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T60 Hard Drive Glitch? Hung on "Powering Up ..."
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Posted by: litzdog911

Came home yesterday to a problem with my Sony SAT-T60 DirecTivo that I haven't seen described here before, at least not quite this symptom.

When I fired up my A/V system, the T60 was hung on the "Powering Up ..." screen. Note that this T60 is never powered down, and is powered from a UPS. So I'm pretty sure this hang wasn't caused by any power glitch.

So I disconnected/reconnected the T60's power and it restarted fine. I found the last program it had recorded and started to watch it. At about 15 minutes into a 30 minute show I began to experience stuttering, freezes, and strange artifacts in both the playback video and audio.

After about 5 minutes of that, the video & audio froze for several seconds and the T60 hung on the "Powering Up ...." screen. Something caused it to restart! After waiting several minutes, I again disconnected/reconnected the T60's power and it restarted fine. So I deleted that show! And for the rest of evening it played and recorded fine.

Any theories about what happened?

Note that this Tivo was upgraded with two 120GB drives by me following Hinsdale's guide with MFS Tools 2.0 about four months ago. Internal temp is pretty consistent at 48-deg C. I've had no problems until this one yesterday. And I hope it's still working fine when I go home this evening!

Thanks for your thoughts!

Posted by: Robert S

Certainly the sort of thing you'd expect to see with a failing drive.

Run diagnostics on the drives.

Posted by: litzdog911

Thanks, Robert. Came home this evening and my T60 was again hung on the "Powering Up .... " screen. Time to pull out the PowerMax utilities. Darn.

Posted by: litzdog911

Well, ran the PowerMax utility to test each of my 120GB drives, and no problems were found! Darn again.

So, now I'm going to "low level format" each drive (which will take a few hours), restore my original backup image (which I'm glad I did!), and keep my fingers crossed.

Posted by: weaknees

You ran the full powermax tests on both drives and they both came up clean? It's possible.... If you continue to get stuttering, etc., you might consider replacing the drives and seeing if the problems stop. We have seen many instances in which Powermax says "no problem," but TiVo still isn't happy with the drives.

Michael

Posted by: Robert S

I think you'll want to put an A drive image on both drives so you can run them independently to see if that gives you a clearer answer as to which drive is causing the stuttering.

Posted by: litzdog911

Thanks, Robert & Michael. That's exactly what I did.

I low-level formatted the drives overnight, and neither yielded any errors using PowerMax. I re-imaged both drives using my backup image (thankfully I had one!). So now I have two "new" 120GB Tivo "A" drives, and the first one is up and running as I type this. If it continues to work fine I'll probably just leave this Tivo with one 120GB drive for now.