TiVo Premier Won't Start

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TiVo started giving me issues, so I believed that the hard drive was faulty again. Copied disk image to new hard drive from a working existing hard drive ( not the one I believed was faulty ) and tried to start the Tivo with the new drive. TiVo goes to initial start screen, then goes to black screen, then goes to no signal on the television.

Tried booting the TiVo again with the working for a drive that contains the disk image. Tivo does the same thing, goes to initial start screen then goes to black screen then go to no signal.

Put the working disk image drive in a second TiVo and the TiVo started without issue. Therefore I believe the issue is not the hard drive, but something else inside the TiVo. What could be causing this problem and is it an easy fix? The problem TiVo has lifetime service, the second Premier does not. I'm not afraid to sacrifice the second Premier to get the first one with the lifetime service to work if necessary.

 

I tried exchanging the HDMI Cable for RCA cables in case it was the HDMI port. No Luck. I get the initial start up screen, then it quits to black screen. And the drive is confirmed working drive.

 

I doubt it is the power supply since the TiVo starts up. I get the initial splash screen. After a few minutes splash screen goes away, the screen goes black, in the TV registers no signal. The TiVo appears to remain on with the green circle lit. Motherboard may be an option. If that is fried however, there is no way to save my lifetime subscription, is there?

 

I just put the good power supply into the suspect Tivo with the same net effect. I put the power supply from the suspect TiVo into the known working TiVo and it started just fine.

 

Yeah...not really keen on sinking $70 ($50 in diagnostic, $20 for shipping) into this older Tivo and then adding in whatever it costs for them to do the repair. Probably looking at closer to $100 to $150 when everything is said an done. Not sure if that is a worth while investment. I'd be willing to try to desolder/solder myself since I have the parts from the extra unit if I knew which parts to switch out, but it might be time to just move on.