Newbie Question - Thanks for helping me!

[tvwriter]

Long story short... I have a series 1 (Phillips) which I hacked years ago. I added a second drive but kept the original as the primary. I think one of the HDs is fried as I am getting the Green Screen of Death.

Question... can I replace the original while keeping the second (newer) one in place? How can I test which is dead? What would I need to replace the original HD other than a new HD (software? InstantCake?)

I am not very tech savvy but a buddy who works for IBM helped me "bless" my Tivo last time.

Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks so much.:D

[tvwriter]

Anyone? Anyone at all? Please????

[bitmap]

If your primary disk has gone bad, anything on the second disk is basically lost.
You can keep the second one, and add a new primary, but with reusing the older disk, you'll run the risk that the second drive will fail soon, and you'd have to do the entire rebuild over again, so its probably best to replace them both with a single larger disk (or even two new large disks). There are a number of threads on replacing disks in an S1, and kernel limitation of disk size over 128GB, with workarounds of kernel replacements which support the larger disks. If it sounds too confusing, you could just use 120 to 160GB disks, and not worry about using more than the 128GB limit.

Since it sounds like you don't have a backup image (still using the original primary disk), the safe and easy way to get back in operation is InstantCake as you mention, which boots from a CD, asks a few questions, and copies everything to the new disk for you. Much simpler probably than the hoops we had to go through back when we first copied and/or upgraded drives in these S1s.