TiVo Community Forums Archives - Problems upgrading a new Series 2 TiVo

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Problems upgrading a new Series 2 TiVo
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Posted by: eldorin

I just purchased a TiVo 2 40 hour unit TCD240040.

I backed up the 40 Gig drive to an image and restored to a 100 Gig Drive. The new drive is a Western Digital WD1000.

It boots up fine and all options work, but after about 3-4 minutes, sound starts getting choppy and gets progressivly worse to include system sounds, and once sound dissappears, then the menu's seem to stutter and no longer move smoothly.

I replaced with the original drive and it works fine. The WD1000 is good, I ran every scan on it I could and it tests fine. The only thing I can think of is it is a ATA/100 whereas the original Maxtor 40Gig is ATA/133..

Anyone experienced this?

Posted by: JimKoke

Read this thread, pay attention to the swap issues (-s 127 option).

From what I (a novice) have read and been through, I would recopy/restore your original image to the new drive, expanding the swap area. The Hinsdale instructions (found here) will tell you how to do it, as well.

Posted by: eldorin

I've upgraded TiVo's before, so I'm familiar with his howto.. I currently have a Sony series 1.

Yes, I did upgrade with swap to 127Megs.. It did say that it shouldn't be necessary except in the case of the tivo needing to recover from a crash or when you exceed 140 Gig of space.. This is only a 100 Gig drive.

Posted by: eldorin

Now it's starting the same thing with the original drive back in the unit. The sound was nothing but light static with a pop of actuall audio ever few seconds or so. Am rebooting the unit now to see if that fixes it. If it's the TiVo itself, then it's the 2nd bad on I got from Best Buy. The first one I brought home just constantly rebooted out of the box. This one is the replacement. I wonder if they had a bad lot of them :confused:

Posted by: Robert S

The need for extra swap does not relate to stuttering. If you do the upgrade wrong, you can get no swap at all. You'll get perfect video playback even so.

Overheating causes stuttering, although it does need to get pretty hot for that to happen.

Posted by: eldorin

Welp, called TiVo support. The stuttering was happening even for the menu sounds and beginning animation. So they had me return it for another. So this is TiVo #3 now. I think I'll let this one just sit and burn in for a good week and pray it doesn't die on me.. I made sure that this one was from a different lot then the last 2.

Posted by: BlueXanaX

quote:
Originally posted by eldorin
I just purchased a TiVo 2 40 hour unit TCD240040.

I backed up the 40 Gig drive to an image and restored to a 100 Gig Drive. The new drive is a Western Digital WD1000.

It boots up fine and all options work, but after about 3-4 minutes, sound starts getting choppy and gets progressivly worse to include system sounds, and once sound dissappears, then the menu's seem to stutter and no longer move smoothly.

I replaced with the original drive and it works fine. The WD1000 is good, I ran every scan on it I could and it tests fine. The only thing I can think of is it is a ATA/100 whereas the original Maxtor 40Gig is ATA/133..

Anyone experienced this?

I have had a similiar problem, but would not say that it is necessarily the cause of your problems. There could be a number of things doing that. As far as a drive being ata 133, or ata 100, I use both. I cannot tell a difference in the series 2 direct tivo's I have. They each came with a 40 gig maxtor ata 133, 7200 rpm drive.

I had purchased a 180 gig W.D. drive, it also was ata 100. I got the restore to work fine, no errors, and the tivo worked for a while, then started exihibiting the same type behavior you are describing. It steadily worsened, and only a complete restore would fix it, which didn't report errors. It got to where the tivo would not boot back up, it would hang on boot, not even get to gsod, if I did a manual reboot.

I ran diagnostics on the drive in a pc many times, with no errors. I thought the drive was just incompatiable, or there was a jumper setting I was not getting right. As the pc wanted the jumper set on master, and the tivo wanted the jumper completely off, to work as master, or hda. I went to check the drive again, about a week ago, tivo was hung on boot, but I didn't reboot it, and had not had any power failures, nor had received any updates, nothing which would have caused the tivo to reboot on it's own. The drive failed in the pc, at boot. The drive turned out to be bad, and all the time, I assume it was on it's way towards complete failure, as the tivo would sense it, but not a pc. It is still in warranty, and Is back on it's way to W.D. I am waiting on a new drive, ready to get rid of the 60 gig drive I have been using in one direct tivo.

Tivo's seem to me to be much more sensitive to any kind of hard drive problems.

~(:

Posted by: JimKoke

Nobody has mentioned whether these drives have passed the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic. My bad WD 160 tested fine on everything except the SMART, which is supposed to indicate a failing disk (one that has had sufficient errors to trigger the failure warning). Just a thought.

Posted by: Webchump

So how did you get it replaced since you basically voided the warranty when you opened the case? I've always wondered how they would know if someone has opened the case or not.

Posted by: eldorin

Series 2 doesn't have a sticker preventing you from opening the case.

Posted by: kbs

quote:
Originally posted by JimKoke
Nobody has mentioned whether these drives have passed the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic. My bad WD 160 tested fine on everything except the SMART, which is supposed to indicate a failing disk (one that has had sufficient errors to trigger the failure warning). Just a thought.

How do you test the SMART, JimKoke? I'm testing my WD drive using the dos-bootdisk diag program I downloaded from the WD website. I see only Quick and Extended tests.
I'm interested in knowing what the S.M.A.R.T has been up to.

-kbs

Posted by: JimKoke

quote:
Originally posted by kbs
How do you test the SMART, JimKoke? I'm testing my WD drive using the dos-bootdisk diag program I downloaded from the WD website. I see only Quick and Extended tests.
I'm interested in knowing what the S.M.A.R.T has been up to.

-kbs

There are two ways that I know of, and definitely more.
1) Enable SMART in your BIOS and the BIOS will (should) test the drives each time you cold boot.

2) I ran PowerMax from WD; testing SMART was one of the options.