Series 3, early model

Got it late 2006, series 3HD and had good luck with comcast S cards in Mtn View. Moved to Santa Clara and had to have M cards installed. Since then, everything described here has happened. Freezing, lagging, stuck, rebooting, chattering, losing HD channels, etc.

Can always get it back with an unplug, reseating cards, rebooting system - so far. May take a few times, but it works.

But latest issue is downloading HD video on demand from Amazon. Used to do it just fine, but IF it is recording HD channels, and I send a download to it from Amazon (on the computer) it acts up in various ways mentioned above. Now it won't even download.

Last call to TiVo support lasted 114 minutes!!!! And they said they ran out of troubleshooting to help with. This was the 4th call in two months and each person says something different.

The first person said they would swap out the machine because there was a software conflict in the early Series 3 models with the M cards.

Next person said signal was too high to get a splitter. Third person said splitter not necessary and to reseat cards.

4th person tried all kinds of things but was pretty new and had to get lots of support (translated means I was on hold a lot). Last thing was that they have done everything they can.

And I would have to buy a new or refrub unit and pay $199 to transfer my lifetime to the new unit. Or I could send it to Weaknees for repair. Repair of what? And then he told me that since I've had the lifetime subscription since 2000 I should be grateful for having it for so long......

That just made me annoyed beyond belief. If it is a software conflict between the early 3 units and the M cards, that is not my fault. And comcast does not give out S cards in our area anymore.

Honestly, how long should a unit last? And why, now, during such a bad economic time, would TiVo not want to keep long time customers happy? Just because I was savvy enough to buy each new unit when they had a special to keep rolling my lifetime script forward does not mean I should be grateful I had it for so long! ACK.

Suggestions? Is it a hard drive issue? Is it an M card/unit incompatibility? Why won't the HD downloads from Amazon work like the regular downloads?

Basically, you should assume that anything recorded after you connected your external will be lost when you disconnect it.

Yes, if your external is bad, then the unit should work fine after you disconnect it.

Thanks Michael. If you had to guess, how many of my old programs are even partially on the external? It seems I have a choice - I either try to watch the old stuff or risk losing it all. In general, does the TiVo use the internal HD first and only move to the external when all the space on the internal is gone?

Does the TiVo store all the information about the programs in some sort of file table on the internal?

If it is a bad HD, why is there not an error during the recording of the show? Why does the TiVo have all the information about a complete show yet freeze after only two minutes?

If there is a chance the TiVo will operate fine without the external, I might be able to make it through the time it takes to exchange the external but I have to risk losing all the programs on the external to find out, right?

Since your problems sound like hard drive failure, I'd recommend disconnecting the external and divorcing it from the internal. This can all be done on-screen. You'll lose any show that was at least partially recorded on the external drive.

Then, if you have no problems, you've got a bad external. I'm a bit surprised by how often we're seeing that external WD fail. It's not a drive we've carried, so we don't have a ton of experience with it.

Of course, if you still have problems, that points to your internal drive, a we have replacement internal hard drives for the Series3 TiVo. Just note that any drive larger than the 250 won't see your external without some work by us with both drives.

Series 3 HD Rebooting

I've read the thread, but I'll explain my issue and let the experts point me in the right direction and save me a lot of time and frustration.

My S3 HD TiVo was bought 11/2007. I added and WD DVR expander in 2008 and up to now have had absolutely no problems. Comcast is my provider and I have 2 cable cards in the unit.

The problems started with shows that were recorded last Thursday. When I started watching these shows on the weekend, the reboot problem reared it's ugly head.

The show appears to have been recorded. It shows up in the list, the program info is listed and it says 1 hour was recorded. When the program starts it shows a full hour of green bar available. At some point in the show, the picture freezes, the unit waits for several minutes (the unit responds to nothing from the remote) then reboots. On several shows this has happened at about the two minute mark, but on another it was 15 to 20 minutes into the show. There is no pixallation, no stuttering, no warnings up to the second it freezes.

Upon reboot, the show is still in the list, I can go back and the exact same thing will happen at the exact same point. This happens whether I am watching the show at regular speed or fast forwarding the show.

I can watch shows that were recorded before last Thursday, but it seems everything from that point forward is affected. I don't think my HD is near full but just in case I deleted about 10 hours of HD programming. Unfortunately, last night the exact same thing happened to "House" when I tried to watch it.

I've seen suggestions about the eSata cable, disconnecting the external expander, running kickstart diagnostics, and more. What would be the most logical thing to do and in what order?

I'd love to keep my shows so options that allow that are appreciated but I have also begun the grieving process in anticipation of their deletion.

Even live TV is always buffered through the hard drive.

But the rebooting issue probably means you have a bad hard drive, so that's the obvious place to start.

My TiVo is pausing and pixelating. It is hard to tell if it a my cable provider or TiVo. When I am live, and current up to the second, I do not see the same pixelation. I have had the Cable company come out several times. How do I differentiate the prognosis? Is it cable or is my TiVo finally dying? Last night it rebooted on its own, after I did a reboot hours before.

Series 2

Scratch that, it seems to still restart regardless. I guess I'll try it without the cable card.

My Tivo restarts constantly. Sometimes it restarts when watching live tv, when watching recorded shows, when turning on the television, when I'm not even watching it, when I'm watching Netflix, when I'm streaming music from my computer - the long and short of it is, it always restarts, regardless of what I'm doing. I got Tivo to send me another box, and this one does the same thing. I have a Sony LCD TV, hooked up via HDMI, with a cablecard.

I just moved to another apartment and was hoping that might fix things. After moving, the Tivo was hooked up just to power, and didn't seem to restart at all. Then the cable guys came and hooked up my cable and internet, but I held off before connecting the Tivo to the network. Everything seemed to work fine. Finally, I was about to paint my apartment and decided I wanted to stream music to my television. I hooked up the ethernet, began navigating menus, and it rebooted.

Why could my network be causing my Tivo to reboot, and how can I stop it? I read that Bonjour can cause this, but I've turned that off in iChat (I use a Mac), and that hasn't seemed to help. Plus, I was never able to replicate a restart by logging in/out of Bonjour. I really need the ethernet to work, it was the main reason I picked the Tivo over the cable service's DVR. Any ideas?

I also suffered from TiVo HD S3 reboots and was finally able to solve the problem. I skimmed through all posts in this thread but it doesn't seem as if anybody touched on what worked in my case.

In my case, TiVo rebooted roughly once every two weeks or so when I powered on my TV. This was always the case, from the first day that I had TiVo. But because it happened so infrequently I just lived with it.

Then about 3 weeks ago I added an external drive to my TiVo. The drive was recognized and worked fine. Except now TiVo would reboot every single time when I turn on my TV. My TV happens to be a Sony XBR60. In my search for a solution, I noticed that this seems to happen a lot with people that have large Sony projection TVs.

Long story short, the cause of this is two-fold:

1) TiVo is extremely sensitive to RFI (radio frequency interference)
2) Sony TVs especially sends out a large EMP when it is turned on. Not enough to fry advancing alien ships but enough to scramble TiVo's little brain.
3) Adding an external drive adds an additional "antenna" that feeds directly into TiVo's circuitry, making TiVo just that much more susceptible to external RFI.

After a lot of troubleshooting and being led down the wrong path multiple times by red herrings (ie, disconnecting the cable input made the problem go away, it must be the external drive, etc) I finally just moved the TiVo from under the TV to next to the TV, and since then I have not had a single reboot.

BitFlipper

That pretty clearly sounds like a bad expander, no? Otherwise, maybe a bad eSATA cable?

same issue,new expander didn't help

I went a month without the random reboot after disconnecting the expander.

I go the new one.... green screen 3 days later......

If you find any solution, I'd love to know..

Rebooting problem

I recently started having problems with rebooting as well. It started about the time that got the Cisco STA1520 SDV box so I attributed the reboots to that after reading some posts in another thread here.

One afternoon I went to check on when the next connection was going to happen and the screen showed that the next update was scheduled for a time that had already passed that morning. Shortly thereafter my S3 hung up and rebooted. After the reboot I went back checked the time again, this time it displayed a connection was scheduled for the next day.

I can't be sure if this is a cause or a symptom but from programming experience I've seen errors like this cause a crash if not handled properly.

Thanks for the input Jeff. I finally was able to get my hands on a SATA to USB adapter to run the WD Diagnostic. Turns out, the program quit halfway through the extended test because there were too many bad sectors. I plan to upgrade to a new hard drive ASAP now!

Thanks for the help!

I don't think there is an easy, quick answer. I'd start by testing your drive. See:

http://www.wkforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9