odd pc setup for upgrade

[matblinks]

Hi -

I am about to upgrade our Tivo HD and am trying to anticipate issues. I know my way around the inside of a PC, but have never upgraded a Tivo before. We have a stock Tivo HD (original drive). The drive I am going to use is the Hitachi Deskstar:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145167

My PC is running XP in raid 1 (mirrored) with two SATA drives. For some reason when I installed the OS my local drive was assigned drive letter H. I have some more SATA ports that I would like to use when connecting the Tivo drives.

Here is what I am worried about:

a) Does anyone think there might be an issue when connecting the drives due to there already being two SATA drives connected, and with an odd drive letter? Could it be worth disconnecting one of the raid drives before the transfer in case there is an issue, as the other raid drive should rebuild the connected one if somehow i screw it up (I don't really have a full backup - that was the reason for the raid drives in the first place)?

b) I have been reading that i need eSATA cables - is this just if I want to use an enclosure? Wouldn't the SATA cables I have lying around do the trick if I am just replacing the internal drive as they are only going to be used for the transfer? I am not going the enclosure route as it seems to be just as much work, only ending up doubling the drive failure chance as there will be two drives, not to mention more clutter and energy usage.

c) A lot more general - is there anything I really should watch out for when upgrading? From what I have researched on this site, it seems all I have to do is connect the two drives, boot up Windows, and click on a few menus in WinMFS. Is there anywhere I could really screw everything up? I managed to convince my girlfriend that this is a better way to go than then getting the WD My DVR Expander, so if there is an issue, I wouldn't want to be me when everything falls apart :)

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, and I apologize if the info I am looking for already posted elsewhere.

-mat

[mr.unnatural]

It shouldn't make any difference what your existing drive letters are since the Tivo drive and the new upgrade drive won't be assigned any drive letters. If XP prompts you to do so then cancel out of the screens when they pop up. For the purpose of upgrading a Tivo drive you don't need to go out any buy an external enclosure or eSATA cable. Just open up the case and connect both drives to two available SATA ports. You don't even have to mount the drives inside the PC case as long as your power and SATA cables are long enough. I usually set mine on a table or on top of my tower case when performing an upgrade. WinMFS will allow you to select the drives from the menu even though Windows may not recognize them. Just be sure you select the right drives when using WinMFS and you'll be fine.

Just a note - in the future, kindly use the shift key once in a while to capitalize letters. Looking at all lowercase is simply annoying. I'm sure you didn't learn to write like that in school.;)

[matblinks]

Just reporting back - everything went smoothly. And I was finally able to put my floppy drive to use creating the boot disk of the Hitachi Feature Tool.

Some notes:

I needed a T15 screw bit for removing the hard drive from its housing - for everything else I used the T10, as mentioned in the Official eSATA Drive Expansion in 9.2: FAQ + Discussion. Also, and this is a bit embarrassing - I removed two screws I didn't need to; the screws holding the exhaust fan in place seem at first glance like they are also holding the housing in place, but if you look closely the holes on the housing are a little larger so the screws will pass right though them when you remove it.

Another thing was that my OS internal hard drive is seen as an external by the bios for some reason. As soon as I had any other drive connected, the computer would not boot as it could not find the windows drive. I had to run the bios and disable boot order, then boot tapping F8 to select the boot drive as the 'external'. Once the backup and copy was done, and the drives were removed, I went back into the bios and choose the 'external' drive as the boot drive.

I thought it might be worth mentioning as in case someone else has a similar issue with their computer not booting, they might want to try checking out their boot order in the bios and start up tapping F8 to get their system to find the operating system.

Thanks for the help mr.unnatural!