A few Sunday mornings back, I was woken up by the dog, who was in a quite agitated state. The media center had been trying to come out of hibernation to check TV schedules and do the other miscellaneous stuff that brings it out of sleep. However, it kept rebooting instantly out of the BIOS. Every time the memory check passed, it would beep, annoying the dog, who passed the annoyance onto me.
Unplugging the Cisco Valet Connector allowed the media center to boot properly. Cool, well not really, as a WiFi adapter should not keep a computer from booting. The fact that the Valet Connector shows up as a USB flash drive before becoming a WiFi adapter seemed odd to be before. And, I’m placing part of the blame on that behavior for this constant rebooting. To resolve the issue, I removed USB flash drives from the boot list in the motherboard’s BIOS.
When the media center finally booted, I noticed another issue. The Valet forgot that it was supposed to be in WiFi adapter mode. This one was my fault. If you do not complete the device setup using the included easy setup software, the device may not remember its state after reboot. Awesome, right? After completing the setup within the included easy setup software I have not had either issue reappear for a week now.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Good thing you had that watchdog timer… bada bing! ;-)