Is my HDVR2 dying?

[NatasNJ]

I upgraded my Hughes HDVR2 model SD Tivo about 6 months ago maybe more. Lately (last week or so) I noticed that most shows if not all are having moments of pixelization. It comes and goes but will even kill the sound about once every 5 minutes for a second or two. At first I thought this was just on my FX shows but am now noticing it several shows but not all.

So is my unit dying? Anything I can do to test this? Should I switch drives?
I am pretty sure I switch out the orginial drive and put in 1 new large drive. Would it be my best bet to just do a restore to a new 200GB drive?

Thoughts? Thanks..

[JimSpence]

I assume you did a reboot and it still happens. This is most likely a hard drive starting to fail. You need to have an image for that machine that you can then put on a new drive. Some have used SpinRite to test their hard drives and it sometimes can fix the problem of bad sectors. Good luck.

[NatasNJ]

Will try reboot tonight!

Can't I use the Tivo Tools CD on hinsdale and just do an image copy from that drive (failing one) to a new drive?

[John in Cal]

Probably isn't a drive problem. I've read of several other HDVR2's having this issue, mine included. I found that it occured only on tuner 2 and only on some channels. I replaced mine with a Phillips DSR7000 and it's all better.

[NatasNJ]

Thanks for the heads up.

NEED A NEW TIVO! Can I claim this issue under warranty?
or is th warranty only 90 days anyway?

[Stanley Rohner]

Probably isn't a drive problem. I've read of several other HDVR2's having this issue, mine included. I found that it occured only on tuner 2 and only on some channels. I replaced mine with a Phillips DSR7000 and it's all better.

It probably is the hard drive dying. What the OP described is most likely from a hard drive dying. The OP didn't say anything about it happening on only one tuner and only some channels.

[John in Cal]

It probably is the hard drive dying. What the OP described is most likely from a hard drive dying. The OP didn't say anything about it happening on only one tuner and only some channels.


Thanks so much for the flame. I'm providing first hand experiance on a similar problem, where is your proof that it's a drive problem?

[NatasNJ]

I said it was 100% happening on FX shows. Live or Tivo'd ones. Also noticed it on some other shows but NOT ALL. Which is weird cause you think it would happen independant of channel.

Not sure if it is tuner specific. Will look into that. I still have to try a reboot.

[ping]

Thanks so much for the flame. I'm providing first hand experiance on a similar problem, where is your proof that it's a drive problem?

Do you have any more details on this? I've been having periodic problems that I had assumed were hard drive related, but now I'm not so sure. It seems like it might be limited to locals (that could just be perception based on how much more I record locals). I played with it a bit after reading this thread, and sure enough, I can cause it pretty reliably by putting both tuners on local channels and then swapping them until I find the bad one (and it will always be only one of the two--not sure if it's always the same one).

I've rebooted (once through the menu, once by unplugging for one minute), and it still does it.

Mine is also an upgraded HDVR2 (120GB).

[ping]

OK, I did some more testing (and reading) on this. In my case, it is definitely isolated to tuner 2 and only some channels (some examples: 204, 229, 232, 248, 249, 266; most, if not all locals).

I'm pretty much resigning myself to the fact that this one is getting swapped with the bedroom unit (and the hard drives will probably be swapped once I watch everything that's watchable off this one, since I really need the space), probably in single-tuner mode. I'm just posting this as further proof (if it's needed) that these problems are not always the hard drive.