Moving a HDVR2 drive with recordings to other HDVR2?

[bingle]

My primary HDVR2 unit seems to have a bad power supply. I thought it might be the drive going, but was able to successfully copy the drive to a new drive and I'm having the same problems with the new drive -- either stuck at "Powering Up" or completely blank video with the front led flashing yellow and green. I've occassionaly gotten it to boot up completely and it has then been able to run for anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple of hours before either spontaneously rebooting or simply freezing.

To me, this indicates a possible power supply problem more than a hard drive problem, especially since now I can't even get to the "Powering Up" screen. Does this sound like the correct diagnosis?

Since the drive in the dead unit has 80+ hours of stuff I want to see still on the disk, I was curious as to the feasibility of swapping that drive into a different used HDVR2. Would I then be able to watch what I have recorded? Or would I be better off trying to swap the power supplies between the two units? If I do swap the power supplies, how long should they be unplugged before they are safe to work on? Any directions floating around out there on how to do the swap or is it pretty straight-forward?

Thanks!

-- Rich

[ping]

Power supply swap is the only thing that will work. The recordings are tied to the physical machine. If there is any way to change that (and I don't believe there is), it's not talked about on this forum.

If you do swap the drives, it will power up and work fine, but Now Playing will report something like "hardware error" and direct you to do a "clear and delete everything".

As to the safety of touching the power supply, I have no idea. I suspect it would involve grounding part of it, but wait for someone who actually knows. :)

Edit: a few more items:
Here apparently is how to discharge a capacitor. Seems reasonable enough.
http://www.ehow.com/how_16749_discharge-capacitor.html

Also, I recall people having trouble with the power cable (specifically to the hard drive), so you may try swapping that first from the known-good box.

[bingle]

Well, hopefully it is just the power supply as I've purchased a (hopefully working) power supply off of ebay. Now I've just got to wait for the darn thing to get here...

I actually managed to get it to give me the "Powering up" message a couple of times today (90% of the time I get a blank screen and the flashing green/yellow led). Once it even made it all the way to partway through "acquiring data" screen before it spontaneously rebooted. Of course then it got stuck on "Powering up" and now I'm back to just the blank screen. :(

Does this sound like a power supply problem to everyone? I'm really hoping that replacing the power supply does the trick...

[dlmcmurr]

Hmmm...

Just speculating here, did you just copy the existing drive to a new drive?

If so, wouldn't any corrupted files from a failing hard drive have been copied also? Or from a system crashing with a bad power supply?

Someone tell me if I'm way off base, since up until I ran the Zipper a month ago, I had never booted up linux. I just know that would have been the case with Windows.

Just my $.02, or maybe it's not even worth that much.

Dave

[bingle]

95% of the time I don't even get the "Powering up" screen if the HD isn't installed, so I'm pretty sure it isn't the HD. I'm just hoping it is the power supply and is fixable while still retaining my recordings. If it isn't the power supply the only thing left is the motherboard :(

[rminsk]

It could still be the hard drive. As dlmcmurr said above you could have copied over a bad file when duplicating the drive. If the power supply swap does not work you could buy an Instant Cake image from ptvupgrade.com and try restoring the boot partition. You may even want to try a TiVo kickstart (http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TivoDiagnostics) using code 52.

[tbeckner]

My primary HDVR2 unit seems to have a bad power supply. I thought it might be the drive going, but was able to successfully copy the drive to a new drive and I'm having the same problems with the new drive -- either stuck at "Powering Up" or completely blank video with the front led flashing yellow and green. I've occassionaly gotten it to boot up completely and it has then been able to run for anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple of hours before either spontaneously rebooting or simply freezing.

To me, this indicates a possible power supply problem more than a hard drive problem, especially since now I can't even get to the "Powering Up" screen. Does this sound like the correct diagnosis?

Since the drive in the dead unit has 80+ hours of stuff I want to see still on the disk, I was curious as to the feasibility of swapping that drive into a different used HDVR2. Would I then be able to watch what I have recorded? Or would I be better off trying to swap the power supplies between the two units? If I do swap the power supplies, how long should they be unplugged before they are safe to work on? Any directions floating around out there on how to do the swap or is it pretty straight-forward?

Thanks!

-- RichThe GRAY/GREY powering up screen is the boot of the eprom and has nothing to do with the hard drive. If you have a known good hard drive, I would INSTANTCAKE it and see if the suspect unit or units will boot. Then you can go forward from there. BTW, you can buy power supplies from weaknees.com.

[beanpoppa]

The initial 'Welcome. Powering Up...' screen is generated by the boot PROM, which is a chip on the motherboard. This is the code that tells the Tivo how to start, and how to load the rest of the software from the hard drive. So yes, you would get this displayed even without the hard drive plugged in.

The symptom you are describing could be the result of many things, but the two most likely problems would be a dead hard drive, or a bad power supply, which is not supplying power to the hard drive.

Is the hard drive spinng? Try unplugging the power connector from the hard drive, and see if there is a difference in the sounds. If you hear it spinning, then the power supply is probably fine. Your best bet would be to buy a replacement hard drive from someplace like Weaknees. They sell them pre-loaded with the software. If you are the least bit computer savvy, you could order the InstantCake CD from PTVUpgrade, find a good deal on a hard drive from a retailer, and load the software yourself. That could be a lot cheaper ($20+ whatever HD cost you get).


My primary HDVR2 unit seems to have a bad power supply. I thought it might be the drive going, but was able to successfully copy the drive to a new drive and I'm having the same problems with the new drive -- either stuck at "Powering Up" or completely blank video with the front led flashing yellow and green. I've occassionaly gotten it to boot up completely and it has then been able to run for anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple of hours before either spontaneously rebooting or simply freezing.

To me, this indicates a possible power supply problem more than a hard drive problem, especially since now I can't even get to the "Powering Up" screen. Does this sound like the correct diagnosis?

Since the drive in the dead unit has 80+ hours of stuff I want to see still on the disk, I was curious as to the feasibility of swapping that drive into a different used HDVR2. Would I then be able to watch what I have recorded? Or would I be better off trying to swap the power supplies between the two units? If I do swap the power supplies, how long should they be unplugged before they are safe to work on? Any directions floating around out there on how to do the swap or is it pretty straight-forward?

Thanks!

-- Rich

[bingle]

Well, after...
replacing the power supply (and cables) with a known good working one...
replacing the front panel (and ribbon cable) with a known good working one...
replacing the IDE cable with a known good working one...
replacing the hard drive with a known good working one...
replacing the button battery with a known good working one...

It still doesn't work :(

(and no, I didn't replace everything all at once I replaced individual parts one at a time and tried to boot it each time - blank screen and flashing led every time - never gets to "powering up" anymore) :(

In fact, putting all the parts that I took out of my old (non-working) HDVR2 and putting them into the one I stole the above parts from yielded a working system (although it gave me error #51 (which is the prelude to clear and delete everything)).

So I think the only thing left is the motherboard.

Anyone capable of diagnosing/repairing the motherboard? Or am I just going to have to face the cold reality that I've lost an entire last season of 3 shows?

[deaninsana]

i tried to move a harddrive from one tivo (hacked) to a different tivo and it would begin to start up but then restarts. I put the harddrive back in the orignal receiver and it works fine.

What would cause this?

Thanks

[wscannell]

If it is the same model Tivo, it will sort of work, but you cannot move a drive to a different model TiVo.

[deaninsana]

they were the same model ... both hughes

[puffdaddy]

Anyone capable of diagnosing/repairing the motherboard? Or am I just going to have to face the cold reality that I've lost an entire last season of 3 shows?
I've debugged a failed Mainbaord before (short circuit), and someone's advice to me was to save my time and not bother--which proved to be sage advice (though I ended up finding the short, removing components from a bad tuner, and the unit now works--it took more time than getting a box of Craig's list/eBay).

I'm assuming that you were running a stock unit, which means that your recordings are still enciphered and thus are tied to the crypto-chip soldered to the mainboard. Depending upon how in love with your recordings you are, you could have someone (someone capable of doing SMD work) transfer the Atmel crypto-chip from your dead mobo onto a replacement non-RID mobo (HDVR2/DVR39/DSR7k). Though honestly, it would be cheaper to buy DVDs for the shows.

If you want to prevent this from happening again in the future, head over to the underground. They've even got a script kiddie install to do all the work for you. Then you can transfer drives between units without losing any recordings or settings.

they were the same model ... both hughes
There are lots of things that can cause this. Note that Hughes makes different models (some S1's, some S2's and between the S2's there are differences). Since you unit (or more precisely, that drive) is not stock, hook up a serial cable and you can see what's going wrong.