Upstairs TiVo upgraded without a hitch

Ok, a few weeks ago I bought a 320Gb drive to upgrade my upstairs TiVo, and discovered that although I had rejected a couple of earlier bargain drives because of it, this time I’d forgotten to check it was SATA or not. But then my coworker Rob pointed me towards satacables.com, where they sell a little adaptor doohickey that you slap on the back of a SATA drive and it can be plugged into an IDE cable and Molex power connector. Nifty.

Unfortunately, it appears that their order page doesn’t like Safari and doesn’t check for stupid situations, so I managed to give them my credit card information and check out with nothing in my shopping cart. And they said they sent me an email about it, but their email system problem puts a bad HELO header or something because I never saw it. After a few weeks, and a switch to using my gmail address and Firefox, it all got straightened out and I got the doohickey a few days ago.

Also, because this is a single drive unit and the DVD burner takes up the space where other TiVos have space for a second drive, the only way to upgrade was to take the original drive out and copy it. So that’s what I did – I put the old drive and the new drive into my sacrificial Windows box, and booted with the MFSTools CD. I ran the command

mfsbackup -Tao – /dev/hda | mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -xzpi – /dev/hdc

and waited. And waited. And waited. 7 hours later, as I was going to bed, it said it was 82% done copying. This morning, like a kid on Christmas, I got up and quickly slapped it into the TiVo. It came up and appears to be working. All the old shows are still there, and it’s talking to the network. What more could you want?

Now if only 1Tb eSATA drives would come down in price so I could upgrade the downstairs TiVoHD.