Last updated on July 1, 2026
Preparing the service update. This may take up to an hour, possibly longer.After getting home and putting a frozen pizza from Costco in the oven, I turned on my new TiVo HD to find a plain, black screen. The format button on the front wouldn’t light anything up, so it seemed to be solidly hung. I powered it off and back on only to get that screen above, which reads “Preparing the service update. This may take up to an hour, possibly longer.”
Here I was ready to take pictures of my old TiVo and offer it up in a post here, but now I might need it. Guh.
Also, my pizza still isn’t done, and it doesn’t look as good as the picture on the box. Hopefully it tastes fine.
UPDATE: When checking on the pizza I heard sound coming from the basement. The TiVo is probably working. Hopefully it wasn’t stuck / hung all weekend, not recording things. At least it’s working for now.
Hopefully the pizza will work out too.
“Up to an hour, possibly longer”
Or, in other words “this is going to take a long time, we have no idea how long though”
Could be worse, it could have a totally meaningless progress meter that slides back and forth, a pointless “spinner” or a good old “Please Wait…”
:)
Thankfully, in reality it only took about five minutes…
Yeah, that happened to me when I first powered ours up, too. I just continued wiring everything else up while I waited for it to update. Also, populating the guide data took for-freakin’-ever.
What’s odd is that mine was working, and then it got that update. Ah well, at least it’s sorted out… I also think the recording is better on the new one. Normal SDTV stuff looks like it does off the antenna, without artifacting.