kickstart 54 results with nonsupported esata drive

[bevansmd]

I have a 2 year old series 3 with a 750gb seagate freeagent pro attached for over one year. I've had no problems until the recent update despite Tivo warnings about the Seagate Freeagent drives. Now I have constant reboots and freezes (coincidence?). I've searched the forums and read about a lot of problems but I started to suspect a hardware issue. I ran kickstart 57 and 58 with no improvement. Now I ran kickstart 54 with a Fail 7 result on the extended test. It looks to me like the tests don't run on the esata drive and just say "nosupport". Does this mean the drive in the tivo is malfunctioning?

I haven't disconnected the seagate esata drive yet. I was initially reluctant to lose all of my recordings but now I am so frustrated with the constant reboots that I will make that sacrifice. Is there a chance that disconnecting the esata drive will fix my problem or does the Fail 7 error on the smart test mean that the drive in the Tivo has failed? I am fortunate to have an extended warranty on the series 3 through Weaknees. What should my next step be?

Thank you!!

[A-1]

The Primary drive was the only one tested so it looks like the drive in the Tivo has a problem.

*
o If the primary drive (DVR) has a "Fail" result, contact TiVo Customer Support to exchange the DVR.
o If the secondary drive (DVR Expander) has a "Fail" result, you need to exchange the Western Digital My DVR Expander. You can process the exchange on your own by going to the Western Digital Product Replacement site OR you can call Western Digital Customer Support at 1-800-ASK-WDC (275-4932) to have an agent process the exchange.
o If each drive passes both tests, continue to Step 6.

6. Allow the DVR to continue through the remaining tests. The length of the tests will vary according to the size of the hard drives. (The full set of tests can take 8 hours or more for larger capacity drives.)

NOTE: You can cancel the test at any time by pressing the CLEAR button.

WARNING: While the DVR is testing the hard drives, it will respond to any TiVo remote, regardless of its address setting. If you wish to use another DVR in the same room as the DVR running the tests, cover the front of the DVR running the tests with aluminum foil, a thick magazine, or some other material to block stray remote commands.

7. When all of the tests are complete, check the results:

*
o If the primary drive fails any of the tests, contact TiVo Customer Support to exchange the DVR.
o If the secondary drive fails any of the tests, you need to exchange the Western Digital My DVR Expander. You can process the exchange on your own by going to the Western Digital Product Replacement site OR you can call Western Digital Customer Support at 1-800-ASK-WDC (275-4932) to have an agent process the exchange.
o If both drives pass all of the tests, contact TiVo Customer Support for additional troubleshooting assistance.

NOTE: If you exchange your DVR or My DVR Expander, you will lose all or most of your recordings.

[V7Goose]

I have a Series 3 with 1 TB internal drive and a 1 TB external Apricorn "DVR Xpander". I have been experiencing some spontaneous restarts in the past couple of months (but zero other errors that I know of), so I decided to run some Kickstart diagnostics.

KS 57 ran fine, but didn't change anything.

KS 58 causes it to say it is installing a software update. That doesn't sound right to me - I thought 58 was another diagnostic test for the drive content? Does anyone have more information on that?

Anyway, whatever KS 58 is doing seems to run OK, but no change to my problem.

KS 54 SMART tests seem to run OK; both drives passed all the tests up to the extended test - I haven't let that one run all the way through yet. I'll do that as soon as I find an extended time I don't have anything scheduled. The screen says it will take about 300 minutes.

Below the SMART test on the KS 54 screen are separate tests for hda, hdb, and hdc. Does anyone know for sure to which disks these letters correspond?

All tests run fine for hda (I am assuming this is the internal drive).

The hdb tests do not work - I get a message that says the drive is not present or not responding.

The hdc tests seem to work. Although hdc has passed all tests a couple of times, the unit has spontaneously rebooted two different times while running "Read, Random location" test on this drive. This makes me suspect hdc as the cause of my other random reboots, but it seems a little strange it doesn't show any kind of errors during the tests.

Last question - is there any documentation describing how to interpret the test displays for these tests? The dot patterns would seem to indicate a location for each random read, but what would be the few bigger and brighter dots that show up much higher on the screen? My guess was that they might represent errors, bt the tests say PASSED.

Thanx for any help you may be able to offer!