Question about plugging IDE TiVo drive into computer with SATA ports

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Hello, this question is a general question for the future - I'm not running into this problem right now.

My series 1 and series 2 TiVos both have IDE drives in them, but it seems like SATA is becoming the way for the future, and my newest computer has mostly SATA ports in the motherboard, though it does have one IDE port for the master hard drive, and I think the CD might have an IDE port.

What if down the road, my computer has only SATA ports, and what if I have an IDE TiVo drive fail? Would I have the ability to use some sort of adapter to plug a new IDE drive into a SATA port in my computer, for purposes of installing the TiVo image, and the put the new IDE drive back into the TiVo? Would that work?

Of course the other question is: are IDE drives going to become so obsolete that down the road, it will be difficult to even buy a new IDE drive to repair an ailing TiVO?

 

Well, my old PC has a bad motherboard, so I can't even boot it. But I guess if the time comes, old archaic computers ought be easy to come by for a dime a dozen. IOW, computers depreciate in value really fast, so old ones should be dirt cheap.

 

Thanks, this was the question of my OP. I didn't know about these converters. I assume then, that the TiVo software would install just fine across these converters? It's possible though that I'd potentially need two if I want to copy data from one drive to another. I suppose it could potentially be cheaper to just get a 5 year old computer that somebody wants to dispose of.

Both of my computers have no diskette drive. But my old broken one with the nonbootable damaged motherboard does. Ironically just a few days ago when I replaced one of the hard drives in my ailing series 1 (dual hard drive model), I couldn't get the utility CD to work, and I also couldn't get a successful burn onto another CD. So I decide to use the diskette utilities I had made a couple years ago. So I harvested the diskette drive plus the narrow IDE cable that connected to it out of my broken computer and temporarily installed it in one of my good computers. It'd be nice to permanently install it, but the only bay I think I could put it in doesn't have a removable panel on the front of the case where I could expose the diskette slot. So I just temporarily had it dangling next to the open case while I ran the utilities and then I disconnected it when I was done.

I guess I'll hang to that floppy drive and it's cable in case I have a future need for it.

 

Don't you still have to run linux commands (by booting to linux, using the MFS utility) disk, in order to load the image on the new drive(s)? And when you do, in the hdx term, where x designates primary/secondary/slave/etc, how do you determine x, when the drive is plugged into a USB port?

It would indeed be nice to do upgrades/repairs without opening the computer.