TiVo Community Forums Archives - Tivo Series 2 is dying

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Tivo Series 2 is dying
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Posted by: Tlad

I have been struggling with a strange problem for the past few months.

About 6 months ago, I upgraded my Series 2 with two of the highly recommended Samsung 5400 120G disks. This worked great until about 2 months ago when I found the Tivo frozen. I reset it by unplugging for a few seconds. This worked for about another week. But this time I needed to leave the Tivo unplugged for several minutes to get it to restart. (This long reset time sounds like an over heating problem.) To make a long story short. The freezing problem became more frequent and the unplugged time for resetting became longer to the point that Tivo would not even boot up. Removing the cover helped and kept the box alive for about another week. During all this, the temperature of the box never exceeded 47 degrees (Normal).

This problem sounds like a classic chip failure. As the part failed, it becomes more sensitive to temperature. But which part is failing? Based on researching various threads on this message board, I concluded that one or both disks had failed.

I pulled the disks and tested them, no errors. And they ran for many hours in my PC during the tests. This is not what I expected.

So I decide to replace the disks anyway. This time I use a pair of Samsung 7200 120G disks. I was able to copy the contents of the supposedly bad disks to the new ones. Installed the disks and everything was back to normal. Well at least for about 3 weeks. Now it’s back to a similar failure. This time however, it only freezes during recorded playback (not just live play as before). Again the problem became more frequent till it won’t boot up.

So now I have no idea of what is wrong. If the disk was bad, why is the new disk failing in a similar way? If the Tivo board is bad, why did it work with the new disks?

If anyone has a clue as to what is going on, please help.

TLAD

Posted by: pkraus109

set it up with just one drive. Install a fresh image on it. Put back in tivo go through guided setup. When finished do a clear and delete all, then do guided setup again. See if this helps. Is the fan plugged in inside the tivo? have you tried to run it with the top off just to see?