Tivo Bolt+ died (4 flashing lights)

Did they upgrade you to the edge from a dead Bolt?

 

yes fout lights hard drive dead recordings lost

 

You could put a new hard drive in the Bolt+ yourself. It's not hard. The 3Tb drives in the Bolt+ have a high failure rate.

 

That raises a good point (thanks for raising it) as to buying a TiVo box used as vs. new. I wonder if this is a hard line that TiVo takes, or if it varies.

 

I've bought Craigslist TiVo's that TiVo has offered upgrade 'deals' to me about.

-KP

 

As far as saving your old recordings, the 4 flashing lights are a bad sign that could mean the HDD is totally unusable.

You could try connecting the HDD to a PC and see if Windows Disk Manager can "see" the drive, but don't initialize! Cancel any prompts.

If the PC can't find the drive, or you don't even hear/feel the HDD spin up, than there's likely no chance. Otherwise, you can try a recovery clone and kmttg.

Note: You will lose everything if you place a new HDD in the Bolt, so you'll want to do that last. You may want to do this later to use the Bolt or resell it if you no longer need it.

 

Got the 4 lights flashing on my roamio couple of days ago. Pulled drive and hooked it to my computer and it seemed to spin up fine. Put it back in the roamio and it wasn't spinning up at all and the fan didn't want to turn. Tried my bolt power supply and the fan and drive both spun and the roamio booted up normal. So try another known good power supply to rule that out. I already placed an order for a new drive before finding it was just the power brick.

 

If you have a PC and want to pull the drive to test another good utility is SpinRite from Gibson Research

 

There is a slight chance you can save your recordings, but be sure NOT to try to put any other drive in that "dead" Bolt other than a clone of the current drive or you will guarantee that the recordings are lost.

There are two possibilities that might work in your favor:
1. Occasionally, the power supply will go bad and cause this problem - that is an easy fix.
2. Sometimes a drive will stop working in a Bolt, but still be readable on a computer. If this is your issue, it might be possible to clone the drive and still access your recordings on the Bolt.

FIRST, try another power supply - small chance, but it is occasionally the problem.

If the power supply does not fix it, then pull the drive out and use either a cloning dock to make an exact copy of the drive, OR use MFSTools to copy the drive to a new one. If the copy works, then the Bolt should boot up on the new copy and still have all the old recordings. That is a free utility, and very easy to use. You can find information on this in the Upgrade forum.

But just to repeat for emphasis: If you boot a Bolt from ANY other drive EXCEPT EITHER THE LAST ONE THAT WORKED OR AN EXACACT COPY/CLONE of that drive, you will NEVER be able to access the old recordings again, even if the drive is still readable!

 

I think spinrite is too old to help anymore.

I have not tried it, but have heard good things about DRevitalize:

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