# Tivo error message



## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

I have a TivoHD.

I got this error message today:

The dvr has detected a serious problem and is now attempting to fix it.

This will take about three hours.

Please do not unplug or restart the dvr.

If after three hours, the dvr does not restart call customer support.

Is there anything else I can do before calling CS?


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

No. Leave it alone. Do not attempt to restart. Let it do its thing.

Since you did not do a kickstart, your HDD figured out it has an error and is attempting to fix. I have never had this take 3 hours, but who knows? Did you upgrade it? Do you have a drive image?

Nothing to be gained from calling TiVo now.

Perhaps a good opportunity to increase your storage size, once you know what is going on.

Good luck.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

jrtroo said:


> No. Leave it alone. Do not attempt to restart. Let it do its thing.
> 
> Since you did not do a kickstart, your HDD figured out it has an error and is attempting to fix. I have never had this take 3 hours, but who knows? Did you upgrade it? Do you have a drive image?
> 
> ...


Thanks for the input.

It's been 7 hours now and now it is stuck in a loop. First the Welcome screen then almost there then the error message.

No I did not upgrade it. This is a stock TivoHD and no image. It did have a 500GB WD External Drive hooked up to it. It was having problems freezing over the last week. I removed the external drive thinking that it might be causing the freezing problems. When it rebooted after the expander was removed is when the error message appeared.

Maybe it knew that I took the cable card out of my other TivoHD and put it in my new Elite.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

KLINK said:


> Thanks for the input.
> 
> It's been 7 hours now and now it is stuck in a loop. First the Welcome screen then almost there then the error message.
> 
> ...


Sounds like the main hard drive might be the problem instead of the expander. Do you have a spare hard drive of at least 160GB that you can try imaging? If so, you can search the following thread for an S3HD image:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=388695


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

lillevig said:


> Sounds like the main hard drive might be the problem instead of the expander. Do you have a spare hard drive of at least 160GB that you can try imaging? If so, you can search the following thread for an S3HD image:
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=388695


Thanks for the info.

No I don't have a spare drive. I am going to check some HD prices over the weekend and look into how hard it is and what I need to do to image a new HD or just buy one from weeknees or DVRugrade.

I tried kickstart and got the yellow and red lights to come on but when I entered 54, the screen went to black for a few seconds then back into it's loop.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

KLINK said:


> Thanks for the info.
> 
> No I don't have a spare drive. I am going to check some HD prices over the weekend and look into how hard it is and what I need to do to image a new HD or just buy one from weeknees or DVRugrade.
> 
> I tried kickstart and got the yellow and red lights to come on but when I entered 54, the screen went to black for a few seconds then back into it's loop.


Maybe a friend has a spare drive that you can at leat borrow to see if that is the problem. If you haven't already, check out MFSLIVE.ORG. I use WinMFS and a simple USB to SATA cable to do imaging. While on WINLIVE, check out the ISO for the bootable MFSLIVE tools disk. That is handy to have in any case and is the one to use for imaging if you don't have Windows. The pre-imaged disks are pretty expensive compared to do-it-yourself. I'll send you links to S3HD images.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

lillevig said:


> Maybe a friend has a spare drive that you can at leat borrow to see if that is the problem. If you haven't already, check out MFSLIVE.ORG. I use WinMFS and a simple USB to SATA cable to do imaging. While on WINLIVE, check out the ISO for the bootable MFSLIVE tools disk. That is handy to have in any case and is the one to use for imaging if you don't have Windows. The pre-imaged disks are pretty expensive compared to do-it-yourself. I'll send you links to S3HD images.


Thanks for the links.

I have a XP SP3 PC. I also just bought a USB to eSata/SATA Adapter.

It looks like a usb thumb drive.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

KLINK said:


> Thanks for the input.
> 
> It's been 7 hours now and now it is stuck in a loop. First the Welcome screen then almost there then the error message.
> 
> ...


You probably should have divorced the external before disconnecting it.

Why don't you hook it back up and see if it'll boot and let you do that.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

unitron said:


> You probably should have divorced the external before disconnecting it.
> 
> Why don't you hook it back up and see if it'll boot and let you do that.


Thanks for the input.

I did divorce the external drive before disconnecting it.

I hooked it back up and it still goes into a loop and I cannot use kickstart.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

KLINK said:


> I also just bought a USB to eSata/SATA Adapter.
> 
> It looks like a usb thumb drive.


That doesn't sound right. Should be a set of cables. One is power with the SATA power connector on one end and the other cable should have USB on one end and a SATA connector on the other end. The cheap cables I use have multiple connectors on the adpater for various IDE drives as well as SATA.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

lillevig said:


> That doesn't sound right. Should be a set of cables. One is power with the SATA power connector on one end and the other cable should have USB on one end and a SATA connector on the other end. The cheap cables I use have multiple connectors on the adpater for various IDE drives as well as SATA.


Here is a link to the device I bought.

http://www.amazon.com/USB-to-eSATA-SATA-Adapter/dp/B002BC32OG/ref=pd_ybh_3

Is there any advantage in buying a Seagate or WD drive?


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

KLINK said:


> Here is a link to the device I bought.
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/USB-to-eSATA-SATA-Adapter/dp/B002BC32OG/ref=pd_ybh_3
> 
> Is there any advantage in buying a Seagate or WD drive?


If you're going for an internal drive upgrade, people lately seem to have been having better luck with WD than Seagate, but the older WD's like the WD20EADS and WD20EARS are hard to come by, and there aren't really enough data yet on the newer stuff like the WD20EARX.

As for that adapter, it seems set up to convert the drive's SATA or eSATA data connection to USB, but doesn't seem to make any provision to provide 5 Volt and 12 Volt power to the drive.

You should have tried to use the various Kickstarts to deal with the problem before divorcing or disconnecting the external drive because of the way that the TiVo "marries" the internal and external.

Now that you've murdered all of your recordings, you might as well take the original drive and restore a TCD652160 image to it, provided that's the model you mean by HD.

TiVo managed to create a lot of confusion with the naming of the various Series 3 platform models.

What you could do is get a 1TB drive and use WinMFS to restore an image to it, giving it a 1000MB swap partition, and then later when drive prices come down you can get a 2TB drive and use jmfs to copy the 1TB to the 2TB and expand by adding a single partition.

Unless you actually have a TCD648250, in which case jmfs won't do you any good and the best you can get doing it yourself is 1TB, or maybe 1.2TB on a 1.5TB drive.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

unitron said:


> If you're going for an internal drive upgrade, people lately seem to have been having better luck with WD than Seagate, but the older WD's like the WD20EADS and WD20EARS are hard to come by, and there aren't really enough data yet on the newer stuff like the WD20EARX.
> 
> As for that adapter, it seems set up to convert the drive's SATA or eSATA data connection to USB, but doesn't seem to make any provision to provide 5 Volt and 12 Volt power to the drive.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the info.

I have the TCD652160 Tivo.

I just hooked up a Elite so I don't need a large HD. It will just be a backup to the Elite whenever my cable goes out. Most of my SPs are from the major networks. I just returned the cable card from the broken tivo, so it is OTA only now.

The two drives that I have been looking at at Best Buy are the WD WDBAAX3200ENC-NRSN($90) and the 
Seagate ST3500641AS-RK($75).

Even though it is cheaper the Seagate comes with a sata cable. The WD does not come with the cable.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

KLINK said:


> Thanks for the info.
> 
> I have the TCD652160 Tivo.
> 
> ...


$90 is pretty doggone steep for only 320GB, and $75 for only 500GB isn't a whole lot better.

Try to hold out for a good deal on a 1TB as long as you're going to the trouble to upgrade anyway.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

unitron said:


> $90 is pretty doggone steep for only 320GB, and $75 for only 500GB isn't a whole lot better.
> 
> Try to hold out for a good deal on a 1TB as long as you're going to the trouble to upgrade anyway.


Thanks for the suggestion.

If I hadn't just got an Elite, I would go for the 1TB drive. I will be using the TivoHD only in an emergency(If my cable goes out). I also have another TivoHD. If the expander still works, I have 500GB there to use.


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## tootal2 (Oct 14, 2005)

I think you need a new hard drive.



KLINK said:


> I have a TivoHD.
> 
> I got this error message today:
> 
> ...


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

KLINK said:


> Thanks for the suggestion.
> 
> If I hadn't just got an Elite, I would go for the 1TB drive. I will be using the TivoHD only in an emergency(If my cable goes out). I also have another TivoHD. If the expander still works, I have 500GB there to use.


You should be able to use Western Digital's diagnostic software to test the drive in the expander, if you can hook it to a PC (you can get an image of a bootable cd with the WD software on it). Do the short test and then the long test.

Assuming the drive in the expander is good, you could remove it from the WD case and stick it in the HD after imaging it with the HD image, or if you are fearful of trying to open the case, you could open the HD and swap the SATA data ends that plug onto the motherboard so that the one that's supposed to have the internal drive's cable plugged onto it has the eSATA jack's cable plugged onto it, and then attach the external drive as usual, only this time it will actually be the internal (and only) drive, it just won't be inside the TiVo.

It's also possible that the internal drive itself is physically okay and it's just that the TiVo software has gotten unfixably scrambled.

However, before you do any of that, open up that TiVo and eyeball the capacitors on the power supply. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find that at least one is showing some sign of bulging.

Take a look at the picture in this thread

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=479176

to see how subtle the difference in the visual clue can be.

A flaky power supply can cause all sorts of symptoms that seem to be something else.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

unitron said:


> You should be able to use Western Digital's diagnostic software to test the drive in the expander, if you can hook it to a PC (you can get an image of a bootable cd with the WD software on it). Do the short test and then the long test.
> 
> Assuming the drive in the expander is good, you could remove it from the WD case and stick it in the HD after imaging it with the HD image, or if you are fearful of trying to open the case, you could open the HD and swap the SATA data ends that plug onto the motherboard so that the one that's supposed to have the internal drive's cable plugged onto it has the eSATA jack's cable plugged onto it, and then attach the external drive as usual, only this time it will actually be the internal (and only) drive, it just won't be inside the TiVo.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the info.

I used a magnifying glass and found no problems with the capacitors.

I ordered this kit from Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000J01I1G/ref=oh_o00_s00_i00_details

I hope it is the right one. They are using the Post Office to ship so I don't expect to see it until next week.

If the original drive passes the WD test should I try that drive with the image I downloaded from a link on this board or try another drive?


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

KLINK said:


> Thanks for the info.
> 
> I used a magnifying glass and found no problems with the capacitors.
> 
> ...


Let's run the long test from WD on both the 160 and the external 500 first and see what they say.

You might be better off to open up that computer and connect the internal drive straight to a SATA port on the motherboard.

Once you've burned a copy of the WD bootable cd with diagnostics, you can disconnect the computer's regular Windows drive to free up a SATA port and hook the 160 there.

You can temporarily remove the eSATA jack from the TiVo chassis to interface the external 500 to a port on the motherboard.

You can never have too many useful gadgets.

That Amazon gizmo may come in handy for other stuff if the WD disc can't test a USB connected drive.

Once you decide what drive you're going to use as the TiVo's primary drive, you should be able to use that thing to connect it to the PC via USB and restore the image without any problems, if you've already put the cover back on the computer.

The software that writes the TiVo stuff to the drive doesn't need to access the drive on as low a level as diagnostic software or firmware altering utilities like wdidle3 (used for turning off Intellipark on Caviar Greens) might need to.

Was the TCD652160 image(s) you download the one(s) I have up on dropbox?


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

unitron said:


> Let's run the long test from WD on both the 160 and the external 500 first and see what they say.
> 
> You might be better off to open up that computer and connect the internal drive straight to a SATA port on the motherboard.
> 
> ...


lillevig sent me a PM with this link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39572185/Series3HD160GB.tbk

I also downloaded the ones you posted:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/49887720/652_gset.bak and

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/49887720/652_gset.tbk


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

unitron said:


> Let's run the long test from WD on both the 160 and the external 500 first and see what they say.
> 
> You might be better off to open up that computer and connect the internal drive straight to a SATA port on the motherboard.
> 
> ...


The internal 160 drive failed both the short and long tests. The external drive passed both tests and I have it hooked up internally with the PC case open and ready to go.

When I click on File>Restore in WinMFS do I only need the image file or do I need a Bootpage and Kernel file?


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

KLINK said:


> The internal 160 drive failed both the short and long tests. The external drive passed both tests and I have it hooked up internally with the PC case open and ready to go.
> 
> When I click on File>Restore in WinMFS do I only need the image file or do I need a Bootpage and Kernel file?


The image file contains all of that.

(Use the one that ends in .tbk Either mine or lillevig's should work just fine, he seems to know what he's doing, sometimes better than me.)

It will make the first 160GB of that 500 look like the original drive, except that one way or another the partition map will reflect the existence of all 500GB.

There are perhaps two areas in which it will allow you to make choices--swap partition size, and partition layout order.

If you get a checkbox that says something about "No optimized partition layout", do not check it. You want whichever option does give you the optimized layout. That's the way they've been doing it since the Series 2s. Only the Series 1 uses the original non-optimized layout.

If there's no checkbox like that, then don't worry about it, it'll automatically do it the right way.

As for the size of the swap partition, my personal preference is to err on the side of caution and make it larger than the original size when going on to a drive larger than the original.

The old rule of thumb is 1MB for every 2GB of drive space, so a 500GB would get a 250MB swap partition size.

If you set it for 1000MB, then that'll have it ready to eventually be expanded to a 2TB drive.

That's only 15 minutes of best quality SD video, so I consider it cheap insurance.

After this, you'll only be able to use jmfs to go to a larger drive without losing recordings, and jmfs won't let you change swap size.

Once you tell it to restore the .tbk file to the 500GB drive, you get to sit and wait until it's done. It may appear to have frozen. Just let it be, eventually it'll finish.

When it does, it'll tell you that there's more space on the drive and ask if you want to expand. Tell it yes.

That should do it.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

unitron said:


> The image file contains all of that.
> 
> (Use the one that ends in .tbk Either mine or lillevig's should work just fine, he seems to know what he's doing, sometimes better than me.)
> 
> ...


I only had one glitch. Since I has to use your backup instead of the one from the original drive. I got a Error 51 message. I did a clear and delete everything. Now it is working so far.

Thanks again to everyone for the help.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

KLINK said:


> I only had one glitch. Since I has to use your backup instead of the one from the original drive. I got a Error 51 message. I did a clear and delete everything. Now it is working so far.
> 
> Thanks again to everyone for the help.


I thought I had that thing set to start in guided setup, which I thought would eliminate the error 51 message. Maybe I'm wrong.

Error 51 is basically the TiVo saying "This drive is supposed to be a TiVo with a different TiVo Service Number, if you want to use it here we have to wipe out all of the settings and recordings tied to that number, which will take awhile".


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## steve614 (May 1, 2006)

unitron said:


> I thought I had that thing set to start in guided setup, which I thought would eliminate the error 51 message. Maybe I'm wrong.
> 
> Error 51 is basically the TiVo saying "This drive is supposed to be a TiVo with a different TiVo Service Number, if you want to use it here we have to wipe out all of the settings and recordings tied to that number, which will take awhile".


I believe, even if you do a C&D before hand, if you make a back up image of a Tivo hard drive, the TSN still gets transferred to the image.

Of course, I don't know for sure either, so YMMV.


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## KLINK (Aug 17, 2004)

unitron said:


> I thought I had that thing set to start in guided setup, which I thought would eliminate the error 51 message. Maybe I'm wrong.
> 
> Error 51 is basically the TiVo saying "This drive is supposed to be a TiVo with a different TiVo Service Number, if you want to use it here we have to wipe out all of the settings and recordings tied to that number, which will take awhile".


It got through the guided setup with no problems. When I tried to go to the NPL, I got the message. Everything else worked.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

KLINK said:


> It got through the guided setup with no problems. When I tried to go to the NPL, I got the message. Everything else worked.


So basically it was either saying "There are recordings here, but this isn't the machine that made them, so you aren't allowed to have them, so we have to erase them before you can do any 'TiVo'ing'", or it was saying "This area needs to be set to encode everything with the TSN, and right now it's set for the wrong one".

Or something like that.


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