Is my TiVo about to die?????

Hi all

Have got home tonight to find the TiVo wasn't responding to the remote control at all and there was no receive or recording light showing. The "live tv" show was running though. I was unable to change channel or go to my Now Playing list. Put some new batteries in the remote without any improvement. I have a second remote as I have my TiVo cabled through the house for bedroom viewing also so tried that one with no success either.

Tried a reboot from TiVoweb interface - which obviously the network connectivity still exists (at least for now anyway) and I was able to use remote after it came back up. However - it was very very slow to react to any input requests - as in, push the TiVo button and wait about 30 seconds before the "Now Playing" list appears. Eventually the picture locked and I needed to carry out a restart again. In the last hour I have been able to watch TV through the TiVo for about 10mins max before it freezes up.

Sooooooo - I'm guessing a hard disk failure is about to happen myself.
What are everyone elses thoughts?

Any suggestions how I can get the data off the current disk (fast) before it stops completely.

I have a huge amount of stuff I really don't want to lose and I'm sure my 2 year old son will be just as gutted at the loss of all his Wiggles & Clifford The Big Red Dog shows..hahaha

:mad: :confused: :( :eek:

I have been able to drag a few shows off overnight to my pc using Tytool.
TiVo seemed to go ok overnight - stayed running obviously while I copied several Gb worth of video during the night.

As soon as I tried to force a daily call this morning though it locked up again on "preparing to call".

I don't know what it means, but I had the exact same original problem a couple of weeks ago. I "fixed" it by rebooting too. Hasn't happened since. My TiVo has only crashed 4 to 6 times in the year or so I have had it. I noticed on the forums it seems some people find they need to reboot every week or so. This was the first time I ever saw it have no lights on the front rather than freeze with what was on screen at the time.

Mine was dead yesterday morning, no lights on at all, I pulled the power to reboot and it came back up ok. Been getting 'jerky' playback for a couple of days before, but that may just have been Sky! Couldn't be anything to do with the compressed data slices, using excessive processor capacity?

I've seen this behaviour (black screen, no lights) once on each of our TiVos in the last couple of days. Both have been fine since a reboot.

Would have done more investigation but the pressure of others sitting on the couch waiting was too great :) .

Cheers, Dave.

PS. I'm in Oz.

Unfortunately a reboot is only a short term fix for mine and then it will lock up again. It also doesn't enjoy doing a forced (or automatic) "daily call up" either.

I thought it was just Windows that needed reboots all the time!...haha

I'm no Linux expert - in fact far far from it, so hopefully this doesn't sound too dumb but can you "Ghost" (or similar) the existing hard disk image onto another disk?

:rolleyes:

I've had this happen several times to both my tivos.
Just a reboot fixes it.

Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, a reboot doesn't fix mine anymore.
(It's had about 50 in the last day)

I'm guessing the hard disk is kaput so getting what I can of it is now a priority hence the "ghosting" option maybe.

Does anyone know if this will work?

Well, I'm just guessing.. but if you copied the disc to another disc it might not work anyway. You'd possibly be copying corrupt data wouldn't you?
I've never tried doing that to a TiVo disk. If you have network access to your tivo, and a dvd writer and the tivo stayed alive long enough you could grab via tytool all the programmes off it to your PC and put them onto a dvd.

I was thinking that if it was an "imminent hardware failure" of a hard disk about to fail then it may have been possible to ghost the image onto a new disk and the replacement would bolt straight into the TiVo and carry on like nothing happened.

I have done this many times without issues as far as Windows goes. It's a matter of ghosting before the disk corrupts the actual system data and even then sometimes if a sector is bad it has "rebuilt" itself ok once on the new disk.

I haven't tried with Linux (TiVo image) though but I'm thinking that Ghost will just see it as an image and not be concerned by what kind (fingers crossed) and therefore the TiVo will boot back up and carry on like nothing happened.

Just waiting to receive another 200Gb drive now.

I have got the TiVo connected to my PC which also has a DVD writer and I have been using Tytools to drag some stuff off but it's things like Live8 (the entire thing - which the newly released DVD isn't going to have) that becomes a hassle to put onto DVD when it will take several discs (it is 20+ Gb) - heaps easier currently having it all at the press of a button anytime!

I also have the entire race from Bathurst (all day's worth) from 2004 & 2005 - more just as a novelty thing, but it does impress people new to TiVo....haha

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Muzza

I'm no Linux expert - in fact far far from it, so hopefully this doesn't sound too dumb but can you "Ghost" (or similar) the existing hard disk image onto another disk?

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Hi Muzza,

Definitely not a dumb question. A couple of methods are described here:

http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/vie...oneOfaTivoDisk

I recall some doubt as to whether the second method will backup the existing recordings or not. My reading of the "-Tao" switches to the mfsbackup command is that it should. If you end up using that method (you'll have to if the disks are different) you'll be able to confirm.

Cheers, Dave.

Generally harddrive issues first show up as pixelation and freezes on recordings. You have not mentioned if you have these issues.

Since you still have access, it might be worth trying 'mfscheck -fix' (note this will lockup the TiVo while it's running and reboot when it's finished).

Peter.

Hi,
I too have had the TIVO lock up on me occasionally & a reboot has always fixed it in the past.

While its easy to archive shows off the TIVO to a PC with TyTool , I've never seen a way to restore shows back to the TIVO.

Is there a tool that lets you put shows back onto TIVO ? Thinking it could be useful for things live Live8 & Bathhurst, where splitting them across multiple dvds is more difficult.

Thanks David - I might give that a try over the weekend (if my hard disk turns up today that is :mad: )

In answer to Pete...

Exact symptoms are....

- First time I noticed any issue was getting home to find a picture on screen but no lights on TiVo and remote wouldn't work.
- First reboot (which took a very very long time) enabled the remote to work and the live tv guide was back working. 10 mins later however the picture froze and another reboot was required.
- Second reboot and it started working again but this time it froze briefly for a few minutes and then carried on again but was now playing the show that was on about 2 mins behind the actual live broadcast which was on in another room.
- Third, foruth, fifth, six etc etc reboots and you get anywhere between 10 mins viewing to an hours before the picture locks up and requires a reboot again. During this time any commands sent from remote get a very very delayed response ie: push TiVo button and see the "Now Playing" menu about 20-30 secs later.
- By rebooting the TiVo and leaving it at the default startup menu I have been able to connect from pc and transfer some video from it - managed to get 12Gb's worth on Wednesday night before I had to restart it again. If I try to do/watch anything on the TiVo while I am doing this however results in a speed up in the "picture freeze/general lockup" process.
- Have only been able to get TiVo to complete one successful daily call since this started and it took about 2 hours.

I haven't been able to get TiVo to stay up for long enough yet to get Live8 off it - that will take a long time as it is about 23Gb and the TiVo keeps freezing before I can get the whole lot off (managed 7Gb last night but because I have to keep starting the transfer from the start again each time it drops the connection I doubt I am going to get it this way).

What does everyone think - hard disk or something else?

I know we've all had the ocasional freeze up that gets fixed by a reboot but this is dragging on and there happens to be a big game of Rugger on this weekend that I was hoping to record and watch at my leisure when I wake up on Sunday...dammitt!! :mad: :( How did we ever get on before TiVo?????...hahaha

I'm still a TiVo newbie but heres what I would do. Sounds like nobody else has had this exact problem before. I say swapping out hardware for known good hardware is the next step. If you can't duplicate the HDD at least build the replacement one fresh to rule out software and the old HDD itself. You could try running it without the network card or DIMM if you have them installed. I wouldn't assume it's the HDD failing off the bat. The problem really needs to be narrowed down.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dread

While its easy to archive shows off the TIVO to a PC with TyTool , I've never seen a way to restore shows back to the TIVO.

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You can use mfs_ftp to upload to a TiVo.

Peter.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Muzza

As soon as I tried to force a daily call this morning though it locked up again on "preparing to call".

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Might want to check your log files (tverr, etc) to see if there are any messages that could be of help. It could be that there is an MFS corruption in which case you can try an 'mfscheck' or in a severe case even an 'mfsassert' (which will trigger a GSOD so make sure you have enough swap configured!). Failing all that you can always reimage your harddrive.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Muzza

I haven't been able to get TiVo to stay up for long enough yet to get Live8 off it - that will take a long time as it is about 23Gb and the TiVo keeps freezing before I can get the whole lot off (managed 7Gb last night but because I have to keep starting the transfer from the start again each time it drops the connection I doubt I am going to get it this way).

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You might want to stop some of the hacks from starting by editing rc.sysinit.author. This might put less stress on the system, giving better uptimes.

Just put a # in front of the commands to stop them from running.

Some of the standard ones you can stop are:
tivoftpd
tivoweb
shondss.sh
endpadplus.tcl

You might have others like dailymail that can also be stopped.

Peter.

Well after a few days of stuffing around trying to remove data from the old drive while waiting on a replacement I gave up and firstly borrowed another TiVo from the in-laws and installed my drive to confirm the fault followed the disk. It did. I then cloned (as per instructions on previous post - which was indeed very easy) the "faulty" disk onto the new replacement which finally turned up and installed it back into my unit. After initially seeming ok it failed again within the hour. Bummer. It appears the cloning utility was so good it copied across the faulty sectors :mad:

So, I have given up on the whole thing and started from scratch again. I guess I'll be buying Live8 on DVD. :(

I've now completed a 1.4 image build as per the instructions which are very very clear and easy - far easier than a year or so ago when I first got my TiVo. So far it is all ok - I had to adjust the endpad which I've done ok. I'm sure there will be a few things I'll notice I have to change again but I'll get there.

It is depressing going into "Now Playing" and having nothing there now but it was more depressing having a TiVo that has data on it but locks up and restarts randomly all the time - sounds like I'm describing my Windows PC!!!! :rolleyes: