AltEPG

My TiVo is now stuck in a loop:

Welcome. Powering up...

Almost there.
A few more seconds please...

A severe error has occurred.
Please leave the receiver plugged in in and connected to the phone line for the next 24 hours while the receiver attempts to repair itself.
DO NOT UNPLUG OR RESTSART THE RECEIVER.
If, after 24 hours, the recorder does not restart itself, call Customer support.

It then almost immediately reboots and goes back to the top (I had to use my phone's video recorder to be able to read the last message).

So what has happened, and would it be fair to say that my TiVo is now bricked???

Edit: OK, on further investigation it looks like this is nothing to do with altEPG; my hard drive has coincidentally died. Bugger.

I had this message too on one tivo,(though not rebooting) I plugged the phone cord in and after a short time it cleared itself. I cant decide if plugging the cord in helped and am reporting just in case it helps anyone.
This was a networked tivo with a new altepg hdd image.

The phone line has nothing to do with it. These are affectionately called Green Screen of Death (GSOD) by some TiVo hackers although no death is involved. Usually for a healty TiVo the green screen goes away by itself within 30 minutes.

The TiVo software itself calls them kickstarts (from comments in the /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit file). It's extremely rare for the TiVo to initiate one by itself, but you can force one to occur by pressing a certain sequence of buttons on the remote control during powerup.

Good to know, thanks Nick

nick1austin wrote:The phone line has nothing to do with it. These are affectionately called Green Screen of Death (GSOD) by some TiVo hackers although no death is involved. Usually for a healty TiVo the green screen goes away by itself within 30 minutes.

The TiVo software itself calls them kickstarts (from comments in the /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit file). It's extremely rare for the TiVo to initiate one by itself, but you can force one to occur by pressing a certain sequence of buttons on the remote control during powerup.

I think I can prove that wrong as my tivo has been stuck on this loop for the last 7 hours, so I'm kind of thinking I need to rip out the drive (again) and reformat/reinstall the AltEPG image (again) then try to remember the settings I had on it!!
And I had just got it working how I liked it.

Will loose all my programs recorded in the last week or so but....... (unless someone has another option to try first!)

Bummer!!!!



Gaz

dragonlord666 wrote:

nick1austin wrote:The phone line has nothing to do with it. These are affectionately called Green Screen of Death (GSOD) by some TiVo hackers although no death is involved. Usually for a healty TiVo the green screen goes away by itself within 30 minutes.

The TiVo software itself calls them kickstarts (from comments in the /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit file). It's extremely rare for the TiVo to initiate one by itself, but you can force one to occur by pressing a certain sequence of buttons on the remote control during powerup.

I think I can prove that wrong as my tivo has been stuck on this loop for the last 7 hours, so I'm kind of thinking I need to rip out the drive (again) and reformat/reinstall the AltEPG image (again) then try to remember the settings I had on it!!

Well, it doesn't really prove it wrong because those are not the only two options. "Usually for a healty TiVo the green screen goes away by itself within 30 minutes" is perfectly correct, NB the 'healthy'. For a less healthy TiVo, and indeed for a sick-but-nevertheless-recoverable TiVo, it's a lot longer. Sometimes a lot lot longer. The advice is normally to leave it for 24 hours to be sure. I've seen 48 hours quoted in the past. Jumping the gun after only 7 hours may mean that you rip/reformat/etc and do all that work when you don't need to.

mrtickle wrote:

dragonlord666 wrote:
Well, it doesn't really prove it wrong because those are not the only two options. "Usually for a healty TiVo the green screen goes away by itself within 30 minutes" is perfectly correct, NB the 'healthy'. For a less healthy TiVo, and indeed for a sick-but-nevertheless-recoverable TiVo, it's a lot longer. Sometimes a lot lot longer. The advice is normally to leave it for 24 hours to be sure. I've seen 48 hours quoted in the past. Jumping the gun after only 7 hours may mean that you rip/reformat/etc and do all that work when you don't need to.

well after 72 hours it's still cycling - so DEATH is something that a severe error can cause.
looks like I'll not only loose the programs on the tivo but all those it did not tape over the last three days.

so my weekend will be to dig out the PC then rip the tivo drive/reformat/etc.

Gaz

bad luck sorry to hear that. However there is one more thing you can do, as you're ripping the drive anyway, you've got nothing to lose. Put it in the PC and run the drive manufacturer's diagnostics tools on it - there may be some bad sectors that can be mapped out, if it tells you that it's done that, then there is a good chance that a green screen would complete the next time you tried (so put it back in the tivo after that).

Secondly, if you think it's a disc problem and have the replacement disc ready, you could run dd_rescue from a live linux CD (you'll have a bit of reading up to do first I'm afraid) which tries to copy as much as possible from the bad disc to a new good disc, and then again try putting that into the tivo and seeing if that passes the green screen. A friend did this and recovered everything except one recording. NB just reformatting the bad disc and putting it back in the tivo won't repair the disc, if it's dead it's dead. But if it's just bad sectors, then the diagnostics above may be enough.

I've just noticed you say "looping" - You mean it's never finishing the Green screen check? How long is it staying on the green screen? The OP's problem sounds very severe, and the green screen never got the chance to even attempt a repair if it just rebooted so quickly you needed a camera to see it. If it crashes quickly without finishing it can sometimes indicate some other problem. As a general guide it's about 45mins on my 250GB drive.

My drive is a new 1tb from tivoland which was purchased formatted with Altepg, it worked OK but suddenly the tivo disappeared from the network, not even a scan of the network would reveal the IP. I formatted it and used the AltEPG image from here to replace it in the hope it would fix the missing IP - works OK up to when, three days ago, I think we had gremlins as a power strip (now replaced) just stopped then started again, guess that was enough to trigger the green screen

the tivo does the power up, loads the cache card (silicon dust) driver, I presume the AltEPG image uses the new drivers as it says on here not to use silicon dust drivers & cache data then the black screen with the tivo (start up screen?) then green screen appears for about 5 seconds then it reboots and we go round again, the cache card bit takes longer at about 2-3 minutes to complete.
It's been doing this for three days now.

The PC I have is a old skeleton I have never thrown away. no harddrive, and no idea where any discs are for it.it's basically just the PSU, cddrive (2 I think) and the motherboard. I have a keyboard for it (no mouse but for just doing the AltEPG image thing a mouse was not needed) and I have an old monitor I don't use.
I really don't use it as I have a macbook pro (laptop) (would be nice if I could attach the tivo drive to that instead but....;( )

Gaz

dragonlord666 wrote:My drive is a new 1tb from tivoland which was purchased formatted with Altepg, it worked OK but suddenly the tivo disappeared from the network, not even a scan of the network would reveal the IP. I formatted it and used the AltEPG image from here to replace it in the hope it would fix the missing IP - works OK up to when, three days ago, I think we had gremlins as a power strip (now replaced) just stopped then started again, guess that was enough to trigger the green screen

ok. The 1TB would have had a big enough swapfile if it came from tivoland pre-set up. But you have to make sure that you create a big swapfile whenever you restore a tivo image to it. I don't know how clear the altEPG setup CD makes this, but if you don't do so, the green screen won't work. Daily calls might be ok.

Can you remember what you did, and can someone else who has used the setup CD comment on the swapfile options?

the tivo does the power up, loads the cache card (silicon dust) driver, I presume the AltEPG image uses the new drivers as it says on here not to use silicon dust drivers & cache data then the black screen with the tivo (start up screen?) then green screen appears for about 5 seconds then it reboots and we go round again, the cache card bit takes longer at about 2-3 minutes to complete.
It's been doing this for three days now.

I didn't realise that was the case, sorry. There's no value in letting it continually reboot for days. The fxfix (green screen) is clearly not getting the chance to check your disc at all. If the screen was static (ie the check was running), that's what needs to be left for 2 days.

mrtickle wrote:

dragonlord666 wrote:My drive is a new 1tb from tivoland which was purchased formatted with Altepg, it worked OK but suddenly the tivo disappeared from the network, not even a scan of the network would reveal the IP. I formatted it and used the AltEPG image from here to replace it in the hope it would fix the missing IP - works OK up to when, three days ago, I think we had gremlins as a power strip (now replaced) just stopped then started again, guess that was enough to trigger the green screen

ok. The 1TB would have had a big enough swapfile if it came from tivoland pre-set up. But you have to make sure that you create a big swapfile whenever you restore a tivo image to it. I don't know how clear the altEPG setup CD makes this, but if you don't do so, the green screen won't work. Daily calls might be ok.

Can you remember what you did, and can someone else who has used the setup CD comment on the swapfile options?

I followed the 1st post directions from this thread viewtopic.php?f=16&t=626
I did not see anything about swapfile sizes. How would I set that and to what size would I need to set it?

Gaz

dragonlord666 wrote:I followed the 1st post directions from this thread viewtopic.php?f=16&t=626
I did not see anything about swapfile sizes. How would I set that and to what size would I need to set it?

It's the first thing it asks you when you select Step 2 "Restore the image". It offers a default of 127MB and says that is sufficient for a 274GB disk. You can key in any value you like.

millsb wrote:

dragonlord666 wrote:I followed the 1st post directions from this thread viewtopic.php?f=16&t=626
I did not see anything about swapfile sizes. How would I set that and to what size would I need to set it?

It's the first thing it asks you when you select Step 2 "Restore the image". It offers a default of 127MB and says that is sufficient for a 274GB disk. You can key in any value you like.

SO I would need to change this to at least 400mb for a 1tb drive?

Search this forum for the word "swap" and you will find various opinions on how big your swap file should be.

For example in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=626&p=8013&hilit=swap#p8013, 1MB swap for each 2 GB of disk is recommended, which would suggest 500MB for your 1TB disk. No one seems to have any hard-and-fast rules.

FWIW, I have given mine 1GB swap - I figure I'm not going to miss that on a 1TB drive.