My Series 2 TiVo died last week unfortunately. I did some research on the TiVo forums and found out that most likely my hard drive had died since it was stuck on the ‘Welcome, starting up’ screen. Based on several threads I read, it looked like upgrading was pretty easy.
There were 2 options:
- Head to DVRupgrade and buy a new drive that was ready to plug in, or
- Buy a new drive on my own and purchase InstantCake and format the new drive with the TiVo image myself.
I opted for option 2 since it was the cheaper route. However, it was much more complex since you have to plug the new drive into a PC and reconfigure the boot settings in the BIOS. But definitely worth the $40-50 for me.
Tools needed: T10 and T15 Torx wrenches, a desktop PC with an available PATA cable and a CD-ROM drive
Step 1: Buy a new PATA hard drive online (it’s hard to find these in the stores these days since SATA is the new standard). Make sure you do some research depending on which model you have and buy a similar replacement drive.
Step 2: Purchase InstantCake. You can either have them ship you a CD, or you can download an ISO and burn it to CD yourself with programs like Nero Burning ROM. (If you have them ship you a CD, ignore the configuration part of the next step.)
Step 3: Crack open your PC and configure it so that you can load the InstantCake image onto your new drive. Boot up the PC with the CD in the CD-ROM drive so that it will “bake your cake”.
Step 4: Crack open your TiVo, remove the old drive and replace it with the new drive.
Step 5: Plug in your Tivo and watch it run! You will have to run through the Guided Setup again though which takes about 20-30 minutes.
Since all your account information is stored on the motherboard, you will have to connect to the TiVo service before you will see any of that info in the Settings screens, but after it connects you should be golden. I did have one issue where the system froze while scanning channels and found a thread that said you should repeat Guided Setup using ‘Cable only’. Once you complete that, you can re-run Guided Setup for the Antenna channels.
soccer fanatic, techie, gadget lover, intel consumer digital marketing for my day job. excited about smart TV's and mobile computing.
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I recently upgraded my tivo HD to a 750 GB drive.. but before it died.. pretty easy.. hook both drives up to a pc and use some free software to dupe the drive