Bought a refurbished Tivo Series 3 (from Tivo) earlier last year and lately it's been occasionally making crazy scratching sounds which are leading me to believe that the hard drive in it is beginning to fail. Can I pop it open and swap it out with any regular SATA (or IDE, whichever is in there) hard drive?
It might still be under warranty, but given that I bought it refurbished I think the warranty might have expired when I hit the 1 year mark a few months ago.
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Tivo Series 3 hard drive failing, can I replace it?
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jonursenbach's pick
If it's out of warranty you can easily replace the drive yourself. Check out www.mfslive.org/ You'll need a spare PC you can hook the TiVo drive up to, and a new (preferably larger) drive to transfer everything to.
There's two flavors, MFSLive a linux boot disk (command line) and WinMFS (GUI) which runs inside of windoze. Either way your basically imaging the old drive to the new one.
MFSLive (linux) is the better option since the process might take a while and you don't have to worry about windoze going to sleep or rebooting for an update.
Suggest starting with a truncated copy first. None of your recorded shows will be copied, only the TiVo system. Then test the new drive in your TiVo and make sure everything is working. After that do a full copy and hope the old drive holds together during the transfer.
I've done this with every TiVo I've owned and am very happy with the results. My current TiVo HD is upgraded to a 2TB drive. That gives me +300 hours of HD & +3000 hours of SD recording.
There's two flavors, MFSLive a linux boot disk (command line) and WinMFS (GUI) which runs inside of windoze. Either way your basically imaging the old drive to the new one.
MFSLive (linux) is the better option since the process might take a while and you don't have to worry about windoze going to sleep or rebooting for an update.
Suggest starting with a truncated copy first. None of your recorded shows will be copied, only the TiVo system. Then test the new drive in your TiVo and make sure everything is working. After that do a full copy and hope the old drive holds together during the transfer.
I've done this with every TiVo I've owned and am very happy with the results. My current TiVo HD is upgraded to a 2TB drive. That gives me +300 hours of HD & +3000 hours of SD recording.
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jonursenbach's pick
Yes, this should be doable. There is a caveat: you can't just plop your old Tivo HD into your computer and copy the files over to a new disk. You will have to do a low level bit copy using something like unix's dd command. You should be able to find information on doing this through Google. The upshot to this is that if done successfully, you'll be able to save your currently saved shows. The downside: it can be tricky. If you have some unreadable sectors on your disk, the copy might not even work. Also, you'd have to do some trickery if the drive you're copying to isn't the same size as the Tivo drive. This might be of use: www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.ht...
The other option is just getting a pre-formatted Tivo HD from a place like Weaknees (www.weaknees.com/series-3-hd-tivo-tcd648250b.php) - The drive comes pre-formatted for Tivo, you should just have to pop it in. Downside: you'll lose all of the programs you have on your old disk. Upside: easy-peazy.
I have successfully done this before under Series 2 systems many moons ago. The information should all be available for you on the internet to figure it out. It's definitely possible.
The other option is just getting a pre-formatted Tivo HD from a place like Weaknees (www.weaknees.com/series-3-hd-tivo-tcd648250b.php) - The drive comes pre-formatted for Tivo, you should just have to pop it in. Downside: you'll lose all of the programs you have on your old disk. Upside: easy-peazy.
I have successfully done this before under Series 2 systems many moons ago. The information should all be available for you on the internet to figure it out. It's definitely possible.
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