Hello,
Bare with me as I'm new to this whole tivo upgrading thing, but basically what happened was that the hard drive in my TIVO series 2 failed very abruptly. We didn't really notice any of the warning signs previous to the failure, but one night the tivo rebooted on its own, and would not get past the powering up screen. The hard drive was also ticking and scraping like crazy. I read some forums and attempted to backup the drive but the damage was done, it was unreadable, and incredibly noisy.
I found the Weaknees site, order a 320GB replacement hard drive and threw it in the TIVO tonight. I followed all of the instructions and powered the unit on. It got to the powering up screen, then the screen went grey, and stayed grey.
I re-read the instructions and they informed me that the IDE cable that came with the TIVO should be replaced by the one provided by Weaknees, and so I did that, and now the TIVO does not even get to the power on screen, nothing but snow. I can hear the harddrive spin, and the fan is spinning, but no picture. I reset the SATA adapter, and no change, I went back to the original IDE cable and no change. To Say I'm mad is an understatement as this drive cost more then a replacement tivo unit. I threw the drive in another PC to see if it was damaged and my diagnostic tools told me it was empty with no partitions. Is this what I should expect or did Weaknees send me a blank hard drive?