# TIVO Edge failure, "The TIVO box has experienced a serious failure..."



## John Hanson (Oct 19, 2020)

This is becomming a long story. I had a Bolt+ that worked flawlessly for almost 4 years then as drives are wont to do, the HD failed, so I contacted TIVO and after promising a shipment in two days took 3 weeks+ to ship a replacement TIVO edge, which I assume is maybe repaired, since the email announcing it said "refreshed" not "new" I installed it, and after a day and a half figuring out how to get it to work with an older TIVO Mini, (From Bolt+ days) and a MOCA Bridge, not Bridge+ it all worked. *FOR 9 DAYS!!* It failed with the "The TIVO Box has detected a serious problem and is attempting to fix it ... This will take about 3 hours ... Do not shut-off or restart the box... " This was the Edge, not the Mini, It seemed fine, and even until it reset would stream Netflix. Anyway, after another email that said would ship in 2 days, it took 12 days to arrive, got this one installed, only took about 3 hours this time, since I had just figured out what settings to tweak and where they were buried in the terrible user interface. (Old software on Bolt+ was a lot better). Thia time it worked great, *for 2 days*, the same problem "The TIVO Box has detected a serious problem and is attempting to fix it ... This will take about 3 hours ... Do not shut-off or restart the box... " occurred. So after 24 hours of it faiing to fix itself, plugged unit, disconnected cable (to isoslate from MOCA net) and tried again, NO JOY. So will call and complain(approaching threshold of anger) and request the third replacement TIVO in 6 weeks, unless someone here knows some fix I can do. 
I am not quite ready to figure out how to open the box and replace the drive myself, since I figure that 
a) might not work, and 
b) would certainly void any chance I have to eventually get a working TIVO again.
But if there is a knowledgable person out there I would appreciate a response. Meanwhile I'll spend another several hours working through the painful customer service chain, answering all the questions multiple times until they think they have inflicted enough pain, when I might get the change to get another defective product. Dont mean to sound sour, just am, but both my wife and I like TIVO and still think with its problems it is still the best DVR experience we have had. I've had others they were worse, so we are still around, at least if we can get past this in reasonable time.

I am an electrical engineer and aerospace systems engineer with 40+ years of experience designing high performance video, audio and data recorders, including worlds first parallel transfer Disk, that did 100 mBytes/second recording in 1980! (For government programs) so I understand this stuff quite well. Worked in AMPEX advanced systems group in 1980s where we developed original studio versions of present digital TV.. We had Hgh Def digital video in lab in 1982. To me, these problems smell of defective hard drives, and maybe intermittant problems that go through the incomming inspections on RMAs and pass, so get marked "No Issue Found" and returned to stock and shipped to the next victim/Customer i.e. me.

At a minimum TIVO ought to extend our subscription for two months, since due to their flawed products and poor replacement timing, it has been almost two months since we were able to use it, and will be more than that soon. And the next box, ought to ship next day air, or if over weekend, I guess, two day air is almost as good, just not ground, which offers change to shake things to destruction anyway. Have a nice day


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## philco782 (Sep 28, 2014)

Was it an old Connor or maybe a Maxtor drive that used two sets of heads with each set on an independent actuator? I remember from way long ago there was that one foray into the consumer electronics space. Might be making a comeback soon maybe!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## John Hanson (Oct 19, 2020)

philco782 said:


> Was it an old Connor or maybe a Maxtor drive that used two sets of heads with each set on an independent actuator? I remember from way long ago there was that one foray into the consumer electronics space. Might be making a comeback soon maybe!
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


No that used old IBM 3300 series packs (300 MByte) drove 4 units with 20 heads each, so 80 streams at same time, used for NFL slo-mo replays for Ampex among other apps. Later used multiple Ampex 5"drives until Ampex got out of disk business ~1986, Off topic and not related to my TIVO failures unfortunately, so won't address further here.


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## Skye (May 18, 2018)

I am on my 3rd EDGE. The first two had the same failure as yours, except immediately upon being powered up. They both "repaired" themselves in about 20 minutes, but I exchanged them anyway not trusting the hardware. My 3rd box is working well, but last night I happened to stick my head in the rack it lives in to move some cables and I could really hear the hard drive whining. Maybe it has always done this, but I know my old BOLT was dead quiet.


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## John Hanson (Oct 19, 2020)

Ouch, I hope next one will work, but Edge mostly seems a step back, my Bolt+ was quiet and worked flawlessly for 4 years, have yet to see Edge work, and it only has 2 TBytes not 3, Both failures seemed to occur when 1) Recording on all 6 tuners, 2) Playing back a pre-recorded show via MOCA net thru a TIVO Mini, using TIVO Bridge, and 3) Wife playing back different pre-recorded show directly from the EDGE, Failure occurred when all the tuners became engaged last time exactly at the 9:00 PM channel/program switches So hope Edge can do what it is supposed to be able to do.


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## mattyro7878 (Nov 27, 2014)

I would refrain from recording on all 6 tuners simultaneously. I know this is not an ideal solution but look at your options: waiting for another box; going thru setup again; same result when using 6 tuners again! Im sure there are thousands of EDGE units that are trouble free but it sure dont seem that way. Lots of issues.


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## philco782 (Sep 28, 2014)

All 6 tuners are “recording” all day long though. Each maintains its 30 minute trickplay buffer, so the box is always writing 6 streams no matter if you’re recording a show or not.


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## blondmbz (2 mo ago)

Skye said:


> I am on my 3rd EDGE. The first two had the same failure as yours, except immediately upon being powered up. They both "repaired" themselves in about 20 minutes, but I exchanged them anyway not trusting the hardware. My 3rd box is working well, but last night I happened to stick my head in the rack it lives in to move some cables and I could really hear the hard drive whining. Maybe it has always done this, but I know my old BOLT was dead quiet.


we have had several issues with tivo and the new edge, I could have purchased a new edge from best buy for about 369 dollars but instead opted to fall pray to the sales reps pitch when she assured me continues lifetime service and a 5 year replacement warranty for the bargain price of $596.09. The first new edge we received would not even install and was defective from the get go, and a new replacement was sent to us fairly quickly. We had some issues with the new one but for the most part it was workable for about 6 and a half months, until we started having major issues. We blamed it on our cable company at first then when the service tech came out from the cable company he pointed out several reasons why it was not their issue. When I called Tivo they insisted it was our router that was causing all our problems with the Edge, so we paid big bucks for a new bigger better router. The router was not the problem, and the same picture locking up and recordings going dark to where we had to keep turning the TV on and back on for tivo to run continued. Tivo said that they would replace our 7 month old edge and when the new tivo arrived to ship the old one back in the shipping box that the new one came in. After more then a week with not even an email saying that our new tivo had been shipped I called tivo. I was told that they did not mail the new tivo because I had not shipped the broken one back to them, needless to say I was irritated at best. They wanted me to pay 49 dollars to have them send me the replacement tivo first, and when I told them what I thought about their business practices she said I needed to pay only 25 dollars of which she took my credit on the spot over the phone.. The package came from Tivo about a week later, but not a new 596.09 dollar tivo edge that I had purchased just barley 7 months prior ,but a plain brown box with a used referb tivo... this is not what was described in a 5 year replacement warranty, and this is not how you treat customers, especially lifelong customers that have been with Tivo for over 20 years and have purchased 5 Tivo's... Where is our NEW in original box replacement tivo??so disappointed in whats happening to this company


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## blondmbz (2 mo ago)

we have had several issues with tivo and the new edge, I could have purchased a new edge from best buy for about 369 dollars but instead opted to fall pray to the sales reps pitch when she assured me continues lifetime service and a 5 year replacement warranty for the bargain price of $596.09. The first new edge we received would not even install and was defective from the get go, and a new replacement was sent to us fairly quickly. We had some issues with the new one but for the most part it was workable for about 6 and a half months, until we started having major issues. We blamed it on our cable company at first then when the service tech came out from the cable company he pointed out several reasons why it was not their issue. When I called Tivo they insisted it was our router that was causing all our problems with the Edge, so we paid big bucks for a new bigger better router. The router was not the problem, and the same picture locking up and recordings going dark to where we had to keep turning the TV off and back on for tivo to run continued. Tivo said that they would replace our 7 month old edge and when the new tivo arrived to ship the old one back in the shipping box that the new one came in. After more then a week with not even an email saying that our new tivo had been shipped I called tivo. I was told that they did not mail the new tivo because I had not shipped the broken one back to them, needless to say I was irritated at best. They wanted me to pay 49 dollars to have them send me the replacement tivo first, and when I told them what I thought about their business practices she said I needed to pay only 25 dollars of which she took my credit on the spot over the phone.. The package came from Tivo about a week later, but not a new 596.09 dollar tivo edge that I had purchased just barley 7 months prior ,but a plain brown box with a used referb tivo... this is not what was described in a 5 year replacement warranty, and this is not how you treat customers, especially lifelong customers that have been with Tivo for over 20 years and have purchased 5 Tivo's... Where is our NEW in original box replacement tivo??so disappointed in whats happening to this company:


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## southerndoc (Apr 5, 2003)

Our Edge just had this warning tonight.


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## Terrestrial (Jan 22, 2016)

My Tivo Edge failed last month with the same error message. It happened after I set a Tivo menu option to save power after 4 hours of no use, I am guessing that it powers down the hard drive as part of the power save feature. This was the first time I had used that option and the next day it gave me the error message when I first accessed it. So suspect the hard drive failed when it was powered back up.

I did an exchange under Continual Care which was $99 since I was in the 1-2 year timeframe. The new Edge is working fine, but noticed that there is no longer the option in the Tivo menu to do the auto power save, could it be the hard drive doesn't like being spun down and then spun back up? Why else would Tivo remove that menu option??????


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