Please help - dead Tivo?

webman2k · 08-06-2006, 07:08 AM

Hello all,

Yesterday, I turned on my TV to find the Tivo frozen -just locked on a screen of some commercial. So I unplugged the unit for a few seconds, and then rebooted. I noticed that the interface was now extremely sluggish, there was a delay sometimes when navigating through the menus. I went to the connection screen, and tried to connect to the service manually, to make sure everything was OK. It connected and downloaded OK, but then I got an error "S03" - and something about an error loading information.

I did some research and found this problem online. Some were saying it could be a bad motherboard, or corrupted data, or a bad drive. A solution for some people was to use the pause 5 7 command on startup. I did this, and got the green screen and the system rebooted after about 5 minutes. Problem is, it kept repeating this. It would boot up, go to the green screen, then reboot and repeat. I let it do this for about 3 hours.

So, I unplugged the unit and went to bed. This morning, I plugged it in, and I get the welcome powering up message, then 1 minute later a grey screen. Nothing on the grey screen, just a plain - disastrous ominous looking grey screen.

So, is that it? Is the system screwed at this point. It's way out of Warrantee. I'm using a Humax 80gig Series 2, with a Linksys WUSB11 USB G Network adapter.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

wscannell · 08-06-2006, 07:37 AM

Sounds like the hard drive has died. There are a couple of options:

1) Call Humax and see what their repair options are

2) Get Instantcake from ptvupgrade.com and load a new hard drive. Make sure you get the proper version for your TiVo. The hard drive you load can be larger giving you more recording time. There are stickys at the top of the upgrade forum that have help on upgrading to larger drives.

3) Get a preloaded replacement hard drive from weaknees.com or ptvupgrade.com