TiVo Elite: And the Spontaneous Reboots Continue...

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Both of my Premiere XL4's have been spontaneously rebooting at least twice a day since February 10th, so I'm sure it's related to bad data being delivered to them by TiVo's servers, not hardware failure.

Usually the reboot is followed by the blue LED lighting up, indicating an attempt to upload a podcast to the DVR may have caused the initial crash. The DVR with fewer podcast subscriptions and Season Passes crashes less often.

A similar spate of reboots happened to both of my XL4's about a year ago then corrected itself, so hopefully TiVo's engineers are working on a fix. It's nice having two identical DVRs so I can rule out hardware issues when things like this happen.

 

So would a Kickstart help? KS 51, 52, and 56 are software installs. Of course software isn't the same as guide data. I did try a KS57 which completed and I still have the issue.

 

For the past couple of weeks my 2 year old XL4 unit has all of a sudden has this reboot issue. So do we wait for TiVo to fix it? Or try a dropkick or something?

 

Suddenly mine started doing the same thing. Glad to know mine isn't the only one.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

 

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I am having the same problem too. Mine started rebooting every few days a couple of weeks ago. Never experienced this problem before. I know it is rebooting because I have to go through the steps to have the clock displayed again. It's happening when I'm not watching it and other times when I am. Mine is a Premiere XL. My other Premiere doesn't have the same problem.

It's VERY annoying!!!

 

The last 10 days or so, all my Tivos have been randomly rebooting at different times and frequency. I have tried to study the logs after it has happened, but have not been able to determine why.

Roamio Pro - once every 1 - 2 days
Elite/XL4 - once to 3x's per day
Premiere - every 2 - 3 days (Premiere has a brand new 2TB HDD)

Something odd is happening.

 

sounds like you're having brownouts. are any of them on battery backups?

 

Mine are on a good UPS. Besides, nothing else in the house is affected.

 

I've also been having this issue on my XL4 for 1-2 weeks. I can tell because my shows list goes back to sort by date rather than name. I haven't lost anything yet that I can tell and it hasn't happened while watching something, but it's very concerning as my TiVo is normally quite reliable.

 

A couple of weeks ago my Premier XL4 started randomly rebooting. Happens a couple of times per evening. (Might do it in the day too for all I know.)

I thought it was likely a failing box, but I see lots of other people are having the same problem.

For me it seems to occur often just as I click one of the buttons on the remote, such as the right or left arrow. Other times it just reboots in the middle of a show when no buttons have been clicked.

 

My roamio started rebooting around the same timeframe - with about the same frequency. I emailed Margret a week ago about it. She offered to have them look at the logs, but still waiting to hear back. I think it's service connections as someone earlier speculated.

 

I also emailed Margret today with my Elite/XL4 TSN and asked her to take a look at the logs. I hope she responds and looks into it.

 

It has happened in the past, but normally there is more of a geographic flavor to the reboots - there is messed up guide data for particular areas of the country that cause problems. I'm not sure I see that here, though most of the reports have been in the western third of the country.

When exactly did it start? Could it be when guide data for the daylight savings time switchover first appeared? (It sounds like a bit before, but perhaps some of the early reports could have been actual hardware disk problems.)

 

I see my Roamio Pro rebooted this morning again at 3:12am MST, according to the CC boot time and OOB start time. (Arizona does not observe DST so that should not be the issue with guide data here.)

It appears it uploaded the logs immediately after, as the logs all start again at 3:40am
Last Service Connection was 3:38 AM MST
Last VCM Connection was 3:40 AM MST

I again emailed this info to Margret.

 

For the DST, what I'm thinking is more along the lines of some misguided shows may have changed the time of their scheduled shows (not realizing that the times are probably already in universal time in their schedule) and the TiVo is seeing conflicts as those mistakes work through the system and are corrected,and the TiVo is responding poorly. Since so few people are seeing the reboots, I would think the problem is probably bad data running into a TiVo bug handling it.

 

Add me to this list.

I'm only running Roamios. But, for about two weeks, daily reboots at random times, sometimes more than once a day, happening when they are recording, not recording - but in use for Live TV, as well as one that sits in standby 99% of the time (which is the one rebooting the most).

A symptom is that while new recordings occur, the drive usage bar won't advance beyond exactly 50%, which is not right.

I suspected hard drive issues too. I use WD Red NAS 3TB drives in my three base model Roamios. I ran all the WD Diags before using the drives. I can't get the drives to show ANY SMART value degradation, when tested on a PC and the tests complete in a shorter time than estimated.

When tested in Roamio, the extended tests built into KS54 (IR mode remote, or RF/IR remote set to IR-only mode required to get kickstart menus on Roamios), estimate the test should take ~480 minutes, I aborted after 2500 minutes had passed. The SMART values still are perfect. I am now running the Roamio SMART off-line data gathering test, estimated at ~716 minutes to finish, and have passed the 1540 minute mark (right now). All the SMART short tests in KS54, in Roamios, complete quickly, and pass.

When I had Premieres, that came stock with 320GB drives, which I had upgraded to 2TB drives, the same long SMART tests finished either in less time than the estimate, or within ~10% beyond the estimated times.

I'll be moving along to trying any other kickstart tests that still are available on Roamios (although, as with the upgraded Premieres, the only HDD tests that larger drives would do were the SMART ones, and not the TiVo-specific ones, which cease to work without a stock drive).

The last thing I will try after all else is running SpinRite to try and get a better verification on whether or not there is anything, at all, wrong with the drives.

I'm beginning to think that it's a TiVo problem, perhaps related to hardware, or the wall-wart power supplies (mine run very hot to the touch). The drives are running very cool, and the MBT is below 50 degrees on all units (although, the tiny fans are spinning like jet turbines, and making noise like min-jet turbines).

That's all I can report at this time. I'll check back in later to update what I find, and/or don't find, and compare notes with anybody else having issues like recently reported (spontaneous reboots beginning ~2 weeks ago).

Yes, I realize this is a Premiere thread/area. I thought sharing that I'm having similar issues with my Roamios may be helpful.

Yes, all my TiVos are on UPS battery backup, with a full 120-125V of power.

 

I've notice a service connect after several of my reboots. I wonder if its standard protocol after an unexpected restarted.

Btw, are you pulling the drive to see the logs? I'm reluctant to open the unit up.

 

While your post isn't in response to mine (directly), I have the answer you seem to be looking for.

The TiVo logs (most of them) can be viewed with a TiVo backdoor, which involves going to System Information then:

Press: Clear, Clear, Enter, Enter, 0.

That gets you into the TiVo backdoor area. The title of screen is "Backdoors Information", and getting to the logs in pretty obvious once you are in. The navigation is explained by the backdoor. But, it's a bit hard to go back a log, since left/back takes you out of the logs, rather than advancing to the next log, like the right directional press will do.

If your system won't allow you in, just reboot first, then go in.

To make life easier, you can make markers in your logs with date/time stamps, by going to Live TV, then pressing 9,1,1,Clear (hit clear before a channel change can happen).

You can initiate/dump extra A/V logging data (and date/time stamps) in the logs by pressing 7,7,7,Clear in Live TV (again, pressing clear before the channel can change).

The logs can also be viewed with a disk editor/hex editor with the TiVo drive connected to a computer. You will find them in the var partition, and will see more than the backdoor allows (my preferred method, when puling the drive suites me).

 

Thanks nooneuknow. This is exactly what I was hoping for.

I've replaced my S3 several times due to drive failures, but probably not worth pulling the Roamio's yet since others seem to have the same problem going on. I am curious though if the same errors appear in S5 logs for drive failures. With this backdoor, I can at least investigate without potentially voiding my extended warranty.

 

Thanks for the logging tips, nooneuknow. I did this and I was able to gather (before syslog restarted and deleted my logs) that my reboots appear to be an out of memory condition.

Here's some info I gathered from tverr:

463562/14 TmkMempool mypool tried to allocate a bunch of bytes and it failed

137461/14 TmkAssertionFailure[26569]: {20359763} : (OutOfMemoryCrash, line 147 ())

Then it dumps a bunch of /proc info and tells me to look at the kernel log for a backtrace. Unfortunately syslogd had restarted and wiped the logs by then.

Not sure where to take this info, but maybe someone else seeing the reboots can see if we're having the same issue? My TiVo is only 43% full and less than a year old. Only started having problems in the last couple weeks. It's an XL4 with lifetime service. My Mini doesn't seem to be having issues from what I can tell.