# WD Green Power HDD Installation Failed



## miimura (Apr 3, 2002)

I have a S3 Tivo that was upgraded to a 500GB WD5000KS even before the CableCards were installed. It ran fine for just over a year. Then the KS drive started to bite the dust. I purchased a WD5000AACS (Green Power) drive for $89 at Fry's. It tested out fine on the computer, but it resolutely refused to boot in the S3. I successfully did dd_rescue to copy everything over and there were only 124 bad blocks (248kB) on the old drive. They were all in one of the MFS Media partitions, so I was pretty sure the Tivo OS was ok. After it failed to boot after copying from the KS drive, I went back to the original disk that has been sitting on the shelf for a year. I copied that over with dd and did the mfsadd. It still wouldn't boot. I wiped the AACS drive with the WD diagnostics, writing zeroes to the whole drive. Then I did a dd from the the factory original disk (WD2500BS) and did not do the mfsadd. S3 still wouln't boot the AACS disk. There was a power outage the last day it was plugged in with the failing disk, so I thought there was a possibility the power supply in the S3 was bad. The S3 would boot the original disk, so I thought maybe the power supply was just a little flaky and the new disk pushed it over the edge. I had a external drive power supply that came with a USB to SATA/PATA drive adapter kit. So, I powered the AACS disk from that external power supply. It still wouldn't boot. This disk had no problems at all on my PC and passed all the WD Diagnostics.

Finally, I punted and returned the disk to Fry's and bought a 500GB Seagate 7200.11 - mostly for the 5 year warranty. I did the same dd_rescue that I did for the Green Power drive and it worked the first time. After I got the S3 back in the rack with the rest of the gear, I coulnd't even tell there was ever anything wrong with the Tivo. What a huge waste of time that Green Power drive was!! I can't think of a reason why it didn't work - It just didn't!

- Mike


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

There may be a firmware issues when using the WD Green drives in a TiVo.


lessd said:


> This drive worked great until the date on the drive went to Jan 2008 than it would not boot on a TiVo-HD (652160), the drives dated Dec 2007 and earlier worked





richsadams said:


> Important WD 1TB HDD Info


I believe that you are the first to report problems with the 500G version.


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