[dforemsky]

My Roamio has been stuck in a software update since sometime yesterday (last successful connection to the Tivo service was Monday morning).

The call goes fine, but the update slows down at the "Loading Info" stage. It seemed to be stuck at 19% last night when I rebooted the machine. After rebooting, I forced a call again, and it again got to the "Loading Info" stage, jumped to 18% almost immediately, then slowed down again.

I let the box sit overnight, then checked this morning and it was up to 23%. Another scheduled call happened a little later, so it looks like it restarted the "Loading Info" stage again. It's now sitting at 19% an hour after that scheduled call.

Current software version is at 20.7.4d.RC15-840-6-840.

Questions:
1. Is there any way to keep the box from trying a scheduled call again? It looks like it keeps doing this because the last call hasn't finished. Will pulling the network cable keep it from even trying?

2. Can this process be slowing the entire box down? We were having trouble yesterday with channels playing for a couple of seconds then freezing or going black, then coming back again. If I skip to a much higher channel in the guide, it seems to freeze for 10-15 seconds before refreshing.

This setup has been bulletproof for several years. I hope this isn't the end.

 

[cwoody222]

1) No. Pulling the Ethernet won’t stop attempts.

2) Possibly but shouldn’t really affect performance.

Have you tried just letting it make its attempt and leave it alone while it processes, even if it’s slow? Ie: stop watching the water boil and rebooting?

 

[dforemsky]

As a followup, my box is working again, but I'm not too crazy about it.

1. As suggested, I let the update run. It ran for two days, never going about 25% before it attempted a call again and reset the counter.
2. I ordered a new drive to replace the current one. Just seemed like a hard drive failure to me.
3. After the new drive arrived, I used the MFSTools 3.2 CD to copy the existing hard drive to the new one.
4. After 19 hours of copying (and a couple of disk error messages, that I though MFS Tools was supposed to account for), I put the new drive into the box.
5. Everything started fine, but most recordings were missing, and got other weird errors (Live TV worked OK)
6. Decided to find an older version of Western Digital diagnostics to check the original drive. Put that on to a USB stick, and ran the extended diagnostics. After 5+ hours, it stated that it found and fixed some errors.
7. Thought that perhaps something had copied incorrectly, so put the old and new drives back into my tower and copied the drive again.
8. After 19 more hours, put the new drive into the Tivo box. Initially looked like all recordings were there, but after an hour or so they disappeared.
9. As a final try, put the original, repaired drive back into the Tivo box. Everything started fine, recordings were there, and the update completed successfully. Everything is running fine for now.

Not too crazy about this solution because once a drive starts failing, it usually continues to fail. We'll see how long this lasts.

I guess the next step is to run the WD diagnostics on the new drive and make sure it is OK and was not the cause of the missing recordings and other strangeness.

 

[kpeters59]

Maybe try a hardware clone using a Cloning Dock?

-KP

 

[dforemsky]

So as a (hopefully) final followup if anybody is still reading, the cloning dock appears to have solved my problems with copying the tivo drive to the new drive.

This is the dock I purchased and used:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0759567JT

This probably would not have worked as well if I was changing drive size; in my case I was going from a 3 TB drive to a new 3 TB drive. The documentation with the dock said that if you were going to a larger drive that the unused space would show up as unallocated space in Windows disk management. Tivo probably wouldn't know what to do with that.

Steps that probably would have worked:
1. Pull drive from Tivo. Install drive into your PC (or use the dock. I guess I could have used that if I had the dock, though it may have been slower)
2. Get a version of the Western Digital tools that run from a USB drive, and boot your PC from the USB drive.
3. Run the tools on your Tivo drive, letting it fix any issues it finds
4. (optional?) Run the tools on the new drive as well. I also had the tools write zeroes to the entire drive.
5. Use the cloning dock to copy the tivo drive to the new drive.
6. Install new drive to tivo

Anybody interested in buying one very slightly used dock? :^)

 

[Finalrinse]

Yes, a cloning dock works great, I swapped out mine in December using this one, all the same...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B018FTE87S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1