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Bad PSU and Now Bad HD?

3K views 39 replies 8 participants last post by  emuman100 
#1 ·
Last week after a power failure my TivoHD was toast (despite being on a surge protector that was probably way to old). No power what so ever. No lights nada. I had a decommissioned TiVo HD in the closet so i swapped the PSU. Back to life! Except if i try to play something back. Normal playback seems ok, but if i Fast Forward the unit reboots. I've had the unit for 7+ years i think. It has Lifetime service. Any other troubleshooting i can do, i don't care about the recordings on the drive.
 
#2 ·
Bad capacitors in the power supply can cause issues including the main board, Hard drive, network connections, etc. Series 3 are notorious on power supply problems from failing capacitors.
 
#3 ·
Visually they looked ok, nothing leaking or blown. Also the replacement looks to be a later build cause the board was a different color and slightly different layout (Horizontal fuse instead of vertical).

One more note, the unit has an upgrade 1TB (2TB maybe, i forget) that I did a long long time ago.
 
#4 ·
Your Sig says 2TB.
 
#8 ·
Ended up using WinMFS to image my spare TiVo's drive (it mounted fine to my PC) and cloning to the new drive. Then expanding.

Before installed i did one of the kickstarts to try to repair the drive. TiVo worked ok for a few weeks but started freezing again. Tonight I got around to installing the drive. On first boot it got all the way past the "nearly done" and dumped me to a message about not being able to record until rebooting. Did that and its been on "Welcome! Powering Up..." for 20 minutes or so. Normal?
 
#9 ·
Ended up using WinMFS to image my spare TiVo's drive (it mounted fine to my PC) and cloning to the new drive. Then expanding.

Before installed i did one of the kickstarts to try to repair the drive. TiVo worked ok for a few weeks but started freezing again. Tonight I got around to installing the drive. On first boot it got all the way past the "nearly done" and dumped me to a message about not being able to record until rebooting. Did that and its been on "Welcome! Powering Up..." for 20 minutes or so. Normal?
The image on the drive (if not from your own Tivo) would need to have "Clear & Delete Everything" done or it will not record and would give error when trying to play any existing shows. This is indicated also if you look in system Information and the Tivo Service number is Unavailable 000000000.

The stuck in the boot screen for more than 5 minutes shows the drive has WDIdle was not run for that drive, but this only happens when it soft boots (from menu or self boots) and just pull the power cord for short time (5+ seconds). This will end after the software in the Tivo updates to the current version and rebooted.
 
#12 ·
So i pulled the drive and re-imaged it using a file from a helpful forum member. New file seems to be at the latest software version (TCD652160_110nK1), but now its been like this for 3 hours.

"Cleaning and deleting Everything, this may take up to an hour"
 
#15 ·
Glad my latest image worked since I only updated it recently to the current software using a 2TB drive as the guinea pig and didn't expand it.
 
#17 ·
Sounds like. It's only about $10 in parts to fix it but I took the plunge a couple years ago and upgraded to a Roamio Pro with a longtime TiVo user sale at the time and have been very happy with the upgrade even though the older S3 OLED's were basically working fine after 8 1/2 years. I also bought a Bolt for my son earlier this year when TiVo had an upgrade deal with Lifetime transfer for a spare HD that we had to get his HD upgraded as well.

Scott
 
#18 ·
Replacing the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply should help. Get aluminum electrolytics that are low ESR. In switch-mode power supplies, the electrolytics ESR increases as they age, increasing power dissipation. This causes their temperature to increase during operation, and this causes them to bulge and eventually leak. Replacements that you buy from an electronics distributor will last much longer.
 
#26 ·
That didn't last long. 24 hours later i wake up to "Welcome...powering On!" Doing a hard reboot gets me back online, but the next morning stuck back at the powering up screen. Obviously stuck cause of the widle issue, but why is it rebootingin the first place. Running SMART now,
 
#33 ·
That didn't last long. 24 hours later i wake up to "Welcome...powering On!" Doing a hard reboot gets me back online, but the next morning stuck back at the powering up screen. Obviously stuck cause of the widle issue, but why is it rebootingin the first place. Running SMART now,
can you try a different ac outlet or power strip maybe the wiring to that outlet is bad.
 
#35 ·
No difference in power supply. Tried using it again today, was watching about 20 minutes of football (live) when it rebooted. Besides another drive, what else should i check?

I called Tivo. they would sell me a refurbed Bolt for $99 and new lifetime for $349. Think i'd rather get the roamio for $399.
 
#38 ·
Did you try using a fresh image on a fresh drive? Perhaps the MFS partitions have corrupt data when you copied over, or the switching FET on the power supply is going bad. Also, it may help to look at the logs if you can use an mfslive bootdisk and mount the /var partition.
 
#39 ·
Yup, used a fresh image. I took the drive out again, reformatted, re-imaged, ran through the setup. Next morning stuck on "Welcome, PoweringUp" again. Granted it is an old drive, but all of the health checks on it pass.

So it is either the switching FET.

Could i mount the drive in OSX to get to the /var partition? (i'm running on a hackintosh, so plugging in via SATA is not an issue).
 
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