# Can anyone provide some assistance?



## pkclark1 (Feb 21, 2006)

I have a Tivo series 2, 80-hour that was fried in a recent power outage. When turned on it tries to go through the set up, but gets suck and begins the loop over and over again.

I am wondering is there a hard reset I can perform- and would this help?

Also, can it be re-loaded/reimaged, and if so- where would I get this- and more importantly, how is it done??

Lastly, I'm thinking this may be a good oportunity to upgrade to a larger drive. Is this something I can do- are they pre loaded with the OS? or are there shops that do this for a reasonable amount?
Any advise is greatly appreciated.

Kim


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## Maxnl (Jan 7, 2006)

Well I would assume that the hard drive was somehow damaged in the power outage if it still tries to boot. If so, the OS on the disk it probably unusable and all your recordings and settings are lost. Weakness, one of the sponsers of this site, does sell hard drives preloaded with the OS, and you could choose any avalible capacity. You can also try to buy one of the cd's from other companys that have the TiVo OS on them and buy your own hard drive to load the OS onto.
The first option is defidently the more user friendly option, but does tend to cost more.


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## windracer (Jan 3, 2003)

Where does the reboot loop happen. Do you get past the "Powering up" screen?

I was going to link to the Diagnostics Wiki (http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TivoDiagnostics) but it seems to have gone AWOL. You could try a kickstart, though (thank goodness for Google's cache):



> *kickstart*
> While booting the power light will change from green to yellow as the line 'checkpanic' in the rc.sysinit gets executed. This happens a few seconds before the screen changes from the startup image to "almost there" and it's your cue to hold down a button (use pause) on the remote to trigger a panic. When the record light changes yellow, key in one of the following sequences:
> 
> 0 - emergency call to tivo, touchtone dialing
> ...


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## funtoupgrade (Mar 15, 2005)

All the downloadable software and instructions for reimaging a hard drive are in the stickies at the top of the upgrade forum. A power outage can trash many parts of a TiVo and that is why most experts recommend hooking your TiVo up to a Universal Power Supply (UPS) of at least 350 watts which will protect the TiVo from this sort of happening. In order to diagnose your problem you need a good backup image (along with the Linux software - Mfstools), and you also need to test your hard drive using the manufacturer's downloadable hard drive utility to make sure it is ok. Like the previous poster indicated the easiest solution is to buy a new preimaged hard drive, second easiest is InstantCake, and finally the free software.


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## dagap (Dec 5, 2003)

Spinrite plus MakeTivoBootable fixed mine when it wouldn't boot after a power outage. All recordings were preserved.

I'm thinking that I could have probably skipped the Spinrite and gotten the same results. It churned for some time on one sector/cluster/whatever in the front of the disk (boot sector?) and finally declared that it had recovered "MOST" of the damaged data. 

Still wouldn't boot, though, until I ran MakeTivoBootable.


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## pkclark1 (Feb 21, 2006)

You guys ROCK! Thanks for the ideas I'll give them a try!


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## pkclark1 (Feb 21, 2006)

So, I decided this was probably a sign- time to upgrade to a bigger drive. Thanks for the advice all. And BTW, Weaknees was great- thanks for the referral!


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