Tivo Series 2 Drive light stays on

One of the pets must have hit the on/off switch on the power strip
last night. After repowering, the Tivo shows:

The power light is on;

The disk/recording light is on continuously;

The remote (fresh batteries) doesn't cause the flicker on the Tivo
power light when pressing any button (tried the DVR1-2 switch);

No video signal to the TV.

I left it unplugged for a few hours and got the same results.

Maybe a chip cooled off after years of being at operating temperature
and cracked?

Is this thing toast?

Maybe a chip cooled off after years of being at operating temperature
and cracked?

Or a cable from the motherboard to the drive worked loose. Crack the case,
tighten the cables and fire it back up again. Leave the case open a listen
to the noises the drive makes. If it's anything other than the usual random
noises (like a fixed click/retry sound) then I'd wonder about the health of
the drive. If it's the drive then pickup a CD from ptvupgrades and prep a
brand new one to replace it. Or get one ready-made from weaknees.com or
other suppliers if you're squeamish about shuffling the drive to/from a PC
and juggling the steps to boot from a CD to prep it.

-Bill Kearney

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:57:02 -0400, "Bill Kearney"
wrote:

Maybe a chip cooled off after years of being at operating temperature
and cracked?

Or a cable from the motherboard to the drive worked loose. Crack the case,
tighten the cables and fire it back up again. Leave the case open a listen
to the noises the drive makes. If it's anything other than the usual random
noises (like a fixed click/retry sound) then I'd wonder about the health of
the drive. If it's the drive then pickup a CD from ptvupgrades and prep a
brand new one to replace it. Or get one ready-made from weaknees.com or
other suppliers if you're squeamish about shuffling the drive to/from a PC
and juggling the steps to boot from a CD to prep it.

-Bill Kearney


Thanks, Bill. I'll open it up and report back.

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:06:47 -0400, R Brickston
[email protected] wrote:

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:57:02 -0400, "Bill Kearney"
wrote:

Maybe a chip cooled off after years of being at operating temperature
and cracked?

Or a cable from the motherboard to the drive worked loose. Crack the case,
tighten the cables and fire it back up again. Leave the case open a listen
to the noises the drive makes. If it's anything other than the usual random
noises (like a fixed click/retry sound) then I'd wonder about the health of
the drive. If it's the drive then pickup a CD from ptvupgrades and prep a
brand new one to replace it. Or get one ready-made from weaknees.com or
other suppliers if you're squeamish about shuffling the drive to/from a PC
and juggling the steps to boot from a CD to prep it.

-Bill Kearney


Thanks, Bill. I'll open it up and report back.

OK. Opened the case, blew out all the dust, checked the battery which
read 2.5 volts.

Powered it up, the disk drive whirred steadily, but made no clicking
sounds that you would expect, at least if it was a PC starting up. All
cables looked intact. Is the drive toast?

Powered it up, the disk drive whirred steadily, but made no clicking
sounds that you would expect, at least if it was a PC starting up. All
cables looked intact. Is the drive toast?

The drives are configured to work in a 'quiet' mode, at least some of them
are/were. So they're pretty darned silent. But a drive that's
failing/failed will generally make more noise than you'd expect.

Your next step is to put the drive in PC and run a diagnostic on it. This
will mean yanking the drive from the Tivo, changing it's jumper settings and
booting from a linux CD. DO NOT CONNECT IT TO A PC RUNNING XP. Or, more
accurately, don't have it connected to a PC that boots into XP, you don't
want XP's drive software to put a signature on it (which is fine for a
regular drive, but bad for the Tivo part). If you're just running
diagnostics then it's probably best to boot the PC from a floppy with only
the Tivo drive connected. That way you don't risk anything. If the
diagnostic doesn't report errors there's still the chance that the software
on the drive has gotten corrupted. But this is usually a precursor to a
drive failure anyway. So it's often a good idea to go buy a new drive, load
up the Tivo software on it (from a boot CD bought from a place like
ptvupgrades) and just discard the old drive. If you go this route make sure
you buy a drive that's got a decent warranty. Most retail drives come with
a 3 or 5 year warranty. That doesn't mean the drive will last that long,
just that you won't have to BUY another one during that timeframe. Don't go
cheap and get an OEM drive that doesn't have a warranty or one with only a
year (like crappy maxtors).

And if you're hestitant about screwing with reformatting/reloading drives
you could just buy one with everything already loaded from weakness or other
providers. You just put the new drive in the case and it's ready to go.

But if you DO decide to setup things yourself give consideration to loading
up the network hacks and such from the Tivo zipper CD. The single best
feature is the ability to hit a web page on the Tivo and pull a backup of
the season passes. Helps a lot to do this periodically. That way if/when
the next drive dies you won't have to manually load up the passes again,
just zipper it and use tivoweb to restore the previously backed up passes.
And no, you can't back them up if the drive is already failed.

-Bill Kearney