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Posted by: DarkMagess

So this all started months ago. My hd broke. It was artifacting, it was skipping, I was on the phone with the techs for a long time and we decided that it was just plain busted.

Now, for $20 more than tivo was going to charge for a 40 hour drive, I could get an 80 hour elsewhere. So I did. Only this drive was incapable of updating. It wouldn't get v4 and it wouldn't get programming data correctly. The techs suggested that upgraded drives can sometimes do that because of a bad image. So I returned the drive and it came back with a new image on it, this time of v4. Only now, it can't record at all. It thinks that it's not getting a signal, despite the fact that I can watch liveTV. Is this a drive/image issue? Is something else in the tivo broken?

My only recourse to get an actual working tivo is to get tivo to fix it. And they will, out of warranty, if I send them the unit with a drive. Well, I threw the original broken drive out.. cause who needs a broken drive. So if I want to send the non-working one back for a refund, I need to find a "new" preferably broken drive to waste on sending to tivo. Fun. That'll cost me another $50.

And now they're telling me that my service # is bad. But it's the same service # it's always had. It's the one on the back of the machine! He tells me that changing the drive can invalidate the service #... so now I have to wait for htem to call me back about whether my service # and accompanying lifetime sub are valid.

Could things go worse?

Posted by: Robert S

You need to do a 'Clear and Delete Everything' reset.

Posted by: DarkMagess

Well I suppose at this point it can't hurt. But it was a fresh, presumably, image. What would have gone wrong in such a short amount of time that would keep the tivo from being able to record anything?

Posted by: Robert S

An encryption key ties the image to the mainboard's serial number. Moving to a different mainboard makes that key invalid. Doing a C&DE re-initialises the encryption for the new serial number.

Posted by: DarkMagess

Would you happen to know if there's a way to test the 'not updating properly' issue? That's the one I had w/ the first attempt on this drive. It wouldn't update to v4 and wouldn't get new programming information. Since this was sent back to me w/ v4, it looks like the only thing I can do to check for this problem is to wait to see if programming data stays current, and that'll take a few weeks.