I have a Toshiba SD-H400 that has been in pretty much continuous use with the original hard drive since January 2004. For the last month or perhaps longer I noticed that live TV would sort of pause / distort into major pixelation, sometimes just freeze. By either changing channels or cycling power all would return to normal for a while (never really noted how long it would stay good before having problems). A couple of days ago (after not looking at it for a while) I noticed that programming had run out on April 30th, and a couple of attempts at connecting to TiVo resulted in either Download errors, or on the next attempt errors while loading. All of this made me suspicious that the hard drive was probably starting to fail so I ordered an upgrade from weaknees that should arrive today.

While waiting for the upgrade to arrive I read about the kickstart utilities which seemed appropriate for trying to identify & correct suspected errors with the hard drive. I successfully initiated a kickstart 57 but since then I get nothing but reboot cycles when the SD-H400 is powered on. I have left it powered on for about 6 or 7 hours, and each cycle is about 6 or so minutes (Grey welcome screen about 2-3 minutes, brief TiVo image / Almost there, then about 3 or so minutes of GSOD).

Before I got into this cycle I took a look at the System information, and I am running a version of the 9.3 software (do not know when this update occurred).

My questions are;

1) Is there anything I can do with the Weaknees boot CD which will either complete diskcheck like operation I requested with the kickstart 57, or remove the "dirty" tag so the TiVo stops trying to run the diagnostic with each boot up?

2) I'm assuming my replacement drive comes with TiVo OS on it, and one approach might be to simply put that drive in and forget about the programming on the old drive, is that correct?

3) Is there any way to copy the programming only from my old drive to the new drive, assuming that the new drive does come with the OS loaded?

4) If I attempt to copy the old drive to the new drive (documented way to move the programming), what happens if that fails because of issues with the old drive? Is there a way to lay down a new OS on the new drive once I've started the copy and at least get the TiVo working again? Given the behavior with the old drive should I even try to copy to the new one?

If at all possible I want to copy my programming to the new drive, but the most important thing is to at least get the TiVo working again. One last point is that I do have a lifetime subscription active on this TiVo.

Thanks for any answers or advice that you can provide.