Tivo Picture skipping .....

[Raven2490]

Every so often maybe every 45 mins to an hr my Tivo keeps skipping or stalls then the picture becomes blurry and sometimes the screen goes black for about 15 secs then it comesback and I miss the time of the show while it was stalling.

has any 1 else had this problem or even heard of it?

I've restarted .... even changed the source and it continues to do it in my bed room as well with a diff sat provider.


any help will be greatly appreciated.

[granoff]

How old is your unit (and what model is it)? Could be that the disk is going bad, given your description.

-Mark

[Raven2490]

tivo brand 240 maybe 4 yrs old.

[granoff]

How handy are you with handling PC components? :D That is to say, would you be comfortable opening your TiVo, removing the disk, copying it(*) to a new disk, and re-installing the new disk back into the TiVo?

(*) I recently did this for both my TiVos and had great success with MFS Live (http://www.mfslive.org). Its a bootable ISO (you burn a CD with this ISO and boot a PC with it) that has all the tools on it to copy one disk to another in essentially a one-step backup and restore operation. But again, you need to be comfortable messing with hardware, have a PC you can use for the task, etc.

In any case, this is what its sounding like you need to do. Maybe you can find someone near you (or know someone) who would be comfortbale doing this, if you are not.

Hope this helps,.
-Mark

[LesAuber]

I had a similar issue with my old Sony S1 box about a year ago with stutters and so on. A new larger drive from ptvupgrade fixed it right up. The cost wasn't much more then a blank drive of similar size at the time anyway. No disassembly of both your PC and Tivo required. Just plug it in in place of your existing drive and repeat guided set up.

If you do this don't go for an add on drive. It sounds like your master HD is already ailing. Of course there's always the chance something might be going bad.

[granoff]

Indeed, you can simply buy a ready-made replacement drive from a place like PTVupgrade or Weaknees. In this scenario, you simply replace the drive in your TiVo yourself (they provide all the instructions for you to do it). However, know that this method does NOT preserve anything you have on your current drive. So you have to willing to basically abandon whatever is on your old drive.

If you are capable and have the inclination to do so, and you want to preserve what you already have on your existing drive (recordings, settings, season passes, etc), then something like MFS Live is the way to go.

I agree that you do not want to go to a multi-drive setup. There are issues with power at startup (the TiVo power supply is not sized to bring 2 drives up simultaneously; Weaknees sells a solution to this), and once you "marry" 2 drives together, if one fails its non-trivial to "divorce" the drives. More importantly, for how ever much space you can get with 2 drives, you can get "a lot" of space with just one drive these days. For example, when I fixed my 80hr unit, I replaced the drive with a 320GB drive. Plenty of space for me, for about $100 at the time.

-Mark

[Raven2490]

Hey every 1 thanx for the replies ... I called tech support and they agreed it was the hard drive that was dying... they offered to exchange the whole unit for just $49. Should be here by tuesday. Luckly this is my 3rd Tivo which I use in the kids room and I can go w/o it till tuesday. If it woulda been my main living room tivo I woulda done what u guys suggested.

thanks alot every 1 :)