TiVo Community Forums Archives - Problem with Tivo Upgrade

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Problem with Tivo Upgrade - Please help!
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Posted by: dparkmit_ml

Hi,

My wife and I upgraded our Sony Tivo Series 1 from 30 hours to about 270 hours by replacing the main hard drive with 2 120GB hard drives. We also shipped the Tivo from SF to NYC via UPS - the Tivo was packed with a lot of insulation. Now, we have been experiencing three problems with our Tivo though. A more detailed description of the problems is below. Any advice on the cause or the fixes for the problems would be appreciated.

3 Bugs That Have Appeared Since the Upgrade:

1. Random and Spontaneous Tivo Restarts - Our Tivo now randomly and spontaneously restarts. It never used to do this before.

2. Totally Black Show Recordings - Some shows that are recommended by Tivo rather than being scheduled by us are recorded as completely black screens for most of the show. When we attempt to play these recommended shows, the first half or more of the show appears as completely black.

3. Picking Programs To Record By Title - When we try to pick programs to record by title, the Tivo says "No Programs." It's still possible, however, to pick programs to record by channel and time.

Again, any help would be greatly appreciated. We love our Tivo and are totally sad that it isn't working well now. :mad:

Thanks,
David

Posted by: Fuzz

This might seem like a silly question, but with respect to the black recordings, did you tell the Tivo of your new zipcode (or signal source)? If not, it may still be looking for your old stations -- just a thought.

Posted by: litzdog911

Some questions for you:

Did your upgraded Tivo work fine after you did the upgrade in SF, before shipping it to NYC?

You say that "some shows ... are recorded as completely black screens for most of the show." Is the video and audio fine for the other portions?

You say that "when we attempt to play these recommended shows, the first half or more of the show appears as completely black." Is the rest of the show fine?

Do this problems only occur with Tivo's recommendations?

What happens when you watch "Live TV" with this Tivo? Do you receive all channels? Is audio/video quality OK?

Is this Tivo connected to phone line? Is it successfully calling in for guide updates?

How is your Tivo connected to the rest of your system? Is your source cable TV, a cable box, satellite box, or over-the-air antenna?

Posted by: myaffee

Hi, i also just attempted to upgrade my tivo and am having problems. It's a series2 sony svr-3000 and i went from a single 80gb configuration to a dual 160gb configuration. I pulled the drive from the tivo, placed it into a pc as master on the second bus (with the cdrom as slave on the second bus) and put the two new drives as master and slave on the first bus. I booted up with the mfstools cd, double checked the drive configurations in the linux startup text output and then ran the command:

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

It took about 3 hours and said it completed successfully. I put the two new drives back into the tivo, making sure they were jumpered properly (actually i didn't have to change that since they were already master/slave on the primary bus). I tried to boot but it just sticks on the Powering Up screen. Hindsdale said that the most common cause of this is improper jumpering, so i tried a bunch of different combinations and a bunch of different IDE cables. Nothing worked. I decided to go back to my original drive just to make sure it was still working but it is now greenscreening. I thought the upgrade process was non-destructive to the original drive?? Anyway, can anyone tell me if I did something wrong or if there's any way to recover? I have a bunch of shows on the original drive that i'd prefer not to lose. Otherwise, i guess i can procure a new drive image from somewhere and restore using that. But are there any commands on the mfstools cd that i can use to see what the problem is and fix it? I have rudimentary linux skills, but i'm willing to try anything at this point since right now everything looks like it's lost.
Thanks for your help,
Masen

Posted by: myaffee

Follow-up.... my original drive recovered itself from the greenscreen. So i'm ready to try the upgrade again, but i'd like to figure out what went wrong so i don't repeat it. Any thoughts about where i might have gotten off track?
Thanks,
Masen