I've mentioned it before ... but I really love my Tivo!
BUT the more I love it the more I want to use it ... and it's 40GB size just won't let me record everything I want. The way I watch TV now is on my terms. I can go 2 weeks without watching a single thing ... then when I finally have some down time I'll go on a mini-marathon of catching up on what I've missed. With the 40GB drive it would overwrite shows as it needed space for new shows...not good.
So I've been reading the Tivo forums over the last few months and made several bookmarks to threads and sites on upgrading your Tivo drive. With the new TV season started I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the Tivo. The online instructions made it seems very simple so I ordered up a 320GB Western Digital hard drive (WD3200JD) for $138 from ZipZoomFly.com
There are several free online guides for upgrading your Tivo ... I choose the guide from WeaKnees.com ... they also sell simple replacement or add-on drive kits for the Tivo ... for my model though the cost would be about $300 for a 300GB replacement drive. They use Maxtors QuickView DVR hard drives and it's a simple plug-n-play whereas I'm using a regular old consumer drive and will have to do a bit of labor and run some linux commands, but I'm saving $162 and getting 20GB more space.
So here's how my upgrade experience went...
After reading over the how-to guides and reading other peoples experiences on tivocommunity.com's "upgrade forum", I ordered up a Western Digital 320GB drive. This drive was recommended by many others as being a quiet and cool running drive. Pricegrabber.com showed ZipZoomFly.com to have the lowest price. This is the same online store where I just purchased 8 Western Digital 320GB SATA drives recently and the experience was great. 2 thumbs for ZipZoomFly!
I noted that there were some tweaks to the WeaKnees guide that people were mentioning if you went with a drive larger than 250GB...hopefully WeaKness will add that to their guide down the road. After my research I posted on the tivocommunity forum HERE asking folks to double check what I was about to do. 2 folks responded with modifications to my command lines...thanks winders and slaponte!!!
While waiting for the drive to arrive, I burnt the Weaknees linux boot CD and downloaded tpip1.2. You need a fat32 drive if you want to backup your current Tivo drive...which I did...so I found an old 15GB drive and slapped a barebones XP image on it using fat32 format. I put the tpip1.2 software in the root of the fat32 drive so it would be easy to find using linux commands. I played a little with the boot CD and fat32 drive just to get familiar with checking drive sizes and such. When the drive arrived I created another boot CD with Hitachi's drive tools...connected the new drive to my PC and changed the acoustic settings on the drive from performance (aka LOUD) to quiet. Made a HUGE difference in the seek noise. You probably wouldn't want to use this drive in a Tivo without making it quiet.
Saturday morning I had everything ready ... unplugged the Tivo and began the upgrade.
Unscrew the back screws and lift off the top cover...there's not much to the Tivo when you look at it's guts... (note: this image actually shows the new drive in the Tivo with the old drive sitting beside)
Remove the old Tivo drive ... and setup drives (fat32, old Tivo, new Tivo) with correct jumpers in PC. In my case I'm using old Tivo hd as Primary Master, new Tivo nd as Primary Slave, CDROM is Secondary Master, and fat32 hd is Secondary Slave.
Boot everything up and check that linux sees the drives all as their correct size...
Now run the modified backup command to make a backup of the old Tivo hd to the fat32 drive: mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hda (It took some experimenting to figure out how to mount the /dos directory)
Now run the restore command to put the backup image onto the new drive: mfsrestore -s 192 -bzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb
Now expand the restored image to utilize the full capacity of the new drive: mfsadd -x -r 3 /dev/hdb
SWEET !!! From 40 to estimated 366 HOURS capacity!!!
Now run a command to modify the swap file for the larger capacity: tpip -1 -s /dev/hdb ...but it couldn't find the tpip app...doh!
OK...so I still don't get how to mount paths correctly in linux. I AIM'd a guy from the forum that seemed to really know his stuff and asked if he'd help me out. THANKS azitnay!!!
He suggested using: ./tpip <switches> which from the screenshot above did the trick.
Powered everything down ... put the jumper on the new drive to Master ... slapped it back in the Tivo and powered it on while holding my breath. It usually takes a minute or 2 to boot up...after 10mins I had a bad feeling something was wrong...the drive wasn't making any read/write noise...NUTS!!!
But all the commands had returned normal responces...what happened. So I unplug the Tivo and start to take the new drive out and notice the jumper diagram on the drive shows 2 possible "Master" configurations...one with slave and one without. Yep...I put the jumper on Master with Slave. I moved the jumper...held my breath and powered it back on.
I could faintly hear the drive doing stuff ... then the normal Tivo startup screens appeared. Then I went to check the recording capacity ... that's the final check ... and here's the sweet result of my efforts
HOORAY!! From 40-ish hrs to 363hrs. I did a happy dance :-)
Then I checked all my season passes .. yep, still there.
Could it see my PC .. yep, it could read the shows I'd moved over the to PC.
Did it save the programs that I didn't care about but were left on the drive before the upgrade ... yep.
KEWL!! The new drive is just a tad noisier than the old...but I had to put my ear right next to the unit to hear anything.
I then spent some time tweaking all my recording settings...up to best quality for our favorite shows and high quality for everthing else. I also turned on the "Tivo Suggestions" for kicks. This is supposed to auto-record stuff that's similar to the stuff you Tivo.
There ya have it ... $138 buck and about 2 hours combined time ... and you've got a fat Tivo :-)
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