TiVo won't boot--help!

[madscientist]

Yikes. I bought an S1 TiVo in 1999 and had a great run with it. We never had any trouble (in fact it's still in the basement and probably still works). My wife bought me an S3 with a disk expander in Dec 2007 and we transferred our lifetime service to it. Up until fairly recently it's worked fine as well. Starting a few weeks ago, we began to get the dreaded short recordings that others have discussed here: only 15-20 minutes of (mostly prime time) shows would be recorded, even though the record light was lit. Just before the "hang" I would get lots of pixellation and audio glitching. The other tuner would be unaffected and continue playing/recording just fine. If I switched to live TV, my screen would be grey. If I stopped the recording, the show would play fine again. If I was watching live without recording (except for the buffer of course) and I got the grey screen I could "fix it" by changing the channel. Over the last few weeks it got worse and worse, regardless of the things I tried including rebooting etc. Unlike some others here, my TiVo never (that I noticed) spontaneously rebooted. In the last few days I have had intervals where it would take 15-20 or more seconds sometimes to respond to the remote control.

I booted into the disk diags mode (reboot - pause - 54) and ran that, and both my internal and external disks came through clean.

Today my wife decided to try to reset the system completely and redo guided setup; we lost a lot of recorded shows but we've missed so many shows this week already (so many season finales!)

But the news gets worse: after we ran the "redo guided setup" it told us to wait for up to an hour. Well, it took a LOT longer than that, probably about 3 hours or so. Finally it rebooted, and went past the "starting up" screen to the "almost there" screen... and sat there for about four hours. Finally we pulled the plug and tried again... and the same thing happened.

Now I've tried redoing this about 8 times, removing the USB wireless network connection, the external drive (it noticed this right away and requested that I use the three thumbs down to divorce the drive, which I did--but it still hung at startup), and the cablecard. It always hangs.

I've booted back into the disk diags and run those, and again they all come through clean with no problems.

It sounds like a hardware problem, but on the other hand I've read a lot of messages from people with _identical_ symptoms that occurred just after a recent software upgrade, so I'm not sure.

I'm totally stuck. I'm pretty tech-savvy and I've been hacking Linux for years (I burned the my first copy onto about 20 floppy disks from a SunOS workstation using dd in 1993--if you know what that means :-)) and I'd LOVE to find a way to see the bootup messages or any other useful information about where the boot is stuck. I'm going to call TiVo support tomorrow morning but from everything I've read I'm not optimistic: customer support quality seems pretty low. Since my TiVo is out of warranty I'm willing to take some risks with it so if anyone has any pointers to do-it-yourself diagnostics or whatever I'm very interested.

I'll tell you one thing, if my only option is to pay $150 to get a refurb TiVo and another $200 to transfer my lifetime service... that's it for me, I'm out. I can get a DVR from my cable company for much cheaper and if I can't even get 18 months out of a TiVo anymore then it's just not worth it.

Maybe I'll look into building my own MythTV box...

[Worf]

Have you tried maybe reimaging the hard disk?

Either using InstantCake ($20), or getting a backup image for your TiVo and putting it on the hard disk (or a new hard drive)?

Worth a try...

[bkdtv]

Sounds like your original drive failed.

MythTV doesn't support encrypted channels, so that's not really an alternative to TiVo unless you are satisfied with the HD locals.

I would spend the $90-$100 (http://www.buy.com/prod/western-digital-av-gp-wd10evcs-hard-drive-1tb-serial-ata-300-serial/q/loc/101/206827123.html) for a 1TB drive (157 HD hours). To that drive, you would restore a backup image from your existing TiVo. If WinMFS reports an error when trying to backup your failed disk, then buy and use the InstantCake CD for $20. Everything you need to know for a backup and restore is in Section V of the Drive Upgrade FAQ (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784). You're tech savvy so it should be a piece of cake for you.

Drive upgrades / replacements do not affect your lifetime subscription, which is stored on a ROM chip.

[madscientist]

Sounds like your original drive failed.

MythTV doesn't support encrypted channels, so that's not really an alternative to TiVo unless you are satisfied with the HD locals.

I would spend the $90-$100 (http://www.buy.com/prod/western-digital-av-gp-wd10evcs-hard-drive-1tb-serial-ata-300-serial/q/loc/101/206827123.html) for a 1TB drive (157 HD hours). To that drive, you would restore a backup image from your existing TiVo. If WinMFS reports an error when trying to backup your failed disk, then buy and use the InstantCake CD for $20. Everything you need to know for a backup and restore is in Section V of the Drive Upgrade FAQ (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784). You're tech savvy so it should be a piece of cake for you.

Drive upgrades / replacements do not affect your lifetime subscription, which is stored on a ROM chip.I did upgrade my old S1 (originally just one drive) using the old methods and had no problems with that so I feel pretty confident with it. The one problem is my current computer is something I built myself about 5 years ago, so while it has 4G of RAM it doesn't have SATA. And, it only runs Linux :-). I miss the days when we had to boot into Linux to do upgrades. I guess I'll have to find another system to borrow.

I do find it odd that, if the drive failed, none of the SMART tests show it. In my day job my company does a HUGE amount of work with disk drives, including COTS drives like WD, Seagate, etc. and we use SMART all the time to determine drive performance characteristics. It's a little hard to see what's going on underneath the TiVo screens for those tests but bad block detection, etc. should be a piece of cake for SMART.

Is there any way to be more confident it really is a failed drive before I shell out $130 or so to replace it?

[madscientist]

From my reading it seems that once I replace my internal drive, my expander (external drive) will become a brick. Is there any way I can still make use of that extra disk, or is it just a total loss?

I really appreciate the help and pointers; this is exactly what I was looking for!

[alyssa]

no, you can still put the expander on,
you've got to marry the new Hd & external when you do the upgrade.
bkdtv's most excellent thread covers this in sec # 4 item #11

[madscientist]

no, you can still put the expander on,
you've got to marry the new Hd & external when you do the upgrade.
bkdtv's most excellent thread covers this in sec # 4 item #11Ah, got it. You can do it by hand but it's not automagic. No problem.

Disk is in the mail, and I lined up a little Shuttle that has Windows installed (and SATA) I can borrow from work. Unfortunately I doubt the drive will get here before the long holiday, so I won't have a chance to hack my TiVo over the break. Too bad. Watched SYTYCD tonight live and boy, that was painful :o

Thanks all; I'll let you know how it goes.

[alyssa]

i'm not sure if you need to marry a supported external to an upgraded HD. I do know you need to marry a unsupported external to a upgraded HD. I'd recommend going through the first page of 'the' thread to double check that.

[madscientist]

Oy. Well, my new drive arrived yesterday afternoon (so much for 2nd day delivery!!) I had a Shuttle from work and had no problems breaking open the TiVo, extracting the drive, copying stuff over, etc. following the most excellent FAQ referenced above. After successfully doing that I put the new drive back in the TiVo, powered it up, and... nothing. It went to "Almost there" and hung forever just like before.

So, hoping that the old drive had corrupted something in the OS that was then copied to the new drive, I bought a copy of InstantCake (ah!! Linux!! ;)). I had some troubles because the Shuttle CDROM was not mounted by the InstantCake kernel. I had to mknod it myself, and the InstantCake scripting wouldn't let me enter any device I wanted to, so I had to then remove the /dev/sr0 and create it as /dev/sdf (with major number 11 and minor 0). This technology is pretty dated: the newer embedded Linux environments use udev or, for busybox systems, mdev or similar so that you don't have to create devices by hand like this. Whatever, once I got past that it created the system for me just fine.

I put that drive back in the TiVo and... this time it booted. Whew!! It's running guided setup now. My fingers are crossed.

My last question is regarding the My DVR Expander that I have. Right now it's not hooked up. I can't quite figure out from the FAQ what to do with this. There is a lot of discussion there about eSATA but I can't tell if that applies to the approved TiVo external Expander SATA disk, or only to "do it yourself" eSATA. It seemed like maybe I had to use winMFS to "marry" the drives, but when I looked at the SATA connector on the Expander it wasn't a standard SATA connector, so I can't connect it to my system to perform the marrying function. And, there is no obvious way to open the Expander casing and get at the drive inside: there are no screws, latches, or cracks. So... I dunno. The FAQ seems to say that if I have a upgraded internal drive I can't just plug in the Expander and have it work. Any hints are welcome.

[tannett]

Hi... When I was playing with my external expander, I didn't have an eSATA port on my computer either, but looking inside the TiVo, I realized if I removed two screws, that I could "borrow" the SATA to eSATA port from the TiVo itself to connect to my SATA port in my desktop.

Now, in the end, since I was a bit ticked that I couldn't do an upgrade without unmarrying the two drives, I ended up opting to not marry the expander to the new drive and just decided that 1TB was enough space for now and not have to worry about loosing everything again if I upgrade down the road.

[alyssa]

My last question is regarding the My DVR Expander that I have. Right now it's not hooked up. I can't quite figure out from the FAQ what to do with this. There is a lot of discussion there about eSATA but I can't tell if that applies to the approved TiVo external Expander SATA disk, or only to "do it yourself" eSATA. It seemed like maybe I had to use winMFS to "marry" the drives, but when I looked at the SATA connector on the Expander it wasn't a standard SATA connector, so I can't connect it to my system to perform the marrying function. And, there is no obvious way to open the Expander casing and get at the drive inside: there are no screws, latches, or cracks. So... I dunno. The FAQ seems to say that if I have a upgraded internal drive I can't just plug in the Expander and have it work. Any hints are welcome.

I'd be tempted to simply try the supported eSATA drive with the newly upgraded HD(:up:). What's the worst that could happen?

Having never played with a supported external I'm clueless about how to crack the case and access the HD for the marrying process. If the supported expander doesn't work on the upgraded Tivo, sell it on ebay & build a unsuported one.

I'm of the school that thinks you can never have too much space.:D

[madscientist]

Well, I'm happy just to have my TiVo back (got my update from the InstantCake 9.2 or whatever to version 11.0c yesterday--yay, Netflix on demand again!) I enabled Mfssupersize and my 1T internal drive went from 131 HD hrs. (with version 9.2 software) to 144 HD hrs (with mfssupersize on), up to 157 HD hrs. with mfssupersize and 11.0c software. That's more than I had before even with the external drive, and summer is here which means fewer shows to watch anyway... so I'll leave it be for now and see how it goes.

Thanks for all the help everyone!