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-- TIVO Hard Drive Upgrade 3--


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**All files required for this procedure are available from our Members Area


Step 3: Tools needed


  1. To upgrade your Tivo hard drive, you will need a Torx driver, T-10 and possibly T-15. You can buy these at most hardware stores. Your best option will be to buy a set of different sizes.
  2. If you are planning to add an additional drive to a single drive Tivo, you will want to secure the drive to prevent it from moving or shifting inside the Tivo unit. You can purchase a bracket for this purpose at 9th Tee, or you can use felt furniture pads on the bottom of the new drive and as a spacer between the 2 drives. You can then secure the new drive using plastic cable ties or zap straps. This method secures the drive and provides good airflow.
  3. Series 1 Directv with Tivo and original Series 2 units will not require a mounting bracket because the drives are screwed to the drive tray. Newer series 2 Tivo units require a special bracket (see above) as they were only designed to hold a single drive. Some models will also require removal of some insulating foam in order to fit the second drive.
  4. Some Tivo units, such as the Hughes models and all series 2 units require a "Y" adapter for the power cable connector in order to add additional hard drives. You will also need a 80 wire ATA 66/100 IDE computer ribbon cable with master and slave connections. (Series 1 Directv with Tivo may use ATA 33 40 wire) These are readily available at most all computer stores. Some units require that the master drive, be connected to the end of the ribbon cable and the slave drive connected to the middle of the cable.



Step 4: Download upgrade utilities


  1. MFS Tools Boot CD

    For most upgrades, if you are a Member, you can download the latest version of MFS Boot CD (Version 2.0+) from our Download Area The boot CD is in an .iso format. You will need to write the .iso image to a CD as an ISO image, not a file, using the default burn option in your CD writing software.(Uses Data Mode 1, Block 2048). You may also need to adjust your computers BIOS setting if it is not already set to boot from a CD before looking for hard drive to boot from.

    The Boot CD will generally automatically unlock any TiVo locked Quantum drives. However, if your TiVo comes with a Maxtor drive or you are using a new Quantum or Maxtor drive in your planned upgrade, then you may require another utility to unlock this drive if it is ever placed in the TiVo for testing/use and then removed later for further upgrading steps. If you run into a locked drive (total size reports as 9-10 MB) during this upgrade process then use the qunlock utility to unlock. You will find this utility on our Download Area. You will need to create a DOS boot disk to run this utility from, and you will need to run it every time you take your drive out of your Tivo. If you are using Windows 95/98/ME can create this in Control Panel-->Add/remove programs-->Startup Disk. Users of Windows 2000/NT/XP can download a bootdisk for their version of Windows from Bootdisk.com

  2. MFS Tools Boot Floppy

    If you do not have a CD writer, or are having difficulty with the bootable CD, you can also create a bootable floppy. If you are a Member, You will find the MFS Tools Bootable Floppy (Version 2.0+) on our Download Area. Unzip the file to a folder, and place a blank floppy in your floppy drive. Double click on the makedisk.bat file and it will automatically make a bootable floppy for you. (Label MFS Boot Floppy)

    If you are using GoBack, you will want to disable it, as it can cause corruption of files created while in a Linux boot environment.

  3. Other possibly required utilities

    If you are going to be restoring a backup image running Tivo software version 2.0 or below (Does not apply to 2.0.2 or above) to a non Quantum drive, you will also need to download the latest version of TivoMad from our Download Area. (Requires blank floppy disk). Unzip the file to a folder and place the floppy in your drive and double click on makedisk.bat and it will create a TivoMad boot floppy. (Label TivoMad)





 Tivo Hard Drive Upgrade Page 4





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