I have a Series 3 that was dead upon return from vacation. All lights on the front were on. When I power cycle it displays "Powering On" and after about 20 seconds I get a gray screen with no further boot progress. The drive is a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar. I can hear the drive spin-up and I can attach to a Win7 box and it is recognized. I have also installed the original drive that came with the Tivo and it boots normally. Given this info I expect the hard drive has been corrupted but before I order a replacement drive from Weaknees I just want to make sure I am not missing something.

That really does sound like a good diagnosis.

On the first Series3 models (TCD648250B) we do see a lot of failing power supplies also at this point. So you might want to check that - see this page:

http://www.weaknees.com/bps

Thanks.. All caps looks good. Drive ordered.

OK - post back if you have any problems!

I have a Tivo HD (model TCD652160). I was having a problem similar to what sdurrill posted in april - I would get powering up for 10-20 seconds then gray screen and nothing. Sounded like a dead hard drive so I got a replacement drive kit - tivo working again. Followed some guides I found online and decided to do a backup just incase this drive dies so I can buy any generic drive and load the image myself. I backed it up with Win MFS http://www.mfslive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=976. After I did the backup on the new drive I noticed they had a "repair option" in that program so I tried it on my original drive and wouldnt you know now it boots up just fine.

So.... the old drive I bought in January 2013 to upgrade my capacity. Its only 2 years old so I know its possible it is starting to have issues, but im wondering if the drive may be fine and do I need this new drive I just bought (should I return and get my $130 back)? Is there a way to test wether or not the old drive is really starting to have issues or not really a good way to know and better safe than sorry?

I feel like maybe trying it and return the old one and now that I have learned about win MFS even if it dies another few months from now I can just buy a generic drive for $50 and restore the image myself....

Your thoughts?

You can certainly do the kickstart 54 test on the old drive:

http://www.weaknees.com/54

Try the "overnight" test.

Hi Michael, My father's Series 3 stopped working, where it could go to the Tivo menu but not move in it, and eventually reboot itself. I looked over the PS caps and the look fine (I had replaces a few a while back). I did the overnight test and he tells me it failed. Does all this line up as a bad drive?

Yes - if you get a "failed" message, then you definitely have a bad drive.

Replacement kits are here:

http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-upgrade.php

Hello! We have a TiVo premiere from 2010 with the original internal hard drive and a Western Digital My DVR Extender 1 TB eSATA external hard drive. It has worked great until a few days ago, when it developed a terrible stutter while showing recorded or buffered programming (works fine with live tv). It has rapidly become unwatchable. Rebooting temporarily clears the problem. I have used kickstart codes 54, 57, and 58, and every time I run 54, it tells me that both drives have failed the second, third, and fourth SMART tests (the fifth test takes several hours and I saw no point in letting it finish). Primary drive = fail 4, secondary drive = fail 7. The TiVo is on a UPS and since it works fine for live tv, we assume this is not a power-related problem.

My husband and I are geeks so we extracted the drive from within the My DVR housing, and he's running disk utilities against the drive from a computer to see if the drive really has errors and if they can be handled more gracefully. We are assuming that the drives are toast and we may not get any existing recordings back from them. We would be fine with just blocking out any bad sectors and fixing any other problems, then putting the drives back and starting from scratch.

Unfortunately, the scan is taking FOREVER and we don't have any idea why. It seems to be intermittent; it speeds up (maybe 1 megabyte per second) and then it slows down (8 kilobytes per second!) with no obvious pattern, and it has not yet reported any errors. There is no way we can scan both drives in less than months. Has anyone else run into this problem? Should we simply give up and replace this TiVo at least temporarily with our other TiVo (which I've also run diagnostics on and it passed with flying colors)? Do these symptoms indicate some other problem that we haven't thought of? Any clues would be appreciated. Thanks much!

I can't say I've seen that problem - the slow scanning.

We use a similar version of the WD utility here, assuming you downloaded the utility from the website, and it runs speedily enough.

Maybe the SMART errors are causing the slow reads?

Thanks for your reply. We too were guessing that the SMART errors were causing the reading to be so slow. Even at 1 megabyte per second, it would take months to scan the entire 1 TB drive, so we've abandoned that. We have a second TiVo that we don't use much, so I'm in the middle of getting it set up in place of the first one.

Thanks for your help!

I should add that we've never seen a drive that fails the SMART tests, or any other kickstart tests, work reliably ever again. So that's enough for us to consider it a failure.

I ran the WD QUICK TEST and it passed. Does that mean my HD is ok and the problem is something else. The problem is on a Roamio Plus all I get is flashing blue and red lights on front panel. The fan doesn't work or anything else.

You really should do the extended test before concluding that the hard drive is OK.