Help much appreciated please

[jimbojones1989]

Sorry for the long post in advance, I?m trying to add in as much detail as possible.

Hi, I am having various problems with my vu+ duo and at the moment am at the end of my wits with the box and am running out of patience. I have tried searching through loads of different forums throughout the past year to try and resolve it but haven?t had any joy so far.
I bought a VU+ Duo from World of Sat in Dec 2012 (so it must be genuine) and installed a 1TB WD Green HDD. I played around with a VIX image but fresh out of the box I started getting green screen crashes with it so I ditched the VIX image for BlackHole and had it set up with BlackHole running fine with CCCam for a while. After a month or two I realised the limitations of my setup because the flash would get filled up quickly by CrossEPG and would crash constantly (I had CrosEPG setup to HDD but when the HDD was in use, CrossEPGwould default to internal flash.) Then I setup a USB for crossepg and picons but then box would still crash, I figured this was because of all the plugins taking up flash space.

I then read up on MeoBoot and for the next few months had a MeoBoot setup running from an 8GB Sandisk USB.
Started experiencing constant crashes with the box and when rebooting the box, the front display would either get stuck on ?Starting? and boot up fine but have no response from the remote control until I would have to restart the box again. Sometimes the box, when booting up would display garbled up letters that would resemble ?Reading USB? but all misspelt or rearranged and I would have to keep rebooting the box until ?starting? would appear, then a quick split second flash of ?reading USB? which would then revert back to ?starting? for the box to boot up properly. The plugin?s I regularly installed on the box with every reflash were CCCam 2.3, TSPanel, 1channel, TSMedia, Autobouquets maker, (Sometimes on demand iplayer,4od.)

I then thought it was a problem with the 8GB file size of the USB drive and that maybe it was interfering with the boot sequence as the box was checking if there was an image on the USB so I downgraded to a 4GB Sandisk USB and started playing around with ?avalon universes? instead to expand the flash but still kept getting green screen crashes without logs.

Then maybe I thought it could be a problem with the bootloader so reflashed the boot loader cfe 3.0 and then reinstalled BlackHole 2.0.8 worked fine for a while, set up with all the same plugins but then again started crashing without logs, sometimes would get a green screen right at the startup with the crash logs showing a date of 1970.

So I got fed up last week and installed VIX 3.0.808, setup the channels, bouquets, CrossEPG, CCCam, TSPanel and TSMedia. Setup a 96M swap file on the 4GB USB, timeshift on HDD but now and again the box freezes up with no warning (Sometimes if i leave it long enough it will reboot itself), not even running a plugin, just watching normal channels, TSPanel tells me I have 46mb free in flash and I?ve tried looking but there are no Crash logs to be found. Also the box has started experiencing the bootup problems again when I restart it, garbled display or box loads up but display is stuck on ?starting? but not able to control it with the remote.

I know it would be more helpful with crash logs but so far I havent found any to share.
Does anyone have any idea what could be wrong or any possible solution to this peculiar problem? Any tips/advice? Or any clarification on returns, I bought it from World Of Sat, I?m not sure but I think EU warranty might be 2 years.

[digicon]

Dont quote me on this but i think the warranty with World of satellite is 12 months standard pretty much like all the other e-tailors

[DOUGALMCD]

Vix menu > setup > system > logs You say it had vix on from start but you were getting green screens so ditched it for bh it's bh that you get green screens on. What happens if you leave all or most plugins off when reflashing does box work ok? Try checking logs on vix screen.

[jimbojones1989]

Vix menu > setup > system > logs You say it had vix on from start but you were getting green screens so ditched it for bh it's bh that you get green screens on. What happens if you leave all or most plugins off when reflashing does box work ok? Try checking logs on vix screen.

My bad, I was using 'green screen' as a generic term for crashes/endless spinning Vix logo. I got some advice from another forum that it could be a problem with the hdd/USB so am going to try and run without them to see if it affect the stability.
The more I read about it, the more I think that it might be a problem with one of the capacitors as sometimes when I power cycle the the box off and on from the switch at the back too quickly, I do get a solid red light and have to power cycle it again to get the box to start up.

[DOUGALMCD]

Duo's have had problems with capacitors memory leaks etc clones with powering motors and hdd's because of crap psu's etc etc The usual cap problem was c807 You are best to try the box without hdd's and usb first if all works then install plugins etc one at a time to make sure stable. Make sure you mount all hdd and usb properly and set the paths to these correctly so as not to fill the internal flash.

[jimbojones1989]

Just a quick update, will post full details for future reference when I get time.
From the replies i received from this forum and others i had narrowed it down to definitely being a hardware problem and not a software one as it was affecting the bootup procedure straight from the get go. I decided to experiment with different h/W configurations to narrow it down and since i have been running the box without the hard drive and only the USB for swapfile purposes it has been running glitch free. Now that im happy its the HDD, my next step will be to try to stick in a 320gb hdd from an old sky hd box and will update with results.