Frozen TiVo...

[rzep]

Hey all

I replaced the 40 gig drive on my Phillips DSR704 DirecTiVo last year. It was freezing during programming and then stuck on the Welcome Powering Up page. I upgraded to an 160 gig drive and it had been working great until recently.

Yesterday it was again frozen during programming and not responding at all. Soooo I unplugged it, left it unplugged for about five minutes, managed to get through the Welcome Powering Up page(which took about 5 minutes), then she hung up on the Almost there page and went no further.

Now I have to turn myself in as I "meant to" get an UPS for the TiVo as we have crappy power where I live and get random power flickers that average about once maybe twice per week. I realize that just pulling the plug cannot be good for any computerized device and I dropped the ball by not getting an UPS.

I have done some pointing and clicking and found that perhaps it is the drive again may have a corrupted boot sector. I have not found if there is a way to reinstall the boot information? Can I my TiVo have dual drives? Can I recover the stored programming on the 160 gig drive if I have a dual drive setup?


Thanks


Mike

[WK-Michael]

There's really no way to reinstall just the boot info - you'd pretty much have to reformat the whole drive and you'd need an image to do it. Have you tested the drive in a PC to see what happens? Be sure to use the manufacturer's utility, and if you want to try recovery, be sure to NOT boot it into Windows at any point.

If it takes 5 minutes to actually get just to "Powering Up" then you may also/instead have a power supply problem.

[rzep]

Hey there

I am in the process of running the Maxtor test disk right now. It seems to be a thorough test and is taking some time right now.

Will post results shortly.


Mike