After power cycles... Tivo HD boots to gray screen

Many things can fail here.... the external drive, the external case, the connections between the drive and the Tivo, the internal drive, and mainly.... the capacitors in the power supply. Your recordings are at risk with this setup.

 

If you want to preserve your recorded shows, and they are not copy-protected, You can use KMTTG/PyTivo to download them to your computer....

Then, remove the external drive and boot it back up to fully divorce it.

Back up with WinMFS to make an image file.

You would need to replace the internal drive since its the original and its 10 yrs old. Replace it with a WD Red 2TB (WD20EFRX). This is the max that Tivo can handle. Connect to the PC and restore the image to it, MFSAdd, Supersize. Plop it in the Tivo and now you have more space then you currently have. Your recordings are now much less at risk of loss then using 2 drives.

 

You can hook the drive(s) to SATA or USB and WinMFS can see it. Just don't let Windows format it.

 

Capacitors, you need to replace them, that's one of the classic grey screen causes and those look original, there's a sticky at the top of the forum about it, but I see one questionable, but if they've never been replaced, they're going to be failing and the odds of saving your recordings drop if the bad caps cause HDD corruption issues.

 

I have a tivoHD that has one job in life, record young and the restless
It has an upgraded disk from years back, and currently have over 680 episodes recorded to be watch eventually, all the way back to 2016

 

Yep!
What Diane says.

 

Honestly? I just order them from Amazon since with prime free shipping I have them all in a few days, I could go and order them from digikey or mouser but Amazon is just simple and done.

 

In 2013 I ordered caps for my 648250 TiVo from Mouser Electronics, total cost was $12.18 including shipping.
www.mouser.com

 

The HD model had 2 power supply options so you need to find out which one you have so you can order the correct capacitors. There are a number of posts on part numbers which you should be able to find in some of the links below.

Tivo Series 3 - Bad capacitors in power supply

Series 3 Tivo HD Capacitor List

Scott

 

You do have one other option. It is not as easy as WinMFS but it is not that hard either.

You could use MFSTools 3.2 or above to copy both internal and external drives on to one internal drive. You would have to have all three drives hooked to your computer while you run MFSTools (which is a Linux program)

 

KMTTG and PyTivo is a program to copy/transfer shows on the Tivo to PC. Technically it is not a backup, but it makes the shows playable on the PC.

WinMFS and other programs need to have the hard drive out of the Tivo and connected to the PC to copy/backup the entire drive. MFSAdd is a function in WinMFS that adds the extra space for use that the image did not add previously. Same for MFSTools.

 

If you mean to format it on a computer first, before WinMFS, no.

 

Depending on what drive fails... external or internal. If external fails, you divorce it from the internal via on screen prompts. If the internal fails, you may require a new image to restore it. (Excpet for Roamios and Bolts as they self format the drive.)

 

And you would have to have both drives hooked to WinMFS to back it up unless you want lost recordings.

If you divorce your external drive from your current setup you will lose recordings. That is why kmttg is recommended to back up all your recordings if you go that route.

Not sure the WinMFS commands but the MFSTools command to do your copy with all drives hooked to your computer would be mfscopy -ai /dev/internal:/dev/external /dev/target. You replace internal, external, target with the Linux name of those drives (sda, sdb, sdc, sde, ...)

This will copy both drives to the single drive without loss of recordings.

Basic instructions can be found in my post with the ISO of MFSTools 3.32 in the MFSTools 3.2 thread.