TiVo Community Forums Archives - Possible major TiVo problem (sluggish)

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Possible major TiVo problem (sluggish)
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Posted by: azitnay

Hi... First, some background:

Our bedroom TiVo is a 40-hour TCD240040, upgraded earlier this year with a 120GB Western Digital as the B drive.

Now the problem:

Hurricane Isabel recently blew through here, and we experienced roughly six power outages Thursday night. Thus, both our TiVos lost power and rebooted roughly six times. I didn't think anything of it, since I thought TiVos were supposed to be able to handle a "plug-pulling" gracefully, and they're both on surge protectors.

Now that the power's restored (though the cable isn't), we were hoping to catch up on some TV, but the previously-mentioned bedroom TiVo is, at most times, horribly sluggish. It even affects playing certain shows, introducing freezes into the action. Worse, when I rebooted it today to try to fix things, playing anything caused it to complain that it couldn't find it on the drive. Luckily, after another worrisome reboot things returned to "normal" (except for the sluggishness).

I'm currently feverishly transferring hours and hours of TV to the living room TiVo through MRV (sometimes it transfers horribly slow but it looks to be picking up speed, at least for now). I'm wondering what course of action to take after everything's transferred (could be days). Is it a potential hardware problem, or will a wipe and restore of the drive take care of it?

Thanks in advance for any help you might give.

Drew

P.S. I'm only posting this here because the main TiVo Help forum says it doesn't help with upgraded TiVos.

Posted by: Robert S

Hard to say. Might worth running the WD diagnostics, but I don't expect them to find anything. Try DiskSpeed32 too.

Posted by: Fangfoo

Many 'affordable' surge protectors are single shot protection. I only use those with a physical fuse that I can reset after checking. Honestly for my TIVO/DVD/STEREO and TV I have them on an APC UPS the same as I protect my PC's with.

I point this out because after a network power loss, something significantly different than simply pulling the plug happens; there may be a surge on the electrical lines that greatly exceeds normal current/voltage that will burn out the protection in 'affordable' surge protectors and ruin unprotected electricly powered devices.

**A note of caution, printers shouldn't be plugged into UPS's as they spike on printing and this can damage the batteries/controls on UPS's. So before plugging in any media equipment to a UPS I would recommend you understand it's power consumption and behavior.

I'm not commenting on your issue and I hope you find a solution and that no damage has been done, just offering up some related information.

Posted by: azitnay

Well, my problem may just have become a nightmare. I woke up this morning to find that absolutely no progress had been made transferring the 31 or so hours of TV from the bedroom to the living room (I've got about 7 hours already transferred). So, I decided to cancel the current transfer and see if it would pick up with the next one, no go. I then noticed that the LIVING ROOM TiVo's To Do List was now acting weird (only showing the pending transfers and a couple suggestions, nothing else). I decided to reboot it, and it's now taking FOREVER to get past the "Almost There" screen. The hard drive is still churning, so I'm holding out hope, but is it possible our only working TiVo has now bitten the dust as well??

Drew

Posted by: azitnay

Oh, thank god. It took 20 minutes, but it finally came up. I've never been so happy to see that little TiVo guy jumping around :). To Do list is fine now, too... Maybe it was rebuilding it or something and that's why it took forever?

Drew

Posted by: azitnay

Wanted to post an update on my situation: I've pretty much finished transferring all the important stuff off the sick TiVo; there are four shows that won't fully transfer for one reason or another. I'm really starting to suspect the WD hard drive, too... I figure the reason those four shows won't transfer is that they're partially on the bad part of the disk. I also may have woken up this morning before 6 AM to a "click of death"-like sound. I've never heard the click of death before, and I was quite tired when I heard it this morning, but is that possible on a WD (i.e. not Maxtor) drive?

If I have time tonight I'll pull the drives out and run some diagnostics. Thanks for the tip on DiskSpeed32, Robert.

Drew

P.S. If the WD drive is indeed at fault, is there any chance I can get it under manufacturer's warranty (I bought it for $10 after rebates at CompUSA back in May or so, guess you get what you pay for)?