Saturday, February 9, 2013

GoogleTV Failed to Boot Today (NSZ-GT1)

This morning my kids went downstairs as part of their usual 6:00am weekend routine.  (As a sidenote -- why aren't there Saturday morning cartoons on the major networks anymore?  When did this happen?)  My son came back up and told me that the TV wasn't working so I went down to investigate.

My GoogleTV wasn't booting.  Here are the symptoms:
  • The device had a DVD left in it.  I could hear it spinning up when the power button was pressed.  
  • The green power light would turn on, as well as the yellow eject light.  The SONY Logo would appear briefly but then disappear.  My TV would act as though there was no signal.  
  • The device would sit there as though it was still booting (DVD still spinning at high speed), but eventually the yellow eject button started flashing.
Thinking that the DVD was interfering with the boot process, the first thing I wanted to do was get the disc out of there.  But the device wouldn't let me eject it.  In this case I decided to boot into the service menu to see what options I had.
  • Unplug the power from the GoogleTV
  • Press and hold the power button, and keep it held down
  • Plug in the power while still holding the power button down
  • Continue holding the power button down until the service menu appears
Once the service menu appears, you have an option in the menu(s) to eject the DVD.  So, I tried it.  Annnnd I Got my disc out.  Now I tried to restart again.

No dice.  Back to the recovery menu.

At this point I tried the following:
  • Wipe/factory reset + reboot (didn't work)
  • Recovery (which is a reflash of the software) + factory reset + reboot (didn't work)
Now I'm getting a little concerned.  The first thing I do when I'm concerned about anything like this is turn to Google.  I came across this thread where user flavorhammer describes this process to reset the video output:
Reset the Eagle:
Turn off the power for 5 sec
Turn on the power and wait 30 second (system is rebooting)
Press and hold the Connect and eject buttons
- Connect first then eject: within 1 second of each other
- Hold both buttons until the green power light blinks
- Release both buttons
SiTV BD player will power down and reboot on its own.
SiTV BD player resolution is now set to auto; picture will be visible after splash screens.
So, I did this.  Actually I just approached the device in whatever state it was in (it may have even been off) and tried the connect + eject hold (connect first followed very shortly by eject) and waited to see what would happen.  In a few short moments the device was powering up (I was still holding the button combination down) and it started up!

Because of the several resets and reboots I had to start over with the screen calibration and carrier selection but this was not a big deal.

My GTV is back in business.

[Update Dec 2013] This "no signal" issue has happened a couple of times since.  I am not sure what triggers it or exactly what steps recover from it.  Last night I had this happen, I did a factory reset and update from recovery mode about three times and it would not boot, just showing "no signal".  In frustration, I unplugged the device and unplugged the HDMI cable and left it overnight.  I went back today to try again and it booted up fine after it was plugged in.  (??)