OK - tell us how it goes.

Will do. Works great with just the antenna -- as good as the day it came out of the box.

OK, I think we have a winner here. I brought the Series 3 back to its owner and connected it up to cable. Started it up, went through Guided Setup and inserted the cable cards when prompted. I got a warning that the cards would need to be authorized, but I just continued through the setup -- when it was finished, it was working! Cables channels were received on both tuners; no reboots; all seemed normal.

The only thing out of the ordinary is that her premium channels don't come in -- you get the gray cable card info screen on those channels. I'm guessing the cards just need a reauthorization hit or something like that -- she's going to give Comcast a call later.

Anyway, bottom-line ... I think the new drive and fresh image did the trick! Thanks for your help!

Sounds great! Yup - I think once they re-hit the CableCARDs, you'll be all set.

Continuous Reboot

I have a Series 3 that just started to continuously reboot. It will boot all the way up, but I only have about 10-20 seconds before it reboots.

I've run Kickstart 54 and it passes all the tests. Is there something else I can try?

It reboots and passed the overnight tests? Then I'd try a new power supply:

http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-power-supply.php

but it may be a motherboard issue.

Same thing started happening to my Series 3 as well. I bought it right when they were released.

Rebooting maybe once an hour. When it comes back up, menus are slow, remote is slow to respond, but video plays ok.

It has lifetime so I want to find the cheapest way to fix it to possibly sell it and buy a new Premiere.

What is likely the cause? Hard drive?

-smak-

That's almost definitely a hard drive problem. A "replace" kit for your model should fix the problem:

http://www.weaknees.com/s325.php

I unplugged my ota antenna and everything springs back to life. Plug it back on and everything goes nuts again. And the video is all choppy.

I ran the first drive test and it passed, so now I'm running the overnight one.

I ran kickstart 57, but it ran for like 15 minutes and then restarted. .

Endless "Powering Up" with cablecard #2

My Tivo S3 is stuck in the endless "powering up" phase. In an attempt to fix I replaced the hard drive -- which didn't solve the problem. So I restarted the Tivo without the cablecards and was able to run guided setup. After much trial and error, I can get the machine working as long as I only use a one cablecard (slot 1). The minute I install the second cablecard the unit goes back into the endless "powering up."

Any suggestions? Do I need a new cablecard for slot 2? Thank you.

Possibly. You might also want to ask the cable company if they have a multi-stream cablecard.

Broken or Comcast issue?

Tivo series 3 has been working fine for almost 3 years. All of the sudden it froze up on Welcome screen. I reconnected the box on a new TV to try and trouble shoot and it seemed to be working. In the meantime I had ordered a replacement drive. After installing the new drive all seemed fine. Now tonight it is slow to respond. Live tv is cutting in and out and it rebooted on its own. Are the Cablecards really the problem here or is the box/drive just a piece of junk?

Our 2 year old S3 Tivo with lifetime service has been rebooting intermittently for a few weeks. We thought we had it fixed with a software update, but after several days of no problems it is now stuck in an endless reboot loop. We have accepted the fact that it needs a new drive, but I have a few questions I was hoping someone could help me with. This unit had the 20hour HD internal drive, so we added a 500 gb external drive for space. As we went through troubleshooting, we thought the external drive might be the problem, so we tried having the Tivo boot without it, knowing that we would lose our shows. It kicked out of the process of removing the drive in seconds and reentered the reboot loop, so we know it's the internal drive that needs replacing. My question is, if we replace the internal with a WK 1TB internal, can we safely reuse the external drive on another Tivo? We have one HD S3 box that is still attached to a standard def TV, so we never added storage, but we are upgrading that TV soon and would like to reuse the external drive. My second question is, if we can and do use the external drive on the other box, will it automatically reformat when we attach it, or do we need to do anything to clear the drive first?

You can't re-use the external on this same box if you put in a larger internal. The external will only work with a stock sized internal, which is why we still sell the 250GB drive for that one model.

But you can just plug it into the other unit - all the rest is on-screen.

So we'd recommend getting a 1 TB drive for this unit, and moving the external to the other.

TiVo Reboots = Signal Strength?

TiVo S-3 constant reboots. Sometimes runs OK for an hour or so. Runs great if the incoming cable line is disconnected from the TiVo.

Called TiVo. They had me go to Cablecard Diagnostics and look at:

SNR = 36 dB on both cards
Signal Strength jumps back and forth between 95 and 100

They said the signal is too strong and to get an attenuator from Radio Shack.

Called Time Warner and the tech who came said the signal is fine. And he didn't know what the 95 and 100 stood for (no parameters.) While he was here, he saw no Corrected nor Uncorrected Errors on the Tivo unit nor on the TW DVR that is also on that input line.

He went online and googled S-3 reboots. In 2007 a forum said to redo guided setup for each cablecard and then for both together. That it happens after a power failure. I did have a power failure a week before, but I don't know how long it lasted.

Does that make sense?
Is the signal really too strong?

Any advice?
Thanks, cb