TiVo Community Forums Archives

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

Lockups
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: loubird

I purchased a new Series 2 stand-alone Tivo about 2 weeks ago. I think it came with version 2.5-something software. It worked fine for the first 2-3 days. After downloading and activating the version 3.0-01-2-130 software, it began to lock up on a regular basis a short time (about 1 hour) after it successfully completes its daily phone call. By "lock up" I mean it is unresponsive to any user controls--remote or front panel. If set for live TV, the picture freezes, as if on Pause, and there is no audio. The only way I have been able to restart it is to unplug the power cord for a few seconds and then reconnect it. It then works perfectly until after it completes the next daily phone call, shortly after which it can be depended upon to lock up again.

The only upgrade this unit has is a 120 GB drive. It will be very hard to convince me (an engineer) that the larger drive is in any way related to this failure. My unit's reported temperature is 41 degrees C. I would like to know whether this appears to be a universal problem, and if so, whether the folks in charge of Tivo software are working on a fix. While it does not prevent me from using my Tivo (as long as I remember to restart it about an hour after every scheduled daily call), it is very annoying. Please don't dismiss this simply because of the disk upgrade.

Posted by: Dan203

Sounds like the main hard drive died! :( Here's an explanation...

The main TiVo drive is divided into several different partitions. Two of these are used for software. Evey time a new upgrade is downloaded it's installed onto the opposite partition of the last software install. This works great for preventing botched upgrades, but it can also hide hardware problems. Because if that other partition has developed a bad sector you wont know it until new software is downloaded and installed onto that partition.

Now since it is only 2 weeks old, and the new TiVos don't have a warranty sticker, you should be able to take out your 120GB drive and send the unit back for a free exchange.

Dan