jeudi 21 avril 2016

Strange HW Issue with Tivo Roamio; persistent reboot cycle

I bought my first (and only Tivo), a Roamio model TCD846500 (the base version, 0.5 TB HD, can do cable or OTA) not quite 3 years ago, with lifetime subscription based on the rave reviews from a friend and longtime Tivo user.

A few weeks ago it got into a cycle of constant reboots (green led and the initial starting screen on TV, the amber light flashes a bit, then looks like reboots, and just keeps doing this). It eventually (after quite a few hours of this), successfully booted, and worked for a little while, but soon all video was badly pixelated. I tried rebooting to see if it would fix it,
but now is continually in this reboot cycle.

Some googling suggested these symptoms were likely to be a bad hard drive, and the forum suggested replacement is easy. I tried installing a 250 GB SATA drive I had lying around just as proof of concept before ordering a new drive, but no avail. I also checked, and the original drive seems to be working (attaching drive to a linux PC, I was able to do SMART tests which passed and read the entire disk using dd).

More googling, and I found a list of kickstart codes for the Tivo, and with both the original 0.5 TB and the test 0.25 TB drives, tried a variety of codes (e.g. the weeknees page tivo-kickstart-codes.php) without avail. Indeed, the kickstart codes did not appear to do _anything_; the start up screen appears, the amber light flashes, I press pause for 2 secs, the amber light stops flashing and is steady, I enter the code, the green and amber lights alternate for a while, then the system just returns to the previous reboot cycle. In particular, code 57 does not result in a GSOD (not even sure what that looks like, but not seeing it), code 54 does not give SMART test screen, codes 51/52 do not give the sw install page shown, the dial-in codes do not display dial-in page (not that I have a phone plugged into the Tivo anyway).

Any help would be appreciated. Right now I have a _very_ expensive black paperweight.:(
Any suggestions?


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