TiVo Community Forums Archives - Acted strange, then wouldn't boot up...

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Acted strange, then wouldn't boot up...
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Posted by: ACE101

Well I believe that after I received the most recent TiVo patch (3.02?), my TiVo stopped being able to search for titles or programs. My season passes stopped working totally, and only a manual record would work. The shows were certainly in the list, but TiVo couldn't find them. I'm using an AT&T digital cable connection.

Anyhow, I tried going through setup again, but it didn't solve anything. So I thought I'd reboot to see if it would help. Well, all I got to was the grey "screen of death". I tried removing power and letting the system sit for a while but nothing helped. So I nosed around here, and while some situations seemed similar, none were spot on. Most people seemed to say it was a drive death, and so I assumed this to be true. So off with the lid, in with the MFSTools, and a plug in of the drives. Sprise! Drives are just fine, no problems I can see. Plug them back into the TiVo and.....grey screen of death. New ATA cable didn't help, nothing did.

But one guy here mentioned that he got the grey screen of death for apparently no reason at one point. After disconnecting the second drive from his system, starting the system (it won't go past, "Powering Up"), then shutting down, and connecting the second drive again, he got the green screen of "Something really bad happened, trying to fix", and then after a few hours, his TiVo was all good! So I thought I'd give it a shot.

Well I tried it. On the reconnection to disk B and restart, I got the green screen! Then I wait till morning, and it's FIXED. I mean no more problems WHATsoever. Could this have happened because the upgrade wasn't totally successful, and removing a drive and restarting got the TiVo software to think something bad happened, and basically it reset all of my initialization files? Because I didn't lose ANYthing, and now TiVo finds programs just fine.

Ron

Posted by: weaknees

It sounds like you probably DO have drive errors, just intermittent ones. Did you test the drives with PowerMax or something similar, or just boot them into mfstools and verify they exist? That tells you something, but not a lot.

Frankly, even drives the fully pass the advanced test in PowerMax (or that PowerMax claims to "fix") can still be problematic. I think that's what you've got here.

Michael

Posted by: ACE101

I agree with you. I certainly don't want to take any chances. I would like to back up both the drives to an image just in case. Could someone give me a pointer to software that I can use to backup the disks? Can I back them up to an XP formatted drive with Norton GHOST possibly? Or how can I back them up?

Speaking of which....can I load these images to larger hard disks and expand them? I'll go search for an answer here as well.

**EDIT**
I now realize I can use MFStools2 to perform the backup directly to other disks. I'm going to investigate further if I can create an image file somewhere just in case.

Ron