u/CryptographerTop2023

Lucky enough to still have a system that supports cable cards.

I have a Bolt where I installed an external SATA from Weaknees — this replaced the internal drive, so it is the one and only Tivo drive. Was using the hard disk enclosure from WK for years until a few weeks ago — after a blackout, the hard drive enclosure refused to power up (no power to the drive, the fan or status lights). The power brick was good. I did basis troubleshooting, but the enclosure seemed unrepairable.

That original enclosure didn’t seem to be available, so I ordered a functional equivalent from eBay. That box has power, but the Tivo didn’t recognize it (dance of the flashing color lights on the Bolt.). I replaced the 22 pin SATA to eSATA cable, with no better result.

WHAT DOES WORK — If I open the TIVO and directly connect the 3.5 inch drive to the TIVO SATA connector, it works perfectly. The drive is too big to physically fit in the Bolt, so the bare drive sits clumsily on the side of the TIVO, so it is less than an ideal solution.

Any ideas? Unless I have ANOTHER bad external enclosure or ANOTHER bad SATA cable (possible, but seems unlikely), I am running out of ideas on how to get back to where I was before the blackout.

I’m not going to make a fuss with this, since it was under $5, but I got a note from eBay that the item I shipped at 6 pounds was really 12 pounds, and I owe the difference (I paid). (The carrier was UPS, they made the determination on the weight)

The thing is, I am 100% sure it was under 6 pounds, we weighed it 3 times (fully packed). The item in the original packaging (which was what we shipped) is 4 pounds without the shipping box, so it would be impossible for the shipping box and bubble wrap to add 8 pounds, so this can’t be a scale problem on my end.

Just curious if anyone else has run into this, or was this just a random human error.