Troubleshooting Your Foxtel IQ2

This evening, it appears that our Foxtel IQ2 cable box died after exhibiting some strange behaviour in the form of:

• inability to time shift live television (the show on screen would pause but could not be unpaused),
• recorded content would not playback,
• restarting or resetting the unit would eventually result in the box going back to a red power light and unresponsive to button presses on the remote or unit.

Listening closely and carefully to the unit revealed intermittent attempts to access the hard drive and not much else.

At any rate, there are a few things to attempt to get things going again which will usually be what technical support will get you to try on 131 999.

Warning: There is a risk of losing recorded content with any of the below solutions – loss off data may correlate with hard drive or file system corruption which would have rendered recorded content unplayable in any case.

1. Warm restart the device:
1. On the unit, hold down the “Select” and “Back” buttons until you hear fans spin up and lights flash on the front,
2. Let the unit finish rebooting and at the end it should power back on by itself.
2. Cold restart the device:
1. Turn the unit off either by using the remote or pressing the power button on the unit,
2. Pull out the power cord for two minutes,
3. Reconnect the power cord,
4. Press the power button on the front of the unit,
5. Let the unit finish rebooting and at the end it should power back on by itself.
3. Perform a system reset (last resort):
1. Turn the unit off either by using the remote or pressing the power button on the unit,
2. Pull out the power cord for two minutes,
3. Reconnect the power cord,
4. Press the power button on the front of the unit,
5. When the blue ring is illuminated on the front of the unit press “Power”, “Up”, “Down”, “Power”,
6. The unit will then download the latest software off the network (might take a little while),
7. Let the unit finish rebooting and at the end it should power back on by itself.

Foxtel IQ2 - System Reset

Don’t worry, it looks scary for those used to graphical user interfaces but for old hats that are familiar with old “command line” interfaces this shouldn’t faze you.

After all that, if your Foxtel IQ2 (and perhaps your IQ, not sure if the steps would be absolutely identical) doesn’t work then you should give Foxtel a call. Annoyingly, the automated menu will try and send a reset signal to your box, ask you to call back in five minutes if you still have issues (which you will) and then hang up. Wait a few minutes and then call back, explain what you’ve done and hopefully the technical support person will be satisfied with what you have tried and book a service call.

Foxtel also warn that if the problem is with something belonging to Foxtel (like the unit, network infrastructure, etc) then you won’t be charged but if the problem is related to user error then you’re going to be up for $75 (at the time of writing). I guess this is in place to stop people wasting the time of the field technicians for things other than service restoration tasks.

So, we are without a cable box until Tuesday morning but we have digital free-to-air television as well as our Optus MeTV, DVD/Blu-ray content and other streaming media including QuickFlix to tide us over.