My TiVo Died (or how I spent my extended weekend)

The last couple of days TiVo started st-st-stuttering. While it was st-st-stuttering I could hear the harddrive clicking away...Obviously it is going bad and needs to be replaced. Sunday I sped off to compusa, while I was out getting baby food, and grabbed a Seagate 160gb barracuda. This is more than double what is currently in there. OEM it had the orig 30gb and I added a 40gb upgrade a couple of years ago, so total = 70gb.

In researching the upgrade process again.. I found a cool upgrade tool at weaknees.com. At least I thought it was cool until I started the upgrade.

This line is incorrect.

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc /dev/hdb) mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda

I believe the mfstools incorrectly report the size of the drive so there is an error related to not having enough space on the NEW harddrive. I solved it by removing the -s and -x in the mfsrestore command. SO the new command looks like this

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc /dev/hdb) mfsrestore -zpi - /dev/hda

It took around 8 hours to complete the backup. I had a 4th of July party to go to anyway...When I returned the restore was complete and I loaded the new drive into TiVo and promptly plugged it in and turned it on. Awesome! Right? Wrong!

After it booted up and i jumped around a couple of changes it suddenly froze on jay leno's head. It was very unflattering the way it made his face all jagged, but I don't like Jay anyway...Then I was presented with the GSOD (Green Screen of Death). Akin to the MS blue screen of death. It warned me that a serious error had occurred and to wait 3 hours while it tried to recover.

I switched over to regular tv while it chugged away. I checked on it 30- 45 minutes later, before I went to bed, and it was fine.

Go TiVo!!!