One of my two ~4 year old Hughes HDVR2s appears to be dead. It is cycling through the power-up sequence, periodically displaying a message to the effect that a serious error has occurred and I should leave it connected for at least three hours. I think the other two screens are something like "powering up" and "almost there", but I'm not positive about that.
My other identical unit is still running, so I don't think it's a bad software update. I think "it's dead, Jim" :-( What's the likelihood it's the hard drive rather than some other component? It sounds like the heads are moving when I power up, but I don't know if the platters are spinning (I haven't removed it yet). Does the above message come from firmware flashed into the TiVo, rather than the hard drive? The hard drive was installed about 3 years ago, and I have the MFS(?) tools backup from that time. At the time, the maximum disk space it could use was 137GB. Is that still the case with newer kernels (assuming TiVo has updated the kernel since then)? If it can handle bigger disks, will I be able to use the extra space after restoring the backup (which is limited to 137GB drives due to its age) and then letting software updates take place? It must have known I was struggling with the "how to upgrade to high def" question lately ;-) Thanks ... Mike
