[janctil]

I purchased a tivo series 2 140GB harddrive about a year and a half ago, and at least once a week for the past 4-6 weeks, my wife will be in the now playing list and the tivo box freezes and refuses to respond to the remote. Unfortunately, this normally happens when the box is recording, so I have to wait until it stops recording and then unplug the tivo box to recover it.
When the box start to boot up, it goes into the 'installing service update' screen. The software version has not been updated in 6-8 months.
I do have the box attached to my PC using the tivo desktop software (version 2.4, I believe).

Any help would be greatly appreciated, since my wife want to throw the tivo boxes and the directv reciever off the balcony!

 

[jtreid]

With the S2 box freezing, my guess would be that hard drive. I know it's difficult to believe that it only lasted a year and a half, but that's probably your case. The fact that it keeps trying to install an update when none is occurring sounds like something is going wrong during the install.

Maybe one of the gurus can pipe in with a method to perform the GSOD disk scan. That may be able to correct the disk problem. If it doesn't, try a new drive.

 

[jtreid]

On second thought, you may want to check out this thread.
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=342600