Heave-Ho

Before I start let me say for the record, I love TiVo. It far exceeds the offerings from cable companies when it comes to DVR’s. That said, some of their choices when it comes to expanding your hardware border on draconian.

The low end HD model that I have came with an eSATA port for adding external hard drives. As my consumption of HD content has increased, I needed more storage space. Not to mention, I had several digital movies, via Amazon, I wanted to keep. The simplest choice was to just attach an external drive right? Wrong! Lol.

Allegedly, all you had to do was plug in your new drive and reboot the TiVo. The device was then supposed to detect the new hardware, format, and set everything up for you. NOT!

After 2 1/2 hours of tinkering, Googling, and several failed hacks, it was discovered my particular model only works with one specific external drive. ^[1]Naturally, this was not the drive I purchased. we then decided that the best approach would to simply replace the existing drive completely. Being a geek, I normally tackle such projects with gleeful exuberance. However, having no working knowledge of Linux, ^[2]TiVo is based on Linux I was leery of cracking open the case to attempt a drive transfer. If I were to brick the TiVo, I currently can’t afford a new one so I was more than a little perturbed.

Apple Guy, having run his own computer business for years, was less daunted and took over the task before I decided to chunk the whole pile out the window. Even with his knowledge and skill set, it took several more hours of tinkering and failed attempts before he managed to get it up and running. I couldn’t thank him enough for doing it for me. In the end, I did lose all my recorded content but retained all my licensing and settings. Fortunately, I was able to redownload all my Amazon movies so nothing of real value was lost. I’m now the proud owner of a ‘new and improved’ TiVo with a 1 terabyte drive of storage!