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The following equipment is needed.
- Torx #10 screwdriver. You can one at almost any hardware store. (Sears
and Lowes had them in my area). The TiVo uses special Torx screws for the case
and drive. Don't try using a regular flat head screwdriver or you will end
up stripping the screws out and making the upgrade more difficult.
- New IDE hard drive. See section for more information on drive options
- A backup program of some type to backup the "A" drive in the TiVo. See section
for more information.
- Something to store your backup on. Section details this.
- Mounting hardware to mount the drive. See section for more information.
The answer is yes and no. These are the current upgrade issues.
- Any single drive TiVo is upgradeable by adding a second drive. If you have
a 30 hour two drive unit you cannot remove the 2nd drive and add a new larger
drive. The only way to upgrade a 2 drive unit currently is to buy a new TiVo
that has a single drive and either upgrade it or copy its A drive onto a new
A drive for insertion into your old TiVo. It probably makes more sense to buy
a new TiVo and upgrade it, and then sell your old one.
- It has been reported that some TiVo's have not accepted "blessed" B drives.
Information on this is still sketchy. The vast majority of people have reported
no problems upgrading their TiVo's. If you run into this problem contact any
of the people listed in section below for more help.
Well currently there have been three brands of drives that have been used
to upgrade a TiVo. Here is a breakdown on known working drives.
- Quantum 15GB Fireball LCT10 5400 RPM. This drive adds roughly 15 hours
of capacity.
- Quantum 30GB Fireball LCT10 5400 RPM. This drive adds roughly 38 hours
of capacity.
- Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 30GB 5400 RPM. This drive adds roughly 38 hours
of capacity.
- Western Digital Caviar 30GB 5400RPM. This drive adds roughly 38 hours of
capacity.
Some caveats on choosing the right drive
- Only Quantum drives work as A drives. If you wish to backup your original
A drive and use the backup in your TiVo it has to be a Quantum drive or the
TiVo will not boot up.
- Some newer Sony TiVo's don't seem to like the Quantum as a B drive. At
the current time, nobody is sure why this is.
- Drives larger than 33.8GB require a modification to the TiVo Linux kernel.
This is detailed in section below.
- 7200 RPM drives work fine. They usually cost more than 5400 RPM drives,
and will not give you any speed improvements by using them. There are some
fears that the 7200 RPM drives will draw too much power or generate too much
heat. This has not been proven and there are users running 7200 RPM drives.
Well there are numerous reasons you should make a backup
- If something goes wrong and you damage your original A drive your TiVo
is now useless
- Once you add a second drive it can not be removed. If you pull a second
drive from a TiVo once it has been added, the TiVo will no longer boot up.
- If TiVo changes something in future software revisions it is possible user
hacked units may stop working or just do "weird things". If this would happen
a backup gets you back to your original state.
- It is the smart thing to do so do it!
Well the ideal time is with a TiVo that has never been powered up. Getting
a backup in this "virgin" state is ideal. The problem with this is you are going
to void your warranty on a new TiVo you have never used. Some people don't
mind this, but if your TiVo modem is fried and you don't use your TiVo first
you will never know until after you ruin your warranty. If you are going to
make backup to file a virgin backup is ideal because many people have been
able to compress their virgin TiVo A drives down to a file small enough to
compress onto a single CDR (less than 650MB). Newer units with the demo mode
only compress down to a file about 3GB or so which is still small enough to
fit on 5 CD's. If the TiVo has actually been in use it will not compress well
and could take dozens of CD's for a backup.
Smart choice! Well there are a couple ways to do it.
- You can buy an extra drive and make a complete backup of your original
A drive onto the new drive. This way you can pull the original A drive out
and store it for safe keeping and run using the new backup A drive. Remember
that your drive needs to be large enough to hold the copy. So if you have a
TiVo with a 30GB Quantum as the A drive, you should buy a 30GB drive as the
backup drive. I recommend getting the same drive as your original A drive so
that you ensure your copy will fit. Some people bought a Western Digital 15GB
drive for backing up their 15GB Quantum in their 14 hour TiVo only to find
out the Western Digital was actually a tiny bit smaller and they couldn't make
a backup. If you do buy a Quantum drive as your backup device you can run your
backup drive in the TiVo and keep the original drive tucked away for safe keeping.
- You can also make a backup to a file or series of files onto another drive.
You could keep them on that drive or possibly burn them onto a CDROM if you
have a CDR or CDRW. The benefit to the backup to file method is that you do
not have to worry about drive model type. As long as your drive is large enough
to hold the image you are fine.
There are two recommended programs to do this with. One is a DOS program
called Dolly. The other is a Linux boot disk put together by Dylan. These first
steps must be done first regardless of method.
- Unplug your TiVo and allow time for the hard drive to stop spinning before
moving it
- Open your TiVo. Remove the three Torx screws on the back of the TiVo. The
top lid should slide off. It is on very tight. Some people have used a flat
head screwdriver to pry under the top of the case where the screws in the back
were removed. Take your time.
- Remove the IDE connector and power cable from the back of the drive in
the TiVo. Be careful to not touch the power supply.
- Remove the two Torx screws from the front of the plate the drive is mounted
to. The drive should then lift up from the front and easily be removed from
the TiVo.
- Power off your PC and open up the case. Connect the original TiVo A drive
to the Secondary IDE channel on your motherboard. Take your new backup drive
and make sure it is set as the slave drive. This will vary depending on your
drive type. See the manufacturers documentation for details. Connect it to
the cable connected to the Secondary IDE channel also. This will make your
original TiVo A drive the master on the Secondary IDE connector, and the backup
drive will be the Slave on the Secondary IDE connector. Make sure each drive
also has a power connector plugged into it.
- Power up your PC and go into your CMOS. This varies depending on the computer's
BIOS. Some systems require hitting the delete key on power up, some F10, and
some the escape key. If you don't know you will need to check your computers
documentation. In the make sure the Secondary Master and Slave drives are set
to AUTO. If your BIOS does not have an AUTO settings you can sometimes have
the BIOS detect the drives for you. Save your settings and reboot.
- Make sure your PC detects the drive sizes correctly. If your CMOS reports
either drives capacity wrong then DO NOT continue with the upgrade. Listed
below are some reasons for the CMOS to not be able to auto-detect the drives
capacity.
- Your computer is an older model and has trouble with large drives. Find
a system with a newer BIOS capable of handling large drives.
- The drive is locked. If the CMOS reports something like 19 cylinders, 16
heads, 63 Sectors you probably have a locked drive. Those numbers were reported
by a user with a locked 30GB Quantum A drive in his TiVo. If your CMOS detects
your new drive you want to backup to fine, but reports the TiVo A drive incorrectly,
it is probably a locked drive. See section below for information on how to
backup locked drives.
If the capacity for each drive is detected correctly then you may proceed
to the section for using Dolly or the Linux boot disk. You do not need to do
both. Either one will work.
The following are the steps needed to backup your original TiVo A drive
to a new drive. If the new drive is a Quantum also it will be bootable in your
TiVo. The below steps assume you have the drives connected as described in
section.
- Download Dolly at the following address ftp://ftp.bke.hu/pub/mirrors/sac/utildisk/dolly.zip
- Format a bootable floppy and extract the files from the dolly archive to
it. Do NOT run Dolly from inside Windows or from a DOS window.
- Boot your computer with the floppy in the drive. Make sure your computers
boot up screen (Post screen) detects the drives fine.
- Type the following command from the A prompt "dolly xhd129: xhd130: /c" (do
not type the quotes)
- After that command is finished type the following "dolly xhd129: xhd130:"
(do not type the quotes)
- After the last command finishes you can turn off your computer, wait for
the drives to spin down and you are done! Make sure there were NO error messages
or problems with the copy process. If there was you should go back through
the backup section here and make sure you followed every step. If it fails
again, your likely problem is smaller destination drive.
This process can take HOURS to run. Do not be alarmed if it takes awhile.
Once finished you can either boot your new copied A drive if it is a Quantum
and store your original drive for safe keeping. If your new drive is a non
quantum you will need to put your original A drive back in and keep the new
drive as your backup.
Dylan's boot disk is a "Linux on a floppy" that one of the AVS members (Dlyan
in case you didn't guess!) put together. It has everything on it you need to
make either a disk to disk copy of a TiVo A drive, or a disk to image copy.
It also contains my BlessTiVo program which will be described in later sections.
The process to do this is as follows.
- Download Dylan's disk at the following sites. http://www.geocities.com/tivohack,
or http://www.idrive.com/tivohack
- Extract the files from the archive. Get a blank formatted floppy ready
and run the batch file from the archive. It will prompt you to insert a floppy
in drive a, and it will create the boot disk for you.
- Reboot the PC with the floppy diskette in the A drive.
- Once the floppy has booted you will see a login prompt. Login as "root" (no
quotes) and hit enter.
- Type the following command to make your image. This assumes you have the
drives connected to your PC as described in section above. "dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdd
bs=1024K" (no quotes)
- Make sure when the command is finished that no errors were reported. The
program should report X number of blocks in and X numbers of blocks out. These
should be equal. If there were errors, you need to go back through the backup
section and see if you skipped a step.
- Turn off the PC and wait for the drive to spin down. Your backup is complete.
Well this is a tricky one. There is a way around it, but it has some risks.
The following steps need to be taken before you can connect the A drive to
your PC for doing a backup. The below steps are tricky and could damage your
TiVo, so do at your own risk. Others have done this and not damaged their TiVo's
yet, but there is always a first time!
- Place the TiVo unit near your PC.
- Power up your TiVo with the A drive connected.(leave your PC off). After
the TiVo has gotten to the "almost there screen" you need to unplug the IDE connector
from the drive "while it is powered up". Leave the TiVo running. Then plug the
TiVo drive into your PC's secondary IDE port. DO NOT move the drive while it
is running. Get the TiVo as close to your PC as you can. This process works
because the TiVo upon power-up will unlock the drive. As long as power remains
on the drive remains unlocked.
- Proceed with the backup instructions detailed in the above sections for
your particular backup type.
- When finished turn off the PC and the TiVo and allow time for all drives
to spin down.
To be added soon
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