Shared Knowledge
“Tivo: Yet Another
Tivo Recording Hour Upgrade How To”
Modified 18 March 2007
I have now successful upgraded the recording time hours on 5 Tivo series 2 boxes.
How did I do it and what "tips" or "tricks" do I have for you:
-Upgrading a Tivo box for more recording hours is not a difficult task or project. You will need a personal computer (PC),
be willing to open up the PC, set jumpers on a hard drive, connect a new drive to your PC and run some special software.
If you have never had your PC open and do not know anything about IDE channels or hard disk jumpering, then go
another route in upgrading your Tivo. On the Internet, there are various sources of Tivo upgrade kits, which make it very
easy to upgrade Tivo hours.
-A Tivo is like a very primitive computer in that it has a motherboard with a central processing unit (CPU) and a very small
amount of random access memory (RAM), a power supply and a plain old vanilla EIDE interface hard drive for recorded
program storage. Tivo also has a modem (telephone line interface to Tivo Central), a TV tuner, USB ports and other
"stuff" but nothing of consequence to upgrading recording hours. After having been into (5) Series 2 Tivo's, a 40 hour
Tivo has a single 40GB hard drive, and an 80 hour Tivo has a single 80GB hard drive. I understand from reading various
on the Internet that in some units can contain 2 hard drives but the recording time is the same, just that the 2 drives are
smaller in GB size. For example, some 40 hour units may have (2) 20GB hard drives in them. When you upgrade the
recording hours of a Tivo, you can replace a 2 drive system with a single large hard drive. In a single drive system, you
will probably not be able to put 2 large drives in because of mounting restrictions.
-Tivo has an operating system, which is Linux. Tivo runs the Tivo application on top of the Linux operating system.
-In summary, to upgrade the recording hours of a Tivo, you have to replace the computer hard drive in the Tivo with a
larger drive. However, you simply can not replace the hard drive with an empty or raw hard drive as the new drive does
not have Linux on it. So you will have to prepare the large drive you are installing in the Tivo.
-The Tivo box serial number, which is used by Tivo Central, via a phone line or WiFi, to determine your subscription level,
is encoded on the motherboard and not on the hard drive. Thus you can easily swap out the small original hard drive for a
larger hard drive and not worry that you are going to lose your Tivo subscription information. Note that when you swap
out your existing hard drive for a new hard drive, you are going to loose any and all recording programs and your "Season
Pass" information.
-You will need both a #9 and #10 size Torx screwdriver to open the Tivo box and to mount the new hard drive.
-Have a spare hard drive you swapped out of your Windows system you would like to use in Tivo? No problem but you
must do a low level format on the drive first and erase all traces of Windows. Low level format tools are available on the
Internet for free. Just be careful when you use one of these tools that you low level format the right drive and not your
Windows operating system disk.
-Linux. As I said above, Tivo's operating system is Linux and thus you have to get Linux on any new hard drive you buy
or have on hand, but how? Now if you really want do it the hard way, you can look around the Internet and figure out
Linux and get all sorts of tools for free that will let you put Linux on the hard drive but being a Windows guy and not
interested in learning Linux at this point, I opted to just buy Linux all set for my specific Tivo systems. Called "Instant
Cake", this $20 software works great but does have these issues you must be aware of: (1) Comes in a zip file, which is
not a problem as Windows XP unzips .zip files without any additional tool or application, (2) Once unzipped, creates an
.ISO file, which is a disk image and which must be written out to CD. Now Windows will not write out to CD an ISO file
for you, so you must have a tool. Some CD burner software applications will burn ISO images to CD but I just looked
around the Internet and found a free ISO burner tool, downloaded and installed it.
-Instant Cake. After you have Instant Cake as an ISO image on a CD, you have to configure your PC to run it. Now
Instant Cake on CD is set to be a bootable CD and thus you have to go into your PC's BIOS and set it to boot from the
CD and also make sure you have your CD reader as a slave drive on the primary IDE channel and the drive you are
preparing for Tivo insertion as the master on the secondary IDE channel. Now when you buy Instant Cake, it comes with
some instructions on how to use it, like setting up master and slave, etc. and it also references that it is a good idea to
remove all additional CD drives and hard drives from your PC (remove does not physically remove, just electrically
unhook) but in my case, the PC I used to run Instant Cake had to have a hard drive as a master on the primary IDE
channel with a CD reader slave before it would boot from the CD, so I could not remove "All drives" from my system to
get Instant Cake to work.
-After Instant Cake finishes. You insert the Instant Cake ISO bootable CD into your primary IDE channel slave CD reader
and you get your PC to boot from the CD and the Instant Cake application starts and after a few simple questions, it puts
Linux on the Tivo target hard drive. Now note that when Instant Cake finishes, it clearly says to power down your
system
and remove the Tivo hard drive and it means just that: power down even though,
when Instant Cake finishes, it
leaves the system at the equivalent of a "Dos" prompt,
only it is a Linux command prompt. Me, being so smart and all and
knowing that hard drives do not like to be just dumped at a power out, I decided to type "Exit" at the Linux command
prompt and Linux responded by doing several things that happened so fast I could not see what they were, but I assumed
all was well. Well, it was not. If you do the "Exit" at Linux prompt thing, when you install your new drive into Tivo, Tivo
is simply going to hang and never fully come alive. So, when Instant Cake says, power down your system, it means to
simply turn off the power, either by way of a power switch or by pulling the power cord.
-With your new drive all prepared for insertion into Tivo, turn off Tivo power and then remove the screws holding the top
and side cover to the Tivo chassis and remove it. Now, proceed to replace the old drive with your new one, being careful
to not touch any part of the power supply section. As you configured the new hard drive as "master" when you had it on
your PC's secondary IDE channel, there is no need to change it when you insert the drive into Tivo.
-Once you have your new drive mounted in Tivo and the power and EIDE cable attached, place the top and side cover
back over the Tivo chassis and mount it to the Tivo chassis with the Torx screws.
-Power up Tivo and wait. Although you have Linux on the new hard drive, you do not have the Tivo application, which
must be downloaded from Tivo Central and this can take some time. Once Tivo actually comes alive, you will have to do
a guided setup again but this does not take long.
So that is it: easy. If there are any real keys, it is these: (1) Buy Instant Cake software for you model Tivo, (2) configure your PC hardware just like Instant Cake wants it with the CD reader as a slave on the primary IDE channel and the new Tivo drive as the master on the secondary channel and finally, when Instant Cake is all finished and tells you to power down your PC and remove the new Tivo drive, do just that: pull the power on your PC.