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Freezing tivo
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Posted by: martin181

I purchased a tivo on Ebay. its the 30 hour two drive philips system. Its seal was not broken and it's in standard configuration, 3.001 software load.

The unit seems to work fine, it updates on the phone, indexs, records etc.., but it seems to freez at random times, twice, to three times a day. The unit completly locks and needs to be unpluged and restarted.

Any suggestions? I think its might be a hard drive problem, but which one? I hate to replace both when I don't have to.

Posted by: Robert S

Firstly, this doesn't exactly scream 'hard drive problem'. Typically failing hard drives resulting in stuttering video and/or the TiVo failing to boot. I suppose a bad sector in your swap partition might cause these symptoms, but it's more likely a fault on the motherboard (bad RAM chip, perhaps).

Assuming you try to change the hard drive anyway, two drive systems are a lot more complicated than singles. Read Hinsdale and you'll get some idea of the issues.

It might be better to buy a 80-120Gb H/D, download a Philips drive image and turn your system into a single-drive system. At the very least, if it doesn't work after that you'll have dramatically reduced the number of possible problems.

Posted by: martin181

Thanks for your input.

I'll pull the hard drives, and scan em for faults. I hope its not a mother board problem. I have seen video skips. When the skips start, its not long before the freez up. I think the single drive system is simpler. I have a spare 14 gig around, I may just run it as a single for a while to see if the board is bad, and before I spend money on hard drives.

Posted by: martin181

I pretty much fugured out the problem, bad hard drive. When I attempted to back up the primary drive, my boot up utilites warned me that the drive was in immediate danger of failure and should be backed up. So I backed up the tivo system with mfstools. I will probably convert to a single drive system, just have to have to find the best deal on a 80 gig.

Posted by: BareMetal

go to dells small buisness section and then go to "software and peripherals" tab. Search for item A0009135. It's an 80 gig IBM drive for 86 dollars. I believe that's a pretty good price. you can also apply code "2E61C54CE9FE" for an additional 10% off. There should also be free shipping as well.