TiVo Community Forums Archives - "Welcome...Powering Up" My turn! HELP!

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

"Welcome...Powering Up" My turn! HELP!
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: the_Skywise

The story thus far:

About a month ago I upgraded my Sony T-60 from a 30gb/15gb 2 drive configuration to a 30gb/80gb drive configuration. And all went well. No problems at all.

Tonight I came home and lo and behold Tivo was in infinite reboot land with the famous "Welcome... Powering up" screen for about 30 seconds, then rebooting and showing the powering up screen again...

Took both drives out and ran the latest Maxtor diagnostics on them. (90 second test and full scan). Both passed fine.

Now, unfortunately I stupidly did NOT make a backup of the OS (It's a long story). But I did successfully make a backup from the A drive just now.

I put both drives back into the Tivo and I'm still getting the same problem.

Here's my questions: Do I have a hard drive problem, or a hard ware problem? Probably hard drive and how can I diagnose it? (If it's a clue, the reboot occurs, regularly, just after the yellow remote indicator light flashes on the console)

Is my backup "good"? Or did I just backup whatever's causing the error?

Lastly, does any kind soul out there have a Sony T-60 tiny backup? I'm already suffering withdrawal...

Thanks!

Posted by: SquirrelyM

It's most likely a drive issue, so you might as well try a new image and/or new drive. Check your private messages for more information.

If it were me, I would probably just restore a backup image to the 80gb drive and try using that as the A drive (forget a B drive for now). If that doesn't work, I might try a different backup image. Failing that, I would buy a new drive and try again.

Posted by: the_Skywise

A big thanks to Hinsdale's How-To, Squirrely and the rest of this group.

I have a Sony T-60, dual drive unit. About a month ago I replaced the 15gb "B" drive with an 80GB Compusa/Maxtor. Everything went fine and daddy for about a month. On Friday Morning (September 13th.. heh...) night, I discovered that overnight my Tivo had rebooted (Tivo animation on main menu)... hmmm... I checked the version and saw that it hadn't changed... I dismissed it as a fluke and went to work. Late that night I returned home to the dreaded "Welcome... Powering Up" screen in infinite reboot.

This has happened once before in my two years of Tivo ownership, so I tried my usual bag of tricks (unplugging the unit, unplugging the hard drives, etc) No go. Worse, I had no backup image to restore.

Thanks to the kindness of others in this community I was able to get a backup image... and off I headed to CompUSA Saturday morning and bought a brand spanking new 160gb drive.

First I tried backing up my original drives and restoring them to the 160. No go on that. Eternal reboots. Then I tried one of the backup images. No joy on THAT. Now I was wondering if I didn't have a motherboard failure and the hard drives were fine... So I downloaded another backup... 12 hours later, I had the older backup which, thankfully, worked. (it IS the hard drives). But not wanting to lose my settings, and not wanting to have to wait to get the software upgrade again for two tuners, I tried to backup my original hard drives again, and restored them onto the 160GB single drive. I also added one (I think important) step. I removed the CMOS "coin" battery for a few seconds before installing the hard drive. For some reason, Tivo responded to the new hard drive images better with a cleared memory (drive signature maybe?). This time, the backup got to the "Almost there" and immediately GSOD. However, that was a good sign. It meant that Tivo was finally recognizing that it had a set of bad hard drives and was going to run a diskcheck on them. Sure enough, about 40 minute later Tivo rebooted itself again and
VOILA... I'm back online with an extra 30 hours of storage, and all my seaons passes and thumb settings (Ya ever try to train a Tivo to record anime? It's painful...)
(And minus about 80 hours of shows.. but I'll deal...)

Anyway, thank you all for this forum and your support. Otherwise, I'd have a dead lifetime Tivo on my hands that would have to be going back to Sony repair for about a month while I twiddled my thumbs or paid Pegasus TV $50 to turn on my old DSS box...

Posted by: Autobott

Hi, I've been having a similar problem for a month or two with my unmodded sat-t60 single drive...can someone point me towards a disk mage so I can try another drive? The TiVo is out of warranty and it is cheaper for me to upgrade than it is to have it repaired.

Posted by: loucapo

Need some urgent help.

I'm having the same problem as Skywise. When I turned on my Sat-T60 last night it played the animation, meaning a reboot had occurred? Then after finishing watching a show last night, I shut the unit off & went into the other room. When I came back, I noticed the power light was still on. I turned on my TV to see the 'Welcome. Powering Up...' screen, which I have never seen before.

Sony is telling me I need to pay them $100 for labor & they will put in a new drive & motherboard, but will NOT restore any saved shows/settings. :mad:

Do you think I should just get a new drive myself & try to do what Skywise did, or should I forget all my setting/shows & suck up the $100 charge for a unit that is 4 months old?

Thanks in advance guys.

Lou

Posted by: Robert S

Sticking at 'welcome' is highly diagnostic of a failed hard drive. Look at Hinsdale and see if you think you can do the drive swap yourself.

You can buy a nice big hard drive for $100.

By the time the TiVo becomes unbootable it's usually too late to save the recordings or even get a viable MFS Tools backup of the drive(s), but you can certainly try.

Posted by: loucapo

If I do attempt this, which I think I can definitely do since I have assembled a few PCs for friends, what happens if its not the hard disk? If I can restore everything to the way it was, Sony should still cover the warranty, right?

Posted by: Robert S

The consequences of broken warranty seals seem highly variable - almost as if it's at the discretion of the agent who answers the call. So yes, if it's not your hard drive you are making things more difficult for yourself by breaking the seal.

There are independent repair shops around like weaknees who can fix all common TiVo problems and for less than an 'official' repair. I don't think you're taking an unacceptable risk.

Posted by: loucapo

Many thanks for your help! I'm going to try this today. I'll let you know how it goes!

Lou