Glad to hear the drive is working well!

As for the lights, they are a bit bright. But, as you discovered, they're very focused, so turning the case a slight bit lessens the impact significantly. They're like little lasers in a dark room.

There's no 'space remaining' indicator on a TiVo. The only thing you can do is to turn automatic recording of TiVo Suggestions on, and then keep an eye on the Suggestions folder. It uses all available 'free' space, so the length of the list is an indicator of how much free space is really on the drive. This is pretty much the only way to gauge free space on a TiVo.

Series 3 freezing/rebooting

I have not used my series 3 tivo for over year until reconnecting it a week ago. I removed and returned the comcast cablecards because I do not have HD or extra digital cable channels now - just have regular cable. Now I am having constant problems with: menus transitioning slowly, menus freezing, live tv freezing & stuttering, tivo not responding to remote, frequent/random reboots, pinkish hue on menus after reboot and while menu is frozen, programs not recording or freezing, reboots occuring during recording, etc...HELP!!!

What's wrong???? What can I do???? I am not super tech savvy so I did not understand much of the discussion here so give me the "Kindergarten" version please! Thanks!

These all really sound very clearly like a dying hard drive, with the possible exception of the pinkish hue, but that may be also related.

A "replace" kit should fix your problems - see our TiVo Series3 hard drives.

I have a Series 3 HD unit that is suffering from similar reboot problems. I have gone through the recommended fix of pulling the ccards and repeating setup with unfortunately no luck. Regular channels work OK, and the system is stable. But when I switch to a HD channel (or the unit does via "to do"), the video starts to lag, pause and pixelate. This goes on for about 7 mins, then the unit reboots. Again, this happens every time it goes to an HD channel, but its OK on regular channels and can play previously recorded HD programs just fine. I think the issue started on or around 1/15/09, because I have a few HD shows in "Now Playing" that are all partial :07 and are pixelated, etc. Do you think this is a cablecard issue or drive issue? Other? Thanks for your help!

That sounds more like a drive issue, to me. HD shows are much more taxing on a drive, since they put about 8x as much data through to the drive (or read that much from the drive).

Do you have both cable and antenna HD? If so, are there any differences?

I have two ccards, no antenna. I'm finding that there's also serious menu lag whenever one of the tuners is on a HD channel in the background but I'm menuing around outside of Live TV. Question: If it's a ccard issue, would it slow down the TiVo OS, or just cause video issues? Or is it hard to separate the 2 once the signal gets into the TiVo box?

Many thanks - P

Yes, CableCARD issues can cause video problems and can slow down the OS, as the TiVo/card is having trouble processing incoming data. Video issues are far more common with bad cards, though.

I purchased a Series 3 HD TiVo around early October. This was my third TiVo for my house, the other two are Series 2. I have not had a single problem with the other two (both are Toshiba). My Series 3 has been nothing but problematic since I got it. I have scoured the internet for what's causing my problems and how to fix it, but nothing has worked so far. Here are the problems I have...

1. The unit will randomly reboot. It doesn't matter if the unit is on or in standby (I can always tell it occurred overnight if both tuners are set to the same channel the next morning). The unit could go a week before a random reboot or it could happen three times a day. It has nothing to do with watching HD channels, I went a week without watching or recording anything in HD and it still rebooted 4 times that week.

2. The unit will occasionally lock up / freeze after changing the channel, pulling up the guide, or hitting the TiVo button. Sometimes it will stay frozen for 2 minutes and then be fine, other times I have to physically unplug the system.

3. The unit will display a black screen for all channels. If I try to rewind the program, the black screen will stay there and the time bar will stay at the current (real life) time. If I skip back to the start of the program, it works normally until a random time, at which point the screen freezes. I can jump to the start of the program again or jump to the end of the program (where the black screen returns). When this occurs, any and every channel I tune to experiences this same problem, while previously recorded shows do not. This problem eventually works itself out, causes a reboot to occur (if I keep fiddling with it), or I force a reboot through the menu.

4. The unit will freeze while fast forwarding near the end of a program. For a 60 minute show, I can't use Fast Forward x2 or x3 after the 45 minute mark, or else the TiVo will freeze (either at the end of the show or after I hit play). Sometimes this will freeze the whole unit and I'll have to force a reboot, other times it forces a reboot on its own.

I have run KS57, 58, and 52 (in that order) to see if that would help. They showed no errors to the hard drive and they did not remedy the problem. I experienced no problems for the first few days, then the unit had back to back reboots within a 4 hour time frame.

Even out of the box, this unit suffered these problems, even before I installed any cable cards. But, I wanted to double check. I have two Scientific Atlanta cable cards (which are actually the 10th and 13th cards that were installed) through Time Warner. I read online these may be faulty, so I completely removed them and re-ran Guided Setup. Once again, the problem seemed better for a few days, but then the system started rebooting and freezing again. This, in my mind, ruled out that the cable cards were faulty, seeing as how problems persisted whether they were installed or not AND they showed no other cable card problems (loss of channels and such).

I called TiVo support after I ran all my "tests" and did my due diligence. TiVo passed the buck onto the cable cards, which I explained had no bearing on the problem. I suggested a hard drive problem, they suggested the Kickstarts, which I already ran a few times. Outside of shipping them the unit to fix/replace (which I refuse to do after a terrible TiVo / Humax experience with a faulty unit... I have ZERO faith in TiVo fixing anything, which usually just means shipping a refurbished unit back to me with seemingly no quality checks), they had no other suggestions.

My question to everyone on this forum... What is wrong with my TiVo? Could it be a power supply problem causing random reboots? Could it be an overheating problem (the unit is well ventilated but perhaps something inside is faulty) causing random lock ups? Could the hard drive be bad (perhaps the 2MB buffer is to blame)?

I'm personally leading to a hard drive problem (as that's what seems to be the most common suggestion to fix problems). But if I'm about to void my warranty (as crappy as it is to begin with) and spend a couple hundred dollars, I want to exhaust every other possibility first. Thanks in advance for the help =D.

I don't think there is an easy, quick answer. I'd start by testing your drive. See:

http://www.wkforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9

Thanks for the input Jeff. I finally was able to get my hands on a SATA to USB adapter to run the WD Diagnostic. Turns out, the program quit halfway through the extended test because there were too many bad sectors. I plan to upgrade to a new hard drive ASAP now!

Thanks for the help!

Rebooting problem

I recently started having problems with rebooting as well. It started about the time that got the Cisco STA1520 SDV box so I attributed the reboots to that after reading some posts in another thread here.

One afternoon I went to check on when the next connection was going to happen and the screen showed that the next update was scheduled for a time that had already passed that morning. Shortly thereafter my S3 hung up and rebooted. After the reboot I went back checked the time again, this time it displayed a connection was scheduled for the next day.

I can't be sure if this is a cause or a symptom but from programming experience I've seen errors like this cause a crash if not handled properly.

same issue,new expander didn't help

I went a month without the random reboot after disconnecting the expander.

I go the new one.... green screen 3 days later......

If you find any solution, I'd love to know..

That pretty clearly sounds like a bad expander, no? Otherwise, maybe a bad eSATA cable?

I also suffered from TiVo HD S3 reboots and was finally able to solve the problem. I skimmed through all posts in this thread but it doesn't seem as if anybody touched on what worked in my case.

In my case, TiVo rebooted roughly once every two weeks or so when I powered on my TV. This was always the case, from the first day that I had TiVo. But because it happened so infrequently I just lived with it.

Then about 3 weeks ago I added an external drive to my TiVo. The drive was recognized and worked fine. Except now TiVo would reboot every single time when I turn on my TV. My TV happens to be a Sony XBR60. In my search for a solution, I noticed that this seems to happen a lot with people that have large Sony projection TVs.

Long story short, the cause of this is two-fold:

1) TiVo is extremely sensitive to RFI (radio frequency interference)
2) Sony TVs especially sends out a large EMP when it is turned on. Not enough to fry advancing alien ships but enough to scramble TiVo's little brain.
3) Adding an external drive adds an additional "antenna" that feeds directly into TiVo's circuitry, making TiVo just that much more susceptible to external RFI.

After a lot of troubleshooting and being led down the wrong path multiple times by red herrings (ie, disconnecting the cable input made the problem go away, it must be the external drive, etc) I finally just moved the TiVo from under the TV to next to the TV, and since then I have not had a single reboot.

BitFlipper

My Tivo restarts constantly. Sometimes it restarts when watching live tv, when watching recorded shows, when turning on the television, when I'm not even watching it, when I'm watching Netflix, when I'm streaming music from my computer - the long and short of it is, it always restarts, regardless of what I'm doing. I got Tivo to send me another box, and this one does the same thing. I have a Sony LCD TV, hooked up via HDMI, with a cablecard.

I just moved to another apartment and was hoping that might fix things. After moving, the Tivo was hooked up just to power, and didn't seem to restart at all. Then the cable guys came and hooked up my cable and internet, but I held off before connecting the Tivo to the network. Everything seemed to work fine. Finally, I was about to paint my apartment and decided I wanted to stream music to my television. I hooked up the ethernet, began navigating menus, and it rebooted.

Why could my network be causing my Tivo to reboot, and how can I stop it? I read that Bonjour can cause this, but I've turned that off in iChat (I use a Mac), and that hasn't seemed to help. Plus, I was never able to replicate a restart by logging in/out of Bonjour. I really need the ethernet to work, it was the main reason I picked the Tivo over the cable service's DVR. Any ideas?