TiVo Community Forums Archives - A little worried...

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

A little worried...
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: mboge

My Tivo (Series 1 DirecTiVo, upgraded to 106 hours, TurboNet, TiVo Web, 2.5 software) spontaneously re-booted today.

It got stuck on "Powering Up" and after I pulled the plug, I got the "Green Screen of Death" (Severe Error screen). After a half-hour or so, my TiVo was back up and running.

Later that evening, I turned the TV back on and hit the TiVo button... I got the animation again (which tells me my TiVo re-booted again). I checked the System Information screen and noticed that my uptime was only 16 minutes (the GSOD incident happened hours before).

I'm a little worried that my full TiVo is starting to go bad.

Is there any way I can diagnose a potential problem before I lose all my recordings? Is there a log I can look at (I have TiVo Web access) to give me any clues?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Posted by: weaknees

You can try to do a complete drive copy - either a 'dd' or an mfsbackup/restore with -Tao - but if the drive is failing, these may not work.

You should try to make a recording-less backup first and then test the drive with the manufacturer's utility to see if it finds errors. Even if it doesn't, the TiVo's harsher demands of the drive may turn up latent errors.

Any way you slice it, this is a drive problem.

Michael

Posted by: mboge

Thanks for the response...

My TiVo has two drives... original 40 plus an upgraded 80.

Is there any way I can replace this with one 120 gig drive, or should I just replace both drives as-is?

If I *can* do the complete drive copy (I assume this is a bit-for-bit copy) without errors, can I just plug the new drives and TiVo won't know the difference, or is there some additional setup?

Posted by: Robert S

You may be able to get both drives on to a 120, but it might not quite be big enough. If you get a 160Gb you'll definitely have enough room, but there will be some wasted space.

You use an MFS Tools pipe to copy the drives:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -pi - /dev/hdc

When it completes the drive is ready to go.