, A64-3500@stock,2G Mem, nVidia 6600GT, with 2xHD3000 tuners) using R5E50.

In addition to the 'Init: Id "c7" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes.' messages, I was also seeing a ' kernel: allocation failed: out of vmalloc space - use vmalloc=<size> to increase size.' line in /var/log/messages.

I believe I've corrected my problem by editing /etc/lilo.conf to add a vmalloc kernel switch.
i.e.


After editing, you'll need to run 'lilo' as in the reminder comment of /etc/lilo.conf

I should probably have tried 192M, but just doubled the default 128M.

Now I just need to get my PVR500 (type B) to actually display something watchable instead of B&W static filled images.

- Leo

This wiki page is the central resource for tuner issues. There's a lot of information packed into the page, so read carefully, with attention to detail, and follow the links provided.
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=BlackScreenWatchingTV