Series 3 freezes then reboots

[heatzeker]

My Series 3 freezes up and then reboots every now and then. Some shows seem to cause the problem more than others, but it doesn't seem to depend on what tuner the show was recorded on (cable vs HD air).

:eek:

Is anyone else having this freeze/reboot problem?

Any ideas or suggestions?

:confused:

[Troy J B]

not yet, hopefully never.

are you running 8.0.1a ? Have you opened a support ticket with TiVo?

[heatzeker]

Yes, the service did update to the 8.0.1a on the 2nd service connection.

:(

I am going to call the 800 number tomorrow to open a ticket, I don't see a way to contact support online. I suppose I must have just gotten a bad unit because I can't find anyone reporting the same problem in any of the forums.

[Donbadabon]

I finally got my Series 3 last night.

Hooked it up, went through the setup, everything fine.

But, now whenever it tries to phone home, either by phone or network, it goes into a reboot cycle where it will reboot twice, and then will finally just sit on the Welcome screen.

Does yours phone home ok?

[heatzeker]

Donbadabon, I have no home phone line to try that method instead.

Funny you should mention the network causing reboots though. I opened a ticket with TiVo support this morning and they had me disconnect my ethernet cable and wait to see if the reboots occur again. They think that a bad ethernet cable may be the problem. This seems strange to me, but I'll do what they say and see what happens.

So right now I'm giving the TiVo 3 a workout to try to get it to crash again before support closes at 8PM PT.

I'll update this thread as my story unfolds...

[Donbadabon]

Interesting.

I am using a wireless connection (in fact, I am using the TiVo-branded one).

The only way I could get it past the Welcome screen was to perform the kickstart process before the 1st reboot.

[heatzeker]

So does yours work perfectly fine over the wireless connection?

My TiVo 3 is less than a foot away from my router, so it makes sense to just use a wired connection. However, if I need to use wireless to keep these reboots from happening, I'm game.

I am still not yet convinced that not using the ethernet cord will solve the reboots, I'll keep this thread updated...

[snathanb]

Mine is connected to wired ethernet only, has been since before I plugged power in. No issues.

[Bodshal]

Mine is connected to wired ethernet only, has been since before I plugged power in. No issues.

Ditto.

It's really quite worrying that something ethernetty (hardware? some malformed packet?) can kill the box. Real DoS issue.

Chris.

[Donbadabon]

So does yours work perfectly fine over the wireless connection?



Well, the connection, before it started rebooting, was perfect. The initial call took about 15 seconds total. Of course, I made the mistake later of forcing a call, and that is when my problems started.

[heatzeker]

The reboot problem persisted even without the ethernet cord plugged in, so I am pretty sure I just have a bad unit here. They are sending me out a new one and I'm going to return this one to them. Shucks.

I am pretty confident that it is not the cord's fault, because I have it very snugly in there, and I tried my identical Tivo2 cord that I know works fine.

[heatzeker]

IT WAS THE POWER CORD AFTER ALL!!!

I was using my old TiVo2 power cord. It must have been loose, because my TiVo has been running for 2 days now with no problems at all by using the brand new cord that came with my TiVo3.

Ugh, what a headache, but now I have a fully functional TiVo3 with a nice big 500GB drive thanks to bumwine.com's upgrade instructions...

http://www.bumwine.com/tivo.html

:) :) :)