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SAT-T60 Second Hard Drive Failing; TiVo crashing...
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Posted by: corky6921

I just ordered and received an 80GB upgrade kit from PTVUpgrades and 9th Tee for the TiVo at my parents' house. I installed the second hard drive today and booted up my parents' TiVo. Voila, 108 hours of programming space!

I congratulated myself and sat down to watch a movie... and the TiVo crashed three minutes into it. It tried to reboot itself after the crash and failed, stuck on the Welcome screen. I had to unplug it to get it to turn off. I waited a few minutes and plugged it back in. This time, I just let it sit on Live TV... and it crashed again in a few minutes.

Thinking it was the fan, I unplugged the TiVo, opened it back it up, and re-inserted the fan cable. It clicked into place. I booted the TiVo again and checked... still 108 hours! I let it sit on Live TV. It sat there happily for 10 minutes. I listened. I could hear the fan and feel air coming out of the right bottom part of the TiVo. I started watching a movie. In a few minutes, it crashed again. This time, it had been about 20 minutes from start to finish... longer than the original two times, but still completely unacceptable.

I plugged it back in, turned it on, and listened. I heard the hard drives spin up, and then CLICK. CLICK. It was still on the Welcome screen. The clicks were so loud that my dad heard them from a good 10 feet away. It sounded similar to dropping a marble on tile... those grit-your-teeth kind of clicks. (Ouch.)

What do you think? Is the second hard drive dead? Did we damage the original hard drive? (I've done several hard drive upgrades before and we did nothing unusual to the original hard drive. It's possible that the second one has some bad sectors.) Or is it possible that we still have a cooling problem? Unfortunately, the tiny Windows computer my parents have cannot hold a second hard drive, and thus, I cannot test it by putting it into the computer here.

I'd appreciate any advice you may have.

Thanks for your help,

Erica

Posted by: Robert S

Yes, one of your hard drives is trash. It's probably the new one (transit damage?), but it would be a good idea to confirm this with diagnostics if at all possible. You don't need to run two hard drives in a PC to do this - the diagnostics run from a boot floppy.

I'm sure 9th Tee/PTV Upgrade will help you resolve this problem, but the drive will be guaranteed by its manufacturer too.

The bad news is that your TiVo is now in a very precarious state - your original drive is now 'married' to the new one and will no longer work on its own!

This is not a problem you can resolve without using MFS Tools, which does require you to run several drives in the PC. Unless you can get access to a more capable PC, this is going to be a problem.

You could ask PTV Upgrade to replace the drive with a replacement A drive (which would mean losing all your recordings, but it may well be impossible to recover them anyway). Or, you could send both your drives to PTV Upgrade and ask them to salvage what they can.

In short, you're in big trouble. Talk to the suppliers of the drive (I'm not sure if that would be 9th Tee or PTVU - 9thT are probably financially responsible, but PTVU are the ones with the skills to fix the problem).