# Replace the Hard drive in a Series 2 question.



## Tobashadow

My old beat up 540 series 2 Tivo in the bedroom has had a problem for awhile with delays in the menu and remote response. 

Lately it's gotten much much worse, and tonight i put my head next to it while my wife went through a few sections of the menu and i heard the hard drive doing multiple read seeking before the option would come up on the screen.

Press a button

Seek / Delay / Seek / Delay / Seek and menu item appears.

If it has been on a channel more then a hour or so i can press the Tivo button and its a 8-10 second delay from the time the light on the front flashes to confirm IR data to when the sound goes off and the screen loads.

My dual tuner in the living room has almost a instant response time.

I know the CPU in it is faster but this is just stupid slow.

To me this screams hard drive dying, so i am going to replace it with one i have. 

"First time at it wish me luck" 

Since money is real short i have to use one off my shelf that i have tested perfect but i have two choice's.

Stock is a 40gig so even tho bigger would be better, speed is more important at the moment.

Options

A: 40 gig 7200 rpm
B: 64 gig 5400 rpm

So does the extra rpm matter in a Tivo like it does your standard computer, or will the Tivo never be able to make use of the extra speed and option B be worth the extra 24 gigs of room.


----------



## unclemoosh

IMHO, the larger, slower drive is your better choice - more space, less heat. 5400 rpm is of no consequence in the TiVo.


----------



## Tobashadow

Just got done with it and used the larger slower drive and.

Man oh man what a time for my first tivo upgrade.

Next time I'm going to have the air compressor ready, nasty inside of it.

I used the windows based winmfs program. My motherboard on this machine has a unused IDE channel since i moved to sata drives, so it was a real easy hookup. But the new drive has been a windows disc in the past so it was given a drive letter and of course the tivo drive did not. Opened the program and could not get it to see the new drive till i thought about it after a few minutes and opened the windows disc management and deleted the partition on the drive which made it demount it. 

The winmfs could then see it and 30 min later i had a slightly bigger storage drive ready to go with everything copied over.

I tell you what that was a long 10 min during boot up till the tivo dance video came on. 

Perfect speed and seems to have been the problem. Everything pops right up now with no delay.

Now im eying the 160 gig drive in a external i have that i rarely use.

Maybe my 80 hour dual tuner in the living room needs to be a 160 hour?


----------



## IamWedge

Hi Ya,
I have a Series 2 Tivo as well, with the small hard drive. Ive seen on DVD Upgrades that one could put a 1TB in this unit. I take it these drives are EIDE format? Im just going to order one from Newegg.
Also Do I have to use insta cake (or whatever its called) or can I just use Norton save and restore to copy the entire drive?


----------



## wscannell

Go to mfslive.org for the proper tools. You cannot use Norton. 

Series 2 units use IDE (parallel) drives. Western Digital is the only major manufacturer still producing these drives.


----------



## unclemoosh

IamWedge said:


> Hi Ya,
> I have a Series 2 Tivo as well, with the small hard drive. Ive seen on DVD Upgrades that one could put a 1TB in this unit. I take it these drives are EIDE format? Im just going to order one from Newegg.
> Also Do I have to use insta cake (or whatever its called) or can I just use Norton save and restore to copy the entire drive?


Actually, the 1 TBdrives are SATA. See this thread for adapters that work.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=416883

Instantcake is a great tool and very simple to use. Or you could download tools from mfslive.com and use the image on your existing drive.


----------

