![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I have owned two different Tivo units now, and have hacked both of them. The first was done with the assistance of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
retcon, in which we replaced the factory drive with a much larger one, turned on Telnet, FTP and Web services, and also added a network card. The upgrade was a rousing success, and that particular Tivo was passed on to Riff when I moved on to a dual-tuner DirecTV Tivo earlier this year. Naturally I upgraded the newer Tivo shortly after I got it, swapping out the single 40 gig hard drive for two 120 gig drives.
In order to safely do the upgrade, there were several steps to follow. First, I bought a custom upgrade bracket and cooling fan from WeaKnees that would allow the two new drives to sit safely inside the case and be kept properly cool. Next I burned a CD image of the MFS Tools 2.0 boot disk. Finally, I printed out the Hinsdale How-To for a complete reference in all the steps to take. This includes jumpering all of your drives and connecting them in a particular order on a PC, booting from the CD, and then entering cryptic linux commands like "mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /dev/hda /dev/hdc". When it was all said and done, I had a dual tuner Tivo with a recording capacity of well over 200 hours.
Unfortunately, the performance of the Tivo began to deteriorate in recent weeks. The list of recorded programs would take several minutes to load. Adding a show to the season pass could take upwards of an hour, during which time you couldn't watch anything else because the screen was stuck on "Please Wait". Something was clearly wrong. I tried a few different tactics to try and revive the unit, but ultimately it became obvious that there was a problem with one of the hard drives.
I threw both hard drives back onto a test computer and ran the manufacturer's diagnostics on them. Sure enough, one of the two large hard drives had a serious problem. The diagnostic program recommended a low-level format which took the better part of eight hours to run, and which ultimately failed. Now I have to dig up my invoice from when I purchased the hard drive in order to try to get an RMA so I can send it back to the manufacturer for replacement. In the meantime, I elected to put the original Tivo hard drive back in place.
Unfortunately, it apparently had become corrupted at some point during the process. Now I was left with no working image with which to rebuild my Tivo. Bad news.
With a little searching, however, I discovered InstantCake from PTV Upgrade. For twenty bucks I had an ISO image to burn to CD, specifically made for my particular Tivo unit. That big long printout of instructions that I needed for the first two upgrades? Not necessary. Here are the steps with InstantCake:
That's it. No commands to type in, no complex directions to follow, just boot, type the number two, and in a few minutes you are good to go. Not only did the upgrade work flawlessly (now using the original factory 40 gig drive plus the good 120 gig drive), but I have a durable CD that has my Tivo's factory drive image if the drives should ever fail in the future. If anyone out there is considering upgrading their Series 2 Tivo, I highly recommend this method. It's worth every penny of the twenty bucks for the CD image. (I specify Series 2 because they come with USB ports and networking already compiled into the kernel, so all you have to do if you want to network your machine is buy a USB nic and you're good to go. For a Series 1 you're still gonna have to do it the hard way, because you need to edit some things manually to get any networking.)
retcon, in which we replaced the factory drive with a much larger one, turned on Telnet, FTP and Web services, and also added a network card. The upgrade was a rousing success, and that particular Tivo was passed on to Riff when I moved on to a dual-tuner DirecTV Tivo earlier this year. Naturally I upgraded the newer Tivo shortly after I got it, swapping out the single 40 gig hard drive for two 120 gig drives.In order to safely do the upgrade, there were several steps to follow. First, I bought a custom upgrade bracket and cooling fan from WeaKnees that would allow the two new drives to sit safely inside the case and be kept properly cool. Next I burned a CD image of the MFS Tools 2.0 boot disk. Finally, I printed out the Hinsdale How-To for a complete reference in all the steps to take. This includes jumpering all of your drives and connecting them in a particular order on a PC, booting from the CD, and then entering cryptic linux commands like "mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /dev/hda /dev/hdc". When it was all said and done, I had a dual tuner Tivo with a recording capacity of well over 200 hours.
Unfortunately, the performance of the Tivo began to deteriorate in recent weeks. The list of recorded programs would take several minutes to load. Adding a show to the season pass could take upwards of an hour, during which time you couldn't watch anything else because the screen was stuck on "Please Wait". Something was clearly wrong. I tried a few different tactics to try and revive the unit, but ultimately it became obvious that there was a problem with one of the hard drives.
I threw both hard drives back onto a test computer and ran the manufacturer's diagnostics on them. Sure enough, one of the two large hard drives had a serious problem. The diagnostic program recommended a low-level format which took the better part of eight hours to run, and which ultimately failed. Now I have to dig up my invoice from when I purchased the hard drive in order to try to get an RMA so I can send it back to the manufacturer for replacement. In the meantime, I elected to put the original Tivo hard drive back in place.
Unfortunately, it apparently had become corrupted at some point during the process. Now I was left with no working image with which to rebuild my Tivo. Bad news.
With a little searching, however, I discovered InstantCake from PTV Upgrade. For twenty bucks I had an ISO image to burn to CD, specifically made for my particular Tivo unit. That big long printout of instructions that I needed for the first two upgrades? Not necessary. Here are the steps with InstantCake:
- Configure your computer with the CD-Rom as Primary Slave, the new Tivo A drive as Secondary Master, and the new Tivo B drive as Secondary Slave
- Boot from the InstantCake CD
- You are booted to a screen asking whether you are creating a Single Drive or Dual Drive setup for your Tivo. Just type in "2" and hit enter
- Roughly two minutes later the drive images have been created and are ready to be installed in your Tivo
That's it. No commands to type in, no complex directions to follow, just boot, type the number two, and in a few minutes you are good to go. Not only did the upgrade work flawlessly (now using the original factory 40 gig drive plus the good 120 gig drive), but I have a durable CD that has my Tivo's factory drive image if the drives should ever fail in the future. If anyone out there is considering upgrading their Series 2 Tivo, I highly recommend this method. It's worth every penny of the twenty bucks for the CD image. (I specify Series 2 because they come with USB ports and networking already compiled into the kernel, so all you have to do if you want to network your machine is buy a USB nic and you're good to go. For a Series 1 you're still gonna have to do it the hard way, because you need to edit some things manually to get any networking.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
You know what I'm thinking?