 Starting last week my DirecTV Tivo unit started to die. To be more specific the hard drive inside started to die. In the middle of our shows the video would start to stutter and stop all together. It got so bad sometimes the entire unit would lockup. I looked around online on how to replace the drive and found a site that sells hard drives ready for a Tivo box. They were obviously priced high (120 bucks for a 80 gig drive) but after searching some more I found a site that had a Linux boot iso image that would format your new drive and copy your old drives shows and season passes to a new drive. This is where the miracle is about to begin. I wandered into our local Staples, hit the easy button by the door and asked it for a hard drive. What popped into my hands was a 200 gig maxtor drive for a $100 with a fifty dollar rebate. Nice! Now with any hard drive they have that stupid 10% stipulation on the back of the box in small print which stats because of formating and blah blah blah you may have less storage by 10%. It should just read take what we have printed on the front of the box and take 10% off the storage capacity because we know every drive we sell works this way. Last month the 250 gig drive I bought for my mac mini upgrade held true to that 10% rule as with every other hard drive I have bought in my lifetime. Well I set up my PC to copy my old drive to the new one using the boot cd. Part of the startup process is to check the new drive to make sure it is not locked and such and then shows you how much space you have. Well it reported back 209 gigs available. Did hell just freeze over? It truly is a miracle! I got more drive space than what was stated on the box. Unfortunately the original drive was so badly corrupted that the shows did not copy over but all the season passes did and now my dinky little 35 hour Tivo has 200 hours of recording time. The process was quite easy if you have a little know how around PC hardware. I should have made this upgrade a long time ago. The website for the custom boot cd iso is http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com. The same guys that run that site also run the commercial site that sells the ready made hard drives and other Tivo upgrades. I have to give them props. They made it very easy to upgrade.
|
