# Possible causes for freezing other than faulty HDD?



## vanillaslimfast (May 20, 2007)

Hi all,

My series2 TiVo, which I upgraded a few years ago, has recently started giving me fits. Playback started flaking on us last week, and then by Friday it had completely frozen and would not respond to the remote. After doing a hard power cycle (by unplugging the power cable), I'm able to get it back up and running only for it to freeze again shortly after. 

My initial suspicion was that one of my drives was starting to or already had gone bad, so I started down the path of doing diagnostics. After spending many hours of troubleshooting and drive swapping yesterday, however, I'm starting to think that it's not a drive problem after all.

Here's the rundown

Model: TiVo TCD24004A - Series 2 40 Hour. It originally came with a 40gb Maxtor drive, which I replaced with 2x160gb Seagate drives. It's been running in this configuration for about 3 years with no issues. 

When it started acting up, I took the two seagate drives out, hooked them up to my desktop, and ran diagnostics with seatools. One of the drives failed the short scan in the windows seatools, but both drives come back clean when running the long scan with the dos version.

In the meantime I decided I would try and at least get back up and running using the original 40 gig drive. After restoring from the "minimal" image recently posted here and redoing guided setup successfuly, I'm seeing the same behavior. The TiVo boots, but freezes while sitting idle shortly afterwards. I did a full scan of the 40g drive with seatools as well, and it also came out clean.

So at this point, the common denominator seems to be the TiVo itself. Is it possible that the power supply or some other mainboard component would cause this kind of behavior? As a sanity check, tonight I'm planning on taking a spare computer PSU and hooking it up to the drive (thereby bypassing powering the drive from the TiVo's power supply) to see if that helps at all.

I didn't resort to getting a completely new drive, imaging it, and loading it up to see if it would work, but based on what I've seen thus far, I'm doubtful that it would behave any differently.

Other than that, I've run out of ideas of things to try/test. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance


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## litzdog911 (Oct 18, 2002)

Welcome to Tivo Community!

Possible causes for these symptoms include ....
* defective hard drive
* overheating
* intermittent IDE cable or power cable

My money's on a defective hard drive. Dual drive Tivos can be tricky to troubleshoot since sometimes the drive manufacturer's diagnostics don't capture subtle problems. You might try a disk repair utility, like SpinRite, but that's a bit pricey.


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## vanillaslimfast (May 20, 2007)

litzdog911 said:


> Welcome to Tivo Community!


Thanks 



> My money's on a defective hard drive. Dual drive Tivos can be tricky to troubleshoot since sometimes the drive manufacturer's diagnostics don't capture subtle problems. You might try a disk repair utility, like SpinRite, but that's a bit pricey.


Right, but I've taken it back down to a single drive setup using the original drive that came with the tivo. Unless I'm extremely unlucky that both the original drive *and* one of the two new drives are failing in a similar fashion?

I would expect a "quick" scan of a drive not to uncover anything, but the long scans with seatools checked every LBA/sector on each of the drives and turned up nothing. Are there other (hopefully free) drive diagnostics tools that I could use that would be more thorough? SpinRite is indeed a bit pricey for this particular need as it would be more cost effective to just buy a completely new drive instead.


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## tivoupgrade (Sep 27, 2000)

If you haven't tried the low-level format, you should do that, as well.

In addition, you could have an intermittent or heat-sensitive problem with the electronics associated with one of those drives. What you might try doing is re-imaging EACH of the drives and running each of them for some time in your TiVo to see if you can isolate the problem.

Its usually not THAT hard to make the determination of it being a bad hard drive, so if things continue to check-out, you might also want to try replacing your IDE cable with an ATA/66 rated one that has better shielding.

As litzdog stated, spinrite is very thorough, but I've never seen a "bad" hard drive that *couldn't* be diagnosed by the manufacturer's warranty, so its probably not necessary to spend any extra $ on that utility.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

vanillaslimfast said:


> Hi all,
> 
> My series2 TiVo, which I upgraded a few years ago, has recently started giving me fits. Playback started flaking on us last week, and then by Friday it had completely frozen and would not respond to the remote. After doing a hard power cycle (by unplugging the power cable), I'm able to get it back up and running only for it to freeze again shortly after.
> 
> ...


Some small number of TiVos will freeze because of the mother board, you can test this out by taking off the input so all you get is the blue screen telling you the input is out, see if the unit will freeze like this, if it does not freeze than for sure its the mother board.


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## vanillaslimfast (May 20, 2007)

tivoupgrade said:


> If you haven't tried the low-level format, you should do that, as well.
> 
> In addition, you could have an intermittent or heat-sensitive problem with the electronics associated with one of those drives. What you might try doing is re-imaging EACH of the drives and running each of them for some time in your TiVo to see if you can isolate the problem.
> 
> ...


Thanks, I haven't tried the low-level format. At this point there's not much sense in me trying to save the recordings on the two new drives so I could go as far as to wipe each one of them clean and see if they are more stable.



lessd said:


> Some small number of TiVos will freeze because of the mother board, you can test this out by taking off the input so all you get is the blue screen telling you the input is out, see if the unit will freeze like this, if it does not freeze than for sure its the mother board.


Thanks, this is a good idea, I'll try this out.

We've been able to limp along with it working some of the time, but it still freezes regularly. I'm already in the process of replacing the entire unit so it's more or less academic at this point. Thanks for all the suggestions and help!


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## bragmatic (Jun 19, 2007)

vanillaslimfast said:


> Hi all,
> 
> My series2 TiVo, which I upgraded a few years ago, has recently started giving me fits. Playback started flaking on us last week, and then by Friday it had completely frozen and would not respond to the remote. After doing a hard power cycle (by unplugging the power cable), I'm able to get it back up and running only for it to freeze again shortly after.
> 
> ...


 I have a Series 2, 40GB that has recently started freezing also. I happened to have another identical unit that had never been used - hooked it up, transferred service, guided setup, etc. Same problem.

I can watch a program for about 30 seconds or so, it starts to hang, freeze, etc. then totally hangs. Press the TIVO button and it chugs along to the menu - sometimes hangs/freezes, sometimes let's me get to the menus. Both units have behaved this way - any explanations out there?


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