TiVo Community Forums Archives - Stuck in "Powering Up" Loop HELP!

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Stuck in "Powering Up" Loop HELP!
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Posted by: tperger

Tonight while watching DTV, my Sony Sat-T60 decided to power off all by itself and reboot. It is now stuck in a loop. It starts with "Welcome. Powering up" then to "Almost there. A few more seconds" then it flashes a live tv screen for about 2 seconds and then right back to "Welcome. Powering up" I've unplug the unit several times with no luck. Any suggestions would be very helpful. Thanks!

Posted by: GREEK

sounds like your drive is taking a crap. run powermax on it from maxtor.com with a full can test. you can replace it for 99 bucks nowadays

Posted by: tperger

Thanks Greek,

I'm going to pull the drives today and run some diagnostics....I'll post my results.

Thanks again.

Posted by: tperger

Diagnostics show one drive is bad...if I can trust the Maxtor Powermax diagnostics program. I read in the forum that it can be tricked if the drive is "locked" Is this true?

Posted by: hawkbug

I had the same problem as you today - I'm very disappointed by this. I love my DirecTivo, and I can buy a new one for $99, so spending $99 for a new drive hardly seems worth it. But, then again, I will only get 40 hours for that $99 when I can get 120 hours for a new drive for that price. Let me know what you find out, I'm going to rip out my drive tonite and try to run some diagnostics on it. My only question is... what do I do now if it is bad? Say I get a new drive, where do I get an image for SAT-T60 to install on it??

Posted by: Robert S

It depends how dead the drive is. There is a zone where drives can be too far gone for the TiVo to boot, but MFS Tools can make a viable compressed backup from it. That's pretty rare, though. If the TiVo is unbootable, I wouldn't expect you to be able to get a viable backup off its drive.

TiVo have just shut down all the well known sites that carried backup files, so they're quite hard to find these days.

Posted by: tperger

Well here's the story on the drives...

I have two 160gig maxtor diamondmax plus 9 drives.

I downloaded maxtor's powermax diagnostics program and it found the A drive to have an error which it gave me the option to repair. I let it run it's course and it gave me a message "congratulations, your drive has been repaired" Just to be sure, I ran the diagnostics again. I received the same results, error found, option to repair...successful. This routine went on and on...then after 5 or 6 tries the diagnostics found no errors. I'm not convinced the drive is OK, but the maxtor warranty system won't RMA the drive without an "error code" from their powermax diagnostics program. So, I guess I will try to set the system up again and if I'm successful...I will make a backup image ASAP.

I do have one concern, after many hours of searching the forums for help, I've found several references to the "qunlock" lock problem with maxtor drives. I don't want to lock my drives, so I'm not going to run qunlock...but if I understand what I read...just using any of the tivo boot disks will automatically run qunlock, right?

Posted by: Robert S

Why would a boot disk try to lock a drive? Dylan and Kazymyr didn't go out of their way to make life difficult for you! The TiVo will lock some drives (TiVo, or at least, Quantum, did want to make life difficult for you).

If the drives are detecting as the correct sizes, don't worry about it.

Posted by: tperger

Thanks Robert,

I think my mind is turning to mush reading all the posts regarding "qunlock"