[OMGWTF]

All,

New here, searched a bit but couldn't find much on my specific problem. On the early morning of 4/23, any season pass I have stopped recording. If I check the To-Do list, every season pass, shows 2 checkmarks ,but the next recording column shows "None scheduled".
-I tried adding a new season pass for a item I found on a local channel that was running in a few hours, and it saved it successfully, and still showed None scheduled in the To Do List.
-Deleting and recreating the same season passes did not fix
-If I find one of the shows in the guide it would normally record as a result of an existing season pass, it shows "this episode will not be recorded".
-Reviewing the "View Recording History" does not display a status for any of the season pass shows it is skipping.
-I probably have 20 or less season passes.
-I've changed the order of them, rebooted
-I've changed settings within some of them, rebooted
-I am able to schedule new single items manually, they record successfully.
All old recordings seem fine, it's like my DVR got stuck in a time loop

[resume]
I've had quite a history, if you want the full skinny read the bottom of the post.
I had been rebooting regularly for various troubleshooting and eventually it displayed an S03 in the connect status. I pressed enter at the channel list and went through the mini guided setup. It took at least 15 hours, but the Garbage Collection ran and schedule downloaded, and everything seems fine right now.

Does anyone know what I can do to fix a scheduling issue? have a preference to keep all the recordings I have. Thanks for your consideration in advance!

System details
TiVo Series3 HD (annual)
11.0n.K1-01-2-652
Service level valid 060518
Today's date Wed May 9 2018, 7:30pm
Program info to May 21, 2018
External eSATA WDC500 gb "WDBook" that was compatible with the TiVo at the time
Service Connection Last Success Tuesday, May 8 10:08pm
(attempt in progress)
GC Wednesday May 9 5:29am
Indexing Wednesday May 9 6:11pm
Guide View Cache to Monday May 14 11:30am
idle

[Full]
This DVR has been in action since mid 2008
it's in a open entertainment center so heat isn't an issue.
For the last few years I have been experiencing intermittent reboots, and it got more serious. As a electronics technician I finally opened it in the fall of 2017 expecting to see bulging caps on the power board. To my surprise they all looked perfect, and after reading around the next obvious culprit is the HD itself. I ran the kickstart for disk checking and SMART failed. I found DvrBARS on a forum and used the tool to image the internal drive to another 160GB drive I had around.
That fixed my stability issues immediately and everything worked, my shows were fine and everything returned to normal.

Fast forward to 4/23, season passes stopped recording. Everything else on the DVR works normally.
I thought maybe the 2nd 160GB drive was bad, I never did any testing with it. I setup a 250GB hard drive I had laying around and used the SEATOOLS utility to erase the hard drive and fully test the drive. I recaptured a new image from the 2nd 160GB drive with DvrBARS and pushed it to the 250GB drive, which worked as expected, but didn't fix my season pass issue.
At this point I had a good backup and I tried so many things, I deleted thumb ratings and suggestions (I have suggestions off anyways) which didn't help
I then finally decided to clear and delete season pass content, after documenting all my current season passes. Of course, it got stuck in a reboot loop, and nothing I did could save it - kickstart 57, 58, and 56 were all unsuccessful.
I rolled back to the 2nd 160GB, under the assumption that the disk itself is not the problem.
It booted successfully and eventually got an S03, which I was hoping maybe had been the root cause this whole time. Goto [resume] above for remainder of current state.

 

[HerronScott]

You can try Clear Program Information and ToDo List, but honestly if you are still paying annually for service after 10 years, I would go purchase a used Roamio Basic on eBay to move to newer hardware with some great new features - even if you don't pick one up with lifetime and stick with annual payments (we've only purchased lifetime and it's saved a lot of money since 2000!)

Scott

 

[OMGWTF]

I previously tried from the same image (laid down on the 250GB drive) to clear prog info and todo, which succeeded but didn't fix my problem. I eventually tried clear program and season pass which resulted in unbootable. Something must be pretty corrupt on my running image. It's slow overall and netflix is entirely unusable.

I read about thumb ratings slowing down the UI to near dysfunction, it's not useless but seems slower than I remember. I have found various thumb ratings over time and never considered it. I disabled suggestions long ago, but anything I recorded by default got 1 thumb, which adds up over time.
I feel pretty dumb after looking at craigslist after the last few weeks finding I can get a used lifetime Series3 HD for $100 or so. For years I've wished/lamented I bought lifetime service, but I was concerned at the time as to the longevity of the product and realizing value of the investment. Time makes fools of us all.

I found this other thread about buying used, i'm thinking i'll do some research and pick up a lifetime sub and replace with a 1-2TB and restart from scratch with spare S3HD as a parts donor for possible future issues. The S3 does what I need, but I'd be glad to get rid of the external eSATA and have more capacity overall.
Is There any Update on TiVo support of Series 3?

Thx for the insight, wish I checked this place out years ago, I'm sure I'd be a much happier camper by now.

 

[HerronScott]

I read about thumb ratings slowing down the UI to near dysfunction, it's not useless but seems slower than I remember. I have found various thumb ratings over time and never considered it. I disabled suggestions long ago, but anything I recorded by default got 1 thumb, which adds up over time.
I feel pretty dumb after looking at craigslist after the last few weeks finding I can get a used lifetime Series3 HD for $100 or so. For years I've wished/lamented I bought lifetime service, but I was concerned at the time as to the longevity of the product and realizing value of the investment. Time makes fools of us all.

I haven't seen any issues with thumb ratings in the 9 years with our S3 OLED's and we had Suggestions enabled so not sure I buy into any posts about that causing issues.

I was going to mention a used S3 with lifetime as the prices have really dropped but really at this point you could also get a Premiere with lifetime pretty cheap also which gets you some of the benefits of newer hardware (but not SkipMode which is Roamio or newer). With a used S3, you are bound to have power supply and hard drive issues at some point given the age unless you preemptively repair/replace both.

Are you cable or OTA?

Scott

 

[OMGWTF]

I'm still subscribed to cable with a multistream card installed. I do like being able to use kttmg to grab shows off the DVR, however the transfer rate is inherently slow on these models. I've not looked into the benefits of newer devices... The netflix function within the S3 is completely unusable from a speed perspective, however I've got about 3 other devices in the entertainment center that will do Netflix natively.

Can you pull shows off the DVR on newer models? At this point a yearly recurring fee, combined with a MCard fee and a tuning adapter fee averages out to a expensive monthly cost.

Drifting off topic, what is the tuning adapter used for? I find that I can't access many channels available to me (FXX for example) as it redirects to a tuning adapter gray screen. I saw an old post further down the threads from circa 2009 where someone mentioned something similar. I recently audited my channels and removed what didn't work, i found 20 or more that would retune to the tuning adapter screen when accessing the channel. However on a cable company provided DVR in the house those channels work fine.

 

[ggieseke]

All of the newer models support copying recordings from the TiVo to a computer.

Tuning adapters are for cable companies that use Switched Digital Video. The TA should be free upon request.

What is Switched Digital Video?

 

[OMGWTF]

Thanks ggieseke, sounds like a call and is in order to Charter Spectrum.

 

[OMGWTF]

LOL - I was out of town Thursday, Friday, and came home today and found new season pass related recordings from last night. Looking at the to-do schedule shows all the season passes scheduled properly now. Seems like things are working for the time being, I'll keep watching the todo for signs of the problem.

In the end all I can think of was fixing S03, and then letting it idle for several days.

Must have needed a vacation or something.

 

[sfhub]

LOL - I was out of town Thursday, Friday, and came home today and found new season pass related recordings from last night. Looking at the to-do schedule shows all the season passes scheduled properly now. Seems like things are working for the time being, I'll keep watching the todo for signs of the problem.

In the end all I can think of was fixing S03, and then letting it idle for several days.

Must have needed a vacation or something.

There is some memory/garbage collection issue on the old TiVos (S3 OLED in my case, but I'm sure TiVo HD is similar)

When you have large guide data downloads it can't complete the processing.

This happens more often when
1) you use a provider like Comcast with huge guide data sets. Comcast duplicates all their HD channels in the 1xxx channel number range, which is roughly 50% more guide data. I never had an S03 error until Comcast started with the overlaid channel #s. I've heard anecdotally that DirecTV users had S03 problems in the past on S2s
2) you lose connection for multiple days. Often your system can download and process the full guide data on the initial download, and then incrementally take care of one days data. However if you lose connection for a few days, the guide data set becomes larger and it triggers S03 error.

Sometimes if you get S03 error, you can connect over and over again giving about an hour to process some data and the connection will progress a few percentage further, and eventually complete.

Sometimes that doesn't work.

If it doesn't work, the best, and IMO only, way you should resolve is to do Clear Program Information and ToDo List. Other methods run a HIGH risk of getting into an S03 initial set up loop that you cannot exit until you complete the setup, which you can't because of the S03 error on initial setup. Your solution if get stuck in that loop is probably to reimage the drive.

As to your ToDo list, keep in mind this is likely a separate issue that is related to your S03 issue.

Sometimes when you are encountering an S03 issue, you might have network issues that caused the S03 issue to start with. This may have prevented your unit from connecting for a while, like 30 days, and your TiVo has become inactive (even if it had lifetime or annual) and that would cause your ToDo list to not record.

Another common problem is after you resolve your S03 error, your TiVo downloads and process a lot of guide data. Even after the network connection is still needs to process the data further to get your ToDo list working, so I would wait 24hrs before thinking there is a problem.

You can also sometimes short circuit the processing and get it to process the ToDo list quicker by changing the ordering of your Season Passes. Just move one entry up in the priority order and save. It should force reprocessing right away.

I only glanced at your posts quickly, but I think you are right and the S03 error was the cause of all your issues to start with.

As an aside, I have an S3 OLED that I connect once a month. It used to be configured for Comcast, but I could only get the initial guide download and then the next month to work. After that it would be stuck in S03 and then I would need to do Clear Program Information and ToDo List, which takes a long time.

I switched it from Comcast to OTA and with the smaller guide data sets, I've never had S03 errors again, no matter how long I go without guide data and no matter how many times it happens.

 

[Philtho]

Have the exact same problem on my HD since a few days ago.. No upcoming episodes for anything in my season pass, or any show whatsoever. My guide data is fine. If I do a search, no results for anything. It looks like maybe the guide data through the live display is fine, but possibly the database for the search/season passes is corrupt or empty or something. I don't know what. I guess I'll let it sit for a week and see if it fixes itself?

 

[OMGWTF]

I noticed yesterdaya few obvious shows weren't recording, and my todo list is empty again. Some severe storms rolled through last night and the tivo has rebooted... will check it when I get home tonight if anything is fixed.

Watch for an S03 error
I would also perform the manual garbage collection via channel up method.
Lastly, be ready to miss recordings of shows, if there is something you are dying to record, go set it manually. My issue lasted several weeks the first time.
I am going to rebuild it soon.

 

[OMGWTF]

To add back to what SFhub says, my digital cable being provided has 1 SD version of the channels and at least 2 of the HD channel I had gone through and manually tuned channels and removed them from the guide, but I'm sure that doesn't stop the tivo from downloading data for it.