TiVo Community Forums Archives - Tivo S2 frozen during Live TV or Welcome screen

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Tivo S2 frozen during Live TV or Welcome screen
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Posted by: gimpyestrada

HELP!?

I've got a year and a half old TiVo Series 2 40 hour with a Western Digital 120GB upgrade, that is suddenly giving me grief. Everything has been working wonderfully until the last couple of days. Now I will turn on my TV to find it either stuck at the "Welcome powering up" screen, or more recently, it is frozen during Live TV.

If I unplug the power wait a few minutes and plug the power back in, it comes back up and I can go through the menus and even watch a recorded program. But if I walk away and come back a while later, I will find it frozen on live TV or at the "Welcome powering up" screen again. What gives?

Is this a hard drive gone bad or something more insidious? Please say hard drive, I can handle that.

Thanks

Posted by: gimpyestrada

Still nothing? Come on one of you guys have got to know the answer to this one.

Tivo said I could send it back to them and buy a new unit and they would transfer th Lifetime subscription, but I don't want to do that.

Posted by: lgkahn

most likely hard drive.. if you don't care about your recording get a new hard drive download an image and mfsrestore it... if you care you can get the same hard drive and dd copy everything before it dies...

Posted by: gimpyestrada

I just did the DD from the TiVo drive to a new drive. I used a hard drive that I had laying around that was exactly the same as the questionable hard drive in the TiVo. It seems to be working, it has been running for more than 24 hours without locking up.

FYI I booted using Tiger’s Mfs Tools Boot Cd and ran this command:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=1024
Where hda was the TiVo drive and hdc was the new identical drive.

You should make sure that DMA is working before you try this one, I started it off once and it was still running the next day. I killed it and ran 'hdparam -t /dev/hda' and found out that it was only transfering data at 2MB/s. That would take FOREVER to DD 120GB, so I used an older motherboard and the boot CD recognized and loaded DMA so that I was transfering at 50MB/s, much better.

I'll post to let everyone know if the new drive lasts through the weekend.