Tivo Hard Drive Replacement

Our stand-alone Tivo that talks to the computer via the home network died. Everything I checked and everything I read in Google searches indicated a hard drive failure. So, I went to the DVRUpgrade.com site and downloaded an image of the Tivo operating system (it is Linux based) for my Tivo model and burned it to a CD.

I took a brand new harddrive off my shelf that I had gotten several months ago for a never started Linux project, and created the new hard drive for my Tivo using my PC to format the drive and write the Tivo OS to it from the CD image. All the instructions for doing the task are detailed on the DVRUpgrade web site. I did have one problem. The task required that I unplugged my PC's harddrives and CD/DVD drives. Then, the instructions called for a CDROM drive in the PC to be set to slave on the primary IDE and the new hard drive be set to master on the secondary IDE. The PC just would not boot from the CD. I then did some Google searches and learned that this is not uncommon as some PC motherboards/BIOS will not allow slave boot from the primary. So, I reset the CDROM to master and the boot from CD worked okay. Also, I did have to respond to the CD dialog that the CDROM was not slave but advanced. After, I got the harddrive all done, I pulled it out of my PC and put the PC back into its original hardware configuration.

I then took the Tivo case off and removed / replaced the hard drive. Here is a photo I took of the Tivo sitting on the dining table with the old Maxtor hard drive in place at the upper left of the photo.



By coincidence the new 160 gig drive was also a Maxtor.

After getting the Tivo all hooked-up back in its place in the entertainment center, I powered it up and subsequently checked the system information and sure enough, it was 160 hours now. I then repeated the guided setup of the whole thing, and it was all back in working order. Also, download of saved programs to the PC worked okay. We lost everything on the dead hard drive like shows we had not seen and shows that we needed to transfer to the PC; however, thats the breaks of the game. We also had to do our season's passes all over.

After I got over the stress of losing my Tivo (only a true Tivoite understands the stress and distress of losing a Tivo), it became a fun fix-it project. The DVRUpgrade site has a Tivo operating system CD image for every kind of Tivo ever made (various manufacturers, series 1 and 2, stand-alone and DirecTV, standard definition, and High Definition, and so on). The upgrades were originally intended for putting in larger drives; however, they serve the dual purpose of replacing a failed hard drive. Our two DirecTV/Tivos (one is 40 gig and one is 80 gig) could someday face this same problem but now I am ready.