We got home from work today. It was raining. A dark and stormy night.

We turned on the TiVo and it was showing the "I'm powering up, just a second" screen. It hung there. We pulled the power and restarted it; we've seen this sort of behavior before, we thought. It booted, as it's supposed to, but instead of getting to the "acquiring satellites" screen, it instead put up a "unable to acquire information from satellite" screen, but it let us watch stuff already stored on the TiVo itself. Fair enough.

We then tried to watch something. It got a few seconds in and then whammo, it started flashing colors on the screen like an old Atari 2600 and rebooted. "Powering up, please wait." From then on, it got into a cycle. "Powering up, please wait" ... "Just another sec" ... pretty colors and reboot. Subsequent attempts to cold boot get back to the same cycle.

This is an original, Hughes, series 1 DIrecTiVo, completely stock. It could be a lightning strike, but everything else in my rack seems to be working. It could be that the hard disk had an unrecoverable failure, but hopefully the TiVo would be smart enough to detect that and say something useful on-screen. I figure I'll just leave it unplugged and try again in the morning with (hopefully) better weather, but I suspect it won't magically start working again.

Any ideas? *Sigh* I just wanted it to last until the HD-DIrecTiVo came out in April.

There are a bunch of people at Dealdatabase.com that fix DirecTivos if you're intersted in getting it repaired...

Bruno

Was the screen green? I recall that TiVo had the green screen of death when something terribly wrong happens.

If all you're wating for is the HD DirecTivo, I can lend you my backup DSR6000R until then. Probably the only drawback is that you will need to buy an access card (~$40 I think). Or maybe you can use your card? I'm under the impression you can't swap cards between Tivos. I am probably wrong though.

No, you're right. The access card is programmed to the serial number of the unit it is plugged into. There are hacking programs out there, but you would have to buy a programmer/reader. You can call DirecTV to say that you have a new unit because the other one died and your access card isn't working on the new one and they should be able to reprogram it for you at no cost.

Yeah, my lightning-struck TiVo was green screen.

No green screen, just the aforementioned reboot / just a sec / funny colors / reboot cycle. Not entirely unlike the Mars Spirit rover.

I'm running off on yet another business trip (*sigh*), but if it's still fubar next week, I may well take you up on your backup offer. That would almost certainly get me through until the snazzy new HD TiVo is out. For the smartcard issue, I'll just call up DirecTV like a naive customer and say that my box failed and I've got a new one and could they help me make it work.

Well, I just ordered my HD DirecTiVo from Value Electronics. I put down a $100 deposit now and I'll pay $800 + shipping when it finally comes out. I also called DirecTV and they're sending me a new smartcard, gratis. Rob's TiVo should also be on its way soon. Hopefully, I'll be back in business again shortly.

/me struggles with indecision as to what to do about HDTiVo

Come on, you know you want one. All the cool people are getting them.

It's one of the reasons I don't watch TV on the projector, actually I can't stand the thought of being a slave to my TV now that I'm so spoiled downstairs w/ TiVo. But man, $900 is pretty rough. But then, I didn't get into home theater and HD to save money

Did they give you an expected shipping date? Last I heard was sometime in March.

-Mike

No expected shipping date. Merely, "you'll be one of the first people to have one as soon as they're available."