# Which drive for my series 2? (RS-TX60)



## porsche944 (Apr 9, 2007)

Not sure if I should post this here or the RS-TX owners forum, but here goes:

I'm looking to upgrade the hard drive on my RS-TX60 and would appreciate any help on selecting the hard drive model.

From Western Digital, I'm considering either the HD AV series or the HD AV-GP series. From Seagate, I'm considering the Pipeline HD series or the SV-35 series.

Someone had strongly recommended the AV-GPs to me (also the Pipeline in 2nd place), but my first choice is the WD5000AVJB froom WD's AV series as it is one of the few current DVR-optimized drives that still provides a PATA interface. All the others I mentioned use SATA and would require an adapter (which I know I could get if I had to). I also know that there have been issues with certain green drives and certain older Tivos, but don't know if they apply to these DVR-specific drives.

Does anyone have any experience with any of these and can offer any suggestions?

Another issue: how big a drive should I get? I would be very happy with the increased capacity of a 500GB drive, but should I consider a 750GB or even a 1TB? I'm very hesitant to "go large" as the RS-TX60 is already painfully slow to navigate. I'm afraid a nearly full 1TB drive will become completely unmanageable, taking forever to populate the now playing list, etc. Comments?

Thanks to all in advance for any help.

PS - I don't want to post duplicate threads, but would it be bad etiquette to post a link to here from the RS-TX owners forum?


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## porsche944 (Apr 9, 2007)

OK, I ended up buying the WD5000AVJB and will soon start the upgrade process. I have a few general questions.

First, hypothetically, If I want to clone my tivo hard drive exactly, without increasing the size, can't I just use a non-windows based
imaging tool from the hard drive manufacturer, like Western Digital's data lifeguard, to make an exact copy to the same size drive?

Next, I've seen all sorts of dire warnings that simply connecting my Tivo hard drive to a windows machine and allowing it to boot up in windows may permanently corrupt my Tivo drive. Clearly this can't be true otherwise tools like winMFS could never work. So what precautions need I take? For example, I know that changing folder options can store a desktop.ini file somewhere on a drive. Should I completely avoid browsing the contents of the Tivo drive? What else should I avoid doing?

Next, various instructions recommend first making, testing, and saving a small backup file so that if anything goes wrong, now or later, you can always recover with this. Do some / all of the tools allow you to save this to CD/DVD, or do I have to copy it to a hard disk, boot into another environment, then copy it to CD/DVD?

Last, I have found so much information from so many places, MFStools, MFSlive, winMFS, etc., I'm not sure where to start. Any suggestions on which tools from which site I should start with? This will be a free DIY project. Thanks for any assistance.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

As I understand it, earlier versions of Windows XP would hose the MBR or thereabouts.

If you use the MFS Live CD and boot from it with your Windows drive safely removed you won't have to worry about it.

Recomended reading includes the readme's from the MFS Live CD, the older MFS Tools, the Dylan's Boot Disk, the Kazymr(sp?), and Steve Jenkin's TiVo networking site.

Read it all, then read it all again.

Also, read up on the Apple Partition Map.


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