Yard Sale PVRs

A friends called me yesterday to let me know about some stuff she knew I would be interested in at a yard sale; a TiVo and a ReplyTV for $25 each.  I told her to snag them and I was on my way...

When I got there, there wasn't just two PVRs- there were four! I purchased three of them and my friend purchased the fourth (which I took home for inspection/upgrades/etc).  Goods for the day at the yard sale:

• One ReplayTV 4508 PVR
• One Tivo Series 1 PVR (Philips PTV100)
• Two Tivo Series 2 PVR (TCD140060, TCD24008A)

Did I mention that all of the above have lifetime memberships?  :o)

So far it looks like the ReplayTV  and one of the Tivo (the TCD140006) have dead hard drives- but fixing these guys will be half the fun! 

I believe I have found a site with TiVo images at ftp://ftp.abs.net/tivo and I am now in #tivo on EfNet to see if I can locate a login/password for this ftp site.  After that, I can use a MFSTools boot CD (free download) to restore an image.

Due to my excessive OCD/ADD, I became tired of waiting for a response so I purchased a copy of InstantCake (so, the case was not a lie?) and created an 80GB drive for the TCD140006- so all three TiVo are now up and running.

I also was able to call TiVo and have all three devices transferred to an account: they only need the activation number from the back of the unit and they created a new account for me and moved all three devices into it.  I must say that their support is very helpful and very friendly.

For the ReplayTV, I installed the drive into may PC and verified the HD was dead with RTVTools (it was unable to backup the drive to an image, so it was bad).  I then downloaded an image from The Serenity FTP server and used RTVTools again to restore the downloaded image over a 300GB Seagate drive.  Finally I ran the RTVTool patch (for drives over 147GB), installed in the drive in the ReplayTV and reset it to default settings with '384 + Zones': The RTV4508 now has 280GB (about 94 hours on 'high quality') for TV and 20GB for photos...