Upgrading Tivo

Using this guide http://www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/upgrade2.html I'm going to put a larger drive in my Tivo and wondered what the largest drive it can support with problems is? Its a Series 1 Thompson unit if that makes a difference.

Also any recommendations for drives? The guide says not all are suitable for 24 hour use.

Cheers,

Phil

The current kernel used in the TiVo software does not support LBA48. This limits the max addressable space to 137GB per drive.
You can of course patch the kernel, but the next time TiVo push out a software up date you'll have to run around and re-patch - unless of course you turn off the updating. How much hacking do you want to do?

You can of course put two drives in there, which should give you plenty of space.

I'll be hacking my Series 2 DirecTV TiVo next week to add a 120 gig Seagate drive (chosen because it has a 5 year warranty) and enable the USB ports so that I can redirect the dial home calls out over the internet and drop the home phone line.

Is TiVo updating S1 units at all anymore anyway? I don't think so, so it might be quite appropriate to install a patched kernel for it.

Patching the kernel is easy, especially if you boot from PTVUpgrade's bootdisk with Large Disk support. ( http://www.ptvupgrade.com/downloads/ptv-mfstools2-large-disk.iso ). I also used a couple of other boot disks, but this may have been the only one I used to to backups and restores.

Bruno

The chances of TiVo doing a software upgrade for the S1 units we've got in the UK is nearly nil. I've had a 250GB drive in my TiVo for over a year now with no problems at all. You might want a Cachecard as it doe get a bit slow when you've got a huge DB.

There is one possiblity for screwing it up and requiring you to yank the drive and copy the kernel again. There is some problem with certain TVs and teletext signalling or something along those lines and if you phone up TiVo customer services they'll push an incremental upgrade to you. There is no other reason to get the upgrade though. It doesn't add anything else.

It's only 137GB when you're using 1000 instead of 1024.

Quote:
...enable the USB ports so that I can redirect the dial home calls out over the internet and drop the home phone line.

I don't believe this is possible. Sure you can enable the USB ports, but because it is a DirecTivo, it will still look for the phone. All your guide information comes down over the satellite with DTV, and the phone line is used for PPV. My buddy and I enabled his USB ports last year, but when you would turn on the DTiVo it would still complain about the phone.