TiVo Resurrection
My first TiVo, the first one I ever owned, died a couple of weeks ago. It was a sad day; not only did I lose a lot of recorded shows, more importantly, I lost the entire season of The Universe and Entourage -- two shows I was really looking forward to watching. I guess I'll just have to buy them on DVD now.
But anyways, back to the title of the post. I resurrected the dead TiVo... sort of. Basically, through some fancy maneuvers (detailed below) and about $90 for a new 160GB hard drive I was able to get the device back up and running. I had some unique circumstances that prompted me to post a step-by-step here for anyone that might find it helpful.
You may wonder how I knew the drive was bad... well it was very simple: when the TiVo tried to boot it just stayed at the "Welcome. Starting up..." screen. When I connected it to my Windows Vista machine (before doing the steps below), I got audible clicks and groans when accessing certain parts of the hard drive followed by I/O errors.
Here is what I was dealing with:
- 80-hour TiVo Series 2 DVR
- 160 GB Western Digital EIDE (to replace the dead one)
- Windows Vista
- 40 GB OS drive (came with my Dell)
- 120 GB extra storage drive (Maxtor)
- Hinsdale How-To
And here's how I fixed it:
- First, I lopped off a small partition on my 120 GB extra storage drive (Maxtor) using Windows Vista disk management
- Start Menu
- Right-click My Computer
- Select Manage
- Selected the extra storage drive by clicking on it
- Right-clicked on it
- Selected Shrink Volume
- Accepted ~20 GB shrinkage
- It did its thing
- Now have a small section of unallocated space
- Right-clicked that and chose New Simple Volume
- Clicked Next to the welcome dialog
- Accepted the default size (~20GB) then clicked Next
- Let it pick a drive letter then clicked Next
- Changed file system to FAT32
- Clicked Next and Finish and it did its thing...
- Using my MacBook (you can use the CD burning method of your choice), I burned the Tiger MFS Tools ISO linked to from the Hinsdale How-To.
- Shut down the Windows Vista machine
- Removed the master hard drive (the "C" drive) and left my newly partioned extra drive connected.
- Connected the bad TiVo drive (didn't change any pin configurations on any hard drives).
- Booted the Windows Vista machine with Tiger MFS Tools in the CD-ROM drive (boot from CD)
- Was able to determine which HD was which by using "Shift+PgUp" and looking for the kernel's drive recognition; wrote those aliases down (for me it was hda [bad TiVo] and hdc [extra drive])
- Mounted the partition on the extra drive that I created in step 1:
- mkdir /mnt/dos
- mount /dev/hdc2 /mnt/dos
- Executed the following (took just a few minutes):
- mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hda
- Remember to substitute your mount points
- Powered off the computer.
- Disconnected the bad TiVo drive and connected the brand new 160GB Western Digital (again no pin changes)
- Booted and confirmed mount points as before using "Shift+PgUp"
- Mounted the partition on the extra drive just like I did in step 8:
- mkdir /mnt/dos
- mount /dev/hdc2 /mnt/dos
- Restored the backup to the new hard drive:
- mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -bzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hda
- Powered off the computer
- Disconnected the new TiVo drive and connected it to the TiVo box
- Let it boot. All was OK, data was there -- just no shows (that was OK)
- Powered off the TiVo
- Removed the new hard drive and reconnected it to the Windows Vista machine booting with Tiger MFS Tools
- Executed the following command to enable the newly available hard drive space:
- mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hda
- Powered off the computer
- Removed the new and expanded recording capacity TiVo drive
- Installed it in the TiVo box
- Let 'er rip!
- Deleted all the shows that it thought it had and made sure that it connected to the TiVo serivce
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