Tivo HD hard drive dead. Need advise on options

[ddorbuck]

Hello all, I'm in a bit of a bind and need advise. My Tivo HD TCD652160 just had it's hard drive die. It has a repeating loud click when I power it up.
It was a single drive unit. The unit is outside of the 1 year warranty and to add insult to injury the drive that died in it was a replacement 500 gig drive I swapped out the factory one for when I purchased the tivo. I tried running spinwrite on the tivo drive in a pc but the crash wont even show it as a drive to windows or the bios. To make matters even worse (yes it gets worse) I cannot find the original tivo drive that came with the system .. yeah I know!

My questions is am I just better off buying a new Tivo HD and transferring my service to that? or is there any way I can get a flat vanilla tivo image and apply that to a new hard drive and keep my old box? Forgive that last question but I am not too familiar with tivo's ways of transferring settings, etc.
I called tivo and they want $150.00 for a swap of the unit. I cant really swap since I'm missing my original out of the box drive.

I'm basically looking at buying a new one. Is this the path I am forced down?
Thanks. Doug from CT who needs to start drinking heavily about now ;>

[lafos]

You can buy an image called InstantCake from dvrupgrade, or buy a preconfigured drive from them or weaknees. There used to be images available through posts on the upgrade forum, but I think most of those are dead, as TiVo frowns on the practice.

[jjberger2134]

Sounds like Instant Cake ($20) is the way to go unless you want to pay more for a plug and play pre-configured drive. You can order pre-configured drives from weaknees or dvrupgrade. IC is from dvrupgrade.

[ddorbuck]

Thank you for your help. I'm downloading instant cake right now (just purchased a license). As a backup plan my wife has a new tivo hd on order with amazon just in case instant cake does not work but I have a good feeling about it.

Thanks again for your help!

Doug

[jjberger2134]

keep us posted!

And read the online instructions so you know exactly how to set the jumpers, and cables. Also, consider disconnecting the PC's main drive so you do not accidentally write to the wrong drive and cause more problems.

[ddorbuck]

Hello. I just wanted to update everyone that Instant Cake worked great for me and I have a working dual cable card Tivo again. The only issue I had was I originally tried restoring to a 150 gig hard drive and Instant Cake needed a larger drive to restore to so I used a 500 gig drive that I had and once I tried restoring to that all was well. I had to tell the tivo to get the latest system software and once that installed and then rebooted my cable cards were both working. I did not have to call comcast either.

So all is well and thanks for everyone who pointed me to Instant Cake.

Happy holidays !

Doug