Upgraded TiVo Rebooting Daily

[mazman]

About a month ago I upgraded my TiVo HD to a 1TB WD10EVCS drive. I Supersized it and got 144 HD hours. All was well for about 3 weeks, but now the TiVo reboots at least once daily. I pulled the drive and ran the WD diagnostics (3 1/2 hours worth) and the drive passed. Put the drive back in the TiVo and within 3 hours another reboot.

The Tivo is about a year old and never had any reboot issues until now.

Any suggestions on what to do next????

[lessd]

About a month ago I upgraded my TiVo HD to a 1TB WD10EVCS drive. I Supersized it and got 144 HD hours. All was well for about 3 weeks, but now the TiVo reboots at least once daily. I pulled the drive and ran the WD diagnostics (3 1/2 hours worth) and the drive passed. Put the drive back in the TiVo and within 3 hours another reboot.

The Tivo is about a year old and never had any reboot issues until now.

Any suggestions on what to do next????

WD drives can have problems with TiVo Series 3 and TiVo-HD units, sometimes just a different date code on the drive and it now will not work when it did before. Its a problem between the Drive and TiVo not the drive itself. Try the original drive and see if the problem goes away (or not).

[richsadams]

If your new drive worked fine for three weeks (plus there have been no software updates) and then began having problems, I'd suspect the drive even though it passed the diagnostics. There are several posts on the TMC Forum indicating that questionable WD drives passed diagnostic tests, yet were still problematic. Replacement drives cured the issues.

There are also various reports of signal/cable cards causing reboots. As lessd suggests, pop the old drive in to see if your TiVo runs normally. If there are still problems, try disconnecting your coax for a while, say overnight and note if TiVo reboots. If so, then there may be a cable card issue.

If it runs fine with the OEM drive (with the coax connected), then I would replace your 1TB drive under warranty (http://websupport.wdc.com/warranty/rmainfo.asp?custtype=end&lang=en). WD would like you to confirm issues by running Lifeguard Diagnostics, but IIRC others that had drives pass the test, yet still didn't work, were able to get an RMA from WD. More recently they seem much more cooperative when it comes to customer service. Or if you bought it from a retail store, return it directly to them.

Best of luck and let us know how things turn out.

[mazman]

Is there a reliable way to determine if a Tivo has rebooted while I'm not watching it since the old trick of the 30 second skip resetting no longer works.

[HomeUser]

- When not using the TiVo put it in standby ("TiVo Central", "Slow", "Page down", "Select") If the TiVo reboots it will play the intro when you bring it out of standby with the TiVo button.

- The pointers in "Now Playing" will be reset to the top.

- If you have a computer running 24x7 there are several free network monitors I use Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/).

[lessd]

Is there a reliable way to determine if a Tivo has rebooted while I'm not watching it since the old trick of the 30 second skip resetting no longer works.

Easy; set the clock SPS9S and the clock at the bottom will show. It will not be there after any re-boot.

[mazman]

Update: Here's an odd one - I put the stock 160GB drive back in and the TiVo has rebooted at least twice in the past week.

The unit is less than a year old and has lifetime service on it. Will Tivo replace the unit with a refurb and transfer the lifetime?

[richsadams]

Update: Here's an odd one - I put the stock 160GB drive back in and the TiVo has rebooted at least twice in the past week.

The unit is less than a year old and has lifetime service on it. Will Tivo replace the unit with a refurb and transfer the lifetime?In short, yes it's still under the one-year parts warranty...s/b a $49 replacement charge. Just don't mention anything about replacing the hard drive. ;)