TiVo Community Forums Archives - Symptoms of Windows corruption

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Symptoms of Windows corruption
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Posted by: jmaas

I was upgrading a series 2 Tivo for a friend when I noticed that it was booting into Win2K. The second hard drive that he gave me as the add-on harddrive had Win2K loaded. I believe this corrupted the original factory drive that was also attached at the time. IS there a way to verify this or reverse this. Now it just keeps looping after "just a couple more minutes"

Thanks

Posted by: jmaas

ok like a good little forum reader I spent a while searching and found some info about this issue. So here are some followup questions.

I tried to restore from a backup I made of another series 2 tivo and it just keeps looping. Does this mean that the harddrive is screwed even if I restore it? Does the restore not overwrite the sector that is overwritten by windows?

If I get a brand new hard drive and restore it should it work ok?

Thanks in advance.

Posted by: Robert S

If it gets to 'a few more minutes' then the drive was NOT corrupted by 2k.

Posted by: dashrender

I'm a total newbie to the Tivo hacks, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Perhaps you can use a low-level format utility. It should get rid of any and all indications of Windows from the drive. Now try your restore.
:confused:

Posted by: Robert S

It won't make any difference, the problem is not that there's anything unpleasant left on the drive. It's probably a cable or jumper problem.

Posted by: jmaas2

Robert,

Thanks for the reply. I have read about the Tivo Boot sector being corrupted by Win2k which does not allow the Tivo software to boot. From what I understand this allows the Tivo to get past the "powering up" screen to the second "just a couple more minutes screen" which is where I assume it is booting the Tivo software. At this point it just loops and reboots. I have read about the utillity called "makeTivoBootable" or something like that. I am having difficulty understanding why a clean restore would not fix this (or should it, and maybe I have another issue).

Let me ask this another way.

If I booted Win2k with the Tivo A drive attached and it "corrupted" the drive, Should I be able to do a clean restore to the drive and get it to work? Or do I still have to use the utility mentioned above to recover the drive?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Posted by: Robert S

I did actually answer both those points, but to do so again less tersely:

Getting to 'almost there' means that Linux has loaded and started to boot therefore the boot block is OK and has not been over-written by the Windows signature.

The signature is not an unusual piece of data, an indelible mark or a gypsy curse, it just breaks the boot block. MTB writes a working boot block on to the drive, as does restoring a valid backup.

Therefore something else is wrong.