Tivo Repair and Troubleshooting: A Severe Error Has Occurred (GSOD) / The TiVo Box has Detected a Serious Problem

Your TiVo: Symptoms you may be experiencing

When you plug in your TiVo, you see a screen that says, "Welcome, Powering Up" (or, on older TiVos, "Your Recorder is Starting Up. Please Wait.") and that is followed by a green screen that says "A SEVERE ERROR HAS OCCURRED" or a screen that says "The TiVo Box has detected a serious problem and is now attempting to fix it" and instructs you to wait for some period of time and to call a phone number for assistance. This error screen is often called the "GSOD" or "Green Screen of Death" after the infamous "Blue Screen of Death" that a PC produces when it crashes.

Fix my TiVo! - Solutions

When a TiVo that is stuck on the green screen ("A Severe Error Has Occurred") or black ("The TiVo Box has detected a serious problem") screen, it nearly always means that the hard drive has failed. If the unit gets to this screen and then cycles back to the Powering Up screen and back to the same error screen, the same is true: Bad drive. In some cases, the TiVo will get to the green screen for a few hours and then start working again. If that happens to you, consider yourself lucky--but you should probably expect it to happen again. The options for solving this problem are straightforward:

1) Replace your TiVo Hard Drive

We recommend that you purchase a preprogrammed, ready-to-install hard drive for your specific TiVo model. To do this, you will first need to find your TiVo model on the back of your TiVo, or see this page, which will tell you what model TiVo you have based on the first three digits of your TiVo's 15-digit TiVo Service Number.

Once you have your TiVo model, you can visit weaKnees, which has preprogrammed hard drives for every TiVo model.

We recommend weaKnees for several reasons: (1) Their customer support is exemplary (offering toll-free phone support, live chat and email support); (2) they will allow returns within 30 days (subject to a restocking fee), in case a drive doesn't solve your problem; and (3) they offer free shipping.

2) We recommend option #1, because replacing a drive is really quite straightforward if you have the right instructions (and the places we mention above have excellent instructions). If you don't want to replace the drive yourself, send your TiVo in for repair. You might consider the TiVo repair service that weaKnees offers.

More Information about this problem

If you want to test your hard drive to see whether it is bad, you will want to download the testing software for your TiVo hard drive's manufacturer. For hard drive testing instructions, see this page.

There are other resources online that have instructions on how to program a new TiVo hard drive, including the TiVo Upgrade Instructions site and the Hinsdale TiVo Upgrade How-To website. Unfortunately, if your TiVo's hard drive is bad, then you will be unable to use these resources because you likely won't be able to extract the TiVo software from your old hard drive.

Why/when/how the "green screen" can appear. In a nutshell, two portions of a TiVo hard drive are set aside for the TiVo operating system: the "active" partition and the "inactive" partition. When your TiVo powers on, the software in the active partition (really partitions, but we'll keep it simple) is used. The inactive partition contains, in effect, a backup of the TiVo operating system. If the software on the active partition develops an error, the TiVo will attempt to swap the inactive and active partitions and restart the TiVo using what had been the inactive partition. While the TiVo makes this "switch," you see the GSOD. If a hard drive is too damaged to switch partitions, then the green screen will never resolve and your TiVo will cycle between the Powering up screen and the GSOD, or will sit on the GSOD forever.

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