# Rebooting TiVo ( I will boot it if it doesn't stop)



## 20039700 (Apr 24, 2006)

I really need help here.

My TiVo has not made a succesful daily call in nearly a week now!
It makes a test call fine and comes up successful, but if I manually force a daily call, or even just let it do it when it wants, it just either gets to "Housekeeping", sometimes not even that far sometimes just to "Starting Up", and then the TiVo locks out, and eventually reboots itself, this is regardless of whether the daily call is started from tivo menu or the tivoweb page.

This is becoming somewhat of an annoyance as this i happening more and more when programs are being recoreded and I am missing like 5 mins of the show whilst the Tivo reboots.

Does anybody have any ideas?

Somebody suggested removing TIvoweb plus, which I have done and I now just use Tivoweb.
Somebody else has suggested that it could be the power supply that is failing and causing the tivo to reboot, but it only seems to do it when the tivo is trying to make a daily call. 

I have a 250gb hard drive and cahcecard with 256mb ram) installed.

PLEASE HELP!


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## frogster (Jan 4, 2006)

The test call and the daily call should both make the same demands on the modem and so I doubt that the power supply has anything to do with it. I suspect data corruption (dying drive?).

I would be inclined to rerun guided setup from the setup menu - choosing to erase all the guide data, SPs etc. This will take some time.

You could also try the special boot procedures that are supposed to help with this sort of thing though in my case they didn't do much.


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## AMc (Mar 22, 2002)

From my 2nd hand experience it sounds like a corruption.
I would start with the option (somewhere in the menus) to delete all the guide data before you blitz all your season passes. Do that before you go to bed/work as I expect it will take a while.

Bear in mind if it fails to complete a guided set up then it will be even more annoyingly inert than it is now.

Did it go wrong immediately after installing/upgrading or has it just gone bad 'by itself'?


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## 20039700 (Apr 24, 2006)

Well I have it set up to use the netwok to make the daily calls, and it just seemed to go bad on its own, nothing to do with anything i have installed.

The drive is brand new so will not be failing!

I am gpnna try repeating guided setup seewhere that gets me!


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## The Obo (Feb 22, 2005)

Try uninstalling Hackman.
I had loads of reboots caused after I installed Hackman - so I uninstalled it and everything is now sweet!
I think hackman is a memory hog that causes Tivo to run out of memory and reboot - there is also a memory setting that it is recommended to change somewhere...


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## frogster (Jan 4, 2006)

20039700 said:


> The drive is brand new so will not be failing!


My ar*e.


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## 20039700 (Apr 24, 2006)

What?

its a 250gb hard drive that has recently been upgraded!


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Unfortunately I have to agree with Frogster 

Just because a drive is new does not mean it's not going to fail. Usually, if a drive is faulty this will show up during testing or as soon as it goes into the TiVo, and if it doesn't show signs of failure at this stage it will last for a couple of years or more depending on the manufacturer and just how lucky you are. However, occasionally, problems won't show until a few weeks or months down the line and a drive will fail at that time. It's rare, but it does happen. 

That said, your problem could also be due to nothing more than some data corruption, so I'd suggest a "Clear Guide Data & ToDo List" (which also deletes your SPs BTW) to clean out the database as a first step. Redoing Guided Setup isn't likely to help in a case like this as, unless you also change postcodes, the guide data is not deleted. 

If that fails then pull the drive and run a full surface scan with something like Hitachi's DFT, or HUTIL if it's a Samsung.


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## 20039700 (Apr 24, 2006)

i am in the process of running guided setup

it does the first setup call fine, and imports the data etc.

but when it gets to the second call it goes into housekeeping and eventually fails saying number unavailable.

Any ideas?

Should I go back to using my turbonet card instead of the cachecard and see if that makes any difference?


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## 6022tivo (Oct 29, 2002)

Check you are using the latest CacheCard Drivers, older ones have reported errors including rebooting tivos, also if the memory is not the best, run guided setup with it removed. Maybe the indexing that is hammering the database is showing the fault if the memory is not up to scratch. The cachecard can be picky about its memory.

Run the tivo for a few days without the memory installed. You will get a driver failled to load error on tivo boot on the screen with Zero mem, but the card will network and work fine.

For latest Driver http://www.silicondust.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=d9aa2c73d31de44c2807583b2f9a15ed


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## 20039700 (Apr 24, 2006)

ok, I removed, the RAM from the cachecard, and am now runnng guided setup again after powering down

the first setup call seems to work ok!

the second call (Programme call) hangs on the connecting bit, it goes starting up> preparing to call> housekeeping and seems to get stuck on housekeeping and tehn eventually failing.

I think the modem in the box is duff, tried changing the settings to daily call by dial up (using hte nic install disk) and it just said mode undetectable or sumfin like that), so netowrk is the only way to make a daily call

Please help, I want my tivo to work


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## PPJ (Jun 26, 2002)

The problems you are having sound very similar to those I had after my recent disk upgrade. It turned out that this was due to the swap-space not being set up correctly.

Try looking in /proc/meminfo to see how much swap space there is.

See this thread for more detail.


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## Ian_m (Jan 9, 2001)

I was just about to say SWAP SPACE.............

If you have no swap space or too small swap space the TiVo will fail to complete the indexing.

If you type "cat /proc/meminfo" from telnet prompt, it will reveal all.

Solutions are:

- No swap space or too small swap space for drive size, there are some major fiddles to recover this, but basically re-image correctly is best.
- Swap space present, but not initialised (look in kernel.log for the error). This can occur using the MFSTOOLS LBA48 cd not on the correct IDE position drive as I think the swap initiatlisation code is hard coded. Follow the instructions correctly and it works. However I am sure there is a fiddle using mkswap command to get things working without removing the drive, at least that what I did, whilst piddling around with a spare 80GB drive before I did the final upgrade.

The commands you need to get the swapfile working are here this thread....


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## PPJ (Jun 26, 2002)

Ian_m said:


> This can occur using the MFSTOOLS LBA48 cd not on the correct IDE position drive as I think the swap initiatlisation code is hard coded. Follow the instructions correctly and it works.


That may be so, but it wasn't the cause in my case. It was the particular version of the LBA48 MFSTOOLS (4.01) I was using.

When I used version 1.00, as recommended by blindlemon, then did everything again (exactly the same way), the swap space got set up correctly and everything worked fine.


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## Ian_m (Jan 9, 2001)

PPJ said:


> That may be so, but it wasn't the cause in my case. It was the particular version of the LBA48 MFSTOOLS (4.01) I was using.
> 
> When I used version 1.00, as recommended by blindlemon, then did everything again (exactly the same way), the swap space got set up correctly and everything worked fine.


Correct, at least you realised this before getting too deep in recorded programmes. I think this situation can be recovered (at least it did in my experimentation case) by:-

mkswap /dev/hda8
swapon -a

Again I would highly recommend, if at all worried about upgrading your disks, buy a cheap say 80GB (Ebay ?) to mess around on first to bump into all these pitfalls. Main issue is of course you want your TiVo back immediately...which is why I in the end I went for the preconfigured disk route, pop it in, turn on and away you go...


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## 20039700 (Apr 24, 2006)

ok, all appears to be well, i just left the tivo powered down for a few hours and then repeated the guided setup, and changed my options, now using digital sat + digital terrestrial (freeview)

the guided setup seemed to complete ok, we will see how it goes enxt time it trys to complete a daily call

although i did still get a random reboot, when trying to launch tivoweb, somebody mentioned something abut altering an option for the memory, any ideaS?


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Yes, check your swap space


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## Ian_m (Jan 9, 2001)

20039700 said:


> although i did still get a random reboot, when trying to launch tivoweb, somebody mentioned something abut altering an option for the memory, any ideaS?


Yes check your swap space and edit the first line of tivoweb file to "export TIVOSH_POOLSIZE=3244032"


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## 20039700 (Apr 24, 2006)

I have just tried the cat /proc/meminfo and it showed 0kb

so i tried the littel trick describe above and it is now showing 130684kb, 

will this be ok now, will this stop it rebooting randomly and can i run tivoweb and hackman without problems, will my daily calls continue to work?


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## PPJ (Jun 26, 2002)

20039700 said:


> will this be ok now, will this stop it rebooting randomly and can i run tivoweb and hackman without problems, will my daily calls continue to work?


I can only speak from my limited experience, but...

I upgraded two tivos at the same time and both had the swap-space problem.

I fixed one by starting again from scratch with V1.00 of the MFSTOOLS. This has worked faultlessly from that point on.

I fixed the other with the mkswap fix. This appeared to cure the problems (daily calls succedding etc.). However, after a while I started to notice problems - mysteriously blank recordings, occasional re-boots during recordings, playback jumping all over the place...

I have now re-done this one with v1.00 of the tools and it works fine. No reboots, no blank recordings, no playback problems.

One possible explanation is that the swap-space made by mkswap is not quite big enough for a 250 GB disk, but I'm semi-guessing here. It could have been an entirely unrelated problem and just coincidence.


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## The Obo (Feb 22, 2005)

Why did you go for only 256MB of RAM in your cachecard and not 512MB as recommended?

Maybe this has something to do with your problems....?


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## 20039700 (Apr 24, 2006)

a 256mb stick was the only one that I have, but the swap space thing appear to have worked!

I have now bought a 512mb stick, i had to wait until i was paid before i could buy one.

It seems to be ok now after wiping everything and re-doing guided setup.

if i was to use the MFSTOOLS v1 disk, would that wipe my drive again?

cheers


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## frogster (Jan 4, 2006)

20039700 said:


> It seems to be ok now after wiping everything and re-doing guided setup.


If I were you I wouldn't do anything more to it unless it starts going wrong again.


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