Sounds like the drives are bad on both units. I'd recommend investing in drive replacements for each unit as a preliminary measure.

https://www.weaknees.com/dtv-tivo-upgrade.php

I build and repair my own PC's, so I have experience with hard drives. The likelihood of two hard drives going out in two different machines within a few days of one another in the same week is extremely remote, if not impossible!

A new hard drive is not always the correct answer and it should always be the last option taken, never the first. It is an expensive guess.

Are there any other reasons that would cause both units to be acting the same way?

We see this often when there is a power event in the house. If you can get into the menus you could always try a "clear and delete everything"...that's free. And if you remove the drives you can run diagnostics on them as provided by their respective manufacturers. Since you have experience in this area, perhaps that's you best starting option.

There might be a different explanation for your simultaneous hard drive failures. DirecTV is sending out a new software version, v6.3e, to all the Series 2 DirecTiVos. I've seen many cases when a new software version is downloaded, the units fail to upgrade the software and get into a reboot loop or get stuck at the "Welcome, powering up..." screen.

The reason for this is the procedure for a software upgrade. There are two boot partitions on every TiVo. The primary boot partition is the one with the active operating system, and the secondary boot partition is used for software upgrades. When a new software version is downloaded, it is placed in the secondary partition and then secondary partition becomes the primary partition and the TiVo reboots. Since it has been such a long time since a software upgrade on the DirecTiVos, the secondary partition hasn't been used. It is possible that there was a bad sector on the secondary partition and the upgrade failed and the TiVos go into a reboot loop, or just get stuck at the "Welcome, powering up..." screen.

Have you tried a Kickstart 52 (emergency reinstall) or a kickstart 51 (software upgrade) or a kickstart 56 (software install). These might get your TiVos back online.

Good luck,
robomeister

I agree with the sentiments above. Using a dormant partition can cause these issues, and there are a rash of them with every OS update.

What really drives me nuts is when people accuse TiVo or DirecTV of sending down an update specifically to kill their machine. They aren't trying to cause problems; they're trying to add features, fix bugs, or both.

This happened to me twice last week, about two days apart -- I was playing something back (different programs each time) and suddenly went to the "Welcome" screen. I have an RCA DVR80 that's about 3 years old with a replacement weaknees drive that's less than a year old.

I received the software upgrade a number of weeks before this happened. I noticed that after the first reboot last week, I was seeing a lot more of the channel identification icons on the "Now Playing" list than I was before.

I certainly hope this is all an artifact of the sofware upgrade. I hate to think that my drive is going bad already, or that something else is going wrong with my hardware.

What is a 'kickstart' and how do you do it?
I must have this problem because everytime TIVO sends out new software (and I get a message about it) one of my machines hangs up until I can get it to reload the software (I guess into the other partition).

Just posted about that - see your other thread.

Return DB35s for downgrade from 6.3e to 6.2a URL

Both of my Samsung S4040Rs with WK Seagate DB35s running 6.2a installed on 7/2/07 started rebooting in late August along with other problems immediately after the message arrived that 6.3e was activated.

A week ago I put the original 40GB drives with 6.2a back in and have not had a single problem since.

I deleted the email with the proper URL in it and I, for the life of me after searching your site and googling for over an hour, can not find the appropriate page. And, of course, your Site Map isn't.

What is the WK URL where I order "I want to send my almost new DB35s back to WK to be reprogrammed to 6.2a?"

Believe it or not, we don't actually have a specific page for "I want to send my almost new DB35s back to WK to be reprogrammed to 6.2a." But just send an email to us at [email protected] and we can go through the options.

And it happened again yesterday at about 7:30PM. I was watching a program recorded the 24th, and there was a recording in progress. When the reboot got as far as satellite signal acquisition, I went back to watch the same program again, and while fast-forwarding to reach the point where I left off, I got another reboot. This time I waited it out, and once the reboot process was completely done, I resumed watching my program again. No problems since, but now I'm very nervous about watching something while recording something else.

That really sounds like a bad drive to me . . .

My HR-10 and Hughes SDDVR just started doing the same thing three weeks ago. My Hughes unit has a brand new replacement drive in it I got from WK less than three months ago. I struggle to think both of my hard drives went at the same time. How do I get rid of the new software update???

You would have to have your drives reprogrammed with an earlier version of the software. We'd recommend that you try to stick it out until a fix comes down for this bug.