TiVo Community Forums Archives - Severe Error Has Occured

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Severe Error Has Occured - it recovered.
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Posted by: MighTiVo

Just in case this happens to someone else, I searched for a bit and only found replacing hard drive and send back for repair as a solution for the Green Screen of Death.

I was swapping hard drives this morning and forgot to plug the second drive back in. When I powered up the unit I got a reboot loop. Took it back apart and saw the cable left off. Replaced cable and rebooted and got the Green Screen Of Death - Don't unplug, move, breathe, think bad thoughts, etc. for 3 hours. I left the room to go meditate on what I had done. When I returned all was well.

Just keep thinking good thoughts.....

Posted by: krose

Yes - the same thing just happened to me this past weekend. I was upgrading my Hughes DirecTiVo with two new 120GB Maxtors (thanks Hinsdale for the great instructions, and to the rest of the hackers who coded up the software!), and everything went great. I actually spent most of my time fiddling with getting all the drives hooked into my PC than any other step.

Anyway, the process went smoothly, and I hooked up the coverless TiVo and checked it to make sure it booted and reported the correct number of hours (from ~35 to ~230). Everything booted and reported fine - life was good. Then all I did was put the cover back on and hook it back up. During the boot process it experience the green screen of sickness. I was tempted to fiddle with it, but had to go to my son's baseball game. When we got back I checked it out and saw that it was happily booting, and hasn't shown a problem since.

I suspect that it encountered some bad spot on one of the new drives, and had to "halt the presses" to run some software that would mask that spot.

Any TiVo insiders wish to divulge exactly what sorts of situations put the machine into the "green screen" state? It might be helpful for HD upgraders to know that this might be a normal occurrence, and to just be patient.

Posted by: jsoukeras

The green screen means something isn't right about the data on the drive. It could be hardware related and it could just be data corruption that has nothing to do with bad hardware. I've seen the green screen only once. Rather than waiting hours for it to fix itself I pulled the drive and did a low level scan and found no bad spots on the drive. I restored a good image to the drive and it's been up for a few months now.

Green screen doesn't necessarily mean bad drive but it can mean bad drive.

Jason

Posted by: krose

Restoring my backup would have been one of my last options, because I would have lost all the shows that I hadn't watched yet. My backup image is the software-only backup, but I dd'd all the data from the original drive to the new drive to preserve my recordings.

Fortunately, the baseball game provided a period of "unavoidable-patience" that allowed my TiVo to fix itself.

Posted by: embeem

It's been mentioned before, the green screen of death *isn't* the "OMFG! MY DRIVE IS DEAD!" that everyone assumes it is. I think that misconception is partially tivo's fault for the harsh wording on that screen -- I suspect that leads to more problems as people panic and pull the plug.

In reality it's nothing more than a series of self checks, and in many cases it's able to fix the problem itself then reboot. In cases where it's unable to fix the problem I'd imagine it'd do a call to tivo but I'm not sure (I'm not about to nuke a drive to find out).

Posted by: seanboltman

I got the GSOD just now... did a recert on the Maxtor 80 (drive B), it's tits. I hoped for a recovery, but no luck here. No biggie though, Maxtor will RMA it.

Posted by: bsnelson

I recently had a GSOD on my 188 hour box; it lasted for every bit of five minutes, rebooted, and was fine after that. So, as embeem pointed out, it's not necessarily a death sentence.

Brad

Posted by: hinsdale

Maybe somebody should bump this post everyonce in awhile:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...ht=Green+Screen