# Rebooting, Drive Diag, and Zipper question



## mitkraft (Feb 21, 2003)

Ok, so my trusty HR10-250 is acting up and while trying to figure out what the problem is I might have boogered up my drive. The tivo didn't seem to be working on the network (couldn't telnet or tivoweb to it) so while I had it out I figured I'd re-hack it remembered back in the days when something would crash and it would switch to the backup partition and I'd loose my hacks. So I haphazardly poped in into my computer and booted to the zipper CD I'd used to hack it in the first place and ran through the script. Of course when it asked if I needed to restore the image I skipped that step thinking it would just hack/enhance the image already on it. Well not when I put it in my Tivo it just continues to reboot after sitting on "starting up" for a few minutes. Also, when asked if there were existing recordings on it that I wanted ot maintain (can't remember the exact question) I said yes.

So did I hose it up entirely?

Second question, if a drive has been zippered and encryption has been turned off, can I put that drive in another tivo of the same model and watch the shows that are on it? I'm curious whether I can put it in one of my other HR10-250's and watch the stuff I'd already recorded without calling DTV to temporarily activate that Tivo. Do they even activate these anymore? Will I have to buy a new card even though the one in my old HR10-250 was activated and working?

I'm totally depressed at the thought of loosing one of my final two Tivos. Thanks for any assistance!


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

Have you looked at the files in /var/log to see if there's a message that might explain why it's rebooting? It's also possible that your drive has gone bad, so trying the manufacturer diags on it couldn't hurt.


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## mitkraft (Feb 21, 2003)

Thanks for the info and feedback. In my attempt to not convolute the issue and make the original post too long I probably left out some stuff. I also did some more testing between my Tivos last night.

When the Tivo first started acting up it was just rebooting infrequently. About a week ago it started having sound issues. Either their would be no sound, it might come and go, or it was "staticky". I tried to telnet into the tivo and check things out but neither telnet nor Tivoweb would work. While tinkering with all that I finally ran into the "your tivo has over heated" message leading me to suspect the power supply. I tried swapping the PS from one of my decommissioned HR10's but they were suspect also. So I then replaced the 2 capacitors (the ones known to go bad) on both of my power supplies. They weren't clearly bad but they were slightly bulging at the top. This seemed to fix the overheating message issue but it still wasn't working properly. That's when I tried the steps listed in my original post.

I did not look at the Var/log because I couldn't telnet into the Tivo and I hadn't pulled the drive at the time. Then when I pulled and re-zippered it I didn't think about it nor would I know where to look. I know those logs can sometimes be long so any guidance as to which log and where to look would be awesome.

Also last night I used the zipper CD to re-image a spare drive I had laying around using the Instant Cake image. I stopped the process after the imaging because I wanted to test a drive with no hacks. I then tried the drive in my two de-commisioned Tivos and after swapping some parts around to find a good power supply and HDMI card I was able to get one to boot with the test drive and appeared ok (its not subscribed so I didn't connect it to the sat or anything). So I put the now known good power suppy and test drive in the main Tivo and I'm still getting the overheating message.

I attempted to see if the HDMI card was bad also but there is a snag. The HDMI card in my main Tivo is the opposite version from the ones in all 3 of my other HR10's so I don't have another one to test with. I tried removing it all together to see if that helped but I still got the overheated message also.


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

Wow, looks like you have a bunch of potential issues going on. I don't have a HR10-250, but the logs are stored on the 9th partition (ext2) on my HDVR2. It might be worth checking out the tverr, kernel, messages, and tvlog (big) files if you run out of ideas.

BTW, what is an HDMI card? I would think the HR10-250 is old enough where it would only have component video and not HDMI, so not sure what you mean?


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## mitkraft (Feb 21, 2003)

Although the HR10-250 is the first HD Tivo (DirectTV Tivo) it does indeed have HDMI. The HDMI out is on a daughter card off the main motherboard and is known to fail on earlier models. There were two versions of the card/mobo with different conenctors between the card and motherboard. I believe the older version had a connector type with soldering issues that accounted for the failures.


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

Ah, did not know that.


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## mitkraft (Feb 21, 2003)

Update: With the prospect of fumbling to repair an already crippled HR10-250 (since it can't do DTV HD) I've decided to go back to cable and back to real Tivo's. So now I'm only interested in the best method for recovering the shows that were on the drive. It was already zippered, encryption turned off and extraction enabled (I know we can't talke about how to do that here but in case its important to my options). Since it's zippered and encryption turned off would I be able to play existing recordings if I put it in my working HR10-250? If not, what's my next best steps?

Thanks!


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