TiVo Upgrades

A while back I posted about the good deal I found for three TiVo units for $25- each with lifetime subscriptions ($300 value).  I finally decided that I am never going to use the units so I am fixing them up to sell on eBay (and one to a friend).

Much information on TiVo upgrades can be picked up in the 'TiVo Upgrade Center' on the Tivo Community Forum.  This page- along with the Hindsdale Hot-to Tivo Upgrade page- proved invaluable in performing the upgrades.

The Series 1 TiVo is a Philips HDR112; a first gen TiVo with a 14GB hard drive.  I used the windows version of WinMFS Beta 9.3 to backup the drive and then clone it to a larger (400GB) drive.  There wer some issues and I tried again with an 80GB and a 60GB IDE drive; the 60GB would boot up once but all other attempts ended with the 'Almost There.  Just a few minutes' screen (indicating an issue with the hard drive). 

After much searching (on UseNet, Warez sites and BitTorrent) I finally gave up and purchased a copy of 'InstantCake' from DVRUpgrade.  After downloading and burning the image to CD, I discovered the configuration is set use hard drives on the secondary IDE ports- which none of my motherboard have... Luckily I had an old Gateway D875PBZ system that I was repairing for a friend- which had dual IDE ports.  The upgrade took about 10 minutes and I was able to boot the HDR112 with no further issues. (the subsequent initial setup and updates took about 3 more hours via dial-up!)

The series 2 were a bit easier as I had an InstantCake CD for Series 2 from an earlier upgrade.  This CD worked on both my TCD140060 and TCD240080 systems.   I upgraded the TCD140 to 400GB (giving up to 507 hours of recording time) and the other to 500GB (with up to 576 hours of recording time).