Brian Cooley: Sure you can easily add capacity to your HD TiVo with the approved external hard drive, but what if you don't want the man dictating that you must use the Western Digital My DVR Expander. I'm Brian Cooley, in this hack we'll show you how to use just about any external SATA drive to add major space to your HD TiVo.
CNET Hacks
Add an external hard drive to your TiVo HD.
Brian Cooley: Now first thing I want you to do is take your TiVo disconnect it from your television and disconnect it from power. Then you are going to remove the screws on the back, it's a Torx driver that does that. Torx is this little funny star shaped it looks like a Philips it has too many little flanges on it T10 is the size. Now when you are opening up anything like this it isn't just the fact that it's not plugged in, but the fact that it has capacitors that make it dangerous, so don't touch any of these power caps these big things in the power supply there are still full of juice that can knock you on your butt. Now I'm going to get this drive out of here because we have to marry this to the external drive that we're going to be adding.
So again being careful with your Torx 10 tool get in there and unscrew that carrier that its sits on. You might want to magnetize this thing also you get the screw out of there give it a little whack on the side of a marble counter or a piece of concrete sidewalk and here is your combo SATA connector which is both power on the left, data on the back that whole thing comes off and they are like so and there is your drive. You can leave this little sled that it lives on attached to it. Now the next thing to do is to take your external SATA drive and take the bare drive out of the case. I'm taking off these lids as you can see, I'm going void the warranty bare that in mind, so there goes that. Now I'm going to crack the case on this side as well, and again it'll vary with every drive that you use, but that's going to be how I get to my bare drive and I'd marked this one in fact with your pen or something as your external, just so that you don't mix these two up. Now my two drives are over here, they both have to be connected to data and power while the PC is off and then when we get in there we're going to work on them.
So take these two SATA data cables and connect those it only go only way, because SATA data cables are keyed its one there and there goes one right there. Okay now the power I've got one side of power over here, again its keyed so you can't put it on wrong, and the other one I'll put up here, be careful when you are laying a drive on your computer like I'm doing, don't short things out. So I'm going to get a piece of paper or piece of cardboard to set on here. So I don't have metal touching metal.
Now notice I haven't disconnected my system drive because the machine still has to boot I've just added these two drives to unused SATA ports. Now I've already installed winmfs on here which is our utility its going to do several drive operations within windows to get these guys to see each other. Now go to file select drive, also click show mounted drive over here in the bottom right to show every drive that is mounted and now you can see we've got two drives to choose from, what I want to do here is go to the first drive and make sure it says that the A drive is my TiVo drive, it says right there. Format TiVo good and check the capacity it should match what's on the drive and a look over there and I see that it does. Now down here in the B drive select that because that says you're going to be adding a drive to the system, which in this case is going to be our 750 gig that does not say its TiVo format its okay that's good, now we'll hit select.
Now go to tools Mfsadd and say yes and cross your fingers because that kind of warning is always nervous but you are doing the right thing. Okay now close WinMfs I'm going to shut down my system, I'm going to pull these drives and put them back into the TiVo. Starting with my old internal drive I want to put that back in the TiVo chassis first then reconnect your multi adaptor here that does power and data. Now take the external drive off of here, I'm going to put it back into the external encloser enough to hook it up and test it. Okay now we're booting up our TiVo with everything connected and powered up, when its done you'll go to your settings screen you'll see all those specs there and you'll see the new added capacity of the two drives we had a 160, in there we just added 750.
You don't get the full capacity because there is formatting losses in there but still we are somewhere in the vicinity of 900 gig on this guy, that's an enormous job for an inexpensive external drive addition and what may be an hour of our time. Here is a note though you've go to keep this external drive powered up and connected forever to this TiVo or you'll loose any new recordings made since the upgrade so be aware of that. Okay that's how you going to hack your TiVo to add just about any external drive you want do it for a very efficient price and just a little bit of elbow grease. Hope you enjoyed it go to do it to yours.
CNET Hacks.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services