Please Help! Tivo Keeps Restarting!

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Or.............even simpler.................

Spring for $125 and put a new Tivo-ready drive in!

Why screw around trying to eeek a few more months out of an obviously failed ahrd drive?

 

That's pretty solid evidence that your drive has failed. You'll need to buy a new hard drive and image it using winMFS (following the directions on the first post). Like Randy says, you'll need a new image. You could use one from another TiVo HD. If you do you'll get a hardware error initially and will have to run Clear and Delete Everything to get it working. Or you could buy an image from DVRUpgrade called Instant Cake. Or you can buy a pre-imaged drive as ciscokid mentions.

 

Is this strange or what? I had switched from component to HDMI maybe three weeks ago. I had switched to component many months before just to eliminate HDMI handshake as a possible cause of occasional lockups. Then two days ago I had 4 lockups/reboots in 24 hrs as described in my previous posts, with only two hours between the last two lockups. These were remote control lockups with the amber light still responding, but leading to a reboot after a minute or so.

So 36 hrs ago, just as a long shot before pulling the drive for testing, I switched back to component. And voila! No more lockups (or reboots).

What do you make of that? (I'll probably to let it go another day or so and switch back to HDMI to see if the lockups start again.)

 

No, I don't think so. I pulled it and used dd to make an exact copy to another drive. The dd operation succeeded, no failures. If the drive was bad, dd would not have been able to copy it. I also did a full drive scan, all sectors, and it found no bad blocks. A read/write test passes. The drive is good, only the data on it are corrupted. Corrupted enough, apparently, to crash TiVo.

The copy acts just like the original. I believe the mfs data section is simply corrupted. It was recording when it crashed and that can cause corruption. I'd hoped that the KS procedures would fix the corruption but the Green "could take three hours" screen is only up for 10-14 seconds, leading me to believe the fsck or whatever is going on crashes, restarting the DVR.

As for images, I've got images. I've got the original drive from this THD as well as the others I own. The TiVo is already back in service but I'd really like to resurrect the corrupted drive to recover the assorted recordings.

 

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As I noted, winmfs crashes while trying to copy this drive's contents. This tells me that the MFS data, some of it, must be badly corrupted.

 

That's very interesting. I'd try a new component cable...they do go bad after a while. It's still possible that it's something to do with the hard drive I/O correction, but more likely an HDCP issue. Is your TiVo connected to a Sony TV by chance? They seem to cause some issues with HDMI now and then.

 

Even if the drive is physically "bad" (sectors, etc.) but still runs dd could still work. dd simply copies bit for bit of the data on one drive to another...garbage in garbage out...there's no error correction. You are correct...the data is corrupted on the original and you've made a perfect, corrupted copy on your new drive.

You could try using SpinRite to correct the corruption, but at around $100 it's a little expensive for one drive. There are no guarantees either so I guess it depends on how much you value your recordings.

Best of luck!

 

I'm sure you meant try a new HDMI cable. I'll try that. The TV is a Samsung.

 

D'oh! Yes, I meant HDMI cable. Although I guess component cables can go bad too...usually depends on the crowd they hang out with.

 

While HDMI cables seem to be loners. Any recommendation for HDMI cables or what price range to get a good one? The price range on these is amazingly huge. The ones I'm using now cost around $8 mail order for 6 ft length IIRC. I have a hard time imagining what would make one worth $100+ such as Monster brand.

 

I get almost all of my cables from MonoPrice.com. Everything I've gotten is first rate, shipping is lightning fast, their customer service is excellent and for the most part they have the best prices. Monster s/b ashamed...bad Monster, BAD Monster!

 

If dd finds sectors it cannot copy, it will stop with an error unless the optional "conv=noerror,sync" is used, which I didn't.

I don't believe the drive is corrupted, only the mfs data. To use an analogy, it's like having a corrupted word document file rendering it unusable, even though the drive itself is fine. I doubt that SpinRite can unscramble mangled MFS data. That's something I would expect the KSs to do. Are the KSs just a glorified fsck?

 

Shows what I know.

I can see now that the drive IS corrupted. I tried to use the MFSLive 1.4 CD to do a backup | restore and it told me" "Volume header corrupt"

Is there any tool to repair this?

 

Here's the plan. I dd'd a copy of the drive and it acts just like the original. Both show "volume header corrupt." So, clearly dd copied the corrupt volume header from one drive to another.

So, in theory, all I have to do is dd JUST the volume header from a good drive and my corrupted drive ought to come back to life, yes?

I've already installed a new 1 TB drive in the THD in question and I should be able to dd its known good volume header to the corrupt drive, shouldn't I?

All I need to do it figure out just which blocks comprise the volume header and how to have dd copy just those blocks from a good drive. That oughtta work, shouldn't it?

Who can point me to info on where the volume header is on a 1 TB TiVo drive?

 

Thanks, two cables on order from MP. Looks to me like Monster is an example of the power of marketing hype and/or the gullibility of consumers. It may be true in general, that higher quality costs more, but it doesn't follow that paying more always gets you higher quality.

 

Here's a similar problem to the one discussed over the last few pages.

I have a Series 3 with an external drive attached. I was having issues with playback over the last several weeks and figured the external was starting to go bad. I powered down, unplugged the external and did the 3 thumbs down once the TiVo saw the drive was gone. It rebooted and gave me the "green screen of death" with the "this will take 3 hours" message. I let it go, it reboots in about 3 minutes and the green screen comes up again.

I bought a formatted drive off ebay and installed it today. That drive gets to "Almost There" and sits....and sits.

Put the old drive in again, just to try it. Green screen loop again.

Is my Series 3 beyond any hope?

 

I'm having a very similar problem--21 month old Tivo HD with 500GB expander recently started freezing/rebooting frequently. KS57 and KS52 didn't help, and KS 54 produced inconclusive results, but I suspected the expander drive was dying, so I went through the recommended procedure to permanently remove it. Got to the screen where 3 thumbs down and Enter initiate the divorce procedure, and the screen comes up that says it's removing the external drive, but within 60 seconds the whole unit reboots, and this now is an infinite loop.

Any consensus out there as to how likely this is to be a Tivo internal hard drive problem (which would be fixable by getting a replacement Tivo hard drive from, say, dvrupgrade)?

 

My WAG is that the internal drive is either failing or was corrupted by the failing eSATA drive. There are more than a few reports of the same scenario by others here.

Either way it's not the end of the world for your TiVo. You could try using Instant Cake to re-image your internal hard drive. As long as you're going to pull it anyway you might as well upgrade it. You could DIY by buying a replacement hard drive (1TB drives are <$75 these days) and still use Instant Cake to image it. Or you could buy a pre-imaged drive from DVRUpgrade or Weaknees.

Best of luck and let us know how it goes.

 

Thanks Rich. One question--the FAQ says that I must "unmarry" the external drive before proceeding with an internal drive upgrade, and this procedure failed on my unit. Can I expect any problems installing a newly imaged (Instant Cake) internal drive because of this?

 

No. You won't have any problems with it. Create a backup image file on your computer. If your intent is to marry your external HDD to the new internal with mfsadd, I'd run full diagnostics on it first. Not a bad idea to do the same on the new one also before using InstantCake. Adding external drive can be done at any time.

InstantCake wasn't successful for my original S3 HDD when attached to SATA port - destination too small. From other posts it seems this might be successful when drive is connected through USB to SATA adapter. Not sure.