Green warning screen

[rwmair]

Here in my neighborhood, we have frequent, lengthy power outages. I have my two DirecTivos (both R10's) on UPS's, but as the outages usually go on for hours, the UPS just lets me shut down the Tivo before the battery runs out.

I thought I was doing this correctly: DirecTV button (to DirecTV central); page down (to Standby); right arrow (to go into standby mode). As far as I'm aware, this is the closest I can get to "turning it off". Is this correct?

Anyway, a few nights ago, the power went out, the UPS's started bleeping, and I got up and shut down the Tivos. About 6am, power returned after the electric company had hooked a generator up to power poles outside my house! (Honest, I live in a major Northeast city, not somewhere in Africa!)

Now, I had had rough night, but I don't think I was delusional enough to turn the TV on and forget about it. Nonetheless, the TV came on, and the Tivo in the bedroom was displaying a green warning sign with words to the effect of "A serious error has occurred. Wait three hours for the recorder to reacquire information. If the receiver still does not work then, call 1800...."

I switched to the living-room, Tivo, which had not come out of standby, so I pressed the DirecTV button. The yellow boot-up screen appeared, after which this unit also displayed the same green screen.

I was exhausted, so switched the TV off and went back to sleep for a little bit. 2 hours later, both units were functioning normally.

I've never seen this warning screen described anywhere before. Has anyone else seen it, or have any idea what may have caused it? The power resumption to the house must have been somewhat violent, as the microwave also needed power-cycling before its clock would work properly. But, the Tivo's were on UPS's which are supposed to provide surge protection and some level of voltage regulation.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[TonyTheTiger]

I've never seen your specific problem, but choosing the Standby option is NOT turning the DVR off. It's just suspending the display functions and the rest of the receiver is pretty much running as normal. The UPS dying and killing power to the boxes is just the same as pulling the power cord from the back.

When ANY electronic equipment has its power cut in this way, there is a minor danger of circuit damage or improper startup next time and, my guess is, this is what happened. Just be thankful no permanent damage was done.

[JimSpence]

With a UPS, when power is restored after the battery dies, it will be a smoother resumption, as most UPSs usually don't supply power to its outputs until utility power is stable.

But, then what Tony said still applies.

[Dkerr24]

The way I usually 'shut' down my Tivo's to do maintenance on them is to go into the menu to restart the unit. I have my hand on the AC plug waiting for the screen to blank out. At the moment it blanks out, I yank the AC plug from my UPS.

With your power problems, sounds like a gas powered home generator would be a great idea. Many folks here have them for spring tornado season. Some are as large as 20kW or more - enough to power many major appliances in the home.

[ADent]

It is the GSOD and I got one last week on my DSR6000R - it came out of it by itself within two hours.

IIRC the media partition is inconsistent and it basically is running a fdisk or chkdisk like tool.

It can be a sign of disk damage.

Also with expanded drives it may run out of memory or VM and not complete - the early tools didn't exand the VM area correctly, esp with huge disks.