Tivo HD Hard Drive Failing?

[TommyMac]

Hello.

A few weeks ago my Tivo HD (cable cards/Charter/500g MyDvr Expander) started locking up, not recording (might record a few minutes of a scheduled recording and then fail), and becoming non-responsive and/or very sluggish. I rebooted but to no avail. So I did some digging around here and found the kickstart stuff and gave that a shot. It passed #54 so I did #57 just for kicks. Since then I have not really used this Tivo much but it is still up to no good ... not recording when it should, freezing after being on the same channel for too long, non-responsive and/or very sluggish and just yesterday all of the front display lights were on and nothing worked (I rebooted).

So my question is, is this a bad hard drive or bad MyDvr expander? My understanding is if it passed #54, it was something else. Is that not true?

I don't have a problem buying a new, bigger HD but would hate to spend the money if that is not the problem.

Thanks in advance for any/all help.

-TmD

[newskilz]

I'm assuming you are saying that it passes the kickstart 54 and 57. You may try kickstart 58 and see if that helps or not.

Sometimes, not usually, but sometimes it can pass the kickstart tests and still be a bad hard drive. If you want to problem solve, de-linking the expander would be a start. If that fixes it, you know it was probably the expander, and sometimes re-linking cures some problems. I don't know much about the expander ways but others should be able to chime in.

When you say it stops working, etc, and you reboot, are you restarting the expander too?

If it's less than a year old, you may be able to exchange with TiVo for a newly refurbished one. Though if it is the hard drive, depending on how old your box is, it may be cheaper for you to put in a new drive yourself. Over a year old, I'd take the hard drive out and test it on a pc with some hard drive scan tools.

[jeffw_00]

most likely the expander, and easy to test - just divorce it

[bkdtv]

The Kickstart tests are not a reliable indicator of drive health. By the time the disk is bad enough to show errors in those tests, the TiVo may not even boot.

In most cases, a failing My DVR Expander is the culprit. You can confirm that by removing the My DVR Expander.