Just had a frightening (to me at least) encounter with my receptor. I think it's an older "REV B" running v1.6 of the OS.
I arrived at a rehearsal and the receptor was locked in the "startup failed. entering recovery mode - restart/reboot/shutdown" endless cycle. I checked several posts and tried reseating cards, etc.., but nothing worked.
After digging very deep I found myself in front of a linux command prompt with root access. I found the logs folder and after a few hours of searching found that two of the registry files "system.reg" and "user.reg" had been corrupted - actually partially overwritten with what appeared to be boot log info (or the info you get when you boot in "verbose" more). Looked like this:
Setting network parameters: [ OK ]
Bringing up loopback interface: [ OK ]
Bringing up interface eth0: [ OK ]
Starting xinetd: [ OK ]
ALSA driver is already running.
etc...
Anyway I was able to clean the registry files (fortunately the garbage lines were inserted into the front of the registry files, not overwriting them (I think, at least), but the whole process suddenly made me very nervous that something this weird could happen. I was dead in the water 48 hours before a gig. Thankfully it wasn't the day of a gig or I would have been screwed. I know this can happen with any box, but in the case of the Receptor, I think a drive cloning utility would be extremely useful but it seems to be frowned upon (the plugin developers understandably nervous about copy protection).
Has anybody else had anything like this happen? I don't think it was the log file error mentioned in the boards, because I've got plenty of room on my boot partition (actually all of my partitions are no more than 30% full). What could cause this to happen? It was working fine and then a short car ride to the rehearsal studio and the registry was corrupted. It's like the boot info was being piped into the registry file instead of, say, the screen.
It seems like my fixes worked because the machine is up and running, but I'm super nervous now... but I was lucky to fix my registry files and make copies of them to my laptop just in case this happens again. Maybe instead of drive clones, a registry backup option would be nice. Problem is that all non-iLok protected plugins store their authorization info in the registry and it becomes a copy-protection issue again, I suppose.
Unsettling
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- KVRist
- 411 posts since 25 Apr, 2007 from Northern CA
Thanks for posting this detailed troubleshooting account...
It also brings up a good point: we should have a way to reset the Receptor to a default state. Since the Receptor is an operating system based device that is not flashed to NVRAM (or similar), we (the customer) need to be able to start over if things go awry. If 'rbcairns' was not able to solve this problem on his own, he would have been forced to rely on Muse for support in the form of a service charge.
We need ISO images for installing the Receptor OS.
JR
It also brings up a good point: we should have a way to reset the Receptor to a default state. Since the Receptor is an operating system based device that is not flashed to NVRAM (or similar), we (the customer) need to be able to start over if things go awry. If 'rbcairns' was not able to solve this problem on his own, he would have been forced to rely on Muse for support in the form of a service charge.
We need ISO images for installing the Receptor OS.
JR
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- KVRer
- Topic Starter
- 9 posts since 2 Mar, 2006
Follow-up...Well, it made it through a rehearsal...We'll see what happens at the gig tonight. I haven't had a chance to speak with tech support at MUSE yet, and I'm curious to get their take on it. My big fear is that there's something else in the registry file that's fouled up and is waiting to wreak havoc in the middle of a set. The good news is i'm extra conservative with my use (mostly samples loaded into RAM, minimal DFD...no patch changes - ever...everything just loaded up and on different midi channels and clever mapping) that I think as long as it's loaded, I should theoretically be fine.
The whole experience is making me honestly think about retiring the Receptor after this show and putting together a laptop-based solution. At least I know I can have a drive backup with my entire setup ready to go at a moment's notice. When the Receptor was dead, I was able to get my entire live setup onto my laptop (most of it is in Kontakt) in a very short amount of time and that got me through a rehearsal. I could borrow/rent/buy a new laptop and have my setup on it in less than 2 hours. If a receptor drive goes down, no way. I'm baffled by Muse's enginners earlier posts about drive cloning ("...what makes you assume it's the drive that's going to fail?"). ??? They've got way to much faith in drives. Plus, that's sort of the worst case scenario, which is what you have to plan for. Even if a hardware synth went down, there's usually a way to backup patches and you could rent a spare and load your patches back on it quickly.
Maybe it's time to simply go acoustic...it's just that there are no lightweight keyboards that have decent piano sounds. You need something like NI Akoustic Piano or Ivory, frankly. I find Akoustic Piano's upright the most playable for pop stuff (as long as you eq it heavily)...Ivory's pianos sound better, but they don't handle poppy singer/songwriter-style playing as well.
But I digress...
Fingers crossed....
The whole experience is making me honestly think about retiring the Receptor after this show and putting together a laptop-based solution. At least I know I can have a drive backup with my entire setup ready to go at a moment's notice. When the Receptor was dead, I was able to get my entire live setup onto my laptop (most of it is in Kontakt) in a very short amount of time and that got me through a rehearsal. I could borrow/rent/buy a new laptop and have my setup on it in less than 2 hours. If a receptor drive goes down, no way. I'm baffled by Muse's enginners earlier posts about drive cloning ("...what makes you assume it's the drive that's going to fail?"). ??? They've got way to much faith in drives. Plus, that's sort of the worst case scenario, which is what you have to plan for. Even if a hardware synth went down, there's usually a way to backup patches and you could rent a spare and load your patches back on it quickly.
Maybe it's time to simply go acoustic...it's just that there are no lightweight keyboards that have decent piano sounds. You need something like NI Akoustic Piano or Ivory, frankly. I find Akoustic Piano's upright the most playable for pop stuff (as long as you eq it heavily)...Ivory's pianos sound better, but they don't handle poppy singer/songwriter-style playing as well.
But I digress...
Fingers crossed....
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SurfacePatterns SurfacePatterns https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=193046
- KVRist
- 54 posts since 7 Nov, 2008 from Woodland Hills, CA.
+1.johnrule wrote:We need ISO images for installing the Receptor OS.