TiVo Community Forums Archives - Help! TiVo is sick!

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

Help! TiVo is sick!
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: ctcaldwell

Hi All. My TiVo is having several symptoms of illness and I thought I'd solicit advice here before I blindly reload a clean image and lose all of my content. So here goes.

Since the 3.0 upgrade (and starting while rebooting directly after the upgrade) I'm getting spontaneous periodic reboots, frequent stutter problems, and less frequent green screens that seem to resolve themselves. And now, I find that my daily calls have been failing for the last week and a half. I'm almost out of guide data...about to enter boat anchor mode. Test calls succeed, but Daily calls hang on "Preparing to call". Only a reboot allows me to tinker with dialing settings or try another test call.

Today, I pulled the drives (40G IBM and 30G Quantum original) and ran Maxtor's "PowerDiag" utility on them. Both showed clean results. What next?

Editing to add that this is a Series 1 Phillips...sorry for the omission.

Many many thanks...
Todd

Posted by: Dan203

You could try a full system reset. However you'll need to watch everything you have saved, and write down all your Season passes and Wish Lists, because that will clear everything.

Dan

Posted by: ctcaldwell

Ok. Looks like my beloved TiVo is dying/dead. I have reloaded a clean 3.0 image multiple times. I have even reloaded a 2.5 image, hoping that something related to the 3.0 upgrade was causing my problems. After installing both 3.0 and 2.5, I am still spontaneously rebooting. It occurs with enough frequency that I have difficulty completing guided setup. Temperature readings never exceed 39C. I have tried reloading the images on each of my drives individually...so that I am confident it is not a drive problem.

So, what next? I have not allowed the 2.5 to upgrade to 3.0. Is there any firmware updating that happens in this process that could have been botched previously? Should I allow the 3.0 upgrade to proceed again before giving up?

Could this be caused by a flaky power supply? Is there any way to determine the problem, short of sending it off for repair? I'm comfortable poking around inside a computer, but I am not an electrical engineer.

Thanks,
Todd

Posted by: mike

Maybe there is a connection problem. First, change the IDE cable. If that works, great. If not, use the spare power connector to the drive. Perform these two independently so you can identify which one was the problem. Perhaps the drive itself is going bad. Try a different one (if available) temporarily.

I originally wanted to tell you to listen for the drive to spin down, but it may not be apparent if it's the cause of the reboot or an effect of the reboot.

Mike

Posted by: ctcaldwell

I should add then, when I explicitly restart the recorder, it almost invariably restarts again while playing the opening TiVo guy animation. It will do this 2-3 times before starting normally. It sometimes gets into an endless restart loop.

Let me restate my question as to whether the 3.0 upgrade performs any kind of flash updates that could have been botched. Should I perform this upgrade again?

Also, I am confident it is not a drive problem. I have not tried a different IDE cable.

Thanks,
Todd