tivo worked fine for 3-4 years.... and now...won't boot up

[Dolamite]

this has probably been asked before, but from what i could find searching, there we're alot of things similar to this happening, but which didn't seem to fit my situation exactly so i wanted to post and see if anyone could help me out.

i have a series 1 sony svr-2000, which i upgraded with a maxtor 120g as the B drive... 3 maybe 4 years ago. i think about 1 year ago i added the cachecard. everything worked fine and then one day it decides to not boot up. when power is applyed i see the "your recorder is starting up, please wait a moment..." screen... and never goes anywhere from there. removing the cachecard does nothing, and unhooking both hd's did nothing (not sure if it should but figured it was worth a shot).

i'm wondering if it's not the hd's or the cachecard, but something wrong internally with the unit.

i suppose my next step is to pull the A drive and see if i can access it etc... just wanted to post and see if anyone had ran into this before though, and whether i should bother with this too much.... i've been wanting a series 2 for a long time, but with series 3 hdtv so close i'd like to keep this old bastard running a little longer. any help appreciated.

[dirtypacman]

Could be the hard drive failing--- If you search the threads there is a way to test the drive to see if its failing/failed I dont know exactly how this is done but I would start there.

[Dkerr24]

Getting 3-4 years out of a hard drive in a Tivo is pretty amazing. My Maxtor 160gb drive lasted 18 months in mine.

[Dolamite]

thanks for the info....and i'm actually glad to hear it's probably only the hd and not something worse.

[Dolamite]

well... i couldn't find my old backup... so i purchased instantcake.... ran it on two new 200gb drives and fired it up..... still is not getting past the initial startup screen.....

am i to assume their is some sort of hardware issue other than hds at this point?

any help appreciated....

(can we still move our "lifetime subscription" to new tivos?)

[Dkerr24]

Try restoring to just a single hard drive in case the problem is your power supply. It may be too weak to power 2 drives, but may boot one.

[blindlemon]

FYI, new Series 1 PSUs are cheap as chips and widely available online.

[Dolamite]

i tried hooking both drives up to my pc's power supply, and still nothing... so to be thorough i went back and set it all up with 1 drive as you suggested (using the tivo's psu), but i'm still getting stuck on the same screen... guess i can rule out the psu...

thanks again for the help...

[Dolamite]

guess it's time to get a new one then?

[mattack]

(can we still move our "lifetime subscription" to new tivos?)

You can't move the lifetime subscription (unless you bought it before the cutoff date in 2000 because they allow a one-time transfer because of supposedly confusing instructions).

However, if you get it legitimately repaired through Philips, the subscription would still be valid. I can't find the site anymore though. There was a place that did the official repairs, which was usually a $80 trade in.

In other words, you can't just go buy another unit and transfer lifetime. But I believe it is still possible to go through proper channels to get your old one repaired/replaced and have the subscription still active.

you'd have to determine whether this was worth it to you though.

[Dolamite]

i bought a used one off ebay, and then called up tivo and transfered my lifetime sub. over.... they didn't want to do it for me at first....

[Dolamite]

so... i have my new (used) tivo working... used instantcake & the lba48 discs, and my cachecard is working for telnet, ftp access & for updates. the only thing not working is the "cache" part of the cachecard.

the reason i'm hesitant is that i've never used instantcake before, my other tivo was done using hinsdale's guide... many, many years ago...blesstivo all that.... so i just installed the drivers on the silicon dust forum and voila...

but.. with instantcake... saying that it has all that stuff already on there, and i see the CACHECARD_ON in the base / i'm wondering if maybe my ram has gone bad or something.... or if in fact i do need to install the driver again on top of the ptvupgrade stuff.

just don't really feel like messing anything up, so wanted to check and see if anybody had been in this situation before i went ahead and did anything...

any help is much appreciated.