Excessive DB35 noise

[imaki]

I purchased two seagate DB35 (ST3400833ACE) drives to upgrade my HR10-250. Both drives make an excessive drive chatter / chirp. Anyone know if this is normal? Compared to the original WD drive, they are very loud. Anyone out there with the same drive have any input?

Thanks!

Ian

[jp7665]

Last night, I put a 400Gb Seagate DB35 Series 7200.2 (ST3400833ACE) drive in my Tivo TCD540040 as a second drive to the original 40Gb. I am hearing similar excessive 'chirping'.

In addition, about once an hour or so, when I am watching a newly-recorded program, the TV screen will have extreme pixelation, and sometimes the playback will even pause several times before continuing playback.

Any suggestions as to what may be the problem?

Thanks,
-Joe

[weaknees]

If these drives are from us, please tell us. Neither of these situations is typical of our drives, and both should be righted.

If they aren't from us, would you mind posting where you got them and how they were packaged?

[jp7665]

weaknees,

No, sorry - I didn't purchase my drive from you. :( I am learning the painful lesson that lowest price is not always the best value.

The drive was shipped in it's small factory-sealed box. I purchased the drive from DigitalHotBuy for $165.54. I just received the drive 12/8, so I have not yet notified them that I am having issues.

I am wondering if the problem I am having is hardware, or just the way I configured the drive. I think that drive configuration is a rather unlikely culprit, but I am rather new to hacking my Tivo, so I am not certain.

I had originally followed the Hinsdale instructions. I was following the path to keep my existing drive A and add a new drive B. Everything seemed to go well: I successfully created a backup of my original 40Gb HDD, and I was successfully able to restore that image to my 400Gb HDD, and I was also successfully able to start my Tivo from the image on the 400Gb HDD.

Then things took a turn for the worse. I had lots-o-problems after that point when I tried to increase the total storage space. The utilities I was using appeared to work ok - there were no errors reported, however my Tivo repeatedly displayed the green-screen-of-death, then rebooted, then the green-screen-o-death, then rebooted - a vicious cycle.

I then restored the backup image to the original 40Gb HDD and to the new 400Gb HDD just to confirm that they both worked ok - and I was successfully able to start my Tivo from both individual drives. When I attempted to increase the space, I received the green-screen-o-death again. It would appear that 'Step #10 - UPGRADE CONFIGURATION #1:' of those instrutions was not working for me. I also tried to just make the new 400Gb HDD my only Tivo drive - GSOD once again.

One note: Those instructions were unclear to me on how to increase the swap space, so I did not. I am not certain if that caused any issues or not.

After wasting several hours already, I then decided to do follow the instructions from a link on your site: 'tivo upgrade-instructions com step4 php'. Within 10 minutes my Tivo was up-and-running. Woohoo!!!!!

Then the intermittent (and very frustrating) pixelation and odd noises started. :(

Do you think that if I just wiped the 400Gb HDD (using Seagate utilities) and started from scratch using the directions from 'tivo upgrade-instructions com' that might resolve my Tivo woes, or is this more likely a hardware issue?

Thanks again for your assistance.
-Joe

[imaki]

I too bought mine from digitalhotbuy. The drives were OEM, sealed in the usual oem hard drive package. Perhaps they got a bad batch?