EPG not populating from saved data after deep standby

[birdman]

However, irrespective of the setting it didn't make any difference to the problem in the first post which eventually a cold boot fixed.

If by "cold boot" you mean you disconnected the power, that won't have made any difference. As far as the file-system is concerned a reboot (of any sort) is a reboot.

epg.dat will be deleted as the GUI shuts down if it finds the data is corrupted (which would be the in-memory data that it's trying to write out). Apart from that it should be there at start-up.

[adm]

If by "cold boot" you mean you disconnected the power, that won't have made any difference. As far as the file-system is concerned a reboot (of any sort) is a reboot.

I disagree. In my experience a cold boot (removing the mains power) does "cure" problems that a reboot from the menu doesn't (menu/standby and restart/reboot). I have found this to be true expecially after some image updates which have already have a software initiated reboot as part of the process, and have resulted in some problems in the past.

epg.dat will be deleted as the GUI shuts down if it finds the data is corrupted (which would be the in-memory data that it's trying to write out). Apart from that it should be there at start-up.

As the epg.dat file was consistantly missing on start-up that indicates the copy in RAM was corrupt on shut down. Surely then a deep standby should have killed/flushed the data in RAM? This appeares to have happened as the EPG was blank on start-up and then slowly populated afterwards - over the air. This should have resulted in a new clean version in RAM which would then be saved on the next shutdown. This didn't happen as on next switch-on after a long deep standby the EPG.dat file was missing and the EPG blank. A constantly repeated corruption of RAM data was resolved by removing power.

[birdman]

I disagree. In my experience a cold boot (removing the mains power) does "cure" problems that a reboot from the menu doesn't (menu/standby and restart/reboot).

That might affect some electrical components, but it won't affect the contents of a file-system. which would be the issue here.

As the epg.dat file was consistantly missing on start-up that indicates the copy in RAM was corrupt on shut down. Surely then a deep standby should have killed/flushed the data in RAM?

Yes, ut if the EIT data being collected was somehow odd (why was ITV HD missing a day?) such that it corrupted the in-RAM data structure each time then the file would be deleted at each shutdown. (It is possible to have apparently-full EPG data but for it to be corrupt on write-out)
And if you were tuned to Freesat at start-up you won't be collecting any data for Freeview at that time, so it would be empty when you switched to it, which you would see immediately. The Freesat would have had several seconds ot populate before you could see its EPG.