Fixing a misbehaving TiVo

[Tuatara]

A month or two back my TiVo gave the game away. It was competely non-responsive -- no picture, no noise from inside the TiVo, no LED, no response from the Turbonet. Suspecting the power supply had failed, I got a new one from George. I tried it out this morning but unfortunately it hasn't made any difference. I've tried using a different power cable, but no cigar.

It sounds ominous -- a motherboard, perhaps? I'm a complete idiot when it comes to hardware ... so, can anybody suggest my next step? Is there a place I can take the box to have somebody knowledgeable cast an eye over it (I'm in Auckland)? Would any PC repair shop at least be able to diagnose the problem?

I just set up a friend's new TiVo this morning and of course it reminded me what I'm missing! ;-)

Cheers
Matt

[STu]

I take it the fan isn't spinning and you don't hear the hard drive spin up when you power the TiVo on.

With PC's I normally start by removing bits one by one to see which component is causing the problem but the TiVo just doesn't have much you can pull out. Might be worth unplugging the fan for a breief period to see if it's shorting or something but it does sound farily bad.

I had to replace a power supply in my TiVo for a different reason (sound dropping out of all things) and have the old one lying around doing nothing (in Ak) but I doubt it would help.

[Tuatara]

I take it the fan isn't spinning and you don't hear the hard drive spin up when you power the TiVo on.

That's right. There's some flicker on the screen which makes me think there's power getting to something, but otherwise there's no sign of life.

I've swapped out the power supply and tried it with a different power lead and a different disk just to be sure they're not to blame. (I did some research and bad disks get blamed for many TiVo problems.)

Cheers
Matt

[zollymonsta]

Sounds pretty ominous.

Do you know anyone handy with a multimeter? You could get them to check that the power supply is actually providing the correct power levels (+5 and +12 ?) off the power supply.

If that checks out fine, then it could be a motherboard problem.