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. I attached the original Tivo drive, the new Tivo drive (I decided to use one of the 80 gig drives), my backup drive, and the CD-ROM drive. Everything was set. Except that nothing I did would allow the PC to see the new drive. So I removed it and performed the backup from the original to the backup drive with no problem: took about a half-hour or so.

Once I had the backup, I removed the original drive and put it somewhere safe (in case I totally screwed the pooch). I then hooked up the upgrade drive. And, again, it wouldn’t recognize it. Since I had bought two of them, I tried the other 80 gig drive. Argh. Both the drives were bad, whee! So I had to disassemble the 200 gig drive that I had tossed into the enclosure earlier. By now, I was about 4 hours into the project and was feeling a little frustrated. Happily, the 200 gig drive worked with no problem. I restored the backup to that drive, then ran a command that allowed the Tivo software to use the full space on the drive. Net result: swapped a old 30 gig 5400 RPM drive with a 200 gig 7200 RPM drive. Everything went back into the case with no trouble, and about 10 minutes later, the Tivo was working again. I did lose all my recordings (I could have preserved them, but it would have cost me about 4-5 more hours, and most of what I had wasn’t worth keeping), but everything else was working better than before: the UI was a little quicker when having to access the drive, and I haven’t seen any stutters or jitters yet. And the capacity went from about 9 hours on its highest quality to about 40 hours. That’s a lot of crap I can record now.

I’ll be keeping my eye out to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong (I have another Tivo that I can use to shadow the recordings for now), but it was a pretty good upgrade, I think. A newer Tivo would have cost me about $400 (the cost of the Tivo and lifetime service) but the upgrade only cost the price of the drive (about $80) and about 5 hours of my life.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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