I'm really bummed out now... I just got beat by a Tivo . I wanted to upgrade my HDVR2 DirecTIvo unit by adding a 120GB drive. No special hacks or anything, just more capacity. I ordered the kickass kit from www.weaknees.com that includes the quieter fan, extra fan, mounting braket, power wires, ide cable, etc etc. I had an old 120GB drive lying around that used to be my empeg backup and thought itd be a peice of cake.

5 hours later and I'm beat... my computer is so old that it can't handle the process (yet new enough to have NTFS which is bugging Linux). I've finally quit and just ordered the full kit from weaknees.com that includes the formatted drive. It's a bargain really, but I figured I'd get use out of that old drive. Besides, how hard could it be? I've done at least 10 hd upgrades on empegs right?

Anyway, I'm bummed out - my first tech endevor gone wrong. I know it's mostly the computer's fault (or mine for having on that doesn't like anything over 30gb and likes to reboot itself) but it feels weird paying someone else to do something that I thought I could do.

I suppose it could be worse, I could have tried to give myself a haircut! Had to share.

The hard drive upgrade process is a pain in the ass. You mention NTFS, but Windows 2000 or XP should never come in contact with your current or future TiVo hard drive because it can leave a signature on the drive that your tivo may not like.

You should be following this FAQ to upgrade a TiVo unit.

Thanks for the Link Rob... reading now.

Windows2K never saw the Tivo drive, I heard that can be bad news. But part of the "new" process is to copy a backup.bak image of your Tivo Drive to your C: drive while booted in Linux (from a bootable CD). Then, you "restore" this backup to your new drive and that does the old "blessing" task for you. So, if your C drive is NTFS, Linux has Read-Only support for it, meaning you can't write that backup.bak image to C. I was getting other "kernal panic" errors and "sync failures" etc, etc. It was just becoming SUCH a headache and because you use your PC, no tutorial can be very comprehensive. Add to that the fact that there are dozen of TiVo models out there, and there is no single authoritative source for good info.

The funny thing is, I did a drive upgrade for a buddy a year ago using the same computer, but using older tools (and a Series 1 Tivo) and it was no big deal... sigh.

You should be able to do it directly from the old drive to the new drive using mfs tools. Then you can disconnect your NT/XP drives totally.

That's what I thought but I couldn't find a detailed way to do this... I had a few ideas but I kept getting "kernal panic" errors..

It's a guide for using drives greater than 128GB but it's still uses the same steps. It's here and it shows you how to do direct disk to disk copying.

one thing i had to do was buy a small hdd, 5-10g if you can find it, format it fat32. then disconnect all your ntfs drives, and use the fat32 drive as the space to copy your .bak file. it worked fine this way using the hinsdale how to. hindsdale seems to take account of most tivo devices.

Did you happen to see this ? New interactive TiVo Upgrade Instructions.