Preparing an upgrade drive for the TiVo

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Preparing an upgrade drive for the TiVo

open tivo I decided up front to buy a 40Gb TiVo knowing that I could upgrade it myself cheaper than what TiVo sold the 80Gb model for (an extra $100). To start off, I browsed the forums looking for tips and found that adding an additional 120Gb drive would be pretty cheap and be pretty painless.

After reading a lot of forum posts, it seemed clear that most people say you should get a 5400rpm upgrade drive, because the extra speed of a 7200rpm drive isn't really necessary in a TiVo, and only contributes more noise and heat to the machine. While shopping around for cheap 120Gb drives online, I couldn't find anything in a slower 5400rpm setup so I just decided to go with a 7200rpm drive from Maxtor.

Oh, there are a couple issues on putting large drives into a TiVo. One is that the linux kernel used to only recognize drives up to 137Gb in size, ignoring any additional space, but with a bit more hacking it is possible to get around that. I wasn't going to use anything larger than a 120Gb drive so this wasn't an issue. The other big issue is the swap file in TiVo's version of linux. When you take a series 1 machine beyond 140Gb or a series 2 machine beyond 180Gb, if the box ever gets a GSOD (green screen of death -- a very rare major error), the required rebuild cannot properly complete because the swap file will be too small. There are ways around this, where you can increase the swap file to 127Mb reliably. Increasing to 128Mb or beyond seems to cause a lot of problems, but again, since my setup was only 120Gb + 40Gb I was in the clear.

I picked up a bare 120Gb 7200rpm Maxtor drive from newegg.com, a place I buy a lot of PC upgrade parts. It was only $98 at the time I purchased it, but may be less (or more) at the time of this writing. One thing about the maxtor that intrigued me was a quieting utility maxtor made called Amset. Amset lets you set your drive's speed to either ultra quiet at the expense of fast seek times to or still fast but only slightly quieter. It sounded like a great feature and everyone on the tivo boards raved about it so I decided to give it a go before I added it to my TiVo.

Small, tedious problems

I only have a newer PC running XP at home and knew that I couldn't boot the machine into XP with the new drive attached, as Win2k and XP add drive signatures that will harm the drive. The amset utility would only run in DOS so I went to bootdisk.com to find a simple win98 boot disk I could boot into and run the program. Unfortunately, my floppy drive is toast, which I found out only after searching for 30 minutes to find an old floppy in my house and finding it couldn't be recognized.

I thought I was sunk, but I noticed bootdisk.com linked to a pretty cool site with software written by a guy that has created bootable CDs that pop you into DOS just like a floppy. Eventually, I found a method to create a bootable ISO that you could also toss your own programs onto, so I burned a CD with DOS and amset. I unplugged my XP drive, popped the new drive in as the primary master, then used the DOS boot disk (ha! DOS boot!) to get a prompt and ran the utility successfully. All told it took me 90 minutes to figure all this stuff out and complete it to this point.

And now, the TiVo

The unsuspecting TiVo

I powered down my TiVo and gently removed the case, the power cables, and IDE cables from the drive, and then the drive itself. There are a couple things to watch out for when messing with your TiVo internals. One is that you should never touch anything near the power supply, as you can fry it and hurt yourself in the process. The other, and this is specific to series 2 Tivos, is to be careful with the white ribbon cable on the front of the motherboard, if you touch it, make sure it's properly seated before you ever turn the box back on, as that can also fry the whole system.

The open TiVo

The original drive removed

The only thing left to do is run some software to prepare the new drive and marry it to the original one. I used the popular and super simple-to-use MFS 2.0 tools, which can be downloaded as a bootable ISO here. Once burned, I placed the TiVo drives into my computer as suggested, with the new drive jumpered as a slave drive on the primary controller, and the original drive kept as master (with slave present for my stock western digital) on the secondary IDE controller (I kept my XP hard drive unplugged).

Drives connected to my PC

MFS Tools booting while reading the how-to

I loaded up the hinsdale how-to instructions on a separate laptop so I could read it, and booted the system up. I checked the boot sequence to see that indeed linux could see I had 120Gb and 40Gb drives attached (if it reported an incorrect size, there could be problems).

The how-to instructions are pretty complete, but entail making a backup and restoring your TiVo's original drive and writing that to a windows hard drive, but it requires a fat32 disk that I don't have handy. I decided to skip all the backup procedures, knowing that there are places online that people store and share their TiVo rom backups if I ever needed them someday (probably not -- didn't with the past TiVo's upgrade).

With that, I could skip all the way down to Step 10, and follow the first scenario, since I was adding a new B drive. I only had to run one command, typed exactly as shown in the tutorial. After a second or two, it was complete and reported a new size and approximate number of hours for the TiVo.

Success!

This was surprisingly smooth, easy, and fast. I could upgrade another tivo in probably ten minutes start to finish. Previously I had done some upgrades on a DirecTivo that required copying the original drive to a new one, then adding in a second drive and that took the better part of a day to complete, but this couldn't have been smoother.

That's it! All that was left to do was plop the drives back into the TiVo and power it up. I'm going to hold off on the details of reassembly, saving that for the next stage of upgrade which includes a review of the Weaknees Twinbreeze package.

Update: In follow-up posts, I covered the install of the Twinbreeze package and the question of whether you should do this yourself or pay someone to do it.

by Matt Haughey July 23, 2003 in SuperTiVo Project

Comments

Wow. Very clear and concise.

On the one hand I think that I could follow the same steps to do what you did, but on the other hand I would be happy to send my unit in to have it done by someone else too.

More modular PVRs could make this a whole lot easier. More like adding drives to a server?

Posted by: Gen at Jul 24, 2003 1:40:47 AM

A bit of very sound advice: replace the internal fan on your TiVo!

7200 RPM drives increase the internal temperature far too much, and that dinky fan in there won't cut it.

Get a temperature controlled 60mm fan and replace the one currently on the box. That way when it gets too hot (and it will, trust me) the fan scales up to compensate for it.

I made the mistake of putting a 7200 RPM drive in mine, and it burned out in six months.

Posted by: jason at Jul 24, 2003 7:28:45 AM

Thanks for the terrific description! Now that I've seen it all laid bare, I think I'll probably get one of the weaknees kits instead of trying to upgrade by hand ;)

Posted by: brian w at Jul 24, 2003 8:18:23 AM

Jason, I'll cover the kit I used that replaced the fans, but my dual drive tivo is running at 32C now, which is lower than it was before (38C) with one drive and the original drive.

Brian, it was really easier than I thought, and I'd say anyone that's ever added a hard drive to their computer could do it.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 24, 2003 9:55:21 AM

Brian: I'd keep a close eye on that temperature...contrary to what you'd naturally think, most people don't have a problem with overheating machines during the summer (thanks to air conditioning). The real test comes in the winter, when you have to worry about internal heating.

It's very possible that the Series2 boxes don't have any overheating problems...I have a series 1, so I've had to be pretty cautious.

Posted by: jason at Jul 24, 2003 1:44:02 PM

is there any way for a mac user to accomplish the formatting of the drive and the installation of the tivo software? that's always been my sticking point, i love my 60 hour Series 2, but i can't mess with it since all i've got is this iBook.

Posted by: regan at Jul 24, 2003 5:42:01 PM

regan, well there are mac versions of some of the programs. MacTiVo Blesser lets you prepare a new hard drive for a TiVo from a mac, but as far as I know, requires a spare IDE cable, which would mean a powermac desktop instead of a laptop.

There are a couple ideas posted here, perhaps a usb -> hard drive adapter + mac tivo bless might work, if your mac could mount the externally connected drive.

Worst case, you could pay the extra for a pre-formatted upgrade drive and just drop that in.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 24, 2003 5:53:20 PM

i don't know what i'm thinking, my mom has a brand-new XP machine. are the instructions to set-up a drive with the tiger tools pretty easy to follow? I've got a good amount of computer experience, but i never did programming, and i'm too young to remember DOS. If they are difficult, would you consider in the future, posting a detailed description?

Posted by: regan at Jul 24, 2003 11:32:34 PM

It's pretty simple, no more difficult than installing a new OS or putting a new hard drive into a PC.

You just connect the original drive and new drive to the PC, boot into linux with the MFS tools CD, then run that one command. All told that part takes 10 seconds. The hardest part is taking the tivo apart and putting back together (sometimes it requires a new bracket).

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 24, 2003 11:36:43 PM

Hi, I'm just wondering what the final cost ended up being? Weaknees sells a 180GB Tivo for $479 and I'm weighing the options.

Posted by: Lisa Clarkson at Aug 13, 2003 9:40:26 AM

Lisa, in a followup to my upgrades, I covered the total costs.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Aug 13, 2003 11:30:42 AM

Total cost question response: My Tivo (Philips 112) from ebay was $160 (no shipping costs) and my 120 gig WD 7200 rpm from Circuitous City was $70. I may want a fan to add to that setup. I have not assembled this setup yet - just ordered the drive. Also, I don't use the monthly service, saving tons of dollars. I just read the TV guide/ newspaper which seems more current anyway.

Posted by: Brad Burns at Aug 30, 2003 8:45:58 AM

You can get a Mac version of the mfstools (command line tools) from sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mfstools/

It apparently works _now_ for series 2, I'm trying to play around to figure out how to get it to work on series 1.

Posted by: Matt Ackeret at Aug 6, 2004 7:03:58 PM

In the above, you state:
"One is that the linux kernel used to only recognize drives up to 137Gb in size, ignoring any additional space, but with a bit more hacking it is possible to get around that."

I'm going to install a 160GB drive as a single in a TIVO TCD240040. I'd like it to be able to use the whole drive, obviously, but what I"m reading elsewhere says it isn't possible. Could you elaborate on the hack, or provide directions to the info?

TIA
Bullethead

Posted by: Bullethead at Nov 29, 2004 1:07:58 PM

The hack you need to search on is called the LBA48 hack. It'll let TiVo recognize bigger drives, but I'm not sure what the current state of the hack is, or how hard it is to do.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Nov 29, 2004 2:37:09 PM

I have a direct tivo I for the life of me can get it to see the new drive any help??

thanks joe

Posted by: joe at Sep 18, 2005 8:49:12 AM

Can this be done on a Comcast Motorola 6412 as well?

Posted by: tom acito at Nov 15, 2005 9:41:12 AM

Thanks for the instructions. Got my done without much trouble. The only thing i saw different from hinsdale's instruction is that with mfstools 2.0, the mfsrestore command will automatically expand without the x or b parameter. i did do a umount, and restart before restoring, not sure if that was necessary, but restoring straight after backup didn't work, then after the restart, it did. Dont forget to mount the drive again after restart. mfsinfo /dev/hdb will show the new tivo time on the hdb drive.

Posted by: jt at Mar 29, 2006 9:32:35 PM

Instead of opening up my PC and adding the new hard drive as a slave drive, could I use an external USB enclosure and just do the Tivo formatting that way?

Thanks
JS

Posted by: JS at Feb 5, 2007 10:43:16 AM

Can you add the second drive to a tivo right out of the box, before you first turn it and everything will start up like normal?

Posted by: Thomas at Nov 26, 2007 6:08:07 PM

Works great I got it the first time
first time using linux but I would to like to save to the backup file for a rainy day. I'll find out with all of them out there. Gracias. Thanks.

Posted by: Armando at Feb 17, 2008 12:08:52 PM

Can anybody help? I just recently activated my Tivo it's a Humax T-800 that my sister gave me as she got it as a wedding gift 3 years ago and never used it. My problem is the interface is really slow. I have an old Directv tivo (or however you spell it) and the interface is much faster. I heard swapping hard drives would reduce lag and in the interest of saving a buck I was wondering I could swap the drives. And if so what are the necessary steps? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Posted by: cuts at Feb 29, 2008 8:25:07 AM