[Luckydawg]

I have a 40 hour Series 2. I also have a couple of extra 60-80 gb drives (all Maxtor) laying around and ordered the bracket and fan kit from weaknees. If you could please give me your opinion on the following:

- 1- What Drive to Use: How important is the brand drive? Do I really need a Maxtor Quickview, or will my old Maxtors laying around work ok for a second added drive?. The first (factory drive) is probably 2 years old.

- 2- Drive Prep: I have 4 pcs in the house; all run windows xp; for some reason 3 are on NFTS and one is FAT32. Do I need to do anything to the drive I plan to add? If I do, I assume I want to use the FAT32 machine? I read somewhere that merely booting to an xp machine screws you. Frankly, I'd like to pitch the FAT32 box and use its C drive as my second Tivo drive. The weaknees online instructions deal more with swapping pre-formatted drives and I'm sure there's some prep I need to do. I know squat about linux, so would popping for instant cake be a good idea?

Thanks.

 

[Luckydawg]

Thanks. Should I even bother formatting the old drive, or just add it as the second Tivo Drive?

 

[Luckydawg]

If you follow the Hinsdale instructions carefully you don't really need to know Linux. You want to use the FAT32 system so you will have a location to create a backup image. The Linux shells can't write to NTFS and you really need to save a copy of the image for when one of your drives fails. Yes, you could use Instacake, it's up to you.

Can I run instacake on a Pentium machine running XP? the PTV site implied I needed an x86 box; I've tossed all of mine.

 

[Luckydawg]

A Pentium IS an x86 based processor.

[Homer Simpson] Doh! [/Homer Simpson]

I know it used to be called a 586 at first, but the PTV site isn't real clear on this point and I've always taken to ccalling them PII, PIII, etc.

I assume I'd better use the 1 out of my 4 XP machines that seems to have a FAT32 C: drive instead of NFTS?