DM500HD clone - won't boot

Got one of these today, knew I'd eventually need to join a forum and start looking for advice and help, but didn't realise it was going to be so soon...

I've attached a photo of an error screen I was getting. The unit since will show an enigma boot screen, then goes black, with the red light on the front of the receiver flashing.

I had the unit running for several hours, had 4 satellites scanned in, even the Ka-Sat from 9E with my new LNB, although I had to put the setting at 8PSK for it to work (it should apparently be QPSK, but it wouldn't work at that setting). One thing I did notice was that I was watching one of the 9E channels, and when I tried going to one of the other sats, I saw a message about the tuner not being available. It's possible it was trying to record (though there was no USB drive attached), or was waiting for a timer event to begin, but I'm not sure.

I wrote down some info from the info screen before it went belly-up:
Enigma: 2011-01019-experimental
Image: Newnigma2-release-2011-01-22

What I'm wondering is if it looks like it should be recoverable? And if it is, what are the steps involved?

Will be grateful for any helpful advice or pointers. Cheers.

Thanks for the reassurance, have looked at a few tutorials, and trying to get connected to the box.

I don't have a router here. Should it be possible to connect to the box directly to PC with a crossover cable?

I've installed the CP210x drivers, and DreamUP is correctly seeing the DM500HD, but when I try a few IP addresses, I can't seem to get connected to it. PC is 192.168.0.1, and I've tried increments up to 192.168.0.6.

I hadn't, but didn't realise that the IP would be displayed on-screen when booting the box up with the front button pressed in (it's not something I saw mentioned in any of the tutorials I read).

Anyway, the crossover cable worked, and I managed to get an image from some other forum, as any 210 image link I tried to get from here were dead.

Scanning at the moment, so back in business. Once I get the hang of this, I'll have to start experimenting with the various images, find one I like the look of and comfortable working with. The channel listing is quite different to what I'm used to, so hoping it can be customised to my liking.

This new image I installed crashes every time I press the "Info" button on the remote.

Is this something I'm going to have to get used to, or is there some rock-steady image that I should be looking out for? Seems like I'll need to install something like coolTV anyway, so if I have the box connected up to the PC again, I might as well install a good image if there is one.

Quote from Ureyesonly

which image you usein? And which sim is init?

LS-dm500hd-ramiMAHER.nfi
ramiMAHER-experimental
Experimental 2011-0515

Sim is 210.

Is there a better one? It seems to be working ok, except for the crash and restart every time the info button is pressed. Have to say that I'm pleased at the speed at which channels change.

Thanks for the link.

Have it loaded up, and it seems good so far. Next thing is to figure out how to make it grab the EPG on 28E.

It does.

It has 2 choices of provider, listed as 28.2 and 28.4. I tried both, and it took a minute or so, as it looked like it was grabbing, but they didn't seem to work, still only now and next. I set up the config to use the USB stick for storing the downloaded info, but no joy. I must be missing something stupid, I'll stick at it.

When I took the USB stick to the PC, there were files there, but they were only a couple of kb in size.

I'll read some more, will figure it out eventually. Then learn how to get the channels sorted, deleted and saved.

I definitely do now - when I say that, I was able to play any media on it, and it was coming up as a device in the configuration part of crossepg, and when I pressed the blue button to "UMount" it asked me if I wanted to unmount the drive. Maybe it wasn't mounted correctly, as there are a few usb things (like usb, usb1 and usb2). Anyway, when I went to the device info screen, it wasn't showing up there, but eventually I got it to show up there too (I'm new to these Linux boxes, but I'm getting there!).

So with the USB stick definitely mounted, and trying to download the epg onto it, it looked like it was doing it, I could see the access light on the stick blinking, but I still have only now and next for the UK FTA channels.

There is a SES Astra bouquet (German channels) that was preprogrammed in the favourites, and it's showing several days, and the RTENL channels are showing a populated EPG too, but they've always been populated, even before I switched to this newer image; might have something to do with that they're all on the same TP.

Any suggestions?

Another thing I was wondering is the loading of plugins, can they be put onto a memory stick, and loaded that way, or do I need to connect the box to the PC to do that?

Ok, for some reason it worked this morning, when I used the crossepg downloader in the Plugins menu. I had tried that before, but it didn't work, and I didn't change anything since, and now it works.

Does the box need to be shut down and booted up again for any changes to be made "stuck"? Or do the channels need to be in a "bouquet" for them to properly fetch the EPG?

Also, when the box is in deep standby, should the standby button on the remote wake it up? Because it's not working here, I need to press the button on the front panel of th box to get it started again.

I finally got a chance to try that last image, but once I had it loaded, and went into the Network menu to see what IP address it had, so that I could restore my bouquets, etc., the system just crashes.

I'll try restoring the previous image I had on, as it wasn't too bad, I still wasn't able to get the picons to work, but I think there was just the one menu item that was causing crashes with the previous image, the menu where you can check fan speed and temperatures.

I'll have a look at openpli in the meantime, unless there are some other images I can try.