Some help, not full fix

It took four visits from Cablevision between 1/2 and 1/17/07 to get two good CableCards working properly in my Series 3, but everything then worked flawlessly--until 2/5, the night of the Super Bowl, which I watched with a friend, after which we played Rome from HBO. When done, and I returned to TiVo Central, the screen was hung, and the box would not respond to any remote commands. I left it that way while my friend and I had another round, and when he left, I sat considering what to do for a few minutes--and then spontaneously, TiVo restarted. Everything seemed at first to be back, but I shortly discovered that an apparently random group of channels were dead: 704 (NBC HD) and 705 (Fox HD); 46 (Discover) and 47 (History), 50 (Comedy) and 51 (E!); and 12 (Cablevisions News12 Long Island service)! All the other premium, digital, and HD channels worked fine.

This is the one and only spontaneous restart I have experienced with this box. The missing channels were blocked. When selected, the TiVo channel banner would flash for a tenth of a second, but then total black <driven black, not just blank>. After half a minute, a TiVo message bar would appear at the bottom of the screen saying "Searching for signal on cable in; check Troubleshooting." The signal strength meter would show "no digital signal," zero. If I try a subscription channel that I don't have, like Cinemax, say, it jumps to the b&w cable provider screen with the message "This channel is blocked." If you Clear that, you get the TiVo channel banner over a black screen. But for the missing channels, just dead black.

Now it gets weird. Tuesday, for no apparent reason, chs. 46, 47, 50, and 51 'healed up'--came back all by themselves. But 12, 704, 705 were still gone. A senior tech came by on Friday, did all kinds of hygiene on the connectors inside and out, and then spent about an hour working with a high level field supervisor in dispatch. We removed and reseated the cards. Dispatch poked them from their end. There was no evident abnormality. Tech did some arcane testing outside on the line. I couldn't follow the whole conversation between him and dispatch, but it seemed to involve something about "rate codes," and there was some strange exchange about swapping out the modem, then trying to put it in 'boost' mode, and having it immediately blown offline, which was apparently strange and inexplicable. After nearly two hours, both TiVo and the two CableCards were declared to be working fine, and the incident was referred to Digital Services, whose engineers would contact TiVo and get back to me.

Having heard nothing in a week, and having found Jeff's suggestion, I decided today to give it a try, even though my case did not involve repeated restarts. I followed the steps precisely. After finishing Guided Setup on pure analog cable, there was ch. 12 again, as usual, since it is a feature of extended basic. I reseated CableCard 1. It authorized. I checked channels; all same as before. Reseated 2. It authorized. Tested channels, same as before: no 12, 704, or 705. Ran Guided Setup again, had breakfast.

Then checked. 12 was back! <So too were 16 and 17, which I don't usually activate, but which the supervisor the previous week told us to check, since he expected that if 12 was missing, they would be too, and they were.>

But 704 and 705 are still stone cold dead.

I've reported this all to TiVo, who have given it an incident number, and referred it to engineering, who will be contacting the Cablevision supervisor we were working with last week <and who provided the direct phone to his desk>. Some the people the TiVo phone tech spoke with had heard of analogies to a couple of stubbornly missing channels, but NObody had heard of everything working perfectly for three weeks and THEN a reboot is provoked, and a couple of channels show up missing.

I continue to impressed that four came back by themselves. And that Jeff's procedure fixed most of the others. Some demon still has hold of 704 and 705, however.

I'll update when I know anything more.

p

Similar Problem With Missing Channel

I have a similar problem with my Series 3 Tivo / Cable Card Channel. I live in Manhattan, Time Warner Cable. Every channel is coming in fine except for A/E channel 16 -- it just disappeared few months ago. Its jsut a blank screen, even tho Tivo has all the channel information on it. Its simply not getting a signal on 16. Didnt deal with the problem for months until the new season of Mind Freak started -- I started to get annoyed and finally called Time Warner. Tech came in, tested the line, swapped out 3 cable cards, and "hit" the cards 15 times and channel 16 still would not show up. I am going thru guided setup again to hope it will comeback live. On another note, I also have my old digital cable box attached to a series 2 tivo box (as a Tivo overflow recorder), within the same TV setup. I have no problem receiveing ALL the channels within the same cable splitter (so the worst case is, I am watching Mind Freak on my series 2 instead of series 3, and have to flick TV input). So I can probably assume its not a line problem. Its logically a Tivo or Cable Card issue. But since we have swapped out numerous cable cards, I highly suspect its a Tivo issue. Will keep you posted. (July 20, 2007)

Yup - you should be watching that in HD!

Tell us if this series of events gets your channel back. We're pretty sure it should do the trick.

Rebooting NO CCARDS NO Lost Channelse

I bought my HDS3 prior to Janaury 2007. It had been working fine until recently (the last week). Now it seems to reboot constantly after recordings start. I have had some snowy channels because of rain recently but it isn't any worse than I have had in the past when rebooting didn't occur. Disk drive could be running close to full also but the OS shoudl handle this properly. Also recently having problem erasing programs. The unit takes time to erase and put into the recently erased folder. I don't use cable cards and do not believe I am losing any

I do have an HD antenna connected to one of the rf inputs. Been connected since day-1 without problems.

-Donner

Tivo HD 1wk old reboots

I've just gotten my Tivo last week and it has been rebooting prior to Comcast installing a CableCARD. It seems to reboot on HD channels and the Tivo contest which is currently avail (enter your Oscar (?) picks and win a free Tivo HD). On the contest, I never make it to the 3rd question and the Tivo reboots.

I called Tivo and the person I spoke with wanted me to swap it out. I'm ok w/ doing this but should I generally be concerned? Are these boxes problematic? Anyone have a Tivo HD which works flawlessly? I've upgraded from a non-HD Tivo and this former box worked without ONE hitch from the day I got it (1yr ago).

Any comments, suggestions (please, no UPS power supply suggestions as this is obviously a software, firmware or HDD issues, IMO).

Cheers,
goethe_sf

still reboots

Update: I just followed the instructions on this thread regarding removing the CableCARD and redoing everything. I've gotten through the entire process and my Tivo HD still reboots when I watch HD channels via Comcast. Any comments?

dead thread

This thread appears to be dead ... my reboots continue. As the box is < 7 days old, I contacted Tivo for a replacement. Will make sure the 2nd box is used a lot before the 30 day money-back guarantee runs out. :-\

It does sound like the unit is having problems. If the TiVo was rebooting prior to installation of the CableCARDS, you should have it (or its drive) swapped out.

waitin for new HD box

Thanks for the post. I coordinated with Tivo to swap the box with a replacement. I'll post on the update after 30 days with the new 2nd box.

Bought S3 (from WK) December'06. No problems until a month ago. At that time random reboots started occuring during playback. I have noticed that if I play the same recorded program during which it once rebooted, it will reboot again at the same point in the recorded program.

I tried the "kickstart 57" as recommended by several folk on the tivocommunity forum. That obviously didn't help, as it did one of the random reboots within a half an hour.

Tonite I followed the instructions from WK-Jeff at the top of this thread. I then played an episode of Cheers which caused a reboot earlier this evening. BAM! It caused a reboot again.

So what do you think? Bad hard drive? People keep saying that freezes and reboots are caused by bad hard drives, but this seems so strange to me. Surely the TiVo programmers would handle bad sectors more smoothly than to just reboot, eh?

Do you see any other indications of a bad drive, such as freezing, stuttering, pixellation, during playback?

No. Well, no stuttering or pixellation, but I'm not exactly sure what you mean by freezing, so let me be explicit. The event always goes down like this: First the playback stops. The image on the screen is frozen, and sound ceases. Four seconds go by. Then the TiVo begins a reboot. Each time I've seen this it has been during playback of an SD recording. Have never seen it while watching HD, and have never seen it while on a TiVo menu. Is that what you call a "freeze"?

Has been happening more often every day. Last night it happened about 5 times within a period of a few hours. (each time while watching a different program) I gave up trying to watch recorded programs.

I boxed up the S3 and sent it to WK this morning for repair (R207441).

Oh... and here's another funky symptom that happened Saturday night. I was watching Saturday Night Live (HD) from the TiVo while it was being recorded. I noticed a funny blue cast on some faces. Walked up to the TV and looked closely. Damn. The blue portion of the image was shifted to the right 4 inches (on my 49 in TV). Red and green were aligned properly, but blue was shifted. If you looked to the right of each person's head about 4 inches you could see the edge of a blue shadow. How easy this was to see depended strongly on the background. (As you probably know, there's not much luminance in the blue channel, so when things go wrong with blue it is subtle.) Strange, eh? I switched the TV to watching directly from cable, and SNL looked just fine. View from the TiVo however, and you see this strange blue shadow. That recording is probably still on the TiVo, so you can see for yourself tomorrow. This might just be a one time glitch, or maybe it is symptomatic of whatever is going wrong with the box. I've heard about sound getting out of sync, but I've never heard anyone describe blue getting out of sync with red and green! I turned the TV off and back on to see if this was some HDMI problem. No change. Went back to TiVo main menu and restarted the program to see if this was something that got out of sync during playback. No, it seems to always be there. Power cycled the TiVo and looked again. Its permanent in the recording. Damn strange.

Sounds good...we'll see for ourselves soon enough. Sorry for the difficulty.

Just last night my S3 broke down and has been continually rebooting itself. There was freezing, stuttering and pixellation during live TV. I was able to watch about 15-20 minutes of HD before the suttering began again. Also the reboot is slow and not always successful. At the Tivo screen, the icon in the upper left also appears to shutter, and will then either finish booting or crash & reboot again.

I think the hard drive was close to full but I was able to delete several programs, which seemed to help get it back up. But it failed again within 1 hour.

We've had this S3 for 9 months with not issue. Could this be a recent update vs bad drive?