So, last night I thought I had lost my Tivo. It appeared to have died after a power outage caused by a big thunderstorm in the area (I heard the transformer blow up down the street after I lost power.) Once the power came back, it was just hanging at the “almost there. just a few minutes more…” screen, and not getting any further. I let it sit there all night and it didn’t get anywhere.
This evening I pulled the system apart and yanked the drive, figuring that the drive was just old and dying, but maybe I had a shot at firing it up one last time and pulling a copy off of it. I followed the directions (well, sort of…) on the following website:
A Step by Step Guide to Upgrading the Hard Drive Capacity of a Tivo Series 2
I diverged a bit from their instructions when it came to how I hooked up the drives, as I have a couple of external USB->IDE drive cages that make it easier to do than pulling a machine apart to hook drives into. So using these I did the quick recovery version of the instructions to just pull over the system, then put the new 120gb drive (an extra 50% capacity… woot!) into the Tivo.
On starting of the Tivo, I thought I was still doomed for a bit there as it was still displaying the “almost there. just a few minutes more…” screen, but that cleared up after… what do you know? A few minutes. 🙂
So I am now the proud owner of a 120 hour Tivo Series II box. 🙂