TiVo Modem Repairs - Stuck at Almost There Screen?

i can make no sense of this, but I had a problem that appeared to be related to the modem failing, but it occured as soon as i turned tivo on (ie. nothing would happen at all - not even a 'Welcome' screen)...

This fixed it:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=7355655#post7355655

However having read that the Modem diagnostics don't occur till later, i have no idea why!

 

Not quite before any access, it's just after first access/detection, but before loading any OS from the drive.

The "powering up" screen won't come up if there is NO hard drive connected,
it comes up as soon as the bios detects ANY hard drive attached.


a_tivo_noob's problem was probably just a loose IDE cable - taking the drive out and putting back in fixed it,
any alterations to the drive was a red herring

 

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Apart from certain WD drives....

 

something must have been loose as i'd done about 5 different images but still nothing was happening (though the drive was spinning up)...

one of lifes great mystery's!

(incidently, the fix above didn't seem to fix anything - just allowed the thing to boot up )

 

I've just had this happen on my older TiVo, from Sept 2001 and with the hard drive replaced along the way with a 120Gb one. I haven't had it connected to the phone line in 3 years so it won't have had a spike or anything like that - I just use it for selected manual recordings throughout the week and as a backup for other stuff - but how can I determine whether it's a hard drive issue or a modem issue (which, ironically, I'm not using any more)?

Thanks.

PS. I forgot to add that for a few weeks the picture has been freezing, although that seemed to be while the humidity outside went mental. I unplugged it again and used it after the humidity went away for a while, and it worked fine for about a week or so until the humidity came back.

 

Anyone know, please?

 

Tivi that freeze at "Almost there" will often boot properly if there's a cachecard/turbonet in and its set to daily call over the network.
Note they still freeze if daily call is set to phone when cachecard is present (though why you would do that is anyones guess).

 

Thanks, but this particular TiVo is as nature intended (well, not a great phrase as I prefer the one that *does* have one but you get the idea) , so it can only try to connect via its modem, although I don't even want it to do that as I just use it for a few manual recordings.

 

Can anyone tell me whether this is the modem or hard drive, please?

 

Try booting with the hdd from your other TiVo ?

 

Call me paranoid, but since that TiVo (my main one) is working 100% fine, I don't want to take the hard drive out of that

There must be a sure-fire way of determining whether it's a HDD or modem issue?

 

From what you say it sounds like the hard disk to me.

If you have a spare disk you could prep that using the AltEPG image and try that.

Or you could put the suspect disk in a PC and run the disk manufacturers diagnostics software to check for errors.

If the drive passes the manufacturers tests try following the link in post#2 of this thread which tells you to rename the /tvbin/modemtest file. As I understand it this will bypass the modem checks so allowing the TiVo to boot with a faulty modem. I cannot vouch for this myself, never having had a faulty modem, but it is worth a try and can be reversed if required.