I understand this is pure conspiracy theory, but you never know...
I was on TE4 for a few weeks and I had a series of hardware failures / replacement cycles with my Bolts using a particular model of hard drive. The hardware failure would occur during power down/power up and the lights indicating it was a SATA port failure on each failure. I went through 3-4 Bolts in a couple of months. In each case I tried multiple drives, including the original drive, to try to recover the failed Bolt, but the SATA port was fried in each case. I first thought it was just bad luck with the hardware, then I thought it was a bad power supply (TiVO replaced), I then suspected it might have been the drive and switched to a different hard drive but same model. Right after the final Tivo replacement and one last drive replacements, Tivo started failing to detect the drive from boot after a software upgrade, not the normal hardware failure. Then after consulting the forum I saw others started to see the same TE4 upgrade affecting boot up with certain drives. I reverted back to TE3 and found the drive was still working yet would then not boot each time I returned to TE4.
It could be bad luck on my part, but I suspect Tivo found a condition where there is an electrical failure during the TE4 boot up sequence with certain drives once they examined all my returned hardware. Also, within a month or two TiVo started blocking almost every drive model I was using. Each exhibited the same issue of working on TE3 but not TE4.
Also... these drives were working on TE3 for over a year. The Bolt hardware failures only started when I initially upgraded to TE4.
I was on TE4 for a few weeks and I had a series of hardware failures / replacement cycles with my Bolts using a particular model of hard drive. The hardware failure would occur during power down/power up and the lights indicating it was a SATA port failure on each failure. I went through 3-4 Bolts in a couple of months. In each case I tried multiple drives, including the original drive, to try to recover the failed Bolt, but the SATA port was fried in each case. I first thought it was just bad luck with the hardware, then I thought it was a bad power supply (TiVO replaced), I then suspected it might have been the drive and switched to a different hard drive but same model. Right after the final Tivo replacement and one last drive replacements, Tivo started failing to detect the drive from boot after a software upgrade, not the normal hardware failure. Then after consulting the forum I saw others started to see the same TE4 upgrade affecting boot up with certain drives. I reverted back to TE3 and found the drive was still working yet would then not boot each time I returned to TE4.
It could be bad luck on my part, but I suspect Tivo found a condition where there is an electrical failure during the TE4 boot up sequence with certain drives once they examined all my returned hardware. Also, within a month or two TiVo started blocking almost every drive model I was using. Each exhibited the same issue of working on TE3 but not TE4.
Also... these drives were working on TE3 for over a year. The Bolt hardware failures only started when I initially upgraded to TE4.
