# Need advice on Tivo Drive upgrade seller on eBay



## Thos19

Hi,

I have a problem I hope the community can help me with. Back in March, I found this auction:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320640612124&ssPageName=ADME:X:RTQ:US:1123

It was for a 2TB upgrade drive for my Series 3 OLED. I e-mailed the seller (uoph) and asked if he would accept $160 (as opposed to asking price of $169.90). He said yes and sent me an invoice through Paypal. I received the drive and installed without issue.

This month the drive started failing (reboot loop: original stock drive still works fine when swapped out). The original and current auction promised a 3 year manufacturer warranty and their guarantee section promised: "We will work with you to cover any issues under manufacturer warranty and will exchange the drive if required."

I have tried to contact the seller numerous times, through e-mail, Paypal mail, and eBay mail. I have not received any response. EBay and Paypal could not help me as the sale was six months ago. EBay did give me his contact phone number, but when I called it, the person who answered said they had no idea what I was talking about and I must have the wrong phone number.

It is odd that they won't respond as their seller rating is near 100% and the auction listing also offers Tivo repair service.

I realize that I am probably out the $160, but if anyone can offer any insight to this seller and/or advice, it would sincerely be appreciated.

Tom


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## magnus

Well, they have 48 good feedback ratings for the past month. So, I would think they are still selling on eBay. I guess you can ask them every day through eBay until they finally answer. You can wait till you see more auctions from them and be sure to ask about it until they answer there. 

Or you can go to the drive manufacturer and see if they will replace it. Or you can write it off. 

It could also be that the drive is okay but the TiVo software has got corrupted on it and you just need to reimage.


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## cannonz

Have you checked your spam folder?


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## magnus

cannonz said:


> Have you checked your spam folder?


That's true. LOL


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## Thos19

cannonz said:


> Have you checked your spam folder?


Yeah...I've been checking that too. 

I'll keep trying. Given they are still active with positive feedback, it is strange
they wouldn't respond (if for nothing else than to offer to repair for a fee).

Thos.


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## lillevig

Thos19 said:


> Hi,
> 
> I have a problem I hope the community can help me with. Back in March, I found this auction:
> 
> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320640612124&ssPageName=ADME:X:RTQ:US:1123
> 
> It was for a 2TB upgrade drive for my Series 3 OLED. I e-mailed the seller (uoph) and asked if he would accept $160 (as opposed to asking price of $169.90). He said yes and sent me an invoice through Paypal. I received the drive and installed without issue.
> 
> This month the drive started failing (reboot loop: original stock drive still works fine when swapped out). The original and current auction promised a 3 year manufacturer warranty and their guarantee section promised: "We will work with you to cover any issues under manufacturer warranty and will exchange the drive if required."
> 
> I have tried to contact the seller numerous times, through e-mail, Paypal mail, and eBay mail. I have not received any response. EBay and Paypal could not help me as the sale was six months ago. EBay did give me his contact phone number, but when I called it, the person who answered said they had no idea what I was talking about and I must have the wrong phone number.
> 
> It is odd that they won't respond as their seller rating is near 100% and the auction listing also offers Tivo repair service.
> 
> I realize that I am probably out the $160, but if anyone can offer any insight to this seller and/or advice, it would sincerely be appreciated.
> 
> Tom


If you can't get a replacement from them, then I would suggest at least pulling the drive and running the manufacturer's long test. If it tests good, then try re-imaging the drive. I've had that fix drives on boxes I've gotten where the seller was sure the drive was going bad. The Upgrade Forum has a thread where you can find a link to the image you need and the WinMFS or MFSLive software is free,


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## Thos19

Hi lillevig,

I have used WInMFS & MFSLive in the past. The problem with my situation is that 2TB drive upgrades are rare. There are only two vendors who have apparently figured out how to break the 1TB (1.3TB?) upgrade limit for the S3 OLED. That's the only reason I dropped $160 on it rather than at least attempt it on my own. In my limited experience, I do not know if the image was the reason 2TB of recording space was attained, or some other formatting to the drive in addition? Seems to be a closely guarded secret, even on these forums.

Unless someone else wants to clue me in... 

Thos.


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## lillevig

Thos19 said:


> Hi lillevig,
> 
> I have used WInMFS & MFSLive in the past. The problem with my situation is that 2TB drive upgrades are rare. There are only two vendors who have apparently figured out how to break the 1TB (1.3TB?) upgrade limit for the S3 OLED. That's the only reason I dropped $160 on it rather than at least attempt it on my own. In my limited experience, I do not know if the image was the reason 2TB of recording space was attained, or some other formatting to the drive in addition? Seems to be a closely guarded secret, even on these forums.
> 
> Unless someone else wants to clue me in...
> 
> Thos.


I missed the 2TB part of it. Have you checked out the JMFS thread? I know they talk about using it to upgrade the S3HD past 1TB but not sure about the original S3.


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## unitron

Thos19 said:


> Hi lillevig,
> 
> I have used WInMFS & MFSLive in the past. The problem with my situation is that 2TB drive upgrades are rare. There are only two vendors who have apparently figured out how to break the 1TB (1.3TB?) upgrade limit for the S3 OLED. That's the only reason I dropped $160 on it rather than at least attempt it on my own. In my limited experience, I do not know if the image was the reason 2TB of recording space was attained, or some other formatting to the drive in addition? Seems to be a closely guarded secret, even on these forums.
> 
> Unless someone else wants to clue me in...
> 
> Thos.


Actually it seems that people are able to "roll their own" 2TB replacements for the TCD648250, the original S3 with the OLED, apparently as a result of the most recent software upgrade pushed by TiVo sometime back.

I'm re-reading where they wrote about it now to try to explain it to someone else, and I'm not sure if the people who succeeded actually knew what they were doing or got lucky.

Give me another day or two to try to sort that out.

In the meantime, did you happen to notice the brand and model number of that 2GB drive?

As long as you'll be hooking it to a computer anyway to run the manufacturer's long test (download the image for the latest Ultimate Boot CD, it's got practically all of them and other helpful stuff), can you fire up WinMFS and copy and paste the results of mfsinfo here so I can get a look at the partition map and some other stuff?

And go read the wikipedia page on "capacitor plague".

There may be just enough difference in current draw, especially at start-up, between those drives for a failing power supply to be able to handle one but not the other.


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## Thos19

Hi Unitron,

The 2TB drive is a Western Digital WD20EADS. Funny you should mention the capacitor plague. After you gave me all your helpful instruction on the capacitors on the power supply, I replaced all 11 capacitors (though only one 20v was bulging). As you theorized, I hoped that the draw was the reason I couldn't get the 2TB drive to boot (the front display shows the Tivo symbol and the four lighted dots, goes dark, then repeats). Unfortunately, the same problem recurred once I hooked it up again. But my 1TB and the original 250GB drive booted fine, so at least I successfully soldered the capacitors. 

I was away this weekend, so I didn't have a chance to run MFS to get a info report, but I will. I do want to create an Ultimate boot CD, but am having trouble finding the iso online (every link in Google seems to have some kind of bloatware attached or some program). Do you have a good link?

Thos.

PS MODS: I apologize if this thread is diverting from "ebay" and needs to be moved to the "Help" forum.


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## unitron

Thos19 said:


> Hi Unitron,
> 
> The 2TB drive is a Western Digital WD20EADS. Funny you should mention the capacitor plague. After you gave me all your helpful instruction on the capacitors on the power supply, I replaced all 11 capacitors (though only one 20v was bulging). As you theorized, I hoped that the draw was the reason I couldn't get the 2TB drive to boot (the front display shows the Tivo symbol and the four lighted dots, goes dark, then repeats). Unfortunately, the same problem recurred once I hooked it up again. But my 1TB and the original 250GB drive booted fine, so at least I successfully soldered the capacitors.
> 
> I was away this weekend, so I didn't have a chance to run MFS to get a info report, but I will. I do want to create an Ultimate boot CD, but am having trouble finding the iso online (every link in Google seems to have some kind of bloatware attached or some program). Do you have a good link?
> 
> Thos.
> 
> PS MODS: I apologize if this thread is diverting from "ebay" and needs to be moved to the "Help" forum.


http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Go to the bottom of the page and click on one of the mirror sites.

Do you have any experience using WinMFS?

I'd love to get a look at what mfsinfo has to say about your drive and its partition map.


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## Thos19

unitron said:


> http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
> 
> Go to the bottom of the page and click on one of the mirror sites.
> 
> Do you have any experience using WinMFS?
> 
> I'd love to get a look at what mfsinfo has to say about your drive and its partition map.


Haven't used it in a while, but I used it to go from the 250GB stock S3 OLED drive to a 500GB, then later to a 1TB drive.

Thos.


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## unitron

Thos19 said:


> Haven't used it in a while, but I used it to go from the 250GB stock S3 OLED drive to a 500GB, then later to a 1TB drive.
> 
> Thos.


As long as you're going to have that EADS hooked up to the computer anyway, start with WinMFS and see if recognizes it as a TiVo drive, and then copy and paste all three pages/panels from mfsinfo here for us to disect, and then boot with the cd and run the long test.

Actually, I think you can tell it to save the mfsinfo output as a single text file, which would work just fine.


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## cannonz

Did you hear back from seller yet?


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## Thos19

Unitron: Downloaded and created a boot CD. Ran Quick and Full test on drive. No errors reported. Tried to run MFSlive on my Windows 7 x64, but it couldn't see the 2TB drive. Tried the 250GB drive and the program didn't "see" it either. Plan on dragging out my former XP machine and running MFSlive with the drive on that. Will let you know.

Cannonz: Vendor finally replied though e-bay e-mail system. Was willing to swap the drive, and reimage the new one for $30. Sounds reasonable. E-mailed back for shipping instructions, but have not heard back. Will try again today.

Thos.


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## unitron

Thos19 said:


> Unitron: Downloaded and created a boot CD. Ran Quick and Full test on drive. No errors reported. Tried to run MFSlive on my Windows 7 x64, but it couldn't see the 2TB drive. Tried the 250GB drive and the program didn't "see" it either. Plan on dragging out my former XP machine and running MFSlive with the drive on that. Will let you know.
> 
> Cannonz: Vendor finally replied though e-bay e-mail system. Was willing to swap the drive, and reimage the new one for $30. Sounds reasonable. E-mailed back for shipping instructions, but have not heard back. Will try again today.
> 
> Thos.


You shouldn't have to pay extra to have the replacement drive re-imaged, unless he's going to take the old drive and save your recordings and settings somehow.

Sounds like you weren't running Win7 as administrator or with admin privileges, which is necessary for WinMFS to be able to see the drives under Win7.

I think you can right-click it and say "run as admin", meaning run that particular program with admin privileges.


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