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half dead TiVo
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Posted by: Peter_Owl

I am seeking advice before crossing my fingers, shipping my late TiVo accross the country, and letting Sony have a go at it. I would much rather repair it myself, if possible. After all, if it needs a new hard disk, why get another one that small? On the other hand, if it needs a new main board, I expect only Sony could legitimately make that match my subscription.

My TiVo still powers up and gets all the way through playing the animation before it freezes. It even slides the main menu in from the right, with all the most recent entries showing. Then it stops. NTSC is still coming out but the background has stopped swirling. And the remote is just talking to the hand. TiVo's not listening.

I tried the serial port for the first time and got into the debug monitor. The only test I found was a memory test, which finds no errors. However, when I tried to get a bash prompt, I failed to make that happen. Apparently not enough of my TiVo is still alive. But there is still enough to run the animation and even render the most recent main menu.

There's a lot of hardware still working in that box. And it seems like a lot of the software still works, too. It just can't seem to be my friend anymore. And it is not clear to me just what has gone wrong.

It might be that a new hard disk, preconfigured from an upgrade dealer, would just fix it. Or it might not. I'd sure like to hear from anyone who might recognize the specific symtoms I'm seeing.

I'd also like to know where I might get a copy of what would be on one of those preconfigured upgrade drives. I'm going to try to back up the old drive. I might learn more in that process. I'm still looking for info on doing a backup in small enough pieces that I could save them on DVD-R.

Thanks for any insights.

Peter

Posted by: Robert S

Backing up onto DVD-R probably isn't sensible, although I guess you could use split to break the stream into 4Gb chunks and then cat to bring them back together.

It would be better to buy a nice, large hard drive and just use the normal techniques (probably dd with conv=noerror,sync) to copy what you can from the old drive.

Your symptoms aren't obviously indicative of a specific problem, so your best bet is to change the hard drive and see if that fixes it. If not, then you can use the new drive in the replacement TiVo. Depending on what kind of TiVo it is (I love the way people regard that detail as too trivial to mention!), you may be able to access the recordings you copied on to the new drive in the replacement TiVo.

My guess would be that there's a bad block in an awkward spot, in which case a new hard drive will do the trick. You may even be able to use the manufacturer's diagnostic to fix the bad block and get the current drive working well enough to make an MFS Tools copy.

Posted by: Peter_Owl

Thank you, Robert, for your thoughtful reply.

If I find a bad block in an awkward spot, I expect that will render my backup useless. But that would also be good news regarding the rest of the hardware. In that case, a new, preconfigured drive would probably fix it. Do you know where I might obtain the same software image to put an existing spare drive?

My Tivo is a three year old Sony of the only kind they made at that time. It has one 30G Quantum drive, probably locked, and no satellite receiver.

Thanks again.

Peter

Posted by: Robert S

The bad block is probably in a recording partition and can therefore be blanked by the diagnostics or ignored by the backup software without causing a problem, so a compressed backup is well worth trying.

Links to backup files can not be posted in public on this Forum, but Google can find many things on the Internet...

Posted by: Peter_Owl

Good news: my disk drive is failing! The BIOS in my PC literally told me to backup the data and replace the drive. However, it did not say how it got that premonition. Anyway, that means the less replaceable parts of my TiVo probably are not failing. If so, that's really good news.

Better news: the backup tool may have been stubborn enough to read anyway the parts that my TiVo was unable to boot from. The bad spot had to be in the operating software or the software would have been operating. In the process of backing up just the bare essentials I saw four timeouts, but the tool went on without stopping. Either the retries were enough to finally read that part or I got a backup with a hole in it. I'll find that out when I try to use it.

Thank you again for your insight.

Posted by: Robert S

That would be the S.M.A.R.T. function.

As long as the TiVo still boots, the backup should be valid - there's quite a bit of empty space in the system partitions, so there's a good chance that the bad blocks in the bits that mfsbackup did cover didn't include anything vital.

It's easy enough to check that the backup is OK when you get the new drive.

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