DirecTiVo Philips DSR-7000 Dying?

[keefer37]

I think I've got a bum DirecTiVo here in our den. We hadn't used it in a couple of days, and turned it on just now and had a gray screen. Rebooted the unit and it came back, but had trouble aquiring the satellite signal. The blue animated menus are stuttering about once a second (jerky animated that puases then animates for a second, pauses, animates, etc.) I'm thinking it's a bum hard drive. Doesn't it sound like the symptoms of one? There's no extra fan or HD noise, but the jerky and slow menus makes me think a HD is the culprit.

It's got the original drive in there and an upgraded. How do I diagnose which of the pair is the bad one? If it is just one of the two hard drives, how easy would it be to swap it back to a 1 disk system temporarily until I can get a new HD for it?

[litzdog911]

1. Yes, probably a failing hard drive.

2. To diagnose you'll need to download the drive manufacturer's DOS-based diagnostic utility and create a DOS boot disk to run their utilities. Remove the two Tivo drives, install them in your PC (with your PC's hard drive disconnected), and use the diagnostic boot disk you created to diagnose both drives.

3. There's no easy to temporarily revert back to a one drive Tivo, unless you kept the original drive in a box somewhere.

Lots more resources in the Tivo Upgrade Center Forum here.