Tivo's Guided Setup Corrupted HD

[lessthansix]

When I moved recently I went thru guided setup to change my zip code and get the cable lineup for that area. As soon as the download was complete the tivo became slow and choppy to the point of almost freezing up (I can hear the hard drive making skipping sounds as the picture temporarily freezes). I checked the hard drives with my PC and they showed no errors. I restarted the recorder and repeated the GS but it didn't help.

Is there a way to fix this without starting from scratch with instantcake? I never had a problem when it dialed in to update my clock but I know the GS is the cause of this.

[Lou Jacob]

The problem may very well still be a bad hard drive. I'm sure you ran at least the "basic" diagnostics on the drive, and possibly "advanced" - but I'm guessing you didn't run the low-level format because that is 'destructive' and will erase everything on your drive? I have seen, many times, drives pass basic and advanced and then show up with errors during the low-level format.

Obviously, you can't run that, unless you have another drive or IC available to you...

Another thing you can try is doing a full "clear and delete everything" - if it IS guide corruption, that will do it. Running guided setup again is not the same as doing the C & D and then running guided setup.

Let us know how it turns out.

[lessthansix]

I could be wrong but it seems that installing instantcake on a drive and then going thru to GS once works out fine but trying to do GS thru tivo after the initial setup causes the PTV software to corrupt. Granted, this could be an issue with my particular tivo but I should mention that I took the original drive which had the same symptoms as my current tivo drives (until I installed instantcake), reformatted it to use in a PC and it's worked fine.

Is this a possible bug for the series 1 in terms of its compatibility with instantcake? It just seems like too great of a coincidence for my drives to have been working perfectly and then go bad right after guided setup finishes.

If I have to start from scratch I'll do the comprehensive drive check and post back if there are no errors but I really have a feeling that after reinstalling instantcake the tivo is going to perform like it used to... but I will have lost everything.

I do think it's possible though that a lot of people just assume it's their drive because they can't really know without losing all their shows and by then they'd rather just get a new/larger HD since they're so inexpensive, but I've owned a lot of HD's and I've never had one die on me yet. I even have a couple 1 gig drives from the time-before-internet that I still use.

I was hoping there was an alternative to a clean install but I guess my Lost is lost.

[lessthansix]

For anyone who still has a series 1 and also knows what an internet is, I'll post the "solution" to my problem.

After I ran a diagnostic test on my hard drives I put them back in the tivo and this time when I started it up I got the green screen that says severe error occured, leave tivo plugged in for the next 3 hours... blah, blah, blah. It cycled on and off twice and then prompted me to go thru guided setup again.

Now the tivo is working the same as before I originally changed the zip code and shows the new cable lineup, etc. I can only assume that by either running the error check (which displayed "no errors" by the way) on my PC or by simply taking out the hard drives for a day tivo was able to recognize the error that had occured and fix it... or plugging and unplugging it repeatedly over the course of a day could have led to a greater error that was fixed with my original error piggybacking along.

I guess I'll never know for sure but I certainly think that anyone who has a huge hard drive full of "memories" should not give up on it because if it boots up at all then there's a chance to save it... possibly.

[Lou Jacob]

I can only assume that by either running the error check (which displayed "no errors" by the way) on my PC or by simply taking out the hard drives for a day tivo was able to recognize the error that had occured and fix it... or plugging and unplugging it repeatedly over the course of a day could have led to a greater error that was fixed with my original error piggybacking along.


The drive diagnostic definitely would not have made a difference as it does not change any of the data on the drive (unless you low-level format it), just tests the underlying hardware.

As for the plugging/unplugging, I'd never recommend that, but if you ended up corrupting the file system and ended up with a "green screen" its possible that the resulting "fsfix" might have corrected some corruption that was previously plaguing you.

More likely, there was some data that was corrupted in the guide-data portion of the database, and over time things got sorted out; sometimes the download from TiVo can get garbled as well, so it might have had nothing to do with your particular situation.

A couple of things to point out...

1) InstantCake is really only the scripts that lay the TiVo OS onto the drive, and apply some of the commonly used 'tricks' used to expand and utilize the additional space on a larger than normal drive; a problem like the one you are having is something happening at a 'lower level'

2) I hope this is not the case, but you may not be out of the woods quite yet; the 'root cause' of whatever corruption exists is still unknown; its still possible that there is something wrong with your drive (although having run basic and advanced tests, you've ruled out that likelihood), so if you start to see weird things happening in the future, you may need to get more aggressive and attempt to low-level format the drive...