HR10-250 stuck in reboot cycle

[bigkah624]

I have an upgraded HR10-250 (added a 320GB drive back in January).

So we were watching Tivo when it started stuttering, freezing, in fits and starts and stopped responding to the remote or buttons on receiver. I forced it to reboot and I'm afraid I made the problem worse. Now it restarts, goes through Almost There, than flashed a green screen and reboots again. I took the hard drives out and ran spinrite on lvl 2, it found no problems. Hooked it back up and same thing happened.

The power supply looks fine, I sprayed the interior with an air can to get rid of all dust, reseated all the connections and still no change.

Anyone have any ideas what else I can try? I'm thinking that by forcing the original reboot, I may have corrupted the OS. Is there a way to repair it without wiping out the drives? I have a lot of stuff saved that hasn't been backed up yet.

And finally, if nothing works, is there a way I can get my shows off before reformatting?

Thank you.

[bigkah624]

Help please?

[litzdog911]

Dual drive Tivos are tricky to troubleshoot with standard PC drive diagnostics because those hard drives are now "married" and any problem on either drive can cause problems like this.

I suggest you start over again with a new hard drive, or drives. I wouldn't trust the old drives, even if they pass the manufacturer's diagnostics. Do you still have suitable Tivo image file?

[TyroneShoes]

...Anyone have any ideas what else I can try?..It's probably a classic indication of a corrupted HDD, corrupted in the area where the OS loads from, at a minimum.

Try googling (or binging) "Tivo kick start". Wikipedia has info if no one else does. These are last-ditch-effort codes to fix certain startup problems short of replacing the HDDs. I went through this with my last SD Tivo a few years ago, but unfortunately for me, as is usually the case, it was fruitless. But it is indeed an option that sometimes works.

If it does, it probably still does not bode well for the lifespan of the HDD. I would then try to watch or dub all programs and replace the HDD ASAP.

[bigkah624]

Thanks for the advice.

litzdog911, I may have the original image somewhere, but I need a few of the recordings. That would be a last resort kind of a deal. If I can't find the image, would you have a copy? Thanks.

TyroneShoes, I'll look into Tivo Kick Start. I'm pretty sure the drives are OK. When I say there were no errors, I mean zero errors. Spinrite is a pretty thorough drive diagnostic. I do agree though that the OS or filesystem is probably corrupted. If I cant get it started, I need to extract a few of the recordings. And to be safe, I won't use these drives in the Tivo again. Thanks again.

[litzdog911]

No, I don't have that image file. Easies solution is to download this ...
http://www.dvrupgrade.com/dvr/stores/1/instantcake.cfm

[bigkah624]

Unless I'm doing it wrong, it seems Tivo Kickstart is not working. :(

[TyroneShoes]

Unless I'm doing it wrong, it seems Tivo Kickstart is not working. :(If its not working, its probably because it doesn't always work, not because you are doing it wrong. IIRC, the instructions were pretty straightforward. As I said, its a last-ditch effort.

I probably misspoke when I said "corrupted HDD, corrupted in the area where the OS loads from". The HDD itself may indeed be OK. What I probably should have said is "corrupted OS files on the HDD".

You could ressurect the drives and put an image on them or new drives, but old recordings can't be extracted and moved unless you previously hacked the original drives, I don't think.

[bigkah624]

So I know the hardware is good. I bought another HR10-250, swapped the drive into the old one and it worked. What I'm going to try is use MFSLive and see if I can fix the filesystem via fsck or some similar chkdsk tool. I havent given up on the drives yet. I have too many recordings!

[badgirl123]

Thanks for the help, I just come up with the same problem.