Series 3 Lockups

My Series 3 is doing the same thing. It's caught in a reboot loop... boots up past the THX screen, then locks up and reboots. Over and over again... until I unplug the coaxial cable input going into it... then it boots fine and works without any hickups. It's been running seamlessly (without cable) for 4 days. Plug the cable back in (with or without cablecards) and I'm hosed. Kickstart 57,58, whatever haven't helped. If the cable is going into the back, the Series3 won't run. The same cable input does nothing to my Series 2 tivos, they work flawlessly and have for years.

My Series3 has run perfectly for a year... until *I think* 9.2 came out. After that update, it began to act up, become unresponsive and slugglish to the remote, as well as randomly reboot. Now it has descended into this reboot cycle. I know the conventional wisdom is that the drive is failing-- but my S3 runs better than ever with the cable unplugged. It's not the drive.

I've been desperately waiting with my cable unplugged for the 9.3 software update to get pushed to my box. I'm praying that fixes things. If it doesn't and I have to swap out another Series 3 or if I have to deal with the cablecard install nightmare again, I'm going to dump the thing in the bay.

 

I just recently had the same problems suddenly develop with my S3 after 15 months of virtually perfect operation. As soon as i disconnected both of the RF cables it worked perfectly, but as soon as i re-connected one or both the problems all returned. Even though it ran perfectly with the RF cables disconnected, Weaknees said the hard drive was indeed bad and it's now working perfectly with the new hard drive. I still have the 9.2a software just like with the old hard drive, and up till a few weeks ago my S3 was working perfectly with 9.2a.

If you can hold out to see if 9.3 fixes it that would be good, but don't rule out a corrupted hard drive.

Here's another thread with a few other people having the same problems:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=6186639#post6186639

 

I too was in the same boat until I swapped out the Hard Drive but could it be that many bad Hard Drive's out there or do you think if I grabbed my old stock Tivo Hard Drive and reinstalled the tivo OS would the problem happen again??? It almost seems that its a live buffer/ being written to the Hard Drive wrong type of thing??? I mean I would reinstall my OS in the stock HD but I guess I wont worry about it if/when the new Hard Drive acts up....

 

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I have been seeing the same thing. My first thought was the HD had an issue so I pulled it out and ran a check on it and no errors were found. I am holding out for the 9.3 update hoping that it will have a fix for this issue.

So for now I have to check my Tivo every day an make sure it is up and running properly. I have found that the clock stops updating when the unit locks up so it is easy to figure out it I need to power cycle the unit.

 

I was having the same issues with my Series 3 last week, called in, went through troubleshooting with the support people and they concluded that I had a bad Tivo. Basically, if I had my cable cards in, or a coax plugged in, the Tivo when to hell, unplug everything and it works just fine.

Got a another Tivo in the mail after paying $903.04 for the "advanced" shipping, and this new Tivo does the same damn thing. After calling in again tonight, they said that it's a known issue affecting a small number of Tivo Series 3's. I was told that 9.3 will fix the issue.

The tech ran me though the update procedure to downloaded the new update, got 9.2a and it's still the same issue.

 

I just got the 9.3a update last night so I will know in a couple of days if it fixed my problem.

 

I wish I would get it. I check daily. Why is there no priority page for S3 users?

 

Another call, another update, this time to 9.3a and I still have the problem. I was told that the engineering team is heavily involved and it's only on the Series 3's.

 

So wow, 1-2 months for a fix... thats insane. I have the same issue. More background here.

As an aside, where are people with this problem located? Which cable provider do you have? I wonder if the issue is localized in some way.

I'm in Eastern MA, Comcast.

I too had 9.2a and was running without _any_ problems (for 8 months) until ~10 days ago. For the past 10 days 9.2a caused partial recordings, huge slowdowns and then spontaneous reboots. But now 9.3a has made the problem so much worse. Like others, as soon as the coax touches the input the S3 flips out spinning its CPU until it reboots.

It is _really_ hard to believe a fix for this is 1-2 months out. I understand that Tivo engineering is just reacting to a new condition they didn't account for but to have the S3 product roll over and die simply when the coax is connected is pretty appauling. Clearly they were too naive with their tolerances; that and/or they used horribly cheap hardware in a supposed "professional" product.

No matter how you cut it this kind of defect makes it extremely hard for Tivo to market any further products as "professional". This all seems very Orwellian to me, in hindsight S3 should've screamed "buyer beware" to all of us from day one. But we all wanted to believe Tivo had the first great HD DVR...

 

I have two Series 3 TiVos. One has version 9.2a-01-2-648 and works fine. The other received the 9.3a.A1-01-2-648 upgrade and now reboots repeatedly and is basically unresponsive unless I disconnect the coax cable. With the cable disconnected it works fine but I obviously can't record anything new. I used to have the 9.2 software on that unit, so why can't TiVo issue a "downgrade" to the older software until they get this problem fixed???

 

I'm on Comcast: Philadelphia.

 

I just checked my S3 this morning and it had downloaded 9.3 last night. A restart with the cable attached and it's still hosed.

When it rebooted (by itself) I unplugged the cable and it started up fine. After poking around to see what the software changes are-- I plugged the cable back in while it was running. Instantly the S3 locked up. I then unplugged the cable and the S3 came back to life. I'm sure hot-swapping the cable is not recommended-- but it reproduces the problem instantly.

 

Does anyone who has this S3 "coax causes immediate slowdown" issue happen to also have a TivoHD? If so, does the TivoHD suffer from the same problem?

I'm contemplating buying a refurbished TivoHD (was looking to get a 2nd Tivo anyway); if the TivoHD wouldn't lockup where the S3 does then it's a no brainer for me. I'd be able to just use a single M-card too...

It would buy Tivo engineering time to fix my S3 too. I'm pissed at Tivo but looking to rise above it... help.

 

From everything I have heard, the issue is only on the Series 3's

 

I have three Series 3s with 9.3a and no lock-up (yet). One of the Series 3s has 9.3a A1 for whatever that means.

 

I went ahead and opened a case with their tech support and was told like others in this thread that this is a known issue and the engineers are working on a patch. They also told me that they can't roll the software back like has already been mentioned. That shocked me so I asked if they at least have stopped the roll out so other TiVo HDs wouldn't get affected and they told me they haven't stopped the roll out. I have another TiVo Series 3 with the 9.s software so I unplugged the Ethernet connection for now. I already have one useless TiVo, I don't want two that don't work.

 

I went ahead and bought a new TivoHD and got it hooked up with a single M-card to comcast. The TivoHD is working great, it pulled down 9.2a and there is no sign of lockups, etc (its now firewalled from calling home!). Here I was thinking my wiring, ccards, and/or comcast signal were bad... I kept all of that constant and switched my useless S3 out in favor of the TivoHD (for the time being).

Oh, and while I was setting up the TivoHD I noticed the S3 rebooted (the coax was _not_ connected) and it then went into the MFS check green-screen saying that it was repairing the disk (ala kickstart 57). SO maybe my S3's disk is dying, time will tell...