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May 25, 2006
TiVo Trouble
If your TiVo is out of warranty, you may want to consider backing it up. Most TiVo's have a one year warranty, and from what I've been reading the hard drive's life is 18-24 months. Making a back up is relatively simple if you're a tinkerer and have ever taken apart a computer.
My story follows, but it would have been a much faster process if I had a backup of the OS. All of the instructions that I found on the internet assume that you are upgrading from a good drive - or at least one that isn't unstable. There's lost of sites like Steve's TiVo upgrade diary where people share their upgrade stories to help others upgrade. This is not one of them.
Upgrading seems rather simple, recovery is not. If you lose your OS, there is a place you can buy the OS and some people have them available for free, but TiVo has sent out cease and desist orders so this seems like a route to avoid. Making a back up isn't about saving your shows, nor is it about saving your settings (thumb ratings, season passes, etc.), which it will do, but about saving the OS and making recovery simple.
It's sad to say, but hard drives are not made to spin 24/7 for years - your TiVo (or any DVR) will fail at some point. It's better to be prepared. If you're interested in what I had to go through - without a back up - read on.
A few weeks ago our 80 hour TiVo died…well, sort of. After a service update it rebooted and never left the "Welcome. Powering up…" screen. I tried a few reboots and still nothing. TiVo community has a number of posts about people having this problem all saying the hard drive is dying.
Some say that the service update is the cause, since it happened quite a bit. Others say that the way TiVo does service updates is the problem. Basically it has three partitions - one for the operating system, one for the shows, and second one for the operating system. With each update, it flips to the other operating system. So, if bad sectors develop on the unused partition and TiVo sends an update…if there are enough bad sectors, poof…
The fault doesn't matter; the fact is the same the hard disk was dying. WeeKnees.com has update (to a larger drive) and backup instructions and sell drives with the OS already on it. So, I followed the instructions at http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com, hoping it would work. The instructions are pretty straight forward.
Taking apart the case is the hardest part of the whole deal. Not because it's physically difficult, it's the crossing the line from TiVo lover to TiVo hacker that's the challenge.
After following the WeaKnees instructions, I plugged the new 250 GB drive into the TiVo and after the warm up screen, the "Almost There" screen appeared, Joy! But the joy was short lived, within 15 seconds it green screened, then rebooted. It did this a few times and I realized that I had left the jumper on the drive - marking it as slave. After I removed the jumper, I got nothing other than the powering up screen.
After some more surfing, I found a lot of posts talking about DD_Rescue and spinrite. Spinrite is a drive recovery system that attempts to copy bad sectors to a better place on the drive…at least, that's what I could figure out. DD_Rescue seems to be a common unix program to copy a damaged drive to a good drive. DD_Rescue is part of several flavors of unix and spinrite is $90. Hopefully, DD_Rescue would work.
I followed the TiVoCommunity post about DD_Rescue and downloaded a CD boot version of Knoppix. It booted into XWindows. I attempted to run DD_Rescue from the equivalent of the run command/dos prompt, but to no avail. I also couldn't figure out how to leave xWindows or boot to the command line. Sigh.
On a whim I tried booting using the WeaKnees CD and see if DD_Rescue was there. It was, but it was a slimmed down version. A TiVo community post suggest using a bunch of extra commands that this version didn't have, but I figured I would use what I could and see what happens.
It took a few hours to transfer the data, then I plugged the new drive in.
"Powering up…"
"Almost there…"
Green Screen of Death. But this time it didn't reboot immediately. But alas it did reboot.
It was getting late so I was going to unplug and come back to it later, but since it was already powering up again, I decided to wait for the reboot to unplug.
This time, the almost there screen was again followed by the GSOD, but this time, the GSOD lasted several minutes…perhaps we're getting somewhere. One last reboot before bed and it came back to life!
It still reads as an 80 hour drive, which is normal for DD_Rescue. There's instructions for reclaiming the extra space at hinsdale but I'll lose the shows that are there, so we're going to watch those first before I try that.
Huzzah, I didn't have to spend $150 plus shipping to get the TiVo replaced and all of our shows were saved. But I did miss taping Lost the night is was down and it cost $130 for a new (but larger) drive.
Anyhow, if you're still reading this, go backup your drive!
Posted by Jesse at May 25, 2006 9:05 AM