# Poor TiVo - RIP



## dave99 (Oct 30, 2002)

I think my tivo took a fatal blast of lightning last weekend. Big storm in manchester and lightning struck either the house or at least very close. It took out everything connected to the phone line - tivo, adsl modem, phones, adsl microfilters, sky box (although strangely this turned out to be just the LNB that blew, the box itself is fine - wonder if the surge came in through the dish?).

When I power up tivo now the power light comes on and the hard drive spins up, but it is unresponsive and the video output just gives a black screen with a few sparklies on it - dont suppose there is anything I can do with it is there?


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## frogster (Jan 4, 2006)

dave99 said:


> I think my tivo took a fatal blast of lightning last weekend. Big storm in manchester and lightning struck either the house or at least very close. It took out everything connected to the phone line - tivo, adsl modem, phones, adsl microfilters, sky box...


It doesn't help you but if I had £1 for every time I've told people to unplug *EVERY SINGLE ITEM * connected to the phone line *EVERY TIME THEY HEAR THUNDER OR WHEN LIGHTNING IS FORECAST OR SEEMS LIKELY * I would be living in Barbados.

But does anyone pay the slightest attention? The f§%:!! they do.

You can buy a Turbonet card or similar and that should resurrect your Tivo, but the built-in modem has had it.


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## 6022tivo (Oct 29, 2002)

Normally if the modem is buggered you will get a welcome to tivo etc and hang during the modem test. What you describe is HDD failure??. You could have totally fried the system board.. Try a replacement HDD if you can borrow one. If it then hangs on welcome... you have a fried modem as well as dodgy HDD.


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## ericd121 (Dec 12, 2002)

dave99 said:


> ...lightning...took out everything connected to the phone line - tivo, adsl modem, phones, adsl microfilters, sky box


There was me thinking I was being overly cautious by unplugging the phone line going into my Belkin SurgeProtector; I didn't think about the microfilters


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## dave99 (Oct 30, 2002)

6022tivo said:


> Normally if the modem is buggered you will get a welcome to tivo etc and hang during the modem test. What you describe is HDD failure??. You could have totally fried the system board.. Try a replacement HDD if you can borrow one. If it then hangs on welcome... you have a fried modem as well as dodgy HDD.


a faint glimmer of hope then - cant try it until I am back home in a couple of weeks, but still have my original pre-upgrade disks so might try putting them back in


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## DaveBrown (Jul 10, 2006)

Pacelink fixed mine after a similar lightning strike nearby. Unfortunately I wasted a fortune on a power supply, a hard drive and a network card first :-((


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## Derek12345 (Jul 28, 2006)

Don't give up all hope.

I too suffered from the same storm. I tried a my old hard disk but it did not solve the problem.

I found an article that suggested I could disable the modem by renaming modemtest to modemtest.old in the tvbin folder of the active partition. And it worked  but of course I was running out of guide.

I invested in a turbonet card from the very nice people at 9th tee and I now have my tivo reborn for 100 USD - much cheaper than buying a new media center.

It might work for you.


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## cwaring (Feb 12, 2002)

Also note that you don't need to buy from the US any more as there are a couple of UK suppliers on this very board


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## Fred Smith (Oct 5, 2002)

But they are charging £86 and £99 respectively for a Cachecard. Current price from the US (if Customs don't add anything) is about £66 delivered.


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## B33K34 (Feb 9, 2003)

The other option is the "Terbonet" - they definitely came in cheaper than the 9th tee card but i don't know if anyone is selling them in the UK at the moment


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