TiVo Community Forums Archives - Please help! Random reboot problem

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

Please help! Random reboot problem
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: Michael3649

About a month ago I used those wonderful MFS tools 2.0 from Tiger following the directions from Hinsdale (Many thanks guys!!) and everything was running great. I had 141 hours!!

On Saturday I ran into a problem. I've looked around the forum, I've browsed through the log files, I can't see what's wrong. So I'm begging for help.

PROBLEM SYMPTOMS:

The DTiVo will be working normally and suddenly for no obvious reason - it resets!

The gray "Welcome" screen appears and DTiVo starts booting up. Occassionally it will get 10-30 seconds into the boot up process and then reset again and start over. But this "mini-loop" has never lasted more than 3 iterations.

After successfully booting, DTiVo will appear to be functioning normally. It may run for 20 minutes, or 40, or even 90, but then it resets. Since the problem started on Saturday I've yet to see it run for more than 90 minutes before resetting. Usually it's between 20 and 30.

I have a Sony SAT-T60. I added one 120 GB drive. The DTiVo ran new out of the box for 30 days straight with no problems. So I upgraded. It's run another 30 days without problems.

It runs a little hot (52C), but that still considered normal.

I have not seen the "Green screen", it sounds similar to the Windows Blue Screen of Death. I have not seen any stuttering of video or sound. Everything appears to be working fine, then the reset hits.

Any ideas?? Any at all? Is there a FAQ on understanding the log files?

Thanks for any help.

Michael

Posted by: Robert S

Sounds more like a power problem than a drive issue. Check the power cable to the mainboard hasn't come loose.

Posted by: bsnelson

To take it further, you might want to fully reseat the power connector (such that it is); this cured my random reboots on my big machine in my sig.

Brad

Posted by: litzdog911

You might also check out this thread
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...&threadid=81164

There is an internal power connector that can also cause this symptom.

Posted by: captain_video

The last three posts all described the exact same connection, FWIW.

Posted by: Michael3649

Thanks to all for the suggestions.

This morning I popped the cover off and checked all the cables. They all seemed to be fine. The power cable, or that thin ribbon that passes for one, seemed to be seated correctly. But just to be sure I pushed it in a bit.

The good news is that my DTiVo has been up all day without any problems. Usually it reboots within 2 hours.

The bad news is that I broke a cardinal rule of debugging: I changed more than one variable.
I got a little anxious and deleted a few hours worth of suggested recordings. So now I'm not sure if reseating the power ribbon fixed the problem or if making more free space fixed the problem. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Could there be something in the log files that would indicate why the reboots occurred?

Posted by: Robert S

Deleting programmes doesn't affect the stability of the TiVo - the recordings are on their own partition, it doesn't matter if that partition is full.

You can certainly look in the loga (see Cpen's post in the Fixes thread) and see if there's anything odd before the boot sequece starts.