# TiVo HD DVR - No Video Output



## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

I have a TiVo HD DVR TCD658000 which was working fine awhile ago; now, though, it no longer generates video output.

When I power up the unit, the green power light comes on and the hard drive/drive fan starts. However, no video output is generated; the attached TV screen is black. There's no post/startup at all - just a black screen.

Also, when I push the format button on the front of the unit, no format indicating lights light up; finally, when I use the TiVO remote, none of the lights flash on the front screen.

I'd like to know what might be wrong with my TiVO and whether or not it's worthwhile fixing. The TiVO has a lifetime subscription.

In case it matters, I used to have a hard drive expander attached to this unit - currently no hard drive expander is attached. I'm pretty sure that this isn't related but I thought I'd mention it.

One last observation - upon closer inspection, it looks light the green power light is very rapidly flashing - it's not solidly lit. Might this be a power supply issue?

Thanks in advance for your help.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

Yes, the power supply is suspect.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

I pulled the cover off my TiVO and looked at the power supply. Visually, all of the capacitors appear to be fine (no bulging/leaking fluids).

Before I spend $100 on a new power supply, is there a good way to test the power supply to verify that it's bad? I have a multi-meter but I've no idea really how to use it to test the power supply. 

Thanks in advance for any help.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

hankinsohl said:


> I pulled the cover off my TiVO and looked at the power supply. Visually, all of the capacitors appear to be fine (no bulging/leaking fluids).
> 
> Before I spend $100 on a new power supply, is there a good way to test the power supply to verify that it's bad? I have a multi-meter but I've no idea really how to use it to test the power supply.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.


First of all, you should use the yellow jack on the back to connect to some sort of video display that offers that same yellow jack input.

That's composite, the lowest common denominator of video connections, and if you're going to see anything, you'll see it on that.

You want to set that meter to DC Volts 0-15, or 0-20, or 0-25, something like that.

Take the black lead, which should be plugged into the - jack, and either alligator clip it to the chassis on the side opposite the power supply, or find a hole on that side you can friction fit it into.

Then the red lead should be plugged into the meter's + jack.

Stand so that the hand that's going to hold the red lead is along a line with the place on the motherboard where the power supply plugs on, and the other side of your body is even further away from the power supply than that, and stick that hand in your pocket when making the measurements.

You can stick the red lead's metal tip down into the individual holes the wires run into in the plug that plugs into the socket on the motherboard until it makes contact with the metal tip crimped onto the end of the wire.

That's called backprobing, cause that's the back of the plug.

The front, of course you can't get to because it's plugged into the motherboard socket.

Since it's what's called a switch-mode power supply it has to have a sufficient load connected to work properly.

The yellow wire is supposed to be +12 Volts, the red wires 5 Volts, and the orange wire, if it uses that, should be 3.3 Volts.

Check those three voltages with the combo data and power plug pulled out of the hard drive and then check them again with the hard drive plugged back in.

I doubt your readings will be exactly 12 or exactly 5 or exactly 3.3, but they should be close, either above or below, and shouldn't change much with or without the hard drive connected to power.

Report back.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

I tested the power supply as described in the previous post.

With the hard drive disconnected, the power supply emitted a clicking sound. The voltage reading on the yellow wire fluctuated quite a bit, reading between say 5 and 8 volts or so.

With the hard drive connected, the clicking sound went away and the yellow wire read 11 volts.

Are these readings normal? Is the clicking sound expected? Should I have read 12 volts with the drive connected?

Thanks in advance for your help.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

hankinsohl said:


> I tested the power supply as described in the previous post.
> 
> With the hard drive disconnected, the power supply emitted a clicking sound. The voltage reading on the yellow wire fluctuated quite a bit, reading between say 5 and 8 volts or so.
> 
> ...


You should have gotten a lot closer to 12 than to 11.

The clicking sound is probably the supply turning on and off.

Ordinarily it would do so because it didn't have enough of a load (or way too much of a load), but ordinarily the motherboard would be sufficient, at least for a while.

It's not absolutely impossible that something on the power supply circuit board other than bad caps is responsible, but bad caps are at the top, middle, and most of the bottom of the charts.

The power supply board should say either AcBel or 3Y Power Technology. let me know which one and also the model number just in case there's a 3rd model I don't know about, and then I can make you a list of the ones that are group among which the bad one or ones will be.

They probably won't all be bad, yet, but doing them en masse like that will be sure to get the one that is or the ones that are.

Edit to add:

I assume the 5 V and 3.3 V rails measured okay with and without the drive connected?


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

Thanks for the help Unitron!

The orange wire reads 3.3V and the red reads 4.7V with the drive attached.

Here's a picture of the large capacitor:









And one of some small capacitors:









The capacitors look OK to me but I suppose that they might be damaged with no visible indication.

The part number is 3Y Power P/N: 38S0158312GP Rev. 1









Note: Elsewhere on the board "CP-1319R2" is printed - I'm guessing that this later is actually the power supply part no.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

Is it possible that my hard drive is bad and/or has unreadable data on it and that this is causing the problem?

Since, when I power my TiVO I'm not seeing any video output I assumed that the hard drive is OK - I read somewhere that even with a bad hard drive you'd see startup/post video output - I'm only seeing a black screen with wavy lines.

The reason I'm focusing on the hard drive is that I used to have a drive expander hooked up to this TiVO. I simply removed the drive expander and expected that my TiVO would detect this and offer to reformat the hard drive. Instead - just a black TV screen.

Thanks once more for any help.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

If it was the drive, the Tivo would be rebooting instead of blank screen. The power you tested should be getting 5 and 12 volts.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

Does anyone have a list of the capacitors I should replace for a CP-1319R2 power supply (TiVO TCD658000 HD DVR)?

If a mouser project exists for this can someone post a link to it?

Thanks in advance for your help.


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

With no drive attached the tivo will show the welcome screen for 5-10 seconds and then a solid grey screen. 

You forgot the picture of the caps on the other side of that big heatsink, near where all the wires attach. Those are usually the first to start dying. 

I just replaced the capacitors on the same style of power supply. I significantly overrated all of them because I was lazy and thats what Frys had in stock 
5x 10v 2200uf replaced with 25v 3300uf
2x 10v 1000uf replaced with 25v 2200uf
1x 16v 1000uf replaced with 25v 2200uf
1x 16v 470uf replaced with 16v 1000uf
These are all the important ones on the DC side of the power supply.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

In the post above, I was measuring voltages with the power supply disconnected from the motherboard.

Here are the results with the power supply connected to the motherboard:

No Hard Drive Attached:
Yellow - 12.3V
Red - 4.9V
Orange - 3.34V

Hard Drive Attached:
Yellow - 11.9V
Red - 4.9V
Orange - 3.34V

Do these voltages look OK?

Just for grins, I inserted an M-Card into my TiVO and hooked it back up to my TV. When power was applied I still get the black screen with squiggly lines.

And, I then tried powering up with the hard drive disconnected. Same exact behavior - black screen with squiggly lines.

The only indication that the power supply might be bad is that the green light on the front of the unit is pulsing quite rapidly - from a distance it appears to be solidly lit, only upon close inspection is the pulsing noticeable.

At this point I'm guessing that the motherboard is hosed. Any other thoughts?


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

hankinsohl said:


> Hard Drive Attached:
> Yellow - 11.9V
> Red - 4.9V
> Orange - 3.34V
> ...


Those seem fine. Its basically a small computer ATX power supply. The limits for a regular ATX power supply are 
12v spec 11.40-12.60
5v 4.75-5.25
3.3v spec 3.135-3.465

How are you attaching it to the TV?


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

>> How are you attaching it to the TV?
I'm using an HDMI cable. This same cable works fine with my other TiVO so the cable is definitely OK.


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

hankinsohl said:


> >> How are you attaching it to the TV?
> I'm using an HDMI cable. This same cable works fine with my other TiVO so the cable is definitely OK.


Connect it using composite or component and see what you get


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## sfhub (Jan 6, 2007)

hankinsohl said:


> >> How are you attaching it to the TV?
> I'm using an HDMI cable. This same cable works fine with my other TiVO so the cable is definitely OK.


I've read some people complain the have connector issues where they need to "lift" the HDMI cable plug to make proper connections.

If you are debugging always use svideo/composite as you'll always get video during startup (unless something is broken)


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## sfhub (Jan 6, 2007)

ciper said:


> With no drive attached the tivo will show the welcome screen for 5-10 seconds and then a solid grey screen.
> 
> You forgot the picture of the caps on the other side of that big heatsink, near where all the wires attach. Those are usually the first to start dying.
> 
> ...


Are you sure upping the capacitance is a good idea? It would seem to change the electrical properties the circuit was designed to operate with.

The upped voltage is fine since that is the tolerance of the capacitor and normally wouldn't affect the circuit.


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

sfhub said:


> Are you sure upping the capacitance is a good idea? It would seem to change the electrical properties the circuit was designed to operate with.


If you follow the traces on the bottom of the power supply you will see that it's an extraordinarily simple design. Many of the capacitors are ran in parallel to each other and there are a couple spots on the board where a capacitor was supposed to go and was never installed. 
The only problem I can imagine is that since these are larger there will be less airflow between them.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

I attached the TiVO to my TV using the component cable which came with the unit.

Here's what it looks like:









I'm pretty sure my motherboard is fried since the power supply voltages check out and I'm not getting any video output. Does this diagnosis seem right or might it be the power supply/hard drive after all?

Thanks again for the help.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

sfhub said:


> Are you sure upping the capacitance is a good idea? It would seem to change the electrical properties the circuit was designed to operate with.
> 
> The upped voltage is fine since that is the tolerance of the capacitor and normally wouldn't affect the circuit.


Changing the capacitance that much is not a good idea because it puts extra load on the power supply--the higher the capacitance the more charge it can hold which means more current being drawn during the charge portion of the cycle, current that has to be supplied by the switching transistors and current that's being diverted from the drive and motherboard.

In other words, it does indeed "...change the electrical properties the circuit was designed to operate with."

Going up a step in voltage rating isn't the end of the world, but when I say step I mean the next industry "standard", not "as much higher as you feel like".

The next step after 10V would be 16, and then 25 after that, then 35, and then 50.

Electrolytic capacitors need to be subjected to voltage below, but near, their rating to keep the electrolyte properly formed.

I wouldn't replace a 10 Volt cap with anything higher than a 25 Volt rated one (at the same uF) except for short time test purposes.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

ciper said:


> With no drive attached the tivo will show the welcome screen for 5-10 seconds and then a solid grey screen.
> 
> You forgot the picture of the caps on the other side of that big heatsink, near where all the wires attach. Those are usually the first to start dying.
> 
> ...


With no drive attached it'll usually just sit there on the welcome screen until the cows come home.

If the drive is attached, but there are problems with the motherboard communicating with it, that will produce the uniform gray screen, or it will cause an endless cycle of reboots, depending on exactly what the problem is.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

hankinsohl said:


> In the post above, I was measuring voltages with the power supply disconnected from the motherboard.


That's almost always a no-no with switch-mode power supplies like the TiVo uses.

Switch-mode supplies need to have a sufficient load attached.

You can run it with the motherboard connected and the drive disconnected for short periods for test purposes, but try to avoid the other way around, and definitely don't do it with both the motherboard and the drive disconnected.



hankinsohl said:


> Here are the results with the power supply connected to the motherboard:
> 
> No Hard Drive Attached:
> Yellow - 12.3V
> ...


That's definitely more like it, although it's possible that the DC reading is in the ballpark but at least one of the outputs has too much AC "ripple" in it.



hankinsohl said:


> Just for grins, I inserted an M-Card into my TiVO and hooked it back up to my TV. When power was applied I still get the black screen with squiggly lines.
> 
> And, I then tried powering up with the hard drive disconnected. Same exact behavior - black screen with squiggly lines.
> 
> ...


Well, some kind of video seems to be getting sent out.

But that pulse in the LED on the front leads me to suspect power supply trouble before motherboard trouble.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

hankinsohl said:


> I attached the TiVO to my TV using the component cable which came with the unit.
> 
> Here's what it looks like:
> 
> ...


By component you mean the Red, Green, Blue plug trio, correct?

What you've got there looks like a video sync pulse problem--that's the signal that tells the TV when to start sweeping each line across the screen--it's not putting the video signal result on the right place on the screen at the right time.

If you're TV has a composite input (the yellow jack), connect the TiVo's yellow jack to that and see what you get.

If you don't have a cable with yellow RCA plugs at each end, use one of the Red,Green,Blue ones--electrons don't have different colors.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

hankinsohl said:


> Is it possible that my hard drive is bad and/or has unreadable data on it and that this is causing the problem?
> 
> Since, when I power my TiVO I'm not seeing any video output I assumed that the hard drive is OK - I read somewhere that even with a bad hard drive you'd see startup/post video output - I'm only seeing a black screen with wavy lines.
> 
> ...


I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that expanders need to be attached when you go through the "divorce" process.

But let's concentrate on getting a good welcome screen without the drive attached first.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

I've got that same 3Y board in one of my 652s.

There are 9 caps near the big heat sink that are possible suspects.

I'll try to get a list of them posted here this evening.

In the meantime look on both sides of that heat sink and check all 9 for absolute flatness on top and no bulge out of the plug in the bottom. We might get lucky and not have to replace all 9.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

When I hook up my TiVO to the yellow composite video jack, here's what the output looks like:










Note: On first booting up, the screen is pitch black. After a few seconds, the squiggly line output appears as shown above. Also note that I haven't connected the cable TV cable or an antenna.

And here's a picture of the capacitors closer to the power cable:









Unitron - Since my re-measured voltages all appear to be within tolerance, doesn't that rule out the power supply? Originally I was measuring voltages by unplugging the power cable; I repeated the measurements (see the "Correction to Voltage Measurements" post above) with the power cable attached to the motherboard and the voltages look OK.

Thanks once more for everyone's help. Does this seem to be a fried motherboard?


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

hankinsohl said:


> And here's a picture of the capacitors closer to the power cable:


It has been my limited experience that those are the ones to fail first. However they look ok in that picture. Here are some good comparison images http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague



unitron said:


> With no drive attached it'll usually just sit there on the welcome screen until the cows come home.


That is usually the case but one time I had forgotten to attach the power cable to the drives and it would show the welcome screenthen switch to a solid grey screen (over component and HDMI)

But yes his out of sync image is not normal



unitron said:


> Changing the capacitance that much is not a good idea because it puts extra load on the power supply--the higher the capacitance the more charge it can hold which means more current being drawn during the charge portion of the cycle, current that has to be supplied by the switching transistors and current that's being diverted from the drive and motherboard.


It does put an extra load on the power supply but that should only happen on startup. I'd argue that running two 7200 1tb drives in my Tivo for years was more of a burden on the power supply than topping up these caps will be. If the load pulled enough to "empty" the capacitor then the sag on that line would also get bad with the original caps right? My understanding of the situation - Lets say under normal conditions the 2200uf was normally alternating between half to full capacity. If nothing else in the unit has changed then the 3300u should then alternate between one third to full capacity and the draw during normal use would be nearly equal. 
I'd rather the capacitor do its work than have something overdraw or brownout that line.

My other motivation for overspecing them is that if you have two identical capacitors at X uf and 1.5X uf the 1.5X uf will have lower ESR by default.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

>> But yes his out of sync image is not normal
Any thoughts on how I might fix this out-of-sync image issue? Or is it a fried motherboard and I'm out of luck.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

I've made a video of the pulsing green light on the front of my TiVO. It can be seen here:





The youtube video really exaggerates the pulsing - in real life it's much more subtle and the pulses are very fast, maybe 1/10th of a second apart or so.

I also tried to check for AC voltage along the power cord using my multimeter. I got zero AC volts on all the power lines (yellow, red and orange).

Finally, just to mention this once more, the format button on the front of my TiVO doesn't do anything - none of the format indicators light up at all.

So, given the above, and noting that the DC voltages seem to be in spec, any guesses as to what's wrong? Might the power supply be bad and cause all of these symptoms and yet be within spec with respect to DC voltage output? Or is this a sign of probable motherboard failure somewhere.

Thanks once more for everyone's help.


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

Can someone suggest an easy way for him to read the logs? Perhaps a boot CD that is known to be able to mount partition 9? We could have him check the last entry now, then try to boot his Tivo for a while and check the log again. If the log has no changes we know its not getting anywhere.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

ciper said:


> Can someone suggest an easy way for him to read the logs?


Thanks Ciper. I looked a bit on the Internet for this - couldn't find anything. Also complicating maters is that the data may have been striped to the drive expander drive which was previously connected - i.e., all of the data currently on my TiVO drive might be totally unreadable at the moment.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

At this point you might want to consider getting a replacement Tivo. Since yours has lifetime on it I'd call Tivo and see if you can transfer the lifetime to another unit. If they will do that for you then I'd head to ebay and pick up a used non-lifetime Tivo. You'll probably pay less for the Tivo on ebay than whatever parts you intend to replace in your unit. 

With the exception of the motherboard, you could get a used Tivo HD and cannibalize it for parts if Tivo won't allow you to transfer the lifetime service.


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## dianebrat (Jul 6, 2002)

I'm still voting power supply, just because it meters ok doesn't mean it is ok, if you'd used an oscilloscope that would show you how good the power really is. 
I'd consider having Weaknees repair it, or putting an original HD in it and calling Tivo to see if they'll give you a deal on a new unit.


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## sfhub (Jan 6, 2007)

Is there a reason mfslive wouldn't fit the bill? Partition 9 is an ext2 formatted partition, right?


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

I contacted weakNees to see whether or not he thought my TiVO can be fixed. His opinion is that it cannot be repaired. It seems that the rapidly pulsing green light on the front of the unit indicates some sort of motherboard issue that cannot be fixed.

I contacted TiVO and they refuse to transfer my lifetime subscription unless I purchase a replacement unit from them for about $350.00 or so. Since you can get a used TiVO HD with lifetime subscription off EBay for about $230.00, TiVO's replacement offer isn't appealing.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions and help. I think I'm simply going to dispose of my TiVO.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

hankinsohl said:


> I contacted weakNees to see whether or not he thought my TiVO can be fixed. His opinion is that it cannot be repaired. It seems that the rapidly pulsing green light on the front of the unit indicates some sort of motherboard issue that cannot be fixed.
> 
> I contacted TiVO and they refuse to transfer my lifetime subscription unless I purchase a replacement unit from them for about $350.00 or so. Since you can get a used TiVO HD with lifetime subscription off EBay for about $230.00, TiVO's replacement offer isn't appealing.
> 
> Thanks everyone for your suggestions and help. I think I'm simply going to dispose of my TiVO.


Did weaKnees use any particular technical terms that might give us a clue what the problem is?

If you're going to pitch it into a landfill, how about I pay shipping and you send it to me to take a shot at?


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

@Unitron
I was going to drop off my TiVO at Staples for recycling but if you'd like to take a shot at fixing it that would be great. I sent you a private message to work out shipping details.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

For the benefit of future searchers, by co-incidence I found out about a guy in Australia who does TiVo repair and on his FAQ page

http://kingey1971.wix.com/tivorepairs#!faq/c1yws

there was this



> MY TIVO HAS A FLASHING GREEN LIGHT BUT NO PICTURE
> 
> This is a motherboard failure and the CPU is detecting a fault. It requires further bench investigation with special test gear. If you want my help with repairs then please contact me for further information.


So, no joy for the OP, but at least we now know more than we did.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Well, instead of the landfill the machine went to me.

It turns out the power supply is apparently okay because swapping in a known good one made no difference.

The green light on the front doesn't blink like it was doing to him--I have no idea if that's related by some bizarre reason to its cross-country trip or not.

I hooked the composite (yellow jack) output to a composite input on a little battery operated black and white portable of the type that was nice to have during hurricanes before the OTA switch from analog to digital, and by fiddling with the vertical hold was able to see that it's actually outputting the initial welcome screen, but I'll need a different set with externally accessible horizontal controls as well to get closer to a stable picture, so apparently there's something wrong with whatever establishes the vertical and especially horizontal sync pulses.

Unfortunately, without a schematic or service manual I'm not sure I can make any further progress.


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## squint (Jun 15, 2008)

If I get an IR rework station in the future, I could try re-balling the CPU or moving it to a donor motherboard.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

squint said:


> If I get an IR rework station in the future, I could try re-balling the CPU or moving it to a donor motherboard.


If you live anywhere near Philly, maybe you and omikron could go in halfsies on one.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

>> The green light on the front doesn't blink like it was doing to him--I have no idea if that's related by some bizarre reason to its cross-country trip or not.
Yeah, I wasn't sure if what I was seeing was the "blinking" that indicates a motherboard failure or just normal operation.

Just before I shipped the unit out, the green light was pulsing very rapidly - 5 or 6 times per second. It's pretty subtle - you need to look at the green light closely to see it. From across the room, the rapid pulsing isn't noticeable.

However, I also found that the TiVO did not respond to the remote - no yellow lights lit up as the remote was pressed - nor did the "format" button on the front of the unit do anything. 

If the TiVO still doesn't respond to the remote, there's probably additional issues with the unit above and beyond the video output.

Anyhow, good luck fixing it! It would be nice to see the TiVO come back to life.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

hankinsohl said:


> >> The green light on the front doesn't blink like it was doing to him--I have no idea if that's related by some bizarre reason to its cross-country trip or not.
> Yeah, I wasn't sure if what I was seeing was the "blinking" that indicates a motherboard failure or just normal operation.
> 
> Just before I shipped the unit out, the green light was pulsing very rapidly - 5 or 6 times per second. It's pretty subtle - you need to look at the green light closely to see it. From across the room, the rapid pulsing isn't noticeable.
> ...


Don't know yet about response or refusal to respond to a remote.

I fear that without a schematic or at least a block diagram with part numbers of the video output section I'm unlikely to resurrect it, although if I can find a way to use it without having to be able to see the video output I might be able to use it to record stuff and copy it off to PC.

Provided I could get it through Guided Setup over a PC or smart phone or something, but I don't think there's an ap for that. 

Anyway, you never told me how, or if, you went about divorcing the internal drive from the previously connected external.


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## squint (Jun 15, 2008)

unitron said:


> If you live anywhere near Philly, maybe you and omikron could go in halfsies on one.


I don't live anywhere near there but if I do end up getting a decent IR rework station, I wouldn't mind attempting to socket a Roamio processor or whatever it is that needs to be done.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

squint said:


> I don't live anywhere near there but if I do end up getting a decent IR rework station, I wouldn't mind attempting to socket a Roamio processor or whatever it is that needs to be done.


This thing is two generations behind the Roamio, but I don't have another 658 motherboard to which to move the CPU, which is apparently BGA mounted.

And starting with the two later S3s, the 652 and 658, the TiVo Service Number, to which the lifetime sub is tied, is in the CPU itself, rather than on the relatively more easily accessed and moved Atmel crypto chip, which was only a 40 or fewer pin flat square Surface Mount Device, and which was used in the S1s, the S2s, and the first S3, the 648.


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## weaknees (May 11, 2001)

I'm happy to report that we're now able to fix this problem. We've got more info on our blog post:

http://www.wkblog.com/tivo/2013/11/tivo-hd-and-tivo-hd-xl-flashing-green-light-is-now-fixable/


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

weaknees said:


> I'm happy to report that we're now able to fix this problem. We've got more info on our blog post:
> 
> http://www.wkblog.com/tivo/2013/11/tivo-hd-and-tivo-hd-xl-flashing-green-light-is-now-fixable/


Bad (SMD) caps on the motherboard, right?


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## ADent (Jan 7, 2000)

weaknees said:


> I'm happy to report that we're now able to fix this problem. We've got more info on our blog post:
> 
> http://www.wkblog.com/tivo/2013/11/tivo-hd-and-tivo-hd-xl-flashing-green-light-is-now-fixable/


Cool. My recently purchased used TiVoHD blinked green the other night and I searched and saw a blinking green like could be terminal. Arrrgg. Luckily it was just a software update gone wonky that a reboot fixed.

The service is pricey ($179.98 at the moment), but a guys gotta make a living.


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## steve614 (May 1, 2006)

unitron said:


> Bad (SMD) caps on the motherboard, right?


I was wondering what the cause is. I doubt weaknees will say -- that would reveal the solution, and undercut their business.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

steve614 said:


> I was wondering what the cause is. I doubt weaknees will say -- that would reveal the solution, and undercut their business.


If it involves replacing the SMD caps on the motherboard, they aren't going to be getting much DIY competition, 'cause we're talking about a much greater level of difficulty than replacing the simple hole-through power supply caps, and even if you've got someone local that can handle it, they're not going to have any idea which caps need replacing to solve which problem, or if the problem can be solved by a cap replacement, unless they're already in the TiVo repair business, in which case they'd already have the answer to my question.


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## hankinsohl (Sep 17, 2013)

weaknees said:


> I'm happy to report that we're now able to fix this problem. We've got more info on our blog post:
> 
> http://www.wkblog.com/tivo/2013/11/tivo-hd-and-tivo-hd-xl-flashing-green-light-is-now-fixable/


Weaknees - how fast does the green light blink when a motherboard failure is detected?

I'm not sure if I ever had a blinking green light or not. In my case the so-called blinking I saw was extremely rapid - 5 times a second or so - and very subtle - unless you held your eyes fairly close to the light, the blinking wasn't obvious at all; from across the room, the green light appeared to be solidly lit.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

hankinsohl said:


> Weaknees - how fast does the green light blink when a motherboard failure is detected?
> 
> I'm not sure if I ever had a blinking green light or not. In my case the so-called blinking I saw was extremely rapid - 5 times a second or so - and very subtle - unless you held your eyes fairly close to the light, the blinking wasn't obvious at all; from across the room, the green light appeared to be solidly lit.


I had an email chat with the guy in Australia, and he says video processing is mostly handled by the CPU in the S3 HD-class units, so the totally screwy sync on your 658 likely means the CPU itself is screwed up, regardless of whether there was any actual LED blinking or not.


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## squint (Jun 15, 2008)

Maybe take it to one of those XBox/Playstation reballer places and have them reball the CPU?


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

squint said:


> Maybe take it to one of those XBox/Playstation reballer places and have them reball the CPU?


That's an interesting idea, provided the CPU is not the problem and you want to move it to another motherboard, taking the TiVo Service Number, and therefore the lifetime sub, along with it.

I don't think the HD and HD XL CPUs have had a problem with coming undetatched the way some BGA chips in laptops have, although you've given me some food for thought.


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