Entertainment mwilliams on 16 Apr 2006 10:15 pm
Nothing like hardware failure to kill productivity: Death of the TiVo
I love my TiVo Series2 unit. For one, I picked up the unit in Dec. 2004 for $0.00, thanks to Fat Wallet, a TiVo mail-in rebate, a CompUSA price mis-print, and Circuity City’s price matching program.
The service is affordable and well worth it. Sure, I know I could easily use my tech skills to build a Linux based PVR running MythTV or some other PVR OS/software variant, but that takes time. Time is something I do not have all that much of (the TiVo both helps and hurts that - I can watch my favorite shows whenever I want but then I end up watching several shows I like in a row when I intended to get something accomplished).
Well, I woke up this morning intending on being very productive, only to turn on the TV and find a frozen TiVo. I went through their support steps, rebooted several times, removed the network adapter, etc, but it kept freezing on the “Welcome, powering up…” screen - a sure sign of a failed hard drive.
Thankfully, TiVo Community helped me locate PTVupgrade’s Instant Cake. This nifty software (a $19.99 download) allowed me to automatically configure my replacement hard drive (a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB that I got at Wal-Mart for $104 after tax since no one else was open today, it being Easter Sunday and all). I just had to install the HD in my desktop, boot from the CD, it loaded a Linux mini-distro and after a few prompts and about 5 minutes, I had a working drive.
Next I visited WeaKnee’s Interactive TiVo Upgrade Instructions to confirm that all I had to do was remove the rear torx screws, slide cover off, unmount the drive, unplug it, mount and plug in the new drive, and close up the case.
I’m about to boot up the TiVo here shortly (need to clean it out with compressed air first), but I will respond in the comments as to how it runs. Wish me luck!
on 16 Apr 2006 at 11:04 am 1.mwilliams said …
Well, we seem good to go. It booted up fine and I had to do a Clear & Delete Everything, then run Guided Setup again. It was at this point that I had to pause for a bit, as I do not have a land line. A quick forum search found that entering ,#401 in the dialing prefix tells it to use the network connection instead, so I did that and it worked like a charm. On a side note, WOW it is faster. Upgrading to a 7200RPM drive (likely with higher cache, 8MB now) really sped things up. I’ll post back later this week to let you know how long term use is.
on 07 Dec 2006 at 3:56 pm 2.mwilliams said …
Well, 8 months later and the TiVo is still going strong with the new hard drive (knock on wood). I have never seen it get full, even after having enough content to page down 5 times to see everything.
on 26 Jan 2008 at 11:03 pm 3.mwilliams said …
The hard drive failed a couple of months ago. Now we have a 500GB drive in there and I am sending the other one off for a warranty replacement.