Official Moxi Hard Drive Replacement Thread - Page 4

I am going through a bunch of switches and one router. Will give a try direct to DSL modem. Nothing to lose. I have 3 1.5 year old Moxi 3 tuner units and I cannot get any of them to recognize the 4 button press sequence. Since two function as Moxis and one does not, I suppose it must be systemic problem to what I am doing as opposed to unique to broken Moxi box.

Direct hookup to dsl modem seems to have done the trick. Initiation of re-install started. How long should process take?

Actually took about 20 mins but worked perfectly. Only issue now is that I must reset Cablecard with TWC. That is by far hardest part of process. Been on hold 20 mins so far.

Thanks for the updates, ordering today....

I had to replace my Moxi OEM hard drive because it was failing as well.

I had a successful replacement/upgrade and everything worked fabulously for a few months. Then some of my local channels would not show up in the guide (I'm running Verizon FIOS.). I contacted Moxi and they said that my warranty was null and void because I had a third party open up my Moxi. Moxi Support has since disowned me and will not help.

As I explained to them, this is not jail breaking. The software that was put on the new hard drive was 100% fresh from Moxi. This should be a simple fix for their Support team but I can't even pay them to look at it.

Has anyone figured out a way to fix something this simple on their own?

Just a follow up...solution found.

While the Moxi is powered up and running, pull the M-card out of the back, wait a minute and then reinsert it back into it's slot. The Moxi will then ask to do a channel scan. Confirm "ok" and it will complete it in less than 10 seconds. Presto! All channels are again present. It even keeps your custom selected and deselected channels.

I must also comment that the Moxi representatives that I spoke with very, very firm on their stance (to the point of being rude) that in no way, shape, or form will I be getting any support from them. I even asked if I could send my unit in to be looked at on my dime and they wouldn't agree. WTF?!

Anyways, just make sure you're ready to cut the cord permanently with Moxi Support if you decide to do your the hard drive upgrade. The new hard drive I had installed is whisper smooth and is a 1.5TB so I'm never have to worry about space anymore. Not sure I'd do it again though. Actually knowing what I know now (re: support), I don't think I would've purchased the Moxi.

P.S. F*ck you Moxi Support! We're here to fix what you won't.

Moxi 3-tuner DVR

Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 3 TB CoolSpin 32MB cache SATA 6Gb/s

Firmware ???

Internal

SUCCESS

So far so good! I haven't seen any pauses and it feels snappy.

Is there any way to confirm that the Moxi sees all the space, other than recording a fair amount of shows and projecting capacity from the % used and an estimate of the amount of space an hour of (HD) recordings uses?

Wow.. breaking the 2GB barrier. Thanks for posting.

Installed Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive. System freezes when watching recorded content. Freezes during rewind as well when pausing and rewinding a show being watched.

This is on Moxi 3-tuner DVR that is 2 years old and was already replaced once by Moxi (on warranty). Original Seagate drive had died.

UPDATE: Switched to Samsung Spinpoint F4 HD204UI OEM 2TB 5900RPM 32MB cache. Now works fine.

I purchased my 3-tuner Moxi about 18 months ago. The recording and playing quality degraded recently and Sunday everything froze. Losing about 50 hours of HD recordings. I replaced the Moxi drive (Seagate ST3500321CS) with an old WD 200GB drive. The Moxi is functional until I recieve the drive (Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 2TB 5900 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5) from newegg.com. I will let the forum know how the new drive performs.

My question, "Has anyone Ghosted or imaged a smalled drive to a larger drive and installed the larger drive into the Moxi"? If this is possible it would allow me to keep the programs I have already recorded on my current but smaller drive. Thanks

No one has been able to ghost/dd an existing drive to a new larger drive. When you swap drive, all records and settings are lost.

No, can't be done.

Use the 2tb as an external. If you loose the 200mb you only lose what was on it. The 2tb will operate with a new internal on the same box in the future with no loss of content.

First of all. . . THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to provide their HDD information.

We were suffering from the "frozen picture" syndrome and finally the moxi wouldn't reboot.

After a trip to Fry's, I bought the cheapest 500GB HDD they had. Took it home and installed it, was up and running in 15 minutes.

A week later, I received a "nastygram" from moxi stating they knew I had opened my case. How did they find out? They never had physical access to my unit. This certainly feels like an invasion of my privacy. There is a choice 4-letter word I would love to use repeatedly in response to their message. It's sad that an American company can't make a reliable, long-lasting product.

Anyhow, enough of my belly-aching. Here's what I installed:

Moxi 2-tuner DVR
Seagate Barracuda ST3500413AS 500 TB 7200RPM 16MB cache
Firmware ??? (it's the one from Aug 2010)
Internal
SUCCESS

My curiosity would like to know if anyone know what moxi charges for an out of warranty (over one year old) HDD replacement.

Once again, THANKS to all those who took a chance and helped save me some cabbage.

They will likely refuse to service your DVR as they consider it to be "tampered" with by somone other than themselves.

They can easily determine that the drive has been replaced when the unit boots up it identifies all hardware during the probe sequence and this information is surely sent to moxi as diagnostic information since they likely monitor device performance issue and they probably noticed a non-stock drive after seeing the diagnostic information?

Who cares? If you put a better HD in the Moxi unit you most likely will not have hardware problems for quite awhile. Now only if the company would engage the customer more and also update the software. TWC is driving my Dad nuts but it looks like converting him to a Moxi would be a big risk as the service could disappear any day. Moxi/Arriss? Are you listening?

Looks like we are moving back to captured hardware. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

Who has the worst customer service ratings? Cable and Cell Phone. What is common? (that is rhetorical)

Nice to know that Moxi Customer Service is proactively shooting themselves in the foot.

When I first got my Moxi the support team would send useful messages to the Mail Box (wondered what that mail icon was for?). Then that stopped and no updates to software.

Moxi 3-tuner DVR
Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB 32MB cache 5400K SATA 3Gb/s
Firmware ???
Internal
SUCCESS

FFP recovery and setup went off without a hitch. The drive is cool and quiet, even seems noticeably quicker than the OEM drive.

Now getting Time Warner to pull their heads out and re-pair my CableCard is a different story... They refuse to do it over the phone and couldn't roll a tech until Tuesday. I called them on Friday night. If it goes like before, the tech will call before coming and we'll do it all by phone then. Ridiculous... what a waste,

It's not a success until you record a few shows and play them back. I tried with a green drive and while it formatted fine the recordings would break up all over the place and were unwatchable.

Even though my CableCard's not paired yet (service call is scheduled this afternoon), I've recorded shows from several HD feeds from local networks that I'm able to tune without it. So far, playback is flawless.

The drive gets noticeably louder when it's actively recording. It's not bad by any means, but it's not silent like it typically is when it's only buffering. Not quite sure why that is...

I am banging my head into the wall trying to figure out why I can't get the four-finger press to work. I have a 2-tuner, rev 1.02 Moxi that perpetually reboots itself; the original hard drive starts clicking about once a second during the boot until it gives up. I'd say the drive is bad. I have a few hard drives handy that I'd like to try, and based on reading this thread I think one of them should work. But all attempts to get the FFP to work have failed. It's just the four arrow keys on the front panel as you plug it in, right? That and make sure it's hooked to the Internet.

Network-wise, my Moxi normally runs through a hub behind the TV which is then uplinked to a router, which connects to a Comcast cable modem. I've tried connecting to the router (bypassing the hub), resetting the router and modem (in both orders), and connecting directly to the cable modem (again resetting it). I also tried Internet Sharing from a laptop with an auto-crossover Ethernet connection, thinking that might somehow give it the IP it's looking for faster. No dice. Every time I hold the buttons in it's the same: Moxi logo for 15-20 seconds, flash to black for a second, then more Moxi logo until it gives up and reboots. I never get anything asking about starting the recovery process.

I read further back in this thread that someone was curious as to how much Moxi charges for a replacement HD. Having just contacted them, I can report that they call all repairs "warranty work" regardless of the age of the unit, and their pricing structure for repairing a unit was given to me (rather oddly) as follows for both 2-tuner and 3-tuner Moxi's:

1-30 Days: No Charge
31-90 Days: No Charge
91-365 Days: $79
366+ Days: $149

Has anyone else been utterly unsuccessful at getting the FFP to work? I don't want to dump another $150 into this thing when it's pretty obvious that getting another 18 months out of it would be lucky at best. However, I don't mind trying the 1TB drives I have lying around as a "free" fix.

One other interesting tidbit... when I first got my Moxi, I had a lot of suggestions on improvements they could make. So I wrote to them via their website and asked if they took suggestions for new features. They said "sure". So I wrote back with an exhaustive list (many items based on the great experiences I had with ReplayTV). Their response was to add me to the beta software program, which got me instant access to a couple of the features I had complained about that they were in the process of developing. I dont' remember what they were; they were definitely minor things.

That was cool for awhile; they sent out emails to the beta testers every now and then telling us to update the software and try out specific actions looking for bugs; a lot of them were related to the Moxi Mate, and I didn't have one of those. But still cool to be on the inside. Then all fell silent. When I had the trouble the other night with my Moxi, I wrote back to my contact for the beta program. Someone there told me (in addition to the repair info) that the beta program is no longer active.

So I would echo what someone said earlier... enjoy Moxi for what it is now; it probably won't ever be getting any new features and will eventually follow ReplayTV to that big failed DVR farm in the sky.

Looking for advice on the FFP though. Thanks for reading.

Disregard (portions of) my previous message. I got the FFP to work on the first try by bringing the Moxi to work and using the internet connection there. That thing is INCREDIBLY picky about how it connects to the internet. At my work (a college campus) all our IP's are "real" internet IP's, not a 192.168 or 10.10 reassigned private range. They do still shape the traffic and block certain ports from certain ranges of IP's, but whatever the Moxi was looking for, it found it. Anyone know the protocol it connects with during the restore process? Simple FTP or HTTP maybe?

Anyway, connecting directly to the Comcast modem at home should have worked, but maybe it wasn't doling out the IP fast enough for the Moxi's firmware to act.

Anyway, hopefully this info helps someone. In keeping with the thread topic, I'll report back later on the type of hard drive and whether it worked or not. I'll also expect a "nasty-gram" from Moxi about violating their terms of service at some point too, I'm sure.

Yes. Moxi is very picky when grabbing and IP and it is hard to tell what it does because it does not give you any indication of the problem. The best advice for everyone is try another router and if that does not work try another one.

One more tidbit... I had been using an external drive before my internal drive failed. Once I installed the new internal drive and got the Moxi OS up and running again, when I reconnected the external SOME of my pre-failure shows magically showed up in the recorded show list. Of course, you have no control (or idea) of where the Moxi stores shows as they are recorded, but I got about half my shows back. I figured it would need to re-format the drive and wipe all those out... not so, at least in this situation.

yes. it has been good to me. it has quadruple the buffer than oem drive and i can tell when streaming to the other dvr. it's as fast as ff, rw, etc. on main dvr!

Moxi 3 Tuner DVR
Western Digital 1.0 TB Caviar Green WD10EADS
Firmware Unknown
Internal Drive
SUCCESS


I agree, Moxi support sucks.
I bought my moxi brand new. Out of the box it had issues, they had to send me a replacement immediately. 6 months later the hard drive crashed, had to send it in and pay $75 plus shipping, then 7 months later now the unit crashed again. They want $149 plus shipping to fix now. I'm so glad I found this thread.
I pulled out the existing segate hard drive, it fails all the manufacture's test. On top of that, googled that drive and it is rated 1 star on google and amazon. People are complaining that it went out on them also 3 months to a year after purchase. Moxi needs to quite putting crap hard drives into their units and fire their support model and start providing some real customer service.

Moxi 3-tuner DVR
Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 3 TB CoolSpin SATA 6Gb/s
Firmware unknown
Internal
SUCCESS


Did this with both of my 3 tuner units. Seems to work better than the OEM

How about the noise level?

Subjectively seems quieter to me.......I have recorded several hours of HD movies without detecting a glitch or hiccup....Wish I could determine whether the MOXI is actually using all 3 TB....