The last two days I have been battling with my Sony T-60 Directv Tivo unit. It kept rebooting continuously. After posting questions on www.tivocommunity.com and www.dbstalk.com, The site that I use the most for Tivo issues has been www.dealdatabase.com, but it was down yesterday. I did get a great list of things to try from litzdog911 on the thread I started on www.tivocommunity.com. When www.dealdatabase.com came back up I also found this thread which might have been useful if some of my data had been corrupted.
I bought my Tivo back in 2000, and upgraded the hard drive to 120GB in 2002. From everything I read it looked like the drive might be the culprit. The MTBF for the drive in 2002 was about 3 years, it is now in its 5th year. From litzdog911 post he mentioned two tools which may repair bad sectors regardless of the disk's format. I went for HDD Regenerator, it was the cheaper at $59.99 and had a 30 day money back guarantee. One of the nice features of HDD Regenerator is the creation of a bootable CD or floppy. I created a CD, pulled the hard drive from the Tivo unit, plugged it into an old PC, and booted up into HDD Regenerator. It scanned the drive all night, this morning it had found and repaired 1214 bad sectors. I put the hard drive back into the Tivo unit and the unit booted successfully.
I feel pretty lucky and very pleased with HDD Regenerator. Now I need to replace the drive, since I fear this is only the beginning of the end. I will have to descend into Linux to run the DD_Rescue utility to copy my drive to a new one, but there seems to be plenty of posts on the subject.
The funny thing about this whole event is that I almost made it to my new HD Directv HR20 DVR upgrade which will be installed on March 19th. My T-60 will then replace an old Sony SAT-A1 that has been limping along.
One other side effect of our Tivo being down is how bad watching over the air TV really is. Being able to easily control when, where and what you watch has become a way of life. It was amazing how fast we noticed and really missed the control Tivo affords.
Comments