I have a Tivo HD bought in early 2008 with a 160Gig drive. A few times over the years it rebooted itself but mostly worked fine. I have always used an antennae with it. I did have basic cable for a while also. I had an external WD 500gig drive on it for three years. I have a dsl internet connection to it.

A few weeks ago it started banging to a static screen and screaming a loud rythmic click every few seconds. Hm. Bummer. A little research and I decided that a new drive was in order.

I ordered a 1 terabyte drive from weaknees. Installed and booted up. The external drive would not get recognized. After three or four reboots I disconnected it and put it aside.

Within the first few days the static and screaming clicks came back, twice. Unplugs and restarts worked both times. Then no problems for a week until Saturday, 14th December. The Tivo froze up while recording the Saints/49ers game. Rebooting and starting up again it happened within three minutes two more times.

This symptom is a frozen screen, the remote produced no flashing lights from the tivo front panel. During the earlier static and clicking symptom the remote would make the Tivo flash the yellow light with no result.

So, whats the problem here? Is the new drive bad? Do I need deeper repairs to the motherboard? The computer board inside is surprisingly sparse. Not much there. I thought that video circuitry would be larger.

Oh, one last thing. This 1 terabyte drive makes noise. The old drive was always absolutely silent. I can hear this drive working. That seems to not be a proper symptom. I have never had a drive this unbelievably big tho. My first hard drive was 20 megabytes.

jd at lyalls dot net