Series 2 stuck on Powering Up. Repeatedly restarting.

[pan2]

I have an S2 that's about 4-5 years old. This morning I found that it's stuck in an endless loop of showing "Welcome. Powering Up..." for about 30 seconds then restarting before going back to the same screen. Over and over again.

Any suggestions? Dead drive is the obvious guess but I'm wondering if anyone has seen this same pattern before. Thanks for your advice.

[HomeUser]

I 2nd the failed hard drive as the most likely cause.

Suggest that if you or someone you with the technical know how pull the drive and check it in a PC with the drive manufactures boot from CD or Floppy diagnostics.

You could force a "mfs check" or an "emergency reinstall" with one of the kickstart codes (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=3795194&&#post3795194)

If the drive has not failed completely you may be able to save the recordings and settings by copying to a new drive with a Linux program called dd_rescue. Check the TiVo Underground-Upgrade section for more information on drive replacement/recovery.

Note: It is best if you do not boot Windows with the TiVo drive in the PC unless you are using WinMFS and have read the instructions.

[pan2]

Thanks for the reply. I removed the HDD from the TiVo but I have a problem which is that my PC has only one IDE channel (which rules out instantcake) and it seems I can't get the image off the bad drive either. I tried WinMFS which made a .tbk backup but it was seemingly corrupted and would not restore without error.

What would be ideal for me, I think, is if someone has a working WinMFS .tbk to match my model (TCD240080). Failing that, I'm not sure what else I can do besides a commercial solution.

I will try the manufacturer's drive check-- thanks for the idea.

[pan2]

I think I found a fix! I put a new IDE drive in a USB enclosure and used the MFSlive CD plus a second CD which I made by extracting the TiVo image from the InstantCake CD ISO. I then mounted the second CD (/dev/hdb) within MFS tools and, what do you know, restore worked like a charm to the USB drive (/dev/sda). I had given up on MFSlive earlier because it was unable to mount any of my NTFS SATA drives, but apparently it has no problem with CDs and USB drives. I can't describe the joy I felt when I reconnected everything, powered on the TiVo, and made it to the scene of the little TiVo guy playing around in the ball factory (or whatever that is).

The upshot of all of this is that one can restore a TiVo drive with just a CD drive and a USB port-- no need to even open the case if you have a USB-IDE connector!

[HomeUser]

Congratulations, Using an external USB enclosure was a great idea. MFSLive has support for SATA drives there may not be full support the NTFS file system however.

How bad did the original 80G drive fail the diagnostics? did you replace it with a larger drive?

[pan2]

The USB enclosure worked well (thanks to the great support built in to mfslive) and I've recently tried a USB thumb drive which also worked just fine. The old 80GB drive didn't fare well at all on the diagnostic-- it would run for maybe 10 seconds before it hit a bad cluster and then it would stick there forever (or long enough that I aborted the diagnostic before it got past it). I replaced it with a 200GB drive which is a nice step up in size *except* in my excitement to get anything working at all, I missed the fact that one needs an explicit instruction to expand the restored image to fill the full drive. So at the moment my 200GB drive is still an 80 hour TiVo, but I intend to remove the drive again, make a backup to a thumb drive for future reference (my original install image was for an outdated version of the system software anyway), and run mfsadd to fill the whole drive. Then I should be good to go until I upgrade to HD.

[pan2]

Did the space upgrade without a hitch and now have up to 226 hours of recording space, plus an backup image of my drive for possible future use. There was a weird side effect on my season passes though-- a few of the season passes from my old drive showed up on the new one! I can't figure out how this happened since I never even copied the image off of the old drive (it being in too bad shape to do so) unless the season pass information was stored on the motherboard? Seems odd, but harmless I guess.

I wasn't sure what -r value to use with mfsadd. Some sources advised -r 4, others advised the default-- in the end I stuck with the default.

The only downside is that the new drive is kind of noisy (it's a several year old 7200rpm Maxtor I had lying around). I don't notice it when the TV is on, but when it's not, I hear the incessant crunching of the drive. Not sure I feel like buying a new drive for such an old machine though, so I'll try to live with it for now.

[HomeUser]

There was a weird side effect on my season passes though-- a few of the season passes from my old drive showed up on the new one! That is a side effect of KidZone and GuruGuides.

The -r4 is not really needed until the drive is 250G or larger.

The noise may quite after the TiVo is done sorting things out sometimes it takes a couple of days.