Tivo Freezes

[skowman]

I have a series 2 which I upgraded with 2 new hardrives about 2 years ago and it worked great. For the past 3 months now it froze approx 1x/week (the TV screen just shows black when I turn it on). I unplug and replug to reboot and then it worked fine until the next time.

Recently (past week or so) it seems to freeze any time it connects to tivo (I believe it freezes while its loading the downloaded TV guide.

I've got about 200 hours worth of recorded material that I would prefer not to lose but I would prefer starting over than not having my tivo.

Please help. My work email is jeremy@furnituremastersinc.com and my home is allister@optonline.net. My cell is 516-322-9133.

Thanks,

Jeremy

[robomeister]

Sounds like your TiVo is on the hairy edge of hard drive failure. A couple of questions.

Did you make a backup of your original drive? or do you still have your original drive?

Did you create a swapfile that is big enough for your setup? (1MB of swap for each 2GB of drive space. Only a problem if the total disk space is larger than 250GB.) Search for tpip in the upgrade forum for more info.

Is your TiVo connected to your home network? Can you transfer your shows to your PC? (You'll need a big disk for this.) If so, you can transfer all of your shows to your PC using TiVoToGo, redo your TiVo's hard drive (I'd recommend only one big hard drive, >300GB.), then transfer them back to the TiVo. Be forewarned, with 200 shows, this could take a long time.

It is a matter of opinion, but having 2 drives in a TiVo not recommended, even though it can be done. It puts more strain on the power supply, generates more heat, and doubles your chance for hard drive failure. And if one drive fails, it takes the other drive with it, since they are "married" to each other. Some TiVos have pretty wimpy power supplies, and if you don't use a UPS, you run the risk of blowing the power supply if you have any kind of power hit (lightning strike, random brown out, power company doing maintenance, etc.).

Hope this helps,
robomeister