# Tivo died - InstantCake didn't help... yet...



## ragamuffin (Sep 20, 2002)

My Phillips Series-1 StandAlone Tivo (HDR31204) was freezing periodically over the past few weeks... cycling the power got it back up and running for a while... only to have it eventually freeze again... the run time interval became shorter and shorter until last week where it finally wouldn't reboot any more... It's stuck at the screen where it says:

```
Your recorder is starting up.
Please wait a moment...
```
So I jumped on this forum and concluded that one (or maybe both) of my Hard disks has gone bad... and it seems to have coincided in time with the latest TIVO upgrade possibly...

So I purchased a new hard disk this week from newegg.com and also bought InstantCake for my Phillips model TIVO... While I'm waiting for the hard disk to arrive, I was curious as to how InstantCake works so I took both the original 30Gb drive and the upgraded 120Gb out of my Tivo... and assumed that the 30Gb drive was the bad one... I InstantCake'd the 120Gb drive (it completed without any problems)... then put it back in my Tivo as a single drive only... but I'm still seeing the same error message as noted above:

So it's possible that the 120Gb drive is the bad drive... But if it isn't, then I'm curious if there is anything else I can do to troubleshoot this any further while I'm waiting for my new hard drive to arrive?

I don't want to pay $89 for spinwrite which seems kinda pricey just to tell me something I'm pretty sure I already know...


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## ragamuffin (Sep 20, 2002)

Just a followup to my original post...

My 120Gb drive is a Western Digital Caviar drive (WD1200BB). I downloaded the diagnostics for this drive and ran both the BASIC and EXTENDED diags and both passed without detecting any problems at all with this drive...

I re-caked this drive as a single drive... and put it back in as a single drive in my Tivo and same problem and error message in my first post are still displayed...

Just for grins, I unplugged the IDE disk cable and power from the disk drive so that the Tivo had nothing on the IDE bus... and I get the same exact error message at power on... It appears to me the the IDE bus controller isn't working? Is there any way to monitor ROM boot status on these things to determine where it's hanging during boot and why?


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## ragamuffin (Sep 20, 2002)

ok... here's a status update for anyone interested...

All is well now in my rebuilt Tivo with new hard disk installed!

Details for anyone else following this path...

InstantCake appears to have some issue with some of the newer MOBO's where both SATA and PATA interfaces exist... On my particular MOBO, InstantCake actually reported completing the "baking"... but, it also displayed an unmount error message afterwards... whenever, this occurred, I could never get the new hard disk to boot in my Tivo unit. Here's a link to others having this same problem:

DVR playground (dot) com - thread #10619​
So after searching around... I found the following thread that has a change in the "baking" process at this link:

DVR playground (dot) com - thread #12324​
This proved to be the trick with my PC's MOBO and InstantCake... I am able to now built a single drive system (250Gb) and it works in my Tivo box. I was NEVER able to get two drives to work... I tried both the InstantCake mechanism, and the MFSTools "mfsadd" mechanism... When I placed both drives in my Tivo, it would never come out of the "Your recorder is starting up. Please wait a moment..." message...

I finally punted and will be happy with a single 250Gb drive...


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