Building a PC to upgrade TIVO HDD's...any suggestions?

[stiletto10]

First let me say that I'm pretty new to all of this TIVO hacking/upgrading stuff. I am a fairly quick learner and would greatly appreciate a mentor or two to help guide me in this project. I would like to build a PC specifically to upgrade HDD's for TIVO. I was wondering if any one in this Forum had any thoughts as to what I should (or should not) include in this build. I already have most of the hardware...case, power supply, CD burner, modem, 10/100 ethernet card, etc...I also have a few HDD's of varying sizes to pick from. I know that the HDD needs to have a FAT 32 partition but exactly how big should the HDD be? What would be the best operating system to use? I think the case that I have has 3 5.25" Bays. My plan is to use 1 bay for the CD Burner and then install a couple of those "Removable HDD Racks" in the other 2 bays and maybe a 3rd external removable HDD rack as well as a FDD in the 3.5" bay. I'm not sure but I think there is room for 2 or 3 system HDD's as well. I figured that using the removable HDD rack would allow me to boot new HDD's without having to open the case every stinking time. Any Motherboard/CPU suggestions? I may have an AMD socket 7 CPU laying around.
I guess the hardest part for me will be getting the system HDD set up with all of the software tools needed to upgrade a drive for TIVO or...does all that software need to stay on a floppy/CD? I'm going to start looking for some of the parts I need so it should be a few days before I actually get started. If anyone has any ideas or wants to shed some light on a problem, please feel free to respond to this thread.

Thank you all very much for all of the really cool things I've heard discussed here and in other areas of Tivo community.

John

[robomeister]

To help you decide what to do, I'll just describe my TiVo Upgrade machine. I have a Pentium 3 motherboard in a case with 3 accessible 5.25" drive bays. I have a DVD writer in one and two removable hard drive bays in the other two. I have a 30 gb hard drive mounted internally with Windows 98 installed with a FAT32 partition. Whenever I upgrade a hard drive, I boot from either my Weaknees LBA48 CD or my PTVupgrade v4.01 LBA48 CD.

I find the removable bays to be great for upgrades. No need to take the computer apart every time.

So when I boot up with mfstools CD, the drives are as follows:
hda - Windows98 drive with FAT32
hdb - DVD writer
hdc - master drive for one of the removable drive bays
hdd - slave drive for the other removable drive bay

Hope that helps

[classicsat]

Anything that can run Win98 or better is fine.
You don't need an OS on it, but you can run any Linux on it if you'd like, or Win98 if you wan't, just to have networkability, and/or to run a CD burner.
Any HDD 3-10 GB is fine, FAT32 or ext2/3 file system is fine.

If it were me, I'd build a 1 Ghz Duron system, 128 or 256 MB RAM, 3 GB EXT2 HDD, one of the smaller Linux distros, maybe even a desktopless one, which can have TiVo support and mfstools added. I might even make a GUI for MFStools, for the heck of it, if I install a full GUI Linux.