I am a long-time lurker, but infrequent poster. I need some help determining what to do next.
The second TiVo I bought is a S3 purchased in December of 2006. Been very happy with it and in ~February of 2010 I added a 1TB MyDVR Expander by Western Digital -- obviously connected by an eSATA cable.
Things were fine until about a month ago, when the TiVo started rebooting with increasing frequency. Eventually, it got to the point where it was rebooting after about 10 or 15 minutes of being on.
I searched the forums and contacted TiVo support. Early steps were to power down, make sure the eSATA and HDMI cables were seated properly. Also did a kickstart on the TiVo and got no errors on either the internal or external hard drive. One of the possible culprits was the external drive, but I still had a LOT of stuff on the S3 that we wanted to watch, so I didn't want to disconnect the external drive and lose all my recordings.
After many reboots and a lot of time, I was able to isolate something at least LINKED to the problem. When my cable (the coax cable from Charter) was plugged into the back of the TiVo, I had the problem; with the coax unplugged, I had no rebooting.
Subsequent steps involved getting two new cable cards AND having a cable tech come out, put an amplifier on the cable to the house, and confirm that the signal to the TiVo was as close as possible to "perfect." I thought the problem was solved, but it wasn't. Still got reboots.
With football and fall programming starting up (and an irritated wife), the decision was made to purchase a new TiVo Premiere XL. (May be switching this out for a Premiere Elite if they can get the things on the market before my return period on the XL expires...but that's another story.)
Here's where I stand today:
- New Premiere XL is set up and working just fine.
- TiVo S3 is still connected to the home network, and we've transferred/watched a lot of the old stuff and are nearly ready to remove it from the family room cabinet. There is one series that can't be transferred that I'd still like to watch before disconnecting the whole thing.
- I have an OLD one-tuner, SD TiVo Series 2 on the TV in the bonus room.
The questions:
- What could be wrong with the S3 that it works fine when not connected to cable, but reboots when it is connected to cable? TiVo had no answers for this.
- Obviously the S3 would be better than the S2 for the bonus room -- IF IT WORKS. What should I do? Swap out the S3 for a refurbished unit at my expense? I think it makes sense to disconnect the MyDVR Expander and try that unit in the bonus room first -- but what if I keep having the same problems?
If your implication is that the operating difference is that it isn't recording live TV to the buffer, then yes: I agree. Who knows if that could be the problem. Seems a bizarre source of error -- but we're well into not-typical here.
