Out of ideas

[spaceman1013]

Has anyone ran into this scenario. I am out of ideas on what could be wrong.

Here is how it all started. Midwest got hit by a storm. Power went out. Unit is hooked to a battery backup, so put the unit in standby and then powered off the UPS unit. When power came back on unit would not start. Unhooked it from UPS and tried to power it several times, but no luck. Fans spin, but thats it no Welcome video.

DSR708 DTivo hacked. Working fine for over a year.

The Tivo will not start with any drive cabled to it. Power is fine, all cables reseated, tried different IDE cable. Tried the 2 drives and both work in a second machine just fine, but not in this unit.

If I just connect the power to the drive then I do hear the drive spin up and get the Welcome screen. But obviously it goes blank after that with no drive. If any Tivo drive is cabled it will not even spin up the drive.

Any ideas?

I suppose I could use the working unit and do a clear and delete. But last time I tried to get DirecTV to activate another older Tivo unit with an ex-sub card they gave me all kinds of problems. Until finally on a 4th call I got a Rep that said he would send me a new card via mail for $10 or $20 charge an activate it.

Are they still giving people problems trying to activate older DTivos?

[spaceman1013]

Okay found this thread about similar problem, and sure enough the large Capacitor under the heatsink is bubbled up on top. The working DSR708 is not.

Damn counterfeit caps strike again! I had 2 motherboards that I got repaired because of this. And my new MB is now all solid state caps, I wonder why

Now my question is where can I find these caps and how hard would this be to do? I have soldered before.

[Narf54321]

Yeah, I've had misgivings about those liquid "electrolytic" capacitors in the first place... chinese knockoffs or not. Perhaps you could call me misguided, but I just can't bring myself trust anything liquid-based in my electronics. I'm not really convinced of those heat-pipe heatsinks either.

[spaceman1013]

I did some research and you can buy the better Japanese capacitors here and this guy does capacitor replacements for a reasonable price. He fixed 2 of my computer MBs and they work great. I don't know if he does power supplies or not.

Anyways I had a backup PS from the other working unit. I swapped it and sure enough the Tivo is back up and working.