[allan]

Late last winter, I had electrical problems that caused random power outages. My Tivo survived several of them with no problem, until the night the power went off, on, off, and on again within a few minutes. The poor box never booted after that.

I've never had any problems just disconnecting the plug.

 

[jrm01]

But what do you do if your PC freezes up?

Mine has always restarted from a freeze by holding down the power on/off button for 10-15 seconds. never had to pull the plug (many freezes).

 

[dianebrat]

Not that you likely "need" to but if you really want to be careful:

1) Go to Tivo Central
2) Select "Messages & Settings"
3) Select "Standby"

It doesn't really turn it "off" but is the best you could get without getting fancy, hacking, etc.

and if you pull the plug then, it's exactly the same as pulling the plug while it's playing a show, while it may "feel good" functionally it's no different going into standby and pulling the plug. Unlike your PC filesystem, the Tivo Filesystem is built to just go off.

Applying current PC logic to an appliance that does not function like a PC is wrong.

the answer is "just pull the plug, Tivo was designed to take it"

 

[Arcady]

Mine has always restarted from a freeze by holding down the power on/off button for 10-15 seconds. never had to pull the plug (many freezes).

What "power on/off" button?

 

[lessd]

What "power on/off" button?

Its under the secret door in the TiVo

 

[jrm01]

What "power on/off" button?

That was in response to what to do when your PC freezes up. If everyone keeps talking about the Tivo secret door it ain't going to remain a secret.

 

[alansh]

All standby does on most TiVo models is shut off the output and turn off the lights. It still records the buffer.

From what I've been able to determine, the "restart" option doesn't do any shutdown or cleanup; it just triggers a reset.

The programs filesystem is normally mounted read-only. There's a writable filesystem for logs and temporary files, but the TiVo can blow it away and recreate it without any problems if it's damaged.

The filesystems for the programs are a special TiVo format that can handle being interrupted.

So my conclusion is just pull the plug.

 

[dianebrat]

If everyone keeps talking about the Tivo secret door it ain't going to remain a secret.

The first rule about the secret door is that we don't talk about the secret door

 

[WayneCarter]

It's entirely possible to write a disk interface that is fully tolerant of losing power at any point in the access to the disk and not having "bad things" happen to the disk, disk structure, disk contents, etc. It's even possible to write the disk interface so the amount of data lost by a power loss is minimal. I have written several disk interfaces of this type myself. While I have no definitive knowledge of how TiVo interface is implemented, it seems quite reasonable to assume it will handle power failure "gracefully".

The only "problem" is that doing things this way is somewhat inefficient, so "high performance" disk access (ie PCs) usually opt for the faster, more responsive implementation, even though it does require buffers be flushed before power down or some structures can become "dirty".

Bottom line - quite trying to shut it down like a PC (can't be down) and just "pull the plug".

 

[lessd]

The first rule about the secret door is that we don't talk about the secret door

For all you people who own a Humax TiVo with a built in DVD player this is a secret I bet most don't know, that cute TiVo logo under the DVD player is really a TiVo button, same as the remote's TiVo button.

 

[nirisahn]

Mine has always restarted from a freeze by holding down the power on/off button for 10-15 seconds. never had to pull the plug (many freezes).

That's what I do, too, but how is that different than pulling the plug? Does the pc have some sort of process it goes thru to protect the file integrity? I guess I don't understand how that really differs from pulling the plug. I pass up no opportunity to learn, however.

 

[dianebrat]

Does the pc have some sort of process it goes thru to protect the file integrity? I guess I don't understand how that really differs from pulling the plug.

Holding down the power button to force a PC off is the same as pulling the plug, it simply bypasses any of the logic behind the "smart power switch" that passes a shutdown request to the OS and motherboard.

If you press a smart power switch on a functioning ACPI PC, you should get the OS to acknowledge that it had a shut down request, and proceed along that path. (depending on settings of the OS)

If you hold a smart power switch, it forces the PS and the motherboard to shut down without waiting for the OS to finish its housekeeping (as would be expected with a locked or frozen OS) end result? same as pulling the plug.
(however there's no need to pull the darn thing out and reach behind to get the plug.. huge plus in my books)

Diane

 

[jrm01]

That's what I do, too, but how is that different than pulling the plug? Does the pc have some sort of process it goes thru to protect the file integrity? I guess I don't understand how that really differs from pulling the plug. I pass up no opportunity to learn, however.

Big difference. I don't have to crawl on my hands and knees under the desk looking for the right plug in the dark.

 

[Brighton Line]

For all you people who own a Humax TiVo with a built in DVD player this is a secret I bet most don't know, that cute TiVo logo under the DVD player is really a TiVo button, same as the remote's TiVo button.

And for those Humax owners if you open the not so secret door of the DVD drive you will see the secret button to open the DVD tray and the secret pin hole to open the tray when you don't have power....

How bout them secrets? :up:

 

[WayneCarter]

Does the pc have some sort of process it goes thru to protect the file integrity? I guess I don't understand how that really differs from pulling the plug. I pass up no opportunity to learn, however.

Kinda', sorta' ... to increase the efficiency of disk access, a PC leaves the structure of a file which is open for writing in a state such that subsequent writes to th file may be processed with minimal overhead BUT in this state, the file structure is not fully consistent. Closing the file is necessary to flush the buffers and complete updating the file structure and directory entries before new version of the file is usable. Onc the new version is closed, the old version is deleted. If power is lost before the file is closed, the entire new version of the file is "orphaned" - all changes are lost AND the disk space occupied by whatever portion of the new version has already been written to disk is still allocated BUT not recovered - both the old version and the partial new version remain on disk!. That is what the diskcheck which runs after a system crash does - it searches for and recovers the "orphaned" file fragments (aka "Lost Chains").

As stated in a previous post, some file systems never put the file structure in an invalid state - using such a file system means the plug can be pulled at any time without corrupting the file system BUT such systems are less efficient

Power distribution failures often are accompanied by power spikes, power sags, and other forms of "dirty" power which can and do cause actual physical damage to electronic devices, even those which don't require a shutdown procedure. A good UPS or surge protector is the only defense against the kind of damage.