TiVo Community Forums Archives - Green Screen of Death

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Green Screen of Death
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Posted by: Chiun

Everything below this line is just a cut-and-paste from my Help Center thread.

Click here for all the info I have.

Posted by: Chiun

No more green screen, but its looping in the Powering Up, Almost There screens.

Posted by: Robert S

You can just link, you know?

Try forcing another green screen. Boot the TiVo without the B drive and then power down and reconnect the B drive.

Your symptoms suggest a problem with your MFS partitions (a loose cable could well cause that). The GSOD is a repair utility (mfsfix) that should be able to fix the damage.

Posted by: BlankMan

That could very well be a bad hard disk or a corrupted sector that it really really needs.

Posted by: Chiun

Sorry for not linking. I'm not thinking very clearly at the moment.

I'm trying the force a GSOD right now. I'll check back in a few.

Posted by: Chiun

I forced the green screen but it's stilll looping in the power up faze.

Does it make a difference that I switched the IDE cable around? I put the end you attach to the mobo to the Master?

Posted by: Chiun

Please, anyone. I don't know what else to do.

Posted by: Robert S

If it's getting to 'Almost there' then the OS is booting, but the TiVo interface isn't starting. There are several things that can cause this, but given that you're in mid-upgrade, we'll assume that it's a problem with your MFS partitions.

If it only gets to 'Powering up', then the OS isn't starting up. In that case, cables, jumpers, etc are suspect. You should be able to reverse the cable without a problem.

Given that the GSOD has failed to fix things, running diagnostics again would be a good idea. You don't want to wipe the disk, but it should be able to scan the whole disk without wiping it, in which case you can look for the bad sectors BlankMan refers to.

Posted by: Chiun

All things lead me to a corrupt B drive. I got a replacement one before I went to work today and I just got home.

I'm going to attempt to copy the B drive onto the new 120 gig Maxtor. And I'm going to make sure to increase the swap like I should.

Posted by: BlankMan

Why B? I'd be more inclined to think A.

I didn't read through your linked post, are the drives Maxtor? If so have you tried running the PowerMAX Advanced Diags to see if it finds a problem? If not, did you try the drive vendors diags?

Typically a problem with the A drive will cause a reboot during boot or shortly after boot. A problem with the B drive which contains only recordings and not any part of the OS happens longer after boot when indexing and what not is going on and typically forces the GSOD on the next reboot. At least that has been my experience with failing drives. Although I did have a failing A drive who's max uptime was 29 minutes.

So I'm curious why you suspect the B drive, you may be right, I'm not saying your not, just wondering.

Posted by: Chiun

I checked both A and B drives with WD's diag disk (latest version). Both came back clean from the quick test. I didn't want to do the long one because it said it would write to the disk. Isn't it bad to write stuff to a tivo drive? If not, I can redo both on the long test.

I suspect the B drive is bad because its about 2-3 years old. And my errors coincide with my installation of said drive.

Posted by: Chiun

If its all right to do the thorough test from WD's diag tool, then I'll redo both drives. But I'm worried about the tool writing data to the drives and corrupting either of them more.

I'd also like to note that I got it working last night for a couple hours and then when I woke up, it was looping again. From what you said, that sounds like B drive errors.

Posted by: Chiun

I seem to be totally screwed. The backup I did of the original A drive before I added the B one seems to be corrupt. It completes all the way to the end and then give me an error about Decompression Error. This is with both commands from Hinsdales how-to.

The backup I did of the A and B just now to see if it would work, doesn't work.

I seem to be out of options. :(

Posted by: Chiun

If anyone has access to TCD140060(Series 2 Tivo 60 gig) backup image I would really appreciate an email(zik@cox.net) or PM.

Posted by: Robert S

gjustice has some Series 2 backups. Ask him how to get to them.

Edit: Oh, I see you're ahead of me on that one. Unfortunately I don't know how to get to his FTP site.