Tivo Breakdown…….and Recovery
August 9th, 2006 by Ian
The Tivo in our bedroom had been slowly dying for the past few months. In the beginning it was slow or unresponsive to commands from the remote. Then in the past month or two it would have one or two small skips in a recorded program. Then it became a small skip every 3 or 4 minutes in a recorded program. I did some research and learned that this was most likely due to a dying hard drive. This Tivo was 6 years old so it isn’t surprising the drive was dying after being constantly written to 24 hours a day for 6 years. The solution was to replace the drive. I wasn’t in the mood for such a task yet, so I put it off.
Well, in the past week things got worse. The Tivo started to freeze. I flip on the TV and the picture would be frozen. No response to any button on the remote. I would have to unplug the unit and plug it back in to get it running again. The horrible thing is that while the Tivo was frozen, it wasn’t recording any season passes.
What I haven’t mentioned at this point is that the Tivo in the bedroom is hooked up to the TV in our workout area. My 45 minutes on the elliptical machine is made bearable by the fact that I can watch Gilmore Girls (yes, I’m hooked…..I’m not afraid to admit it…..it makes for the perfect workout show). Without a TV to entertain me, working out becomes actual work and I don’t do it. Seriously, if I didn’t have a TV in front of me, I would not work out. So it is the TV and not the elliptical machine that has helped me lose the weight 
So you can see that the breakdown of the Tivo to the point that it wasn’t recording shows (ie Gilmore Girls) was a very pressing matter for me. At this point, I was forced to take action. Monday I picked up a new hard drive at Best Buy (damn those things are getting cheaper and cheaper), and went home to get to work. I found a great how-to on the web for replacing/upgrading the hard drive in a Tivo. It turned out being easier than expected. I hit a few snags when I found out my PC does not have an IDE hard drive and my husband’s PC is unable to boot from a CD. Luckily, I had a spare computer laying around (meant to be our new server - another project in limbo) and was able to use that.
The Tivo is up and running again better than before. No freezes, skips in programs, or unresponsiveness to the remote. And Gilmore Girls is being recorded each day for my workout viewing pleasure. Oh, and since I put a larger hard drive in (you can’t find hard drives under 80 gig anymore) we have twice the recording time we used to!