jonfrederick.com

Finally, I’ve completed the hard drive upgrade of my TiVo, and let me say it was a very bumpy road.

First, I had to find a hard drive that was a good price and at least 200gb, and CompUSA pulled through with a 200gb Seagate Barracuda drive that was on sale in their Black Friday ad. So, I headed to CompUSA at 11:30pm on Thanksgiving to be there in time for the Midnight opening, and there were at least 150 people there… Somehow or another I managed to get my hands on the hard drive I wanted, and waited in line for 2 hours to pay for it ($30 after rebates!).

After extensive research on upgrading TiVo recording capacity by replacing the hard drive, I decided to use the WeaKnees.com Interactive TiVo Instructions as my guide to the entire process. The process is fairly simply, and basically involves removing the hard drive from the TiVo and placing it in a PC with the new drive, then copying the TiVo operating system and recorded programs to the new drive. If you want more detail than that, read the directions.

The entire process of copying the original TiVo drive to the new Seagate drive took about 7 hours to copy and completed without any problems…until I put the new drive in the TiVo to see if I was successful or not. As the TiVo powered up, I smelled something burning so I immediately turned off the TiVo and opened it back up to make sure all of the connections were correct. I put everything back together, and the TiVo would not go past the boot screen, and a wonderful clicking noise was coming from the hard drive, a.k.a it was dead.

Luckily, CompUSA had another drive in stock at the local store, and they exchanged the drive for me without hassle. I repeated the entire process again yesterday, and it worked! My TiVo’s orignal maximum recording capacity was 40 hours, and is now 222 hours. Not too shabby for $30 and a few hours of work…

PS If you ever buy a TiVo, refer me when you sign up using jon@jonfrederick.com as the email address!