Does an upgrade hard drive need to be new?

[kurtucky]

Hi,
The hard drive in one of my series 2 tivos just died. Because it is close to the holiday season, I was planning on getting a new hd tivo with the new tv I'll be getting. The hd tivo was going to be the tivo that replaced the series 2 that just died. I don't really want to buy a new hard drive because I will be getting rid of the series 2 that just died soon. I remember reading somewhere that you must buy a brand new hard drive for a tivo upgrade. Will a solution such as instantcake work with an old hard drive that I have laying around (XP was installed on it)? If there would be a problem, could it be fixed by running DBAN?

Thanks!

[David_NC]

The drive doesn't have to be new. The only requirement is that it be at least as large as the original drive that the Tivo image was taken from. The current contents of the drive are irrelevant also - Instantcake will overwrite everything.

[kurtucky]

Thanks
I was all ready to buy instantcake when I noticed that it says that it needs to boot from the cd-rom in primary slave.... On the two computers I have tested, both only let me boot from the cd-rom drive that is hooked up to the primary master (I have two cd-roms hooked up on the same IDE cable in both).

I guess it looks like I'll have to buy instantcake just for the tivo image and use mfs tools to restore it.

[mr.unnatural]

If you boot from Instantcake or any other Linux boot CD with MFS Tools and you have two CD-ROMs attached you will not be able to boot into Linux. All of the Linux distributions used with MFS Tools will only recognize a single CD-ROM and having two connected will confuse the OS, preventing it from completing the boot process. You will need to disconnect one of the CD-ROM drives when using Instantcake.

OTOH, you could simply use WinMFS and let it restore the image from the Instantcake CD you created from the downloaded image. Connect your replacement drive to an available slot on the IDE bus and then identify it as the Tivo drive when using WinMFS. Point it to the backup image located on the Instantcake CD or copy the image over to your hard drive and restore it from there.

[tivoupgrade]

The drive doesn't have to be new. The only requirement is that it be at least as large as the original drive that the Tivo image was taken from. The current contents of the drive are irrelevant also - Instantcake will overwrite everything.

Actually, that's not entirely correct; the answer really depends on what type of TiVo you have.

On Series1 units, there is a requirement that the upgrade drive be slightly larger than the original drive because we use a larger swap space when imaging the drive.

On Series2 units, the drive can actually be SMALLER than the original drive (or the same size); I can't think of any reason you'd want to use a smaller drive, but it is possible to use a drive that is only a couple of GBs with any InstantCake image that is based upon "InstantCake2" (this is in the release notes).

As a general rule, though - we recommend you use a drive that is larger.

And you are correct, you don't need to use a new drive.

You SHOULD fully test the drive you use though, whether it is new or not.

[kurtucky]

Thanks
I was able to get it working just fine by removing one of the cd drives.