TiVo Community Forums Archives - Options if main drive breaks?

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Options if main drive breaks?
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Posted by: PinballWiz

This morning, my SA Tivo stopped on the 'Almost there' screen. I unplugged it, let it sit for about 30 minutes, plugged it in, and all was well again.

This got me thinking....

MY Tivo is about 18 months old. What are my options if my drive bites the dust? I know I can send it to Philips for repair, but that is expensive?

Hypothetically, can I buy a new A drive, like the ones offered on Ebay, and drop it in?

I'm a bit nervous about making a backup. I don't want to do anything that would damage my Tivo.

Is there an easy way to backup, and restore a Tivo drive without much risk?

Any help appreciated!

Rob

Posted by: StanSimmons

Making a backup is fairly easy. If you can add a hard drive to your desktop, you can easily backup/restore/add a hard drive on your TiVo. Read the Hinsdale How-To for details, a link is in the top message on this forum.

Since you already had one problem with your drive, I highly recommend that you get a backup soon. A backup with mfstool saves all of your configuration info, but not your recordings. If you do need to replace your drive, then restoring your backup to the new drive will save you having to go thru a guided setup and adding back in all your season passes, etc.

A factory repair is going to cost you at least $99 plus shipping. You can get a replacement drive much cheaper.