I wonder if this means the disk is going bad... *sob*
Update: The Tivo is dead. Long live the Tivo.
I tried a bunch of things, and eventually did a "factory reset" to see if that would fix it (basically wiping the disk and starting over.) When reinitializing, it got stuck at 28% every time while "contacting satellite". I actually called tech support and they had me try a few other power-cycley voodoo tricks, but finally the guy said, "you're screwed, man. It's dead."
So I got a new one (series 2.) Maybe I'll recycle the old one as a kiosk for the club...
Apparently the USB ports on the new models aren't really used for anything; you can put an ethernet on it and will (soon) be able to use your Tivo to stream MP3s from a file server, but what good is that, really?
My agent inside the Tivo Collective tells me that getting a shell on a series 2 requires opening the case and mucking around, and isn't worth it anyway because there's not actually interesting you can do with it once you do.
Aw, just join me in the happy land of S2 and do the wifi thing.
You know, the only thing that fixed my TiVo when it got this way was to delete all shows + season passes in memory. After that, it went back to being speedy gonzales.
Pain in the ass tho.
That has to be a lie. Even a brand new tivo out of the box is not speedy gonzales. :)
Heh. :)
i have noticed that it gets jerky and slow when i have a lot of shows on the drives or it's just starting up again after a catastrophic failure from over heating.
i think the series 2 also allow for memory upgrades.
Yes, I have a series 1 that was upgraded from 20 hours to 240. When there are a lot of shows on it (which now is almost always since I just let it record suggestions until the cows come home), remote input become very slow, IE when I press something on the remote, sometimes it takes about 20 seconds before that actions is processed. But curiously, the background menu operations never studder and playback is always perfect.
I've just given up being mad about it and assumed that Series 1 tivos were never meant to have a crapload of programming on it.
well thank gog for downloads.
Have you tried searching or posting for help at TiVo Community? Lots of TiVo knowledge floating around there and often more effective than official tech support. Or, you could just use this as an excuse to upgrade to a nice big hard drive on your Series 1, assuming the problem is the drive itself.
Errr, here's a better link:
TiVo Community
Jamie, when will you just accept god's messages to move to a shack in the woods away from computers?
I put an ethernet card into mine (although it's a regular non-directv unit) and it didn't hurt too much. A couple of hours of work even for somebody as retarded as me.
You might try putting it on the network, so you can nfs mount your drives from a *nix box, and write the files to there. Then you can do back-ups, store more shows longer, use a RAID, so if a drive does go, it's not the end of the world. I know a couple people doing this, and are very happy with the results. I don't know if it would fix the "slow" problem, but you would be able to check the disk status very easily.
If you have a spare HD lying around, now would be a good time to make a backup of your Tivo.
If your drive does fail it's pretty easy to install a replacement hard disk (and a bigger one at that).
You've probably already done this (or it happened through the power company's "goodwill"), but frighteningly enough, unplugging my TiVo for ten minutes and then plugging it back in has fixed a host of ills, ranging from frozen screens to an apparently fried modem. You might not need ten minutes, but the modem fix did require it (likely due to needing to let the chips truly get to ground state).