TiVo stuck in reboot loop

[SolidTechie]

My primary TiVo seems to have a problem.

Had a circuit breaker trip the other day - when the power came back on, apparently the TiVo started, loaded CacheCard, displayed the AltEPG "starting TiVo" black screen - and.... well, that's as far as it gets, before restarting. My other half keeps forgetting to tell me that this has been happening for 2-3 days.

I've hitherto had no problems with this unit - although I did notice one random reboot in the middle of watching a recording last week - but has recently had a new 1TB disk - with a 1GB swap partition replacing the previous twin 120GB drives.

Any Ideas or Troubleshooting tips would be gratefully received...

[SolidTechie]

Found the following reccurring in the tverr log:

Aug 21 12:19:14 (none) tivosh[138]: Tmk Fatal Error: Thread died due to signal -2
Aug 21 12:19:14 (none) tivosh[138]: Invoking rule 834: rebooting system
Aug 21 12:24:02 (none) TmkAssertionFailure[138]: (BlockFailure, line 1771 ())
Aug 21 12:24:02 (none) tivosh[138]: Tmk Fatal Error: Thread tivosh <138> died due to signal -2
Aug 21 12:24:02 (none) tivosh[138]: Tmk Thread Backtrace: 1a344ec 1a32a44 1a2ed70 1b95e0c 1c4d5e8 1c85868 1c85158 1c7aee0 1c61a10 1c8e4e0 1c77e7c 1c61a10 1c8e4e0 1c77e7c 1c61a10 1c849c0 1c85ec8 1c4d248 1c28cac 1800134 ipe
Aug 21 12:24:02 (none) tivosh[138]: Tmk Fatal Error: Thread died due to signal -2
Aug 21 12:24:02 (none) tivosh[138]: Invoking rule 834: rebooting system
Aug 21 12:28:50 (none) TmkAssertionFailure[138]: (BlockFailure, line 1771 ())
Aug 21 12:28:50 (none) tivosh[138]: Tmk Fatal Error: Thread tivosh <138> died due to signal -2
Aug 21 12:28:50 (none) tivosh[138]: Tmk Thread Backtrace: 1a344ec 1a32a44 1a2ed70 1b95e0c 1c4d5e8 1c891d0 1c858b4 1c85158 1c7aee0 1c61a10 1c8e4e0 1c77e7c 1c61a10 1c8e4e0 1c77e7c 1c61a10 1c849c0 1c85ec8 1c4d248 1c28cac 1800134 ipe
Aug 21 12:28:50 (none) tivosh[138]: Tmk Fatal Error: Thread died due to signal -2
Aug 21 12:28:50 (none) tivosh[138]: Invoking rule 834: rebooting system

[mrtickle]

Hmm, that doesn't look good . As you say it started with a circuit breaker problem, perhaps there was a "brown-out" that the PSU didn't like? I'm guessing that you have more than 1 TiVo from you calling it you "primary TiVo" - you could put in the PSU from your other TiVo and see if it boots normally? That would eliminate the PSU from it.

And also reboot without the CacheCard connected, to eliminate that.

[drgeoff]

Hmm, that doesn't look good . As you say it started with a circuit breaker problem, perhaps there was a "brown-out" that the PSU didn't like? I'm guessing that you have more than 1 TiVo from you calling it you "primary TiVo" - you could put in the PSU from your other TiVo and see if it boots normally? That would eliminate the PSU from it.

And also reboot without the CacheCard connected, to eliminate that.

Might be easier/slightly quicker to swap the hard disks. Whether the reboot loop swaps too should give some strong clues.

[SolidTechie]

This is really bizarre.

I have 3 TiVos currently, configured as follows

Primary - 1TB Seagate - CacheCard - 512MB RAM
Spare - 1TB Samsung - - CacheCard - 512MB RAM
Test - 500GB Hitachi - - CacheCard - 512MB RAM

The problem you may recall - the 1TB Seagate wouldn't boot. Here are the steps I took. In addition, I discovered that the Spare, had developed a sound problem, that nosound.tcl wasn't resolving.

Replace PSU in TiVo 1. Still wouldn't boot.
Use Seagate in Spare - no worky.
Use Seagate in Test - Joy - Boots. Replace Seagate in Primary, remove CacheCard - still wont boot.
Return Seagate to Test, remove TurboNZnet card - won't boot. Reinstall card, still won't boot.
Run short & long Seatools test on Seagate - both pass - no failures.
Try all combinations of TiVo/CacheCard/TurboNZnet card/nothing - cant get the Seagate to boot.

Next step will be to reimage the drive - I had hoped to retain the recordings, but clearly that's not going to happen.

Samsung - now installed in the Main - C&DE - rerun GS - no issues so far. I have yet to put the other combos of kit back together... ran out of time.

[spitfires]

So with the Seagate you get nothing... not even a "starting up"? Are you game for rewriting the boot sector on the Seagate? Needs a PC to run Linux with a good drive + bad drive attached, and carries the risk of hosing the Seagate permanently However it worked for me when my Sammy failed - I rewrote the boot sector and she started up with all recordings still there etc. If you're game to try it I can try and find the notes I made at the time (i.e. command to run)

[SolidTechie]

I'll give anything a try for a bit of a giggle!

Actually, it isn't going to help I don't think - this one boots all the way through the cachecard drivers and caching, to the AltEPG equivalent of "Almost there" - sits there for four or five minutes, and then reboots. (see log snippet earlier in the thread)

[spitfires]

Ah yes the boot sector fix won't help you there then - sorry I missed that bit in your ealier post