TiVo Dies; Is Resurrected
In the last couple of weeks, something strange has been going on with our TiVo. While watching either live TV or recorded programs, occasionally the action would freeze for a second, then the picture would dissolve into chunky compression artifacts before clearing up and returning to normal. This is similar to what a TV show looks like when its satellite feed is interrupted momentarily, which happens on occasion, so that’s what I thought it was. Until the TiVo started freezing up.
The effect I described above started getting worse. You’d be watching a show you recorded, then everything would freeze for several seconds, and for the next few minutes, would stutter to the point where you couldn’t watch the show. I discovered it was the TiVo malfunctioning when I tried to fast-forward past a section of this, and it wouldn’t fast-forward for a few seconds, either. It was just frozen. Eventually it would come un-stuck, but this was pretty unnerving. I figured that the hard drive was going bad. Now, since a TiVo is, in effect, always recording 24/7, that can be pretty rough on a hard disk. But a 26 month lifespan? That’s pretty lousy. I resolved to do something about it.
The kicker was this morning. Since yesterday, we’ve been having massive storms here in Florida. The power has been “winking” a little bit (not going off, but the lights dimming for a few seconds at a time every so often). I have my TV / TiVo / stuff on a cheapo surge protector, but not a UPS, and the power fluctuation probably wasn’t helping the TiVo’s already-ill hard disk any. So when I turned on the TV this morning, all I saw was a blinding green screen (TiVo wonks call it the “GSOD” for “Green Screen Of Death,” named after the Windows operating system’s own Blue Screen Of Death). The screen informed me that the TiVo had detected a “serious problem” and was attempting to fix it, and that I was not to disturb it for three hours. After which, if it did not reboot itself successfully, it asked me to call support. Well, it must have been doing this all night, because it kept rebooting itself every few minutes and returning back to that GSOD. Yep…the TiVo was dead.
This didn’t really worry me. Being a computer guy, I know that a TiVo is really little more than a specialized, miniature computer, with a regular IDE hard drive inside. Knowing that there was a large community of TiVo hackers and aficionados on the web, I went over there to read up on my problem.
