From mmarion@qualcomm.com  Tue Oct 17 14:53:29 2000
---------

This past weekend, I successfully hacked my tivo, and added a 60Gig
Harddrive.. now it's a 108Hour unit (or, I now have 1 more hour at best
quality then I used to have at basic). :)

I put up some screen captures on my home box http://miguelito.org/tivo

I followed the Tivo Hacking FAQ (http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/faq.html) and the
boot disk they have and it worked like a charm...

I bought a new 30Gig 7200RPM (I wanted a 5400RPM but didn't see any locally),
and a 60Gig 5400RPM drive (both Maxtors).  I went the route of doing a full dd
of the Tivo disk and using the new copy in all testing so I could backout if
needed (which I did.. look below) and I didn't want to toast the system since
it went out of warranty as soon as I opened the case.  I figured the up front
cost of just over $100 for a 30 Gig disk was worth it vs the risk of screwing
up the Tivo for good.

I pulled the Tivo A disk, hooked it (and the new 30 Gig disk) up to the
secondary IDE channel on a PC, booted Dylan's bootdisk, and dd'd the drive
over.  Put it in the next morning (I started it late) and the tivo worked!
Hooked the 60 Gig up to the PC, booted the floppy again, ran BlessTiVo, put
the 60Gig into the Tivo.. and had a 108hour system.

I did run into a problem of freezing: after about 30-45 minutes the screen
froze with a scene from Wings (which I had paused a few seconds before) on
screen.  The menus still worked, but the background never changed.. nor the
sound.  After reading the forums at www.tivocommunity.com (the Tivo
Underground is full of good info) I narrowed it down to the "write verify" on
the Maxtor 60Gig drive I bought.  I also noted that people talked of problems
with bad blocks being found eventually, and that doing a full write test on
the drives first can save a lot of heartache later (if you hit a bad block).
So I decided to pull the drives, and start from scratch with a full write
test on both drives up front.

This takes a _long_ time.  The 60Gig took about 5 hours to test, the 30Gig
2-1/2 hours, and the dd took at least 5 hours (I went to bed before it was
done).  If I'd had another 80wire cable, maybe the tests would've gone faster
due to udma-66 mode.. not sure.

I took the opportunity to put a few of the other hacks into place too.. like a
bash shell on the serial port, I enabled backdoors, etc. (all described in the
FAQ)

If anyone's interested in doing the same to their Tivo.. I suggest reading
this post at the AVS forums:
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum6/HTML/001209.html scroll down to the
post from tom_h near the bottom with a checklist in it.. good steps to follow.