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.