Startup animation

It sounds like it is rebooting while you're away.

Possible causes include a faulty power supply (likely) or a corrupt HDD.

The animation would only usually show following a reboot, so this implies that the box is rebooting when you're not watching it. Do you use a set-top box (freeview/sky) with TiVo? If so, do you switch that off when not watching TV? TiVo will reboot itself after a while if it doesn't detect a source on the scart socket if it's expecting one.
Other than that it could be a dying Hard Drive and you've been lucky that it's only rebooted when you're not watching.

Cheers,

Ian

I have Tivo and its VM cable source on a timer which reboots each night. There have been a couple of occasions recently when the VM signal was not being received by Tivo and I've ended up with a blank recording. When I have noticed this happening during live TV (usually Channel 5), switching to aux restores the picture.
My hard drive is a 400Gb Samsung and is only a few months old so I hope it is not the cause of this strange behavior.

Do you mean that the VM box is on the timer, or both VM AND TiVo are on the timer? If it's the latter then that's why the animation is being shown as the Tivo has rebooted.

If you've had it set up like this for a long time and it's only recently started showing the animation then I'm not sure why this would have just started to happen.

Ian

TiVo will reboot if it has no video input - are you turning off the set-top-box overnight?

ozsat said:

TiVo will reboot if it has no video input - are you turning off the set-top-box overnight?

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Coo, this forum has an echo...

IanF

I've also found that TiVo will reboot if you leave the video input on an NTSC channel - although not many people would be doing that.

If it is rebooting overnight - it may also be that it thinks it has a software upgrade - and is unable to install - so tries again the next night.

Thanks for your input everyone.

To clarify, both the Tivo and my cable box are on the same timer each night.

As a cable box user I understand why you reboot the cable box as some of them suffered a memory leak symptom that led to slow channel changing, however I do not see any reason that you need to reboot Tivo. I suggest you remove the Tivo from the timer supply

You shouldn't reboot TiVo unless you have to - although it should be able to recover OK

You TiVo is processing 24 hours a day - unplugging it is quite likely to interupt indexing, list building etc.

There is also more than a slim chance that you are going to pull the plug during a daily update around once a month.

Remember, most electrical equipment is found to fail when powering up - and is usally best left on 24/7.

I suggest you remove the Tivo from the timer supply

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You shouldn't reboot TiVo unless you have to

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Snap

ozsat said:

Remember, most electrical equipment is found to fail when powering up - and is usally best left on 24/7.

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Surely you mean electrical equipment that is designed to be left on 24/7 is usually best left on.
Unless you have your cooker, vaccum cleaner, lights, lawnmower etc. on right now ?

The reason for putting Tivo and Samsung cable box on timer is that I found it gives the most reliable channel changes.
I don't disagree with any of the advice given which after all is conventional wisdom, its just that trial and error lead me to downpowering each night.

AMc said:

Surely you mean electrical equipment that is designed to be left on 24/7 is usually best left on.
Unless you have your cooker, vaccum cleaner, lights, lawnmower etc. on right now ?

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I do have the cooker, vacuum cleaner, lights, toaster and fridge on the same Tivo / Samsung timer but my lawnmower is petrol and so that would be stupid.

I will remove Tivo from the timer and see what happens.

AMc said:

Surely you mean electrical equipment that is designed to be left on 24/7 is usually best left on.
Unless you have your cooker, vaccum cleaner, lights, lawnmower etc. on right now ?

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Yes - basically if it doesn't have a power switch - leave it on.

Although computers etc. are also best left on if you intend using it again within a few hours.