I have a TIVO Premiere with a DVR Expander and we had a power outage the other day. When the TIVO booted up again, it gave me an "External Storage Missing" error. I have seen this sporadically in the last few years, but some combination of restarting the 2 devices and some patience always got it up and running again, as usual.

I have restarted each device countless times, in the recommended order. Nearly every time, the screen displays "Welcome, Starting Up..." and then a black screen in an endless loop....finally resulting in the "External Storage Missing" error. Occasionally, the cycle never ends on the "External Storage Missing" error and the cycle of the "Welcome" and black screens continues for hours or overnight.

The expander is definitely powering on - the light appears on the front and I can feel the hard drive spin up. The tivo is also powering on, at least enough to show the Welcome and error screens.

TIVO support was unhelpful. I also tried accessing the Tivo Hard-Drive Performance Test menu (https://support.tivo.com/articles/Tr...oubleshooting/) and the lights respond as indicated, but nothing ever happens.

We've had this setup for the last 8 years, so I'm assuming there's some kind of hard drive failure in either in the tivo or the expander.

I'm not interested in deleting all of my programs - if there is nothing else that can be done, I would just upgrade my device at that point.

QUESTIONS:

-Is there any additional troubleshooting that can be done that doesn't involve losing all of my recordings?

-Are there any data recovery services for tivo/expander devices?

Thanks.