Tivo set top box on its way out?

Hi all!
Have had my Tivo S3 HD box for over 2 years and has run flawlessly in all that time!
However there are some minor and not so minor things i am noticing happening in the last few days/weeks

Minor: My 'season pass' - while they are set to record 'first only', i have noticed that when i look at the To-Do list, the season pass is scheduling to record ALL instances of a program

Major: In the last week, my Tivo box has frozen and completely unresponsive. This happened once 4 days ago (static looking grey/multicoloured screen) and once 3 days ago (frozen on a program/tv channel). Unplugged power and powered back on and all was working again. Yesterday i noticed that sometime after the previous reboot, the box was completely off. No lights, nothing. I pulled it out of its home, tried different power points and cords, and still nothing. Removed the case and used compressed air to give the inside a bit of a clean, plugged it back in to test and got it powered on again. This all happened around 3pm. Sometime between 3pm and 5am this morning, the box had once again gone into a frozen state (frozen on a program/tv channel), unresponsive to any remote control operation.

I've done a little bit of research and haven't found too many people having these intermittent issues, i've looked around these forums and nothing much is seen about this issue. I've read some US forum posts, which has indicated that the internal Tivo HDD could be on the way out.

It just seems strange that after 2+ years all was fine, and then in the space of a week it's given me a number of headaches. I logged a support ticket with Tivo, though i'm just wondering whether it's going to be of any use, and whether i should just replace the HDD myself (using the Engadget instructions found within this forum)

Thoughts from some Tivo forum regulars?
Thanks,
Luke

Update: Since i got the stb up and running as at about 7:15am this morning, it has frozen again sometime between then and now (1:45pm) so it's only staying up hours after crashing. Have just pulled the box out of the entertainment unit again, and while it was powered on, the fan was still running, and the box was hot (but no hotter than my foxtel unit which sits right next to it). Since unplugging it, i've gone to plug it back in, and now once again it will not power on at all

Well since it is out of warranty, you might as well check the drive as that is the most common point of failure. Though your symptoms are not the usual first signs of drive failure.

You might want to run a drive check utility like seatools (works even though it is not a seagate drive), before forking out for a new drive.

Peter.

I've organised to take a look at this one. Experience has shown more than a hard disk issue, most likely motherboard problems.