Strangematter

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July 20, 2005, 8:56 pm ET by Vincent J. Murphy My Tivo’s been having a bit of a problem lately: recorded material can tend to stutter when I’m playing it back, and it seems a lot slower than it used to be. It’s an older model: a Philips Series 1. The opportunities to transfer the lifetime service on it are few and far between (in fact, I don’t think Tivo allows it anymore). Sure, getting a new Tivo would cost about a hundred bucks, but the lifetime service sets you back about three-hundred these days. My warranty expired many many years ago, so I figured I’d take a shot at replacing the hard drive with something a little larger and faster. Luckily, there are a multitude of resources for doing the change: the Tivo Community has a lot of great information, as well as advice from people who have updated their Tivos. I found a couple of guides and was on the path. The first order of business was getting some drives. I had mistakenly assumed my Tivo was a dual-drive one, so when a sale popped up on 80 gig drives, I bought a couple, intending to use them for this project. A week afterwards, CompUSA had a sale on 200 gig drives, so I bought one to use as external storage (along with an enclosure). As you’ll see, that was a good plan. The directions require a lot of swapping of drives in and out of a PC, and I have a few of those around. I grabbed my Linux machine (it’s been languishing in a corner, anyhow, since the Mac Mini tends to do all the things it used to) and prepped it for fun. The basic process is that you make a backup of the Tivo software from the original hard drive to some other hard drive. You then use that backup to create a new drive for the Tivo (you can also just copy the old drive to a new one and skip making a backup file). Like any card-carrying nerd, I’ve got about a half dozen hard drives around, the remnants of upgrades long since forgotten. My Linux machine had and extra unused Maxtor drive in it, and I had an old Western Digital drive and an ill-fated IBM Deskstar around, as well. I decided to use the Maxtor, since I knew it mostly worked: I remembered that the Deskstar failed in my wife’s PC: I should just throw that thing away. To perform the backup, you boot up a live Linux CD with the tools you needs. I downloaded and burned a copy, then attempted to get it to boot the PC. It failed. At first, I thought it might be the monitor, so I hooked up another with no luck. Okay, maybe my CD copy was bad: made a new copy with still no joy. I pulled out all the non-essential memory and PCI cards and still nothing. Finally, I popped off the hard drive and discovered it had about 7 broken pins. After removing it (and throwing it away), I was back in business. I tossed the Western Digital drive in and was back in business. Next up, opening the Tivo. The instructions I found were very good: detailing the screws to remove, the best method for removing the case, the warning to NOT touch the power supply. About 10 minutes later, I had the Tivo open, and discovered I had a one-drive Tivo. In a way, that made me sigh a little in relief: doing a one-drive replacement is much easier.

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