The Great TiVO Meltdown of '09

***Update***
Well... it turns out that my celebration was a little premature. After plugging along for all of yesterday, the TiVo started again. I was actually in the process of pulling shows off of this DVR (I'll post in the future about iTiVo to do this) but I only got a few shows in before it started acting up, wife so not happy. I'm pretty sure it actually is a HDD problem now that I've got it back up and running again and I can see some of the oddball behavior.

The moral I guess is do whatever the internets tell you. But the info in this post is still a handy troubleshooting tip since CableCard problems can, in fact cause weird stuff to happen too.
***/Update***


Alright, so this doesn't exactly count as any sort of free stuff. But the internets pretty much failed me when Googling around for a solution, and if I listened to those lying liars I'd be out a new hard drive. So here's my little story that I figured I might share with my interweb friends so that someone else may not suffer.

Last night, as my wife and I sat down to watch a popular reality show in which punk ass kids ruin famous songs, I was greeted with a black screen and no audio. Yeah, I know it was God saying I should do something more constructive with my time. Basic troubleshooting ensued, and it was quickly determined the TiVO was behaving badly. So as is the tradition with said devices, I pulled the plug to do a hostile reboot.

For those of you keeping score, this was my big daddy TiVO, the TiVO HD with the TiVO Extender attached to our main (and only HD) TV. So what happened next nearly made me weep openly. The TiVO dutifuly went through its bootup procedure (the welcome powering up, just another minute screens) and then the screen went black and started back at the powering up screen, which means the unit had rebooted while powering up. Probably not good. Let it go through another sequence, same deal. Pulled the plug for a couple minutes, tried again, another reboot.

$@*!

Time for my BFF, Google to help me out here. I searched on reboot loops, and was horrified with what I saw. Apparently, constant reboots are pretty much always caused by a faulty hard drive.

Double $@*!

Very near weeping at this point.

I found some info on performing what are called "kickstart" codes that force low level diagnostics on a TiVO . For whatever reason, I couldn't get these stupid things to work, I'm pretty sure I did it right, but I want to say in the back of my mind I read somewhere that the new version 11 software uses a different procedure to do diagnostics. By the time I figured out the kickstarting wasn't going to do it for me a great deal of time had passed, and I was pretty much giving up, but first a few tests.

The first thing I did was power off, then unplug my extender. Interestingly the TiVO booted a little further and eventually came to the "hey what did you do with the extender" screen. At that point I could have hit clear to divorce my TiVO from the extender and try to continue to boot. A viable step save for the fact that my wife had several unwatched episodes of Grey's Anatomy on there, if I deleted those unecessarily, a dead TiVO would be the least of my trouble.

So now what? Well I went with a little more Googling, a few more kickstart attempts, and some abject panic to no avail. I was just about to give up and sacrifice Dr. Grey for the greater good when an epiphany of basic troubleshooting hit me. I hadn't messed with the cablecards yet. For those of you who haven't had the opportunity to deal with them, cable cards are a complete and total pain in the ass and the cause of no shortage of headaches on the road to HD TiVO goodness.

So I pull the plug yet again, open the access door on the front up and pop out the cablecard. I plug the TiVo back in and it goes through startup. Then it keeps going, and keeps going (startup is crazy slow on these things, so this is a really good thing.) After the usual several minute wait, I'm presented not with another reboot, but a screen asking me to configure my cablecards since the TiVo seems to have lost them. This is new and promising. I shove the cable card back in and go to the diagnostics, no signal listed, so I'm not overly optimistic yet. So I decide to cancel out of the cablecard setup menu.

AND THE TiVo GOES TO THE TiVo CENTRAL LIST!!!!! WOOHOO, it's all there, the 3 minutes of Idol it tried to record before its near-death experience, and yes, Grey's Anatomy was there just as it had been left, I get to sleep in my bed tonight!

Ok, but what about the cable? Well, after doing the happy dance, I got greedy and decided I'd like it to continue to record new stuff. I dropped out to live TV and at first the searching for signal screen popped up. Then, something beautiful happened, a TV channel appeared, then I channeled, and another channel was there, then one more and I was watching the Weather Channel in glorious HD (I know, crazy). All seemed right with the world.

Don't ask me what happened, I have no earthly clue. I just need to transfer those Grey's off of the thing just in case it breaks again.

Useful links:
http://www.tivocommunity.com
http://www.wkforums.com/forums/