Bolt+ Stopped Working

Checked Weaknees they seem to have drives listed, good luck

 

Did Tivo tell you that your replacement would also have a 3TB hard drive?

 

Is your original TiVo Bolt+ in warranty or out? Lifetime subscription or monthly/annual?

And yep, not selling the Bolt 3TB anymore: the original drive for it, a Western Digital drive, no longer is available, and TiVo has not sourced a replacement; and TiVo was finding that the 1TB Bolt was outselling the 3TB Bolt.

 

I think $79 for that is great. I've heard as low as $49 (although I can't recall all the specifics, and haven't seen that for a while, now), but also charges of ~$100-$150 or more, more recently. Smile.

Also, do consider: you're getting a replacement unit that isn't sold anymore (thinking, the 3TB capacity), and with a VOX remote (they better be including the VOX remote). A big smile.

And if you need any other reason to be way pleased: a 3TB 2.5" replacement drive for the Bolt box (the often-used Toshiba drive) currently is selling for $155 (I found the 2TB Toshiba drive for $85). You're paying $79 despite the expiration of the warranty 1+ years ago and are getting a new box with a voice remote, and don't need to do any work other than mailing the old box back. Are you smiling yet?

 

The box pretty surely is the same as what you already have, although if you're currently on TE3, the new box will have TE4 installed (which you can sidegrade to TE3, should you wish).

I understand the frustration of losing recordings, passes, and wishlists. And you're right, it could relate to defective WD drives. And while I want all of my TiVo boxes to last forever, the fact is, you were out of warranty and for $79, you're getting a brand new box and not losing your Lifetime. I wouldn't think twice about a person who got a replacement for $30 less under whatever specific circumstances he/she had.

Sleep on it.

 

Hi,

Me too. I opened my A/V cabinet to see all 4 lights on the front of my Bolt Plus flashing simultaneously. I searched and found that this means that the drive (or maybe power supply) is "completely dead". In spite of that I continued the process that has worked before when there were bad sectors on a TiVo hard drive.

I purchased a replacement hard drive from WeeKnees. When it arrived I used WD's disk diagnostics on a Windows PC to test for any bad sectors. It checked out fine. I installed both hard drives into an old PC where I booted from a thumb drive containing Ubuntu Rescue Remix. I used "hdparm -i /dev/sda" to confirm that I knew which drive was sda and which was sdb, then I used "ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda /dev/sdb" to copy from the old drive to the new drive. It ran for a long time. In the end it was only unable to recover from 10 errors (45,056 bytes) which I thought was quite good! I installed the new drive in the TiVo. It did NOT run through setup, but when I checked there were NO recordings on the hard drive! Waaa!

Why?

Note: I paid for lifetime service on this box.

Thoughts? Tips? Prayers?
Thanks,
Bill

 

The bad part is we are still getting the crap 3tb drives in the replacements Tivo is sending out. My third Bolt+ had the four flashing lights this morning. The 1st one I bought new with 4 flashing lights out of the box. Tivo replaced free using my 3yr extended warranty that I also bought with it. The replacement lasted about 13 months. Tivo replaced free (after fighting with them over the 3yr extended warranty). That replacement is just over 14 months old and it just died. And I did have a cooling fan sitting behind it. I am up in the air about trying an external 3.5" drive or reverting back to my Roamio and waiting to see what Tivo has to offer with the Tivo Edge. Hopefully they will have a good trade up deal for us Bolt owners. Don't get me wrong I have had Tivo's for at least 15 years and would not use anything else, but the Bolts were a bad design.

 

Jeez, 3 in a row. Sorry you've been subjected to that.

 

Might be better to

I've been using this drive in a white bolt for 2 years.

Seagate 3TB Laptop HDD SATA 6Gb/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 15 mm Height Internal Hard Drive (ST3000LM016)

I've been using a 2TB WD20NPVX for my Bolt Vox for 7 months, which might be a better compromise.

 

$79 sounds pretty good compared to what I was quoted. I have two dead Bolt+ 3GB units each with lifetime. I called today and they said it would be $149/ea to replace the unit, and an additional $199/ea to transfer lifetime to the replacement.

I'm not really interested in sinking $348 into a device that I fully expect to fail in a year.