Series 3 (refurb from TiVo) freezing & rebooting multiple times daily

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About 6 months ago, I bought a refurb Series 3 TiVo (not a TiVo HD, but the older, original Series 3) and immediately had Lifetime service put on it. And for the majority of that six months, it worked perfectly.


In the last week, it's started giving me fits. Sometimes it freezes up (while watching recorded shows), and I can get it to start again by fast-forwarding and rewinding.

Other times it freezes and I can't do anything, and after a little while it solves the problem itself and completely reboots. Note: this one seems to be happening more and more - it happened twice this morning already while I was getting ready for work.


Other times it seems to be working properly except when I try to fast-forward and it responds VERY sluggishly.


Now yes, the obvious thing is to call TiVo technical support and get this fixed/replaced under warranty (which I plan to call about tonight).

But I figured I'd post on here and see what I'm in for - whether it'd be an easy fix that they'll just tell me to do over the phone that would fix it, or whether I'll need to plan on sending it back to TiVo for a repair, and being without a TiVo for a period of time. I'm also curious what period of time to expect the repair to take (roughly, of course).

Edit: This is a Series 3 refurb (lifetime) with two cable cards (both MCards) installed, hooked up to Comcast cable, and hooked to my network via a TiVo wireless adapter.

 

To be honest, a while ago I replaced the hard drive in my TiVo HD and not even with a prepared kit one (used the software to transfer everything with both drives hooked to my computer), so I have no fear of cracking the seal and swapping drives out on this if it'll fix the problem.

My only concern is that it's still within warranty (at least parts - oh and for the record I just looked it up, and just bought it in July, so more like only 4 months old), and I don't really want to void that if I have a choice. Especially if it turns out that the problem is something other than the hard drive.

 

That is very good to know, especially as I did a little shopping around earlier for another hard drive, and on Newegg I can get a WD 500GB drive (AV rated) for about $54, and I have the capability to do the backup (did it before when I upgraded my TiVo HD) from the current drive to the new one (and would have the benefit of doubling the space on it anyways).

My concern about if they exchange it, is yeah, I'd need to have the cablecards repaired, and after the fiasco we had with Comcast getting those installed and working properly the first time, I really don't want to start that mess again.


My only worry about doing the "backup" from old drive to new, is if the problem is a software issue rather than a hard drive one (or worse still, if it's a non-hard drive hardware issue), then I'd be just recreating the same problem (not to mention wasting the $54 on the new drive).


I do like the idea of booting it up without anything connected to it (I'll probably even disconnect the wireless adapter, to be sure), just to make sure it's an issue with the TiVo, and not something else (like the cablecard or the cable signal, or whatever).

 

Well, just so you guys know, after spending a few hours on the phone with TiVo tech support last night, turns out it's a bad tuner.

In a nutshell, the TiVo would get sluggish and unreliable (read: unexpected reboots throughout the day) when I had the coax plugged in, and would be stable without the coax.

After having to jump through some serious hoops to get to DVR Diagnostics (considering with coax plugged in it would just hang on the "please wait" screen, and with it unplugged I'd get no information), we finally got some information up, and it turned out that the RS Connected and RS Unconnected values were astronomical (after a few minutes in the thousands each, a few minutes after that in the tens of thousands).

At first the tech thought it was the signal coming to the TiVo (either bad wiring in the house or bad signal in the house), which I was able to disprove by explaining that I had another HD TiVo elsewhere in the house that worked perfectly fine (I even hooked the bad one up to the same wiring as the other HD TiVo and got the same problems - hooking the HD back up and it worked fine).


So long story short - bad tuner, and now I need to send this in for exchange. Which means, yes, I'll need to re-pair the cable cards when I get the replacement. I just hope that the TiVo tech is correct when he told me that I should be able to re-pair the ccards just by calling Comcast, and without having to wait for a Comcast tech.

 

The problem (as I understand it) was that due to the tuner being bad (and sending bad data to the rest of the box), it was using up unbelievable amounts of CPU cycles just attempting error correction.

If you look at your DVR Diagnostics while your tuners are both on digital channels, you can look at the values for "RS Corrected" and "RS Uncorrected" and it will show how many times it attempted to correct a data issue (from the tuner), as well as how many were able to be fixed (RS Corrected) and how many were not (RS Uncorrected).

These values apparently just accumulate, until you do a power-cycle on the box, at which time they start over.


In my case, I'd power-cycle the box, and both values would be in the thousands within minutes.

At first they thought it was a bad signal from my cable provider, until I pointed out that my other TiVo (a TiVo HD) was working perfectly fine with the exactly same cable company signal (I even moved the failing box to where the working one was plugged in, to make sure it wasn't a problem with my house coax wiring).


The downside, is it was taking so much CPU doing the error checking, that it would slow down the entire machine so much that I couldn't even get to the DVR Diagnostics screen (or anything else for that matter) as long as the coax was plugged into the TiVo. So I basically had to unplug the signal, go to the Diagnostics screen, and try to time it such that I was able to plug it back in just before the actual screen showed up.


Long story short: if you think you're having the same problem as I did (slowdown and possible reboots), try unplugging your coax altogether and see if the machine speeds back up to normal speed. If it does, then it's either a bad signal or a bad tuner most likely.