Registered: Feb 2001
Location:
Posts: 14

Hi all,
My Father gave me a 30 hour Philips Tivo of his. It has a lifetime subscription on it (whooo!). The only problem is that it doesnt work (doh!).

Anyway, when I plug it in, the green light goes on, I think I hear the Harddrive spin & then nothing else happens.

I was wondering if anyone knows what this means? I have an 80 gig maxtor sitting around that I was thinking of putting a DD image on & seeing if that would work.

I just wanted to see if anyone else had a similar situation & what they did to rectify it.

I think Tivo wants 150 bucks to fix it but I am not sure if it is a hardware issue or a software issue.

Thanks,
Rich

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Silicon Valley
Posts: 3135

Uh, how's your relationship with your father? Nice of him to give you landfill

I hope it at least shows the "Tivo starting up ...." message on the TV screen. This is from the boot prom. If you don't have that, a new disk isn't going to help. JMO.

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TOTAL Digital

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location: edge of tomorrow
Posts: 233

When the tivo starts up the power light turns green an splash screen is displayed (generally featuring the tivo character) shortly afterwards it starts booting from disk and durring this process it displays another screen with the words "almost there" -- it's at this point that it cuts into the coax feed and starts sending out channel 3 or 4. After 20-30 seconds of "almost there" you see the intro animation and tivo central.

If you don't see the inital splash screen on the video/svideo connectors check your cabling, this is the screen that lets you know the firmware is booting. If you get stuck in an "almost there" screen then the tivo has started booting the disk and chances are there's just some corrupt files, connect up the serial port and add "REPAIRMFS=1" to the bootup params and reboot to a wonderful green screen -- no, don't pull this plug, this is the fileystem check in action.


(there's easier ways to do this just by hitting a few buttons on the remote but screwy forum rules say I can't post the words "hold down pause while booting until the record light turns yellow and then press 5 then 7 for an mfs check" likewise I can't say that 58 is another mfs check and that 52 is a partial reinstall -- everything but mfs reloaded ... luckily I can say that you shouldn't mess with any other key combination at startup)


Disclaimer:
I don't particularly care to clarify any of the above public or private nor do I know where to download a backup; use the above information at your own risk.

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http://tivo.samba.org/download/mbm
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Registered: Feb 2001
Location:
Posts: 14

Well I knew the Tivo had a problem. I just figured since it had a life time subscription that i would try to get it working since my current Tivo doesnt have anything.

Tivo offered to fix it for a fee, but if i am going to pay that fee, I want to break it a bit more first (only kidding).

I unplugged my Tivo & plugged in the broken one (same cables, same setup).

There is no video at all with the broken tivo.

I plugged mine back in & it worked fine. There is something wacky with the other Tivo.

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location: Corpus Christi TX
Posts: 120

Email me before you send it in. electriclegs@sobservers.com

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