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Why does the TiVo Series3 take forever to boot up?
Added HBO and Showtime to my cable package last night and they told me I had to restart my system for it to come up on my CableCARD and it was the first time I've rebooted it since I bought it a year ago. It took 7+ minutes for it to fully boot and drop me into the TiVo menu. What the heck is it doing?
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I don't know what it's doing, but that has been an issue with TiVos since the beginning. The Series 1 and 2 both took a long time to boot.
I spent some time hacking the DirecTiVo Series 2 to enable home network sharing, caller id display and other goodies. One thing that I know of their operating system is that they basically have two partitions with identical operating systems on it, but one of them is hidden. If, for some reason, it detects that you've tampered with the "live" partition of the operating system (or perhaps it was designed as just a general recovery measure in case one partition failed for some reason or another), it will switch over to the other so it can continue booting. I'm betting a portion of that time is chksuming the files (as well as probably fscking the disk for general consistancy) and making sure that everything is good/not tampered with before proceeding.
As a side note, your TiVo probably has rebooted since you installed it -- When they release software updates, the system will automatically reboot in the middle of the night to enable the new software. IIRC, you can get your uptime from the system about menus.
I spent some time hacking the DirecTiVo Series 2 to enable home network sharing, caller id display and other goodies. One thing that I know of their operating system is that they basically have two partitions with identical operating systems on it, but one of them is hidden. If, for some reason, it detects that you've tampered with the "live" partition of the operating system (or perhaps it was designed as just a general recovery measure in case one partition failed for some reason or another), it will switch over to the other so it can continue booting. I'm betting a portion of that time is chksuming the files (as well as probably fscking the disk for general consistancy) and making sure that everything is good/not tampered with before proceeding.
As a side note, your TiVo probably has rebooted since you installed it -- When they release software updates, the system will automatically reboot in the middle of the night to enable the new software. IIRC, you can get your uptime from the system about menus.
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If I remember correctly, TiVo verifies the entire OS from top to bottom to ensure it hasn't been tampered with by the customer -- one of the many things TiVo goes out of its way to do to protect its subscription revenue model. The effect is incredibly annoying, but fortunately TiVo users don't have to deal with it often.
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