Replaced my TiVo Hard Drive

It was a great day in my house 3 years ago when I hooked up our TiVo. The wife was complaining once again about me spending too much money on gadgets as I strung my 50 ft. spindle of Cat11 across the living room to an available telephone jack in the kitchen. I just ignored her concerns because I knew that as soon as she had a little taste of the TiVo there would be no turning back. I was right! Within 48 hours she was like a junkie asking me to schedule season passes for all kinds of crap like Oprah and Days of our Pathetic Lives. The unit has a Pioneer DVD burner in it so you can burn programs off to disk to free up space. This is a huge plus! It hasn't been a problem having only an 80Gb hard drive inside since we can archive to Princos for pennies.

Fast forward to last week. The unit started to lock up and get stuck in menus. At first I thought maybe it needed a reboot and it would be okay. But soon it locked up again. I was pretty upset because we are on a beta program with TiVo and have some dashboard items not available to other TiVo subscribers. Also, our TiVo data is sent to Nielson and contributes to the ratings. It would suck to lose everything recorded and all of the season pass info as well!

Checking the TiVo website I thought I might find a replacement that would record in HD even, but the Series 3 players are not yet available. Worse yet, they no longer offer a lifetime subscription for a flat price. You see, I hate subscriptions. That is why I don't play Final Fantasy XI (12.95/month? - you dicks!). So when I bought the TiVo I shelled out an additional $300 for a lifetime subscription so that I wouldn't be billed every month. I didn't want to lose that!

Then I remembered my Disk Jockey! This is an IT tool any nerd should have in their bag of tricks. This small freestanding unit copies hard drives sector for sector in minutes. I opened up the TiVo and it looked very much like a PC (or Xbox1) with a hard drive, mobo and DVD-R.
















I took out the failing drive and copied it to a brand new 200Gb one. Of course I can only use 80Gb of space for now since the TiVo OS locks it down. There are apparently tools you can download to address this but I'm just happy it works again. Reading up on the Internet there are some boot discs that you can launch while the TiVo drive is attached to your PCs IDE cable and manage the content. My Pioneer model seems to be a pain in the ass for these tools judging from the forums. If anyone knows of a way to expand the space easily please pass along the tip!

Here are some pics of the inside and the Disk Jockey. Invest in one, it is worth it!