# Expansion Drive on Bolt



## cyclone23 (Jul 3, 2016)

I've just converted over from FIOS DVR's/Set top boxes to a Tivo Bolt and Minis. I would like to expand the Bolt's recording capacity by attaching an ESATA drive. I picked up an ESATA enclosure at a local Micro Center. I have 3.5 inch drives from 500 Gig all the way up to 6 TB. I've read some of the comments on this and other forums, but still have some questions. I've started with a 500 Gig drive. I found that the Bolt when it powers up with the expansion drive attached gives me a message: This Tivo box has detected and expander. When I got to the next step it tells me that it doesn't support this device. I tried this with the drive formatted in FAT32 and NTFS. I'm using a Tivo supplied ESATA cable.

Where am I going wrong? I suspect that not all enclosures will talk to the Tivo, but it would be nice to get some guidance on this. 

Thanks


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

There is one and only one expansion drive that will work out of the box, it is the 1TB Western digital that TiVo sells. 

We know there is a way to marry other drives to a TiVo as Weaknees does it - but I don't think there are any tools available to do it yourself.


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## rsnaider (Apr 25, 2002)

If you decide to purchase the WD drive, you will need a special eSata cable from TiVo as the eSata port on the Bolt is set deeper than a normal one. 

TiVo will provide the cable free of charge but you have to request it.


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## cyclone23 (Jul 3, 2016)

rsnaider said:


> If you decide to purchase the WD drive, you will need a special eSata cable from TiVo as the eSata port on the Bolt is set deeper than a normal one.
> 
> TiVo will provide the cable free of charge but you have to request it.


Thanks, I got the Tivo ESATA cable. The responded quickly and it came in a couple of days.

Has anybody been able to duplicate WeaKnees's configuration? I suspect it's a hardware solution.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

We do not recommend adding an external drive to a Tivo. Any failure in the drives and you will lose your recordings. 

We recommend replacing the internal drive with a bigger one, but this will void your warranty. So it may be better to wait and see how the Tivo behaves before replacing. (I did upgrade mine after a year.)

Tivo does not use partition formats like FAT or NTFS, its a special format only (pretty much) Tivo uses.


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