TiVo HD help please

1206 Views 6 Replies 3 Participants Last post by akbungle, May 8, 2011

akbungle

Discussion Starter · May 5, 2011

Here is my problem and I am just stuck:
I had a Hitachi 1Tb drive in my HD TiVo and it started rebooting and or shutting down so I assumed the drive was going bad so I tested it with seagate tools and the short generic passed but the S.M.A.R.T. test failed so I found it was still under warranty. So I had it swapped and received the refurb unit yesterday. Something I missed mentioning is that I had one other TiVo HD that was working great that I took a WINMFS image of right before I sold it(I also took an image of my ailing Hitachi drive before I sent it away). Okay so I thought I would use the image of my heathy drive to bring back this TiVo to life and I loaded it onto the drive without a hitch. But then I hooked the newly imaged Hitachi refurb into the TiVo and it gave me an error message that there was something wrong with the hardware and that it was going to try and fix it but it would take a few hours so I waited and when I came back the TiVo was playing a station looking normal but when I pressed the TiVo button it said there was a problem and that I would not be able to record anything until it was resolved and that I should restart the TiVo. Oh and also it said if I received that message for the second time I should call TiVo and report that I had problem # 51 or 53 (I don't remember which).

So then I took the HDD back out and tried to re image the HDD using the other image but this time it progressed all the way until the part where it is supposed to tell you to expand but instead I received the windows program shutdown error

. So I tried again but then just selecting the drive gave me the same shutdown error. Then I had to go into disk management and reformat the drive just to be able the select the drive in the WinMfs program but again after almost completing the program error-ed out and shut down. I made several attempts at this using one image then the other and so on.

So I don't know what I should do at this point. I mean is this refurb bad or do the newer Hitachi drives need to be adjusted somehow? Am I missing something or should I be trying something?

Please help. Sorry for the long post

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unitron

· #2 · May 5, 2011

akbungle said:
Here is my problem and I am just stuck:
I had a Hitachi 1Tb drive in my HD TiVo and it started rebooting and or shutting down so I assumed the drive was going bad so I tested it with seagate tools and the short generic passed but the S.M.A.R.T. test failed so I found it was still under warranty. So I had it swapped and received the refurb unit yesterday. Something I missed mentioning is that I had one other TiVo HD that was working great that I took a WINMFS image of right before I sold it(I also took an image of my ailing Hitachi drive before I sent it away). Okay so I thought I would use the image of my heathy drive to bring back this TiVo to life and I loaded it onto the drive without a hitch. But then I hooked the newly imaged Hitachi refurb into the TiVo and it gave me an error message that there was something wrong with the hardware and that it was going to try and fix it but it would take a few hours so I waited and when I came back the TiVo was playing a station looking normal but when I pressed the TiVo button it said there was a problem and that I would not be able to record anything until it was resolved and that I should restart the TiVo. Oh and also it said if I received that message for the second time I should call TiVo and report that I had problem # 51 or 53 (I don't remember which).

So then I took the HDD back out and tried to re image the HDD using the other image but this time it progressed all the way until the part where it is supposed to tell you to expand but instead I received the windows program shutdown error. So I tried again but then just selecting the drive gave me the same shutdown error. Then I had to go into disk management and reformat the drive just to be able the select the drive in the WinMfs program but again after almost completing the program error-ed out and shut down. I made several attempts at this using one image then the other and so on.

So I don't know what I should do at this point. I mean is this refurb bad or do the newer Hitachi drives need to be adjusted somehow? Am I missing something or should I be trying something?

Please help. Sorry for the long post

I'm going to use a couple of made up numbers for the purpose of illustration.

You had a Tivo that you sold. It had a Tivo Service Number of 123 (that's one of those made up numbers, the real one would be much longer and start with the first part of the model number).

Before you sold it you made an image file, by which I assume you mean truncated backup.

You restored that image onto the refurb they sent you and tried to boot in the TiVo you still have which has a TSN of 456.

The hard drive was expecting to boot up in the machine with the 123 TSN, and the TiVo was expecting a drive which expected to be booted in a machine with the TSN of 456. When you get that kind of conflict between hard drive and motherboard the TiVo throws an error 51 message, and then proceeeds to re-write stuff on the drive to make it confirm to the TSN of the motherboard. Once it finishes doing that, it should work fine in that TiVo, but any recordings made if and when the drive was in the 123 machine are no longer accessible, because they're tied to the old TSN (although in your case if the image from which you restored was a truncated one--that's how people usually do it--, there wouldn't be any recordings yet).

As for the rest of your post, I fear I cannot offer any help, but you might ask about that particular model drive on the Drive Upgrade and Expansion thread

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784

to see if anybody there knows anything about it.

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classicsat

· #3 · May 6, 2011

Close. The TiVo does no load the new TSN when it finds a mismatch. It just gives you the "error 51" message. One must C&DE to reset the HDD, which when the TiVo reboots after, setting the drive for that TSN is one of the procedures. With a hacked TiVo (where you have command line and FTP access), you can run a fix51 script, which does nothing but set the HDD TSN and assocated crypto, from the crypto chip on that board.

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akbungle

Discussion Starter · #4 · May 6, 2011

classicsat said:
Close. The TiVo does no load the new TSN when it finds a mismatch. It just gives you the "error 51" message. One must C&DE to reset the HDD, which when the TiVo reboots after, setting the drive for that TSN is one of the procedures. With a hacked TiVo (where you have command line and FTP access), you can run a fix51 script, which does nothing but set the HDD TSN and assocated crypto, from the crypto chip on that board.

Wow that is well beyond what my feeble mind can handle but thanks for the responses. So now if I write zeros to this refurb drive then reload that truncated image of the correct TiVo would I have smooth sailing assuming everything else is all good?

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unitron

· #5 · May 6, 2011

akbungle said:
Wow that is well beyond what my feeble mind can handle but thanks for the responses. So now if I write zeros to this refurb drive then reload that truncated image of the correct TiVo would I have smooth sailing assuming everything else is all good?

The MFS Live cd or WinMFS, whichever you used to make the backup in the first place, will overwrite the target drive as part of the restore process, so there's no need to erase it or zero it out or anything first.

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akbungle

Discussion Starter · #6 · May 6, 2011

unitron said:
The MFS Live cd or WinMFS, whichever you used to make the backup in the first place, will overwrite the target drive as part of the restore process, so there's no need to erase it or zero it out or anything first.

I get that but as I mentioned with the second part of my problem the program just shuts itself down just getting to the drive until I use dick management to reformat it. Maybe I should try the MFS Live way. I think that is how I upgraded my other TiVo HD two years ago.

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akbungle

Discussion Starter · #7 · May 8, 2011

Here is a quote from the Premiere upgrade section that saved me. ( I underlined the exact part):

ThreeSoFar said:
You can make as many dupes as you like, for different TiVos, from the same source drive. All will work.

The one caveat is that all of the boxes except the on the source drive came from to begin with will report a "hardware error", and will not work at all, at first. This is due to the drive containing the hardware address (TSN) of the original system it came from and the other boxes not matching that address.

The menus work though, and once you go to the CADE option (Clear and Delete Everything), and once that process finishes (can take hours), it will work fine.

So after I did that it took maybe an hour or two and then I set everything back up and now its working great!

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