Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 7 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Last night I found my TiVo HD just showing a black screen and it was unresponsive to the remote. No big deal, I rebooted it and it came back up fine. Then I tried to play an HD recording and it spontaneously rebooted. This time it got stuck in a reboot loop. So I let it sit unplugged for a few minutes, tried again and it booted fine. I tried playing the recording again, bam, reboot.

It got stuck in a reboot loop again, so I tried leaving it uplugged for a while like before, but no luck, still the reboot loop. Sometimes it would get to the “almost there” screen, other times it would just keep repeating the “powering up” screen.

Then I remembered I had the Western Digital MyDVR Expander connected. So I checked all the eSATA cable connections and they were tight. I tried booting without the Expander connected and the TiVo got all the way to the “external storage not detected” screen so that pointed to the Expander as the issue.

I wasn’t ready to divorce the drive just yet, so I unplugged the THD and the Expander and let them sit off for a while … but was still unable to get the box to boot with the external drive attached.

When I power up the Expander, it makes a slight vibrating buzz (like a pager) then I can hear the drive spin up. Then I can hear a clicking noise (which doesn’t sound good) and then the drive sounds like it spins down. I also can’t get into any of the TiVo’s kickstart modes to run a drive check. I suspect the box is hanging when trying to read the Expander and thus not getting far enough in the boot process to look for kickstart codes from the remote.

I’m not sure this is the same problem described in this thread on the TiVo Community Forum … it could be an actual hardware failure. I don’t have an eSATA connector on my PC, so I can’t run any diagnostics on the drive without it being connected to the TiVo … unless I rip open the enclosure. I checked my drive’s serial number on WD’s warranty site and it’s still covered, so maybe I’ll just try the RMA route.

Luckily I don’t think there’s any real backlog of shows I wanted to watch on the box, so if I end up returning the drive it’s no big loss (it’s just TV after all, right?). Hopefully I’ll get the replacement drive before the new fall season really starts up.