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A Severe Error Has Occurred...
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Posted by: dan

I noticed that my 2.5 Sony unit was pending restart today, so I went ahead and restarted it to finish the upgrade to 3.0 and I got the following error message:

A SEVERE ERROR HAS OCCURRED

Please leave the receiver plugged in and connected to the phone line for the next 24 hours while the receiver attempts to repair itself.

DO NOT UNPLUG OR RESTART THE RECIEVER.

If, after 24 hours the recorder does not restart, call customer support.

My unit is a single disk system, that I upgraded with one 30 GB disk about 9 months ago. I did notice about a week ago that I appear(ed) to have a disk problem. On a show that I had marked save until I delete, while playing it back at about 10 minutes into it, the unit would pause and I could hear the disks retry about 3-4 times, then the unit would freeze.

I was hoping that after the upgrade I could replace the disk with a new 80 GB drive that I have.

My questions are:

1. Has anybody seen this error, and is TIVO generally able to fix itself?
2. If TIVO fixes itself, will it be safe to upgrade the disk?
3. If I have to restore from backup, how can I tell which of my disks is bad?

Thanks, Dan

Posted by: weaknees

The error you have seen, together with the green screen, is commonly known as the "Green Screen of Death" or "GSOD." Search around for references and you'll see that you're not the first or only one.

If your TiVo fixes itself, you might want to let it run for awhile before doing anything with it. Sometimes the TiVo fixes itself; other times it doesn't.

If your TiVo doesn't recover, then you can use Maxtor's "powermax" utility or some other disk diagnostic tool to check your two drives. If one comes back with an error, then you know which is the culprit. Unfortunately, powermax does not always reveal a bad drive. TiVo can have problems, but powermax doesn't find the bad drive.

I'm not sure about the #2 question. Are you looking to add more capacity?

Good luck!
Michael
www.weaknees.com

Posted by: dan

Thanks, I do indeed appear to have the GSOD. I did notice several nasty green flashes during the reboot, (on my 50" widescreen the image was burned into my retina) but I did not associate this with any error, just a normal reboot.

Tivo managed to repair itself. Yeah! I have backups... (If I didn't I'm sure Tivo would be dead in the water). The suspect portion of my recording still skips and stutters, but Tivo gamely wades through the corrupted region.

Does anyone know if there is a chance that when I do a backup, I will backup a corrupted image? (since I appear to have a slight drive problem?).

I am planning on upgrading my upgrade, and replacing both drives (once I saw those 120 GB drives for $109) so it is not as important that I figure out which drive is bad right now, I can do that at my leisure on my PC.

Thanks!

Posted by: weaknees

If it helps, we have fixed a number of TiVos that had had the GSOD and then were resurrected. In those cases, stuttering and some other annoyances continued, so we recommended an upgrade.

In one case, we copied the entire drive (including recordings) from the troublesome drive to a new drive. We considered that approach to be somewhat risky given the nature of the problems, but tried it anyway. Problem solved.

Usually, we replace the problem drive completely when we are dealing with TiVos that have the green screen that won't reliably disappear.

By all indications, if you have a drive that is causing problems but has resurrected itself and is reasonably stable (i.e., you may have stutters, but the drive is not rebooting constantly), then you might very well be able to get a backup that will work on a new drive.

Also, FYI, the "GSOD" is not the blank green screen that flashes when you see a re-boot. The GSOD is the green screen that says "A SEVERE ERROR HAS OCCURRED."

Michael
www.weaknees.com