9.4, S3, external drive - did Tivo poison-pill us?

'Just you. I have three Series III class TiVos with upgraded hard drives, two of them with external drives. The THD is upgraded with a 500G WD internal drive (actually, it's external: my THD has no internal drive, but the external drive is primary). One S3 has a stock 250G drive with a 750G external. The other is a Weaknees 1T TiVo with an external 1T Hitachi Deskstar drive. The stock S3 / 750G setup does lock up and GSOD every four or five weeks or so. It is reproducble as a problem with the eSATA cable, however, and only happens when the TV is turned on. The EMP pulse from the 400W bulb coming on is too much for the eSATA cable I have. I could resolve the issue by moving the TiVo and external housing, or probably by just replacing the eSATA cable, but since the GSODs are quite brief and always resolve themselves, I've been too lazy to bother. In any case, it's definitely not a 9.4 issue, since it has been occurring since January 2007, when I very first upgraded the S3 with the external drive.

 

Not a chance it's just you. People are reporting problems with the guide remaining on the screen after selecting the channel they want, problems with lockups, green screens/blue screens and the ever-popular external drive going to hell in a handbasket. I just sent mine to Western Digital for a replacement and there's never a guarantee the replacement will work with 9.4. Of course, I also lost about 40 hours of programming when I divorced the external drive but I had no choice.

There are quite a few upset people around. Just read some of the comments in the forums.

 

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Since the recent update, the screen goes blank yet the audio continues during playback of a recorded program

 

All seven of my boxes have been fine. 100% reliability like before.

 

Don't even think about going to the Verizon DVR--you will hate it (because it really is not very good at all). You would be better off just getting a new S3 without an upgraded hard drive.

 

I always smile when I see your signature line. 7 Tivo's??!! Does each person in your househould have their own Tivo?

I have one S3 with a DVR expander and a Pioneer Tivo in operation, and there's no way I can keep up with stuff I record.

 

I have the exact same issue with my Series 3. My TV is a Sony SXRD (R60XBR1). I have a Antec MX-1 eSata connected to my S3. I have a friend with the same setup and issue but he has the official Tivo eSata drive instead of the MX-1.

Otherwise my Tivo S3 has been fine.

 

It's not unique to 9.4. Every software upgrade TiVo has issue has resulted in a flood of "the upgrade killed my TiVo" threads.

It's as simple as this - TiVo's OS writes the new software upload to the alternate boot partition and then switches over to that. If that boot partition has a minor disk error (bad sector) then you're TiVo will exhibit bad behavior ranging from random lockups to failure to get past the power up screen.

If you add the WD DVR expander to their TiVo then you've increased the odds of a disk error killing your TiVo when upgraded.

TiVo (the company) forces you to play russion roulette with your TiVo DVR with every software update, and apparently they've made the business decision that it's cheaper/better for them to not address the problem. This won't change until a competitive product enters their niche.

 

It's def not just you, and I had more problems with the WD TiVo approved expander drive than the SA one I have on my other S3. No issues with that and it was an old drive I used to use with my SA 8300HD when I had that DVR before S3.

 

Dude, put down the tin foil hat

Funny, my 750GB FAP is working just fine w/9.4

for someone who has owned 20 Tivo's, you seem to have pretty thin skin.

For all these problems you are having are you sure it's not an environmental problem? How's your power? Using a quality UPS? Not some line interactive standby unit like a cheap APC, but an on-line UPS that can really deal with and correct crappy power?

It might be cheaper then continually replacing hard drives. But then again it wouldn't be near as much fun impugning Tivo's integrity for smoting you with continual plagues either, would it?

Sigh....

 

Over the past week, I've experienced a large number of issues with my TiVoHD with the WD DVR Expander. The system would reboot or reboot and hang. Sometimes, when the reboot failed, I had to power off/on the external drive in addition to the TiVoHD in order to get the system to successfully restart. Today, I removed the external drive in order to see if that clears the problem. The drive is just under a year old so if this is the issue, I guess I'll try to see if I can get it fixed under warranty.

So is there any idea if these issues are with 9.4 or just failing external drives?

Thanks!