Phillips PVT300 old drives now dead

[cokyq]

I am a new user to the TIVO community, though I have had my TIVO quite a few years (about a year after the initial release). I purchased my unit with the lifetime service, and it really was a good buy.

Unfortunately, after not using the unit for several months (in storage), this morning when I connected the unit, it displayed the initial TIVO startup screen, please wait, and nothing. The drives made a clanky noise after a few tries but are now dead. I removed the drives and installed connected them to my mac and they do not even spin up.

I have a spare seagate barracuda ATA drive which I think should work on my TIVO. I have looked on the forum and found information on upgrading drives but since my original drives are dead, I do not have a way to copy the TIVO information on the old drive to the new. Two questions...

1. Can I replace the previous 2 drives with a single drive? If so, which is the boot drive? I think is the one close to the side (away from the motherboard).

2. How can I format the drive so it boots in the TIVO?

These may have been answered previously, but I could not find responses on the archives.

Thanks in advance for your help... cokyq

[JimSpence]

Do a search for InstantCake. This will allow you to image a hard drive for your TiVo.

[cokyq]

Thanks Jim.

Purchased a copy of InstantCake software (CD image) following your recommendation. Opened up my PC, unplugged my PC drives (luckily my CD/DVD burner was already in the primary slave position, connected the future TIVO drive in the secondary IDE connector as Primary and booted with the InstantCake CD I created from the downloaded image and bingo! System booted, and is just now doing the download.

THANKS... for your fast and valuable help.

cokyq