TiVo Community Forums Archives - A Kudos and a Question.....

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A Kudos and a Question.....
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Posted by: Harbingar

First off let me say what a wonderful site this is!!!! I have had TiVo ever since it first came out and we (My wife and I) could not function without it! This site though has changed the way we view Tivo! I just got bought a new Series 2 Hughes TiVo at CC and I'm waiting for it to be delivered, though rather impatiently. Well, i've already decided once we get the new TiVo in I am going to upgrade my older 35 hour one by swapping the current A drive with a new 120 GB one. Oh and Robert S keep posting!! Your posts have helped tremendously!

This leads to my question: I've read that the Western Digital 120GB at CC is only $99 after rebate, but is this the best 120GB drive to get? I am very cautious about getting it and having it overheat, leading to allot of problems. Any suggestions for a newbie upgrader? I am very nervous (Since my wife would throw me out of the house if I broke the TiVo) about doing this also since I have windows 2000 on both my machines at home. What do I do about that other than partitioning a hard drive on one of my machines? I do have 2 Drives on one of my machines, could I format that to a FAT32 from a NTFS easily? How? Then how would I boot to it or would I even need to if I had a boot disk? Thank you all very much!

Posted by: Barrett

I recently upgraded to a WD 120 gig drive and have had no problems and it stays cool, when i feel it it isnt hot to the touch. Also there is no need to boot into windows 2000.. I unhooked all my computer hard drives just in case so windows xp wouldnt mess it up. so dont worry about that. I have found western digital to be the most reliable hard drive maker, i have had 3 maxtor drives fail on me in the past and a WD never did.

Posted by: Robert S

Series 1 standalones don't seem to have a heat problem unless they're really closed in.

All you need is a FAT formatted partition on a hard drive that you can use for about 10 minutes to write the backup to. Any hard drive will do - there's no reason to mess with your Windows setup.

Think about it, on the day of the upgrade you'll have at least one drive with space for a FAT partition (hint: it'll be the one in the sealed stat-bag!). Just disconnect the TiVo drive and use Windows to copy the backup on to your C: drive before proceeding with the backup.

As you'll know (being such an avid fan of mine:)) I recommend replacing the A drive on the first upgrade. If you copy the recordings with an MFS Tools pipe you won't need to read the backup file any time soon. If you're not bothered about the recordings you can just restore the compressed backup to the new drive. You should find that you can use Hinsdale's instructions to read the backup from the NTFS partition.

This is not especially hazardous to your TiVo's health - just don't touch anything other than the hard drive and its connectors. Once you've got a backup file (you can download one if necessary) you can recover from any hard drive problems.

The old adage about measuring twice and cutting once applies, though. Linux is not forgiving of errors, so make sure you do exactly what Hinsdale says!