Roamio Internal Blue Light... No startup...

Sorry I did not know that you had the 4 tuner Roamio

 

If its the 4 tuner roamio with the little brick power supply, perhaps the hd is drawing too much power on startup. Did you put a low power hd in there? I've seen this on computers with a lot of components and a too small power supply. Hit and miss bootup. Try the original one and see if it boots reliably. If so, you'll have to get a low power hd or a bigger power brick.

 

It seems extremely unlikely that TiVo would have spent money to include a chassis intrusion detector on the S5s, so as long as you don't change the hard drive you can probably take the cover off and leave it off and they'll never know.

And if you take the cover off and find the blue LED, maybe there'll be something silk-screened next to it on the board that gives a clue as to what it's there for.

But I wouldn't waste any time exchanging it as faulty.

EDIT: By which I mean I'd claim it to be faulty and get it exchanged without delay.

 

How many amps at which voltage should be right there on the label on the top of that WD drive.

 

According to a picture I found via Google images, it's 0.60A at 5V and 0.45A at 12V.

 

Which works out to 3 Watts and 5.4 Watts, respectively, for a total of 8.4 Watts.

 

1) The brick should tell you the output voltage and amps, just multiply the two IE 12vdc 3 amps would be 35 watts.

2) I don't think anybody knows what the blue light is as it seems you need a problem with the unit to see the blue light, and most people that had problems with this model TiVo (and few people have any problem in the first 30 days) would send it back, not look for a blue light, if the TiVo CSRs can't tell you its meaning this Forum most likely can't, so send the TiVo back and stop driving yourself nuts over this as your not going to try to fix a new TiVo yourself anyways, even if you knew what the blue light was for.

 

Other people have upgraded the low end Roamio with 3Tb drive without problems, why yours ?

 

If you've already replaced the original drive, even temporarily, then technically you've voided your warranty already.

Can you tell by looking at the original power supply for that TiVo if it puts out AC or DC and at what voltage?

Because if it's just a +12V DC supply, find another one (+12V DC supply) with the same connector (with the polarity wired the same way!!!!!) and more current capability and see if that makes the blue light go away.

 

I just got that internal blue light on my Roamio its on the top, right of the box close to the front.

This morning I lost the picture on my box but the sound was still working so I decided to reset the box by unplugging it. After I plug it back in I got no response and the blue light on top came on and stayed on. I unplugged it again this time waited for about 30sec then plugged it back in and it rebooted and started up. Its working now.

I have the Roamio I got it about a year ago and I upgraded the HD to a 3TB HD when I first got it.

 

I'll answer it but leave you with more questions.

There's actually 4 internal LED lights on a Base Roamio board.
Green
Blue
Red
Yellow

Blue and Green are used during booting probably as checkpoint indicators. I'll elaborate.

Embedded developers code on a PC and upload to the board the build for testing. Many times, a bug you introduced will prevent it from booting all the way, so you put statements in the code at critical operations to indicate it's gotten past that hump. When there's a terminal, you can print a detailed progress, but without, when you just have the board you resort to these LED indicator lights, as a broad stroke.

That's a long way of me trying to say, the BLUE LIGHT is not an error message per se, everyone's Roamio does that. The trouble is it does not turn off, so it was the last OK message [ "I'm here" ] to make it out, before getting stuck or derailed.

From my memory, the stages during a normal boot are:
a) Blue external + Red external LED's then
b) Blue internal LED then
c) Green internal LED then
d) Green external + Yellow external flashing LED's

d) is what we call Kickstart entry, so the c->d transition is triggered by a startup script

The Roamio hardware boots really fast so it's hard to eye for certain what's doing when, without some contraption.

I'm going to guess from experience, the b->c transition is an instruction in the bootloader.

That might leave the a->b transition, an instruction (if it can be called that) in the verifier (for the bootloader). That's a guess, or more precisely a deduction on shaky information.

The off->a transition may be a hardwire for when chips reach ready.

The best way to find out for sure is someone who consistently gets a stuck blue light, would need a TTL serial cable monitoring for a descriptive error message being printed out.

If someone's box does this reliably and wants to volunteer, I'll write out the directions. Requires a USB computer near by. It also might not say anything. If it's too early, it might use a lower level communication channel.

Alternatively, the box is not 100%... if you contact Tivo Support and can have the details passed to Engineering (if it appears it's not in their error troubleshooting script) the developers should easily recognize it, but you might not get a better explanation than it needs to be replaced.

New questions:
Why does the first stage have two LED's ? Is it two CPU cores, two chips?
Where is the bootloader stored that it could not pass verification sometimes?
When does the Red or Yellow LED get used? Unlocked bootloader? An Error condition?

 

We have a bedroom TiVo Roamio that we noted this morning is shining an inside blue light, even after removing and reinserting the power cord after counting to 10. No front-panel lights, and the TV is reporting "no signal."

We did have a lightning storm last night. The Roamio worked right through it, but a lightning storm last year fried the Ethernet jacks on two of my TiVos (including a white Bolt) that forced me over to using a MoCA network.

I'll try leaving the Roamio unplugged for a while and see what happens when I plug it back in. If no joy, what's my next step? Reformatting, and then, if need be, replacing the drive?

Of further note, I found the living room 6-tuner TiVo Roamio with no lights on this morning. After removing and reinserting the power cord, it booted up normally and is functioning. (I purchased this one after last year's lightning storm.)

Gah, I wish these things were just a little bit more robust.

 

Hey Steve-O. Were you able to solve the issue? One of my Roamio Basic DVRs has a blue internal light right now. I wonder if I should just buy a new HDD for it? Thanks for any help.

 

Never did figure it out. I pressed my white Bolt back into service and shelved the blue-light Roamio. But after re-reading this thread I might put in the original HDD and see what happens.