SAT-T60 constantly reboots

[botcher]

My trusty old SAT-T60, which has been running fine for the last 3 years or so without taking updates and remaining on v3.1.1, has started acting up.

I turned the tv on to see the unit constantly rebooting. It goes thru the whole process, and gets to the point where it is performing the satellite/guide setup, hits 100%, attempts to switch to the video screen of the last channel viewed (in this case, 360 FOX), and as soon as the blue channel/info banner appears, the unit reboots. It is doing this in a constant loop.

While it is doing the 0-100% satellite portion, I can get into the menus and all looks good. I can see my list of recordings, but if I try to play a recording, it comes up with an error message that the recording is unavailable, or something along that line.

In my system info screens it shows backdoors enabled and updates disabled, and I've survived the previous update attempts, Did something change with the lastest update that would override things?

Any ideas? Do I need to pull the drive and re-image it?

Maybe the portion of the drive that stores recordings and live buffers got whacked, thus the crash once it tries to go live? Would a "clear and delete all" recover it if that were the case?

I'd like to salvage my recordings if possible, but at this point I no longer need hacks; I mainly just want to use it in our guest room as needed.

It's been a few years since I heavily played with the Tivos and linux, but with a few pointers in the right direction, I should be able to salvage it.

Thanks
Botcher

[captain_video]

Try running a diagnostic on the drive to see if it's failing. Chances are you may have some surface defects on the platter that are causing bits of the software to go missing or corrupt, resulting in the constant rweboot loop. There are programs you can use to rejuvenate the drive and recover from this, such as SpinRite. However, the cost of a new drive will probably be less than the software unless you can obtain it elsewhere.

[mikey]

if you haven't already try clearing and deleting the guide data. It's worked quite well here several times.
Mikey

[botcher]

You hit the nail on the head, Mikey!

The other day, on a whim, I decided I had nothing to lose, and just before I was ready to do a "clear and delete everything", I did the guide data only first, and after coming back to it a few hours later, it began working fine once again. And my recordings are intact.

Thanks
Botch