S3 dying, or is it the external storage?

[squiredogs]

I have an unmodified S3 (that I payed waaay too much for the second it came out), and have the WD TiVo certified external drive. No cablecard or signal problems, everything really good... Until a couple of days ago. I got the first random freeze and reboot of it's 3 year old life. It was once or twice the first day, and now it's every 15 minutes.

A quick search of the boards makes me think it might be the WD going bad. As a matter of fact, I woke this morning and saw the External Storage Missing or not detected, or something like that onscreen.

We had a couple of power outages today as well, for a total of 6 or 7 reboots. I unplugged the WD box, and that gave me a screen that asked if I wanted to remove the external box (which I plugged back into the S3, and then said yes)

I'm waiting for the reboot to see if taking the WD box off solves the problem. So here are a few questions as I stare at the "Few minutes more" screen -

1 - if the S3 operates solidly, is there any way to stick the WD back on, and transfer some recordings onto the S3's drive?

2 - is it worth it to buy and try a new esata cable? The drive is about 15 months old or so.

3 - I have lifetime on the S3. If it is OK, I was thinking about doing the weakknees 500gb or 1 TB upgrade, rather than buy a Premiere and pay for Lifetime for like the 4th time...

any ideas?

[JTYoung1]

AFAIK once you remove the drive and let your S3 go through its process of unmarrying itself, you've lost all those recordings and there is no way to get them back.
IMO it is not worth it to buy a new eSATA drive for your S3. I've gone through 2 of the 500GB WD drives and neither lasted longer than 16 months. You could try a new cable but unless you've put some pretty bad kinks in it, your problem is most likely the HD.
I finally broke down and upgraded the S3 myself with one of the recommended 1TB drives.