I was at my daughter’s home for Mother’s Day dinner and noticed that her TiVo DVR was not responding to inputs from the remote control. I rebooted the TiVo by unplugging/replugging the power. (There is no power switch on TiVo DVRs.)
There was a terrible grinding noise as if the hard drive platters were scraping against something. I packed the TiVo home at evening’s end.
This morning I removed the drive from the TiVo and when I shake it, I can hear the drive internals rattling. Probably a massive failure of the bearing(s). I’ve never seen a drive so badly damaged that it rattled.
Note: this is a Seagate 750 GB drive that I installed, not the original TiVo drive. The original is kept as a backup for occasions when the DVR needs a new drive, like now. I’ll copy the original drive to a new drive for the DVR and put the original back into storage.