Hello, looking for help on a dead Tivo HD. Tivo tech support directed me to you guys, and I'm pretty sure I need to replace the hard drive, but since my symptoms don't seem to exactly quite match your troubleshooting page, I figure I'd ask to be sure. About a month ago (the Tivo is 3 and a half years old) I started noticing it randomly restarting for no reason in the middle of a show, and a couple days after that it started freezing and then going black in the middle of a show (both live and recorded), to the point I had to pull the plug and hard reboot it. This continued for a couple of weeks, restarting and/or freezing anywhere from a couple hours apart to a couple days apart. Eventually it started taking more than one try to reboot it before it would get all the way to the intro video.

Yesterday, Tivo support tried having me do the drive diagnostics (reboot and hold pause), but now I cannot get it to boot at all. Every time I try, it shows the "Welcome! Powering up..." screen for about 8 seconds, then flickers off and changes to a solid grey screen. I have not yet opened the case, but if I listen closely at this point I can hear the hard drive stopping and then spinning up again every 19 seconds or so. The screen stays solid grey. It is the same on both component and composite outputs (the HDMI output has always had problems - but that's a separate issue).

At no point does the front panel ever seem to respond to any commands from the remote control. It always just shows the green LED - I cannot get yellow or red to blink or so anything else. I have been unable to enter the diagnostic menu.

Does this definitely sound like a dead hard drive? I'm willing to try pulling it out and running tests from a linux box, but Tivo is offering to sell me a Premier for $199 and keep my annual subscription, so I'm not sure replacing the drive for $139 + shipping is really worth it at this point. Would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.