My Tivo Premiere has a motherboard failure after 2 years, and they don’t save your recording to do list

My dad has a TIVO many many years ago, and I ended up getting one not long after. It just had the best interface of any cable provider, and the ability to schedule shows online was so amazing.

My first Tivo has a DVD burner built in, and then I moved to an HD Tivo, which lasted quite a few years, before moving to my Tivo Premiere about 2 years ago.

Previously I had also replaced a failing hard drive, in my Tivo 3 to extend it’s lfie

The latest Tivo interface was annoying in that it added adds into the channel lineup, but the interface was still great, and I still love the ability to set recordings from my phone whenever I hear about a new show.

The problem is, just before the 2 year mark my Tivo Premiere bit the bullet, and it looks to be a known hardware fault where the motherboard fails. Tivo would have let me purchase a refurb for $150 to replace my TIVO, but it turns out they didn’t save my Recording To Do List anywhere but on my TIVO.

And honestly it is the To Do List that is the most important thing, as it all your upcoming recordings. And that is something you can’t record at once, because so many shows only show up near when they are able to record. So losing this list is a huge thing. And knowing that the Tivo Premiere’s have motherboard issues, why program it again, when it will likely only last another couple of years.

And honestly we were paying too much for cable, to have hbo and all the channels, so we just gave up on Cable.

First we got a digital antennae, but first off some channels don’t work well (though the ones that do, look better than they ever did on cable), and the interface on the tv is so slow, and awful, and I have lived too long with a DVR to start trying to watch tv when it is on.

Frontier offered a deal on YouTubeTV, which is a basic cable with a DVR, and we got $10 a month off from them. So we did that and it works well enough, though some channels don’t look great, and I hate the recordings interface, which I can’t figure out the interface. Why aren’t the newest shows first? What order is it in exactly?

Still it works and less than were paying for cable and all the channels, and I can still watch the news.

Managed to fix my ailing TIVO with my Mac

My TIVO Premiere XL had started having issues, it was pixelating and randomly pausing, which are signs that the hard drive is failing. My TIVO is way out of warranty, and last time I called TIVO for this issue with my previous Series 3 TIVO, they told me to buy a new one. Well right now we can’t afford a new TIVO, and especially not a TIVO and moving over my lifetime service (which they don’t offer on their site, but I was certainly going to call them and get it), plus since I have the XL if I got a new TIVO I would really like a PRO model, and there is no Pro Model of the TIVO Bolt, only of the previous generation ROMIO.

So I decided to try and repair my TIVO by replacing the drive, and doing it with a bigger capacity. I did this with the help of two sites, Ross Walker’s excellent guide to Upgrading or Rescuing a TIVO, and the Tivo Community forum thread on the awesome JMFS Live CD that Walker tells you to use.

Now it was not without issues, firstly because I have a Mac, and it would not boot off the JMFS Live CD, and to get around this I used Parallels to run the JMFS Live CD in emultation, though this meant I had to connect the drives externally so I could get them to mount in Parallels (i have a Sonnet SATA card, but the drives show up as internals so I couldn’t get them to mount). At first I tried to use 2 external drive housings, that the drives just plug into, but one was USB 3 (and my USB 3 card no longer works with OS X EL Captian) so it was really slow and kept failing after 24 hours.

After this I tried using the Ubuntu method to just do the copy, but couldn’t get that to work as the drives would not show up in it in parallels, so I gave up and went back to the JMFS live CD in Parallels.

So I put one drive in an OWC housing and tried that, but still I got failures. So I put both drives in OWC housings, with a lot of space around them and pointed a Vornado at them to cool them down. On my fifth try it succeeded.

This is after it succeeded and trying to fix failed blocks, which it changed from 469K to only 29K, nice job JMFS!

This it almost completed showing the higher errors.

And with JMFS, after the copy I was able to expand, and supersize the drive. The commands to activate the Accoustic and Sound management (got errors) but it is a brand new drive, and a 3TB WD Green Drive, so I am not worried.

I put the new drive in and started my TIVO and it did 2 restarts with noise, and then did it’s full startup and all my shows and record settings made it over, and it works great!

Amazing how painful it was having no TV for a week, but at least it is up and working now, and now I have higher capacity! WOOHOO!

Thanks for the help people on the boards.

Tivo Talks Cable Cards

  • Post category:TIVO
  • Post comments:0 Comments

Tivo has released a new blog post talking about Cable Cards.

This is because congress has repealed it’s legislation that required cable companies to use cable cards in their own devices, and allowed 3rd party devices like TIVO to use them.

TIVO is saying they will still exist for a while, and they are working with Comcast to create a new non-cable card solution, but it still is worrisome as a longtime TIVO user. I mean of course I would like something that also works with all the VOD from Verizon, but I hate their DVRs and have loved the simplicity of TIVO for a long time, so I hope they manage to stick around!