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Ugrade Success Story....well not exactly

OK, here's the situation. I have two Phillips 112 TiVo,s and a couple weeks ago I successfully performed the upgrade, TiVo now shows 52 hours.

Well over the next couple of days I notice a lot of partial recordings showing up. Then, twice while watching a prgram one night, TiVo restarts itself randomly. This continues over the next couple of days as I troubleshoot different things (power cord, new ATA66 cable, voodoo spells, etc.) Now I do have my A drive backed up, but this didn't seem like a drive issue, so as opposed to restoring my drive, on a dangerous hunch I simply swapped the drives in my two TiVo's to perform a little test.

Sure enough, the same TiVo BOX (now only a 14hr) continues to show the same problem, while my other TiVo, with the upgraded drives, has been working beautifully for almost 10 days now.

Anyone have any ideas or run into a similar problem? My guess is that something got fried while I had the box open, I always try to wear a static band, but you never know sometimes. Well, on the bright side, I have a perfectly functioning 52 hour TiVo and a semi-useful 14 hr TiVo to experiment on.

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Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Allen, TX, USA
Posts: 4810

One fairly cheap thing to try would be replacing the IDE cable with an ATA66 cable as outlined elsewhere on this forum. You're not having the exact symptoms as most, but in general, any time there is "random flakiness", cabling is a good place to start.

Good luck!

Brad

[This message has been edited by bsnelson (edited July 22, 2000).]

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Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Seattle, WA USA
Posts: 13

Another incredibly obvious (but normally overlooked) possibility is that you knocked the MB's power connector loose when the top was off.

A more serious problem could be that you put some pressure in the wrong place and either created a separation in a circuit trace, solder joint, etc, or just pushed a marginal factory flaw over the edge. Try pushing on the MB in various placed and see if you can cause a reboot. (wear a rubber glove; the conductance of your skin might be enough to cause a multi-megaherz signal to jump-the-tracks and cause an anomaly itself)

As a concert audio engineer & technician, I've seen more than one million-dollar-event saved by stuffing a matchbook or sugar-packet underneath a cracked circuit board. If you locate the flaw and don't have the confidence (or eyesight) required to repair it, sometimes a piece of rubber tubing or similar material stuffed under the board can work wonders as a temporary fix. (of course, if you leave it that way for more than 30 days, you'll have to change your name to "Bubba", move to a trailer park, and keep at least one of your vehicles up on blocks in the front yard at all times )

------------------
Patrick Callahan
Check out www.themothership.net for links to the latest PTV technologies!

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Registered: Not Yet
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Thanks for the responses! I will definitely check the motherboard to see if I find any loose connections and/or broken solder joints.

Wish me luck (and call me Bubba!)

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