Toshiba SD-H400 Question

[Rick-s]

I have a Toshiba SD-H400 that was used with cable a little over two years ago. In December of '06, I stopped my tivo service and went to D'tv. My 2yr contract expired with them and I am now back to cable. I went to power up my tivo that had been sitting quietly in the entertainment center unpowered and it would not boot. Just the gray power up screen and a hard drive that was trying to find sectors without luck.

I got a copy of the instant cake for that model which had version 7.2 of the software. Wanting to be 100% correct that the only problem was the tivo drive, I ran instant cake on an old 10G seagate drive I had from an old Xbox. (I know the original was 80G, remember this was only a test)

Upon installation, the tivo jumped back to life, and since I only use the tivo in my bedroom for pausing and backing up live tv I figured I'd let it go a while with that drive before upgrading it. All was good, The software even updated to 9.3.2a. The only problem was (beyond the obvious lack of space for any recordings) was the fact that the drive was noisy during seeks, and since it was small it did them often. Not good in the bedroom when trying to sleep. :(

I then remembered a couple of old series 1 Directtivo's I had. I openend up one which had 2 drives, a 30G and a 15G quantum fireball. I figured these should be quieter so I instant caked the 30 and put it in the machine.

Here's where the question comes in.

After running through the guided setup, I forced a call to tivo and saw the pending restart message. Assuming this was for the software update I did a reboot and the unit would not get past the gray screen.

I tried the same with the 15G and got the same results.

I placed the 30G back in my computer, booted with the instant cake CD, went to the command prompt and issued the command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdd (hdd was where the 30G drive was located in my pc)

I thought if I zeroed the drive out to a clean slate it might work. I'm not a linux person but I read that this was as close to a low level format as you can get.

I re-did the instant cake, installed and let it make it's calls in the Tivo and upon reboot after the software update was downloaded, It made it to the orange background/tivo-guy/this will take a while screen then stopped, rebooted, and went back to a constant gray reboot like before.

Is there a problem with using old series 1 tivo drives that appear fully functional on a series two machine? Nothing reports any errors when writing to either of the drives.

Any Ideas?? I'm not ready to retire this tivo. I always like the fact that it came with lifetime basic service so I could use it like a vcr or just to pause and rewind live tv.

Thanks in advance and sorry for babbling :D,

Rick

[ciper]

Aren't those drives smaller than what came in the unit originally? Doesn't this unit require the Toshiba_Unlock tool if the drive size is changed?

[Rick-s]

The drives are definitely smaller, the original drive was an 80G. I don't know anything about a "Toshiba unlock tool" I have never heard of it. I'll search here to see if I can find out about it.

What I find odd, is that the puny 10G seagate works fine. Updates and all. The larger 15 or 30G (which is still much smaller than the original as I know) work fine under the 7.2 version of the software from the instant cake and operates as normal downloading program guides and all seems good. However, as soon as the Tivo downloads and installs the software update from the tivo servers, the tivo goes into a constant reboot situation.

I downloaded SeaTools and did the long test on both the 15 and 30 and both passed with no errors.

My main concern is that I hate to invest in a replacement 80G drive if there is something else going on with the Tivo.

[ciper]

Why invest in an 80g drive? You will end up pay more per MB than that of a larger drive. Not counting online prices here are my local brick and mortar prices for drives
1TB SATA drives ~100$
500gb SATA drives ~70$
500gb PATA drives ~80$
160gb PATA drives ~60$

[Rick-s]

I just used the 80 as a reference to a direct sizewise replacement. I researched the toshiba unlock utility and it seems to only be needed if you are restoring an original toshiba image to a larger drive. From what I can tell, the instant cake image has already taken care of this. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

If I did buy a new replacement drive, I would probably go for the best price drive 80G or larger I could find.

Like I said, I want to make sure the Tivo is not having problems before making the investment in a new hard drive.

[ciper]

If you live in California you can buy a hard drive from Frys and return it even if it is used. That would be my advice :)

[Rick-s]

No, California is not my home, I live in NW Indiana. I could only dream of living in Sunny Warm California! :D Today we had a wet drizzly cold (Highs in the mid 40s) day.

I'd probably buy a drive online, most of my computer equipment purchases are made that way. I'm just baffled by this. I don't understand the tiny 10G seemingly working fine when the 15 and 30 fail as soon as they receive a software update.

I've replaced drives in two series two directivos (more than once :) ) using instant cakes for those and never had any issues. Of course I did always go bigger size wise with those.

I just can't understand what is causing the failure after the software updates??

[Rick-s]

For now, the Tivo is chugging along seemingly fine on the 10G drive. I'll keep reading and doing research to see if I can figure this out.

[ciper]

I think you should ask on the DDB and in IRC. No offense to my fellow TCF members but this forum usually isn't into the nitty gritty.

If you don't have/want an IRC client try this http://pjirc.viper007bond.com/ Just enter your handle, #tivo for the channel and irc.efnet.org for the server. Realize it can take upto 12 hours for someone to reply so ask the question and then leave the computer on.

[Rick-s]

I'll try those places. Thanks for all your help.

Rick