sydnius
08-18-2008, 12:28 PM
I'd like to relate to tivocommunity.com some information about my recent purchase of a Refurb Tivo HD.
I purchased a refurb $179 Tivo HD directly from the tivo website. I immediately set about replacing the internal drive with a 1TB Western Digital WD10EACS. Opening the case, I immediately saw an artifact of this being a refurb unit. The power supply board was cracked!!! I carefully removed the power supply board and noted something worse: a trace was broken at the crack. For shame, Tivo refurb tech! I have no doubt that the unit was plugged in and tested at the factory, but there's no excuse for not popping open the case to see if anything obvious was wrong, like, hmm, a cracked power supply board?! Seeing that I could fix the cracked trace, I soldered on a jumper and hoped for the best.
Following the instructions at http://coffee.sdsc.edu/rcw/tivo_upgrade/, I popped the SATA drives in their bays, booted my Mac Pro off the MFSLive CD, backed up and expanded the partitions to the new drive, and carefully ensconced the original drive in case something went wrong with the refurb. The new 1TB drive placed back in the Tivo, booted great.
I had to wait for the Verizon FiOS tech to install the cablecards next.
Installing and authorizing the cablecards had no effect until I rebooted the Tivo. If you're having trouble with your cablecard install I'd certainly recommend attempting a restart if you think the cards should be authorizing but aren't. Unfortunately, Verizon is still sending out S-cards with installs as of 8/4/08 in Delaware.
Everything appeared to be fine with the install. The guide seemed a little slow to arrive, but that's fairly normal with a new install. Then I tried to transfer shows to my computer. Here's where it got interesting for me. The open-source Mac tools for show transfer weren't working! The MAK was entered correctly, I could see the shows fine, but when I attempted to transfer them, nothing happened! No show on computer! I upgraded to Toast 9, which includes the very nice Tivo Transfer program, to see if that would solve the problem. No! Every show would get to 13K or so transferred and then it would stop, eventually failing. No!!! I then replaced the cat5 cable running to the Tivo. It was a bad cable causing the transfer problem. After replacing the cable, I'm transferring shows off the Tivo without a problem in about 50% show length (a 1:00 show transfers in about 30 min).
2 weeks in, no problems at all. I'm looking forward to repurposing my old DirecTivo as an MRV unit for my wife.
I'm very glad I went with the ultra-quiet WD10EACS. You cannot hear the hard drive working at all. I highly recommend this drive.
I purchased a refurb $179 Tivo HD directly from the tivo website. I immediately set about replacing the internal drive with a 1TB Western Digital WD10EACS. Opening the case, I immediately saw an artifact of this being a refurb unit. The power supply board was cracked!!! I carefully removed the power supply board and noted something worse: a trace was broken at the crack. For shame, Tivo refurb tech! I have no doubt that the unit was plugged in and tested at the factory, but there's no excuse for not popping open the case to see if anything obvious was wrong, like, hmm, a cracked power supply board?! Seeing that I could fix the cracked trace, I soldered on a jumper and hoped for the best.
Following the instructions at http://coffee.sdsc.edu/rcw/tivo_upgrade/, I popped the SATA drives in their bays, booted my Mac Pro off the MFSLive CD, backed up and expanded the partitions to the new drive, and carefully ensconced the original drive in case something went wrong with the refurb. The new 1TB drive placed back in the Tivo, booted great.
I had to wait for the Verizon FiOS tech to install the cablecards next.
Installing and authorizing the cablecards had no effect until I rebooted the Tivo. If you're having trouble with your cablecard install I'd certainly recommend attempting a restart if you think the cards should be authorizing but aren't. Unfortunately, Verizon is still sending out S-cards with installs as of 8/4/08 in Delaware.
Everything appeared to be fine with the install. The guide seemed a little slow to arrive, but that's fairly normal with a new install. Then I tried to transfer shows to my computer. Here's where it got interesting for me. The open-source Mac tools for show transfer weren't working! The MAK was entered correctly, I could see the shows fine, but when I attempted to transfer them, nothing happened! No show on computer! I upgraded to Toast 9, which includes the very nice Tivo Transfer program, to see if that would solve the problem. No! Every show would get to 13K or so transferred and then it would stop, eventually failing. No!!! I then replaced the cat5 cable running to the Tivo. It was a bad cable causing the transfer problem. After replacing the cable, I'm transferring shows off the Tivo without a problem in about 50% show length (a 1:00 show transfers in about 30 min).
2 weeks in, no problems at all. I'm looking forward to repurposing my old DirecTivo as an MRV unit for my wife.
I'm very glad I went with the ultra-quiet WD10EACS. You cannot hear the hard drive working at all. I highly recommend this drive.