Cannot Boot Kernel

[fdx45]

What does 'cannot boot kernel' mean?

Is it a bad mainboard or a bad hard drive?
I have a SAT T60 w/ 2.5.2.

[njdboy]

its not finding the software on the hard drive. First off I would check your jumper settings and make sure you have the tivo drive on master.

[fdx45]

This happened a while ago to me to a normally operating T60.

It happened the day after a thunderstorm. When the thunder started, I unplugged it, then restarted it after the storm passed. Several hrs later, I got the GSOD, which fixed itself in about 15 min later. The next day, I came out to see the message 'cannot boot kernel'.

I sent the unit in for repair after I talked to the folks at DigitalRecorder.tv who told me that that meant I had a bad main board. I paid for the repair ($199) and got the unit back with their stickers on it and virgin TiVo hard drive. As far as I know, it was the same hard drive. I asked why they had messed with the hard drive, they told me that b/c they replaced the main board, they had to put new software on it so the hard drive would recognize the mainboard.
Is that true for an unhacked TiVo? They said there was no way around this. Luckily I had backed up the hard drive before I had a problem. When I got it back, I reupgraded to 2.5.2 and xplusz'd it. All was fine, except that I lost all my channel icons, and they didn't come back like they had before.
Regarding the icons, I've read all the threads, and I just popped in my backup drive, saw they were all there and everything was working, so I dd'd that hard drive to the one they had messed with and stuck it away as my backup.

Now, I'm starting to wonder if they ripped me off. Had I known that, I would have popped in my backup hdd before I sent it in. I was trying to get it to FedEx before they closed, and perhaps I should have taken a bit more time...?