TiVoless!
Mood: worried
Music: Puddle of Mudd, "Heel over Head"
Posted on 2005-01-19 13:14:00
Words: 545

For those of you that haven't experienced the wonder that is TiVo, allow me to explain. TiVo is a Digital Video Recorder, which means that it records all the shows David and I watch for me when they come on, and we can watch them at our leisure. I've had my TiVo for around 2.5 years now, and I can't imagine going back. We just sit down later in the week whenever we feel like it to watch our shows that have come on earlier. It also records all sorts of random stuff that we only sometimes watch in case we feel like it. It is very magical! Hopefully the company will live long and prosper.

So, anyway, over the last 6 months or so, we've seen some random skips and stutters in playback that have been getting a little worse as time goes on. Nothing too serious, although sometimes it would stutter for a few seconds, but that's a pretty good indication that one of the hard drives is dying. (it came with a 60 GB hard drive, and I added a 120 GB drive soon after I got it) Since David was gone this weekend, I decided to go ahead and replace one of the hard drives. I assumed the problem was the 60 GB hard drive, since that was the older one, so I went to Fry's, picked up a 60 GB hard drive, and did the replacing on Sunday. It took a while (since I wanted to keep all of our recordings, I had to copy 60 GB's from one drive to another, which took around 4 hours), but no biggie. Watched a Futurama episode Sunday night, and things seemed to be fine.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. On Monday, David watched a program or two, and said the skipping and stuttering was worse than ever. When I got home, we watched an old Newsradio episode (the one with the suggestion box...good stuff!) and it was still skipping and stuttering. When we tried to watch the Futurama episode I had watched Sunday night, it played for about 9 minutes, got stuck, and eventually rebooted, which is pretty unheard of for a TiVo (they're very stable). After doing this a few times, we got the dreaded Green Screen of Death, which I looked up and found out that the filesystem was messed up, and it was trying to fix it. Which it eventually did, but there were still all sorts of resetting problems and such.

So we figured the 120 GB drive must be the problem, bought another 120 GB drive and set it up to copy over overnight. Got up this morning, and the copy had failed. When I checked the logs, there were all sorts of read errors trying to read the 120 GB drive.

Anyway, we're pretty sure that's the problem, and we're still trying to copy the data over (skipping sectors that can't be read). But the upshot is that I can't get to my computer (since the TiVo drives are in it), which means I can't listen to music or anything (although I did listen to some in the car on the way to lunch). And there's no TiVo. And I want it to get better!

This backup was done by LJBackup.