Stuck in a reboot loop...

[angusr]

Hi all.

After several successful months I just restarted my TiVo and I have a reboot loop - gets as far as the black AltEPG "Starting Up" screen, sits there for a minute or so, and then goes back to "Powering Up".

I have had a few glitches of late on live TV - screen freezing, then a little loop of a fragment of the current programme, then back to normal - so it might be the disk.

It may be the PSU of course and I do have a spare, so I'll try swapping that in and see what happens. Any suggestions how I might proceed if that doesn't help - can I force an fsck, or somehow try and get it up enough to get the season passes/wishlists off?

Cheers!

[angusr]

Well, swapping in a new PSU doesn't seem to have helped... so, no further forward!

Any ideas anyone?

[angusr]

Actually, it did just move forward slightly - it did the TiVo slide animation, got to the main menu and gave me a few seconds of being able to do things then it died and rebooted again - now it's back in the loop. Very strange!

It just got that far again - tried to watch live TV, worked fine for 20 seconds or so and then back into reboot.

Is it possible that it's not a "fault" but one of the add-ons has gone rogue and is somehow causing my TiVo to crash? Is it worth trying a kickstart 57 to force a GSOD?

[healeydave]

Its unlikely to be a rogue add-on unless you recently installed something or did some reconfiguration.

If you've swapped the PSU, it could still be a HDD issue or a faulty Main board.

I'm surprised these reboots haven't caused a GSOD!

If you have an old PC (with an IDE (PATA) based controller) you could pull the drive and run it through a diagnostic utility.
I still use an ancient DOS based utility called Powermax to do an advanced surface scan of drives, its non-destructive.
If you can try that and it comes back as a failing disk, we probably no the cause of the reboots, if the HDD passes, its got to be software or the Main board I guess.

[angusr]

I'm surprised these reboots haven't caused a GSOD!

Eventually they did, but it didn't seem to last long (I wasn't watching, but I checked half an hour later at most and it was back into a loop).

If you have an old PC (with an IDE (PATA) based controller) you could pull the drive and run it through a diagnostic utility.
I still use an ancient DOS based utility called Powermax to do an advanced surface scan of drives, its non-destructive.
If you can try that and it comes back as a failing disk, we probably no the cause of the reboots, if the HDD passes, its got to be software or the Main board I guess.

It's actually a SATA disk with a SATA/IDE adaptor - actually, that's another potential point of failure, isn't it? I do have access to old machines though so I can use one of them and test that too.

I am starting to worry about main board failure... I do have another TiVo though, which I retired due to a believed dodgy PSU. So I could swear loudly for another hour and swap the new PSU into that if need be.

Thanks for the help - couldn't have happened at a worse time (for a start a flyer came through the door advertising the Sky F1 HD channel... will... not... succumb... to... Sky HD...)

[healeydave]

Well you can probably put the PSU you took out of the other machine into the spare tivo with the suspect PSU since the issue remained, we can assume that PSU is fine after-all.
At least then if the reboot loop cycle happens on the other Tivo, we should know one way or the other if its the drive or the Main board.
The IDE2SAT could be another point of failure, but it will be the first example I've heard of, so we will suspect that as a last resort

[angusr]

Well, ran the full SeaTools test on it (had it to hand, and I think it might actually be a rebranded PowerMax now that Maxtor is Seagate...) and the drive passed. So I'm thinking motherboard. I'll slap the drive (and the old PSU) in the other TiVo and see what happens...

[angusr]

Sigh. Looks like the PSU in the old TiVo was fine as well - it must have been the motherboard on that one too. It was even worse! Only got as far as "Powering up..." before restarting - put the drive back in the first TiVo and it got to the TiVo slide before restarting.

So I think I have two busted motherboards... time to call some friends who I know have TiVos in the loft.

Heesh!

[SolidTechie]

Before doing that you may want to try re-imaging the drives - I have had this happen on a number of TiVos with 1GB SATA drives - work fine for a few weeks, then crash and burn. I have tried all possible combinations of chassis(3) M/B(3) PSUs(5) Cachecards(2) TiVoNZnet card(1) and disks - with the disk being the (no fault) culprit every time.

I wish I could nail what was causing it, but alas I am way too stupid!

What I do know is that having identified the "faulty" disk - reimaging it, makes it work fine.

[angusr]

I would have thought if it was the disk it would behave the same in both systems, but it's a fair point. I have another TiVo arriving on Monday, so if it fails in that one too (which is believed to be fine bar a bad disk) then I'll try a reimage...

[angusr]

I would have thought if it was the disk it would behave the same in both systems, but it's a fair point. I have another TiVo arriving on Monday, so if it fails in that one too (which is believed to be fine bar a bad disk) then I'll try a reimage...

It failed in the one on Monday - same issue as in TiVo #1, got as far as the menus and then rebooted a few seconds later. So I think I can assume that TiVo #2 is probably dead.

Trying a reimage, see if that helps... still not 100% convinced that something, somewhere isn't just choking on some bad data and causing the reboot, but I don't think there's much else I can do. So...

[Rob Nespor Bellis]

Well, ran the full SeaTools test on it (had it to hand, and I think it might actually be a rebranded PowerMax now that Maxtor is Seagate...) and the drive passed. So I'm thinking motherboard. I'll slap the drive (and the old PSU) in the other TiVo and see what happens...

To be fair, seatools ( from memory ) only tests the integrity of the disk, not the filesystem ( especially something like a byteswapped EXT2 or EXT3, ) it is possible that there is corruption in the filesystem - now a re-image will resolve that somewhat destructively, alternatively using a bootable TiVo friendly Linux CD/DVD e.g. one which will byteswap the OS partition, and then running FSCK against it may be able to fix the problem and get you back to a fully booting TiVo.

Rgds,

R.

[angusr]

To be fair, seatools ( from memory ) only tests the integrity of the disk, not the filesystem ( especially something like a byteswapped EXT2 or EXT3, ) it is possible that there is corruption in the filesystem - now a re-image will resolve that somewhat destructively, alternatively using a bootable TiVo friendly Linux CD/DVD e.g. one which will byteswap the OS partition, and then running FSCK against it may be able to fix the problem and get you back to a fully booting TiVo.

Theoretically the GSOD should be able to do that, but you're right - it could be that the filesystem is so shagged that it's crashing out during that too. If it happens again I'll give that a go.

I've now reimaged, and I'm back up and running... time to recreate all those season passes and wishlists (and remember to back
them up regularly this time, idiot that I am.)