TIVO Series 2 reboots and then gray screen

[robertsb]

Hello,

I have a Series 2 Dual Tuner (TCD649080) that had recently had to go through a check disk cycle. It has rebooted on me randomly once. Now it won't boot. It gives the sunny screen, then the screen goes gray. I have tried holding down the pause button on the remote on bootup, but nothing. I probed the power of the hard drive, and it was good (+5V, +12V).

I saw that you can test the hard drive, so I took it out and plugged it into my computer. I booted into Windows XP and ran WD's disk checker which reported no problems. I then read that booting into XP with the hard drive attached is not a good idea, but I have no idea of knowing if I actually caused a problem since the unit won't respond anyway.

I tried the MakeTivoBootable program -- "MakeTiVoBootable -d /dev/hdX --pk 3 --ak 6 --bp root=/dev/hda4", and it did appear to change things. I'm not booted into Linux right now, but "dd if=/dev/hda of=file count=1K" on the before-and-after are a little different. Now, the unit doesn't even get to the gray screen. It just hangs out on the first sunny screen and doesn't proceed. Then again, that might be a good sign. Maybe I'm not patient enough.... I will let it keep going until the morning.

What can I do next? What are the likely causes of failure here? The drive checked out OK, and random power cycles seem to indicate a power supply issue. The unit has been sitting under a power amplifier, and I've been worried about overheating. That said, there's not so much dust.

What can I probe to identify the state of the power supply?

Thanks,
Brent

[WK-Jeff]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say it "had to go through a check disk cycle." What exactly happened and what does this mean?

[robertsb]

Unfortunately, I was not there for that. My wife reported it to me. Apparently the Tivo was checking itself for a few hours. The Tivo warned us to turn off the TV in order to avoid screen burn-in. I took this to mean that it must have been checking the disk.

-Brent

[WK-Jeff]

Sounds like you had a green screen, "A Severe Error Has Occurred."

This is a tell-tale sign of a bad hard drive. If that's what you saw, then I'd suggest you consider a replacement drive kit.