That's most likely your hard drive, but you should pull the CableCARDs and Wifi adapter and try to boot again to just rule those out.

OK, thanks. I have been able to get everything to work for as much as an hour or so before it goes back into reboot mode.

Have already done a reboot without the adapter, had no affect. Just did the SMART tests and they all passed. Doing the overnight test now, and when that's done I'll try pulling the cablecards. (Would be nice if they were the culprit, since it would give me an excuse to get Cablevision out here with an M card to replace the two S cards and save me a few bucks!)

Removed the cable cards, but the unit began to reboot again right in the middle of Guided Setup (as it was downloading program info). Presume it's the hard drive. Sigh. Will order an upgrade kit.

I assume I remove the cable cards and set up with the new drive before adding the cable cards back in? THanks.

Tivo keeps resetting

Along with everyone else my series 3 loves to reset!! I bought an original Tivo long ago and had it working for 5 years without issue. Since we wanted to stream netflix we were forced to buy the latest model which lead me to the series 3. Ever since we've had nothing but reset after reset after reset.

The original box was okay for the first 2 months and then started having problems. At first it was a reset here or there and was easy to ignore. Eventually it stopped fast forwarding, would reset more and more and would gray out channels (and the only way to bring them back was to reset). We called Tivo and we got a replacement box.

Replacement box number 1 worked for about a month and then it started having the same issues. I dealt with them for 3 additional months and then couldnt take the resets every 10 to 20 minutes so I was forced to return it and get another replacement box.

Replacement box number 2 worked good for about 2 weeks when I noticed the first reset. And now, 4 months later I cant even watch TV on it because within 5 minutes it resets. Ive contacted Tivo and they have absolutely no advice. Their only suggestion is that the power strip was causing the issues. Well we plugged it straight into the wall and still had issues and then bought an UPS and still had reset issues. We do not use cable cards as they are not needed (we just have basic and expanded cable, no HD channels). I also dont feel its a heat problem as the box sits on top of our entertainment center in the open air and is not in a cabinet...it should have ample air circulation.

I've read post after post in this forum where you say "its probably a bad hard drive", but really can all three of my boxes have had bad hard drives? Any ideas?

You might want to check with your cable company about the quality and/or strength of your incoming signal. TiVo can help give you an idea as to whether your signal is too high or too low.

Well, *MINE* turned out to be the hard drive. Replaced it and everything's working fine. Losing my recordings wasn't nearly as much a pain as losing all my settings and season passes, though!

Reboot problem on Tivo HD XL

Hi there,

I'm having what seems to be a similar problem to the above posters. My system would reboot once or twice a week. This progressed to once a day and is now happening several times a day. I do not have any other symptoms. The problem seems more pronounced when the Tivo is trying to record two HD channels at once. It also seems to occur if I haven't used the tivo for several hours and then use the remote to either go to the now playing menu or to watch live TV. I ran all of the hard drive tests and they all passed except for the overnight one which my wife accidently interrupted. I also removed the cablecard, reran the system set-up, reinstalled the cablecard, and rereran the sytem set-up, to no avail.

I haven't called tivo tech support yet as all of the message boards seem to agree that would be a fruitless endeavor. I'm considering buying a 2 TB drive and replacing it myself. Is there anything else I should try before doing that?

Thanks for any help in advance

Brian

That does sound like a hard drive problem, but you could potentially get confirmation by trying a kickstart 54:

http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-kickstart-hd-tests.php

Hi everybody! I'm new here, though I've got many years logged over in the TiVo Community Forum, AVS Forum, etc.

Anyway, I'm here because I am troubleshooting a S3 for a friend. I'm kind of on-the-hook for it since I sold it to them about 6 months ago. I had it connected to an antenna only, but they are using cable cards. Not that long ago, it developed a problem with pixellated recordings and/or Live TV, and then the entire menu structure became unresponsive.

This sounded like a bad hard drive to me, so I dropped a new one in there, using WinMFS to copy the old drive. That fixed the menu problem, but then I found the machine was rebooting itself exactly 2 minutes and 20 seconds after it started up and the main menu appeared!

In troubleshooting this, I decided to re-do Guided Setup since I do NOT have cable here, so there's no way for me to feed it the signal it is looking for. Once I re-did setup using antenna only, it works fine ... good as new.

So my question is, do you think that once the cable signal is connected again, it will stop the reboot cycle? Or maybe I need to redo Guided Setup with the cable connected?

Any tips or tricks appreciated!

My guess is that you have some software corruption in the OS, and that a drive formatted with a fresh OS would fix the problem. Hard to know until you try, but that's the first thing I'd try.

Thanks Michael! That's kind of what I thought too, but I figured I would try the drive-copy method first as it would save a few bucks. The only thing that is not setting right with my brain right now is why the OS works fine once I set it to "antenna only?" I would think if the OS was corrupted, everything would be hosed.

Well, I'm going to take it back to its home later this afternoon, connect it back to the cable and see what happens. If that doesn't work, I'll re-do Guided Setup while connected to cable. And if THAT doesn't work, then I'll wipe the drive and install the OS from scratch.

It could be that some of the libraries that deal with CableCARDs are corrupted and that the rest of the OS is just fine.

Wow, I appreciate your quick response! I guess this is just indicative of the great service WeaKnees provides. I've bought a number of things from you guys and the experience has always been top-notch!

One other question if I may: If I have to reinstall a fresh OS, what happens with the cable cards? Will Comcast have to come back out to do anything, or should they just work? Wondering what kind of a monster this will unleash.

These days, most CableCARDs just work after a reinstall with a fresh image.

If not, you can generally just call the cable company, provide them with the new Host ID, and they'll re-authorize the cards immediately.

Well, I hooked it up to cable this afternoon and while it ran longer between reboots (about 20 minutes, vs 2 with no signal), it's still hosed. Just purchased and loaded a fresh image -- running it through Guided Setup right now for antenna only (as that's all I have). Assuming it works, I'll take it over to my friend's house this weekend, hook it back up to cable, run Guided Setup again and hope for the best. If that doesn't fix it, I'm out of ideas. It would almost certainly have to be cable card related at that point, as it works fine with antenna only.