Unresponsive box - any way to reset without access to menus?

Phil Cooper

New Member
Hi

I have an HDR Fox T2 running the latest version of the custom firmware and it has been doing so for many months quite happily. However, I decided to try out the detectads plugin and now with hindsight this appears to have been a rather foolish move. I found that it caused all sorts of lock ups and freezes so removed it. However, that only seems to have made things worse.

The situation I am now faced with is a box that will boot up and quite happily show the last channel it was tuned to (Channel 4 in this case) but is completely unresponsive to any button presses on the remote. I did have access via the web interface (albeit with very painfully slow load times) but even that now seems to have failed with connection timed out messages being returned.

It would appear that the hard disk is being accessed, as I can hear what sounds like it being written to, so I'm guessing that some sort of processing is taking place that is consuming all the cpu time and making the box completely unresponsive.

I have tried powering down and leaving for a while but with no change in its behaviour when powered back up again.

Is there any way to perform a factory reset without access to the menu system or the web interface?

If not, what's the best way to get the box functioning again? Would swapping out the hard drive for a new one work?
 
quick update - web interface access is back \o/

I've also managed to get in via Telnet. So any suggestions on what I can try next? Should I just try a Custom Firmware Reset?
 
Note that it may be entirely coincidental that your problem occurred at the same time as installing the detectads package.

Yes it may well be, it just so happened that that was the only change I've made in months though and so one can't help but wonder if that was the cause. Anyhow, I'll try the System Flush update when I get home this evening and see if that gets things working again.
 
If you have Telnet access, then try removing detectads and see if normality returns after a reboot.
Code:
humax# opkg remove detectads
I don't think a system flush will fix the problem here BICBW.
 
Last edited:
If you have Telnet access, then try removing detectads and see if normality returns after a reboot.
Code:
humax# opkg remove detactads
I don't think a system flush will fix the problem here BICBW.

Unfortunately, I have already removed detectads and rebooted several times since doing so :(
 
Does running top provide any clues as to CPU usage? You'll need to install the procps package.
 
Success! System flush did the trick and I have an operational box again. I had one recording from last night that appears to be corrupted so maybe that was the issue? Thank you for everyone's input.
 
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