TiVo Community Forums Archives - Recurring Stopple Problem

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Recurring Stopple Problem
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Posted by: KingdoK

About a year ago I bought a Sony SVR-2000 TiVo and, of course, shortly thereafter started thinking about upgrading it. I upgraded my unit with two 120 GB drives and had no problems. After a month or so of use I started seeing stopples and, eventually, tiling. I became increasingly frustrated until about a week before my unit upgraded itself to 3.0, all errors stopped. I had a perfect TiVo again.

However, about a month later, the stopples and tiling returned. The problem got increasingly worse until we got digital cable last month and I repeated guided setup to add the cable box to the mix. After guided setup was complete, I had no problems again. I assumed this was the fix my unit needed.

That brings us to the last few days. Of course, the stopples and tiling are back. I tried to rerun guided setup, changing nothing but having it go through the process anyway. Well it did not help this time and I'm pretty fed up with my malfunctioning TiVo.

I've taken the drives out and checked them and I have found no errors on the drives. The temperature seems to be stable at about 37C. I'm running out of ideas. I'm afraid that my TiVo is a loss and I'll have to get a new one but I'm concerned that if I upgrade a new unit that this problem will return. I love my TiVo to death but I'd rather not have to deal with this.

Does anyone have any ideas for what I can do to fix my current TiVo?

Posted by: Robert S

I would definitely be thinking hard drives, even though they passed diagnostics. It's actually quite common for diagnostics to pass drives that aren't working in a TiVo - particularly when the problem is vague stuttering issues like yours.

Have you still got the original A drive?

Can you get hold of a suitable drive and make it an A drive from your backups?

Posted by: KingdoK

I do have the original A drive but it is from before the 3.0 upgrade. Is my TiVo going to complain if I put an old software version back in?

If I had a bad drive (or drives) why would I see periods of perfect behavior?

Also, if one (or both) of the drives is bad but passes diagnostics, how do I figure out which to replace?

Thanks for any help anyone can give me.

Posted by: Robert S

It you're worried TiVo will complain, just don't plug the phone in!

TiVo won't mind you upgrading to 3.0 twice.

I wouldn't claim to understand the deep truths of hard drive failure modes, but you are definitely not the first person to see these sorts of symptoms.

You may have to put an A drive image on both drives so you can run them independently. This may be inconvenient if you want to save your recordings.

Anyway, I think running that old A drive is the first step - let's prove it's a hard drive problem before we work on fixing it!

Posted by: KingdoK

I'm think I'm going to try to reinstall my old A drive tomorrow as I have the day off. Hopefully I won't have to wait a month to discover if this is a drive problem. :) Thanks for your help.

Are there certain brands of hard drives that people seem to always/never have problems with? I think the two drives I have in there are identical 120 GB Western Digital drives.