# Format Never Used Before Hard Drive for Tivo on Windows Computer



## rnbarg (Aug 24, 2007)

I am returning my Tivo w/a broken HDMI port for a replacement unit. This is a Series 3. The broken unit has a 1 TB replacement hard drive. The original hard drive was sold years ago.

I will be swapping out the 1 TB drive from the broken unit w/a 250 gb refurb, the same drive this unit came w/or close WD 250 gb SATA video/PVR ready. As far as I know it was never used in/a TIVO. It will probably be formatted w/FAT or NTFS.

I want to simply format this drive for the TIVO and ship it back. So this is not an upgrade but simply sending them back the unit the way I purchased it.

How do I do format the new drive?


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

Do not format the drive in windows. You cannot go backwards from a 1TB to something smaller. I believe you will need a fresh tivo software image to put onto the drive. Check out the upgrade forums. 

Why on earth did you sell the old drive? Too late now, but most keep these as a backup and for selling in the future.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

rnbarg said:


> I am returning my Tivo w/a broken HDMI port for a replacement unit. This is a Series 3. The broken unit has a 1 TB replacement hard drive. The original hard drive was sold years ago.
> 
> I will be swapping out the 1 TB drive from the broken unit w/a 250 gb refurb, the same drive this unit came w/or close WD 250 gb SATA video/PVR ready. As far as I know it was never used in/a TIVO. It will probably be formatted w/FAT or NTFS.
> 
> ...


The MFS Live cd v1.4 or WinMFS will overwrite any other formatting on the drive when you use one or the other to restore an image to the 250.

Somewhere on the "Need an image? Don't PM me" thread you can search by my user name and find TCD648250 images for both programs to download.

However, you can also use either program to make a truncated backup from your 1TB drive and restore that onto the 250.

Either way, no need to do anything to the drive beforehand unless it was previously used in a GigaByte brand motherboard and had a Host Protected Area put on the end of it.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

rnbarg said:


> I am returning my Tivo w/a broken HDMI port for a replacement unit. This is a Series 3. The broken unit has a 1 TB replacement hard drive. The original hard drive was sold years ago.
> 
> I will be swapping out the 1 TB drive from the broken unit w/a 250 gb refurb, the same drive this unit came w/or close WD 250 gb SATA video/PVR ready. As far as I know it was never used in/a TIVO. It will probably be formatted w/FAT or NTFS.
> 
> ...


Are you transferring a lifetime subscription to the replacement S3?

If not, would it be cheaper to just buy a used one off of Craigslist?


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

unitron said:


> However, you can also use either program to make a truncated backup from your 1TB drive and restore that onto the 250.


No, he can't. As jrtroo pointed out, you can't go from larger to smaller, not even by using a truncated image. He needs to acquire an image from an original 250GB drive.

Edit: He also has to hope that the "new" drive is actually at least as large as the original and isn't even _*slightly*_ smaller.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

lpwcomp said:


> Edit: He also has to hope that the "new" drive is actually at least as large as the original and isn't even _*slightly*_ smaller.


Sometimes the slightly smaller issue can be handled by reducing the swap partition size in WinMFS. I've done that before on an S2.


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