A couple of years ago I got Bridget a TiVo2 for Christmas. This year it’s 2 yr old. When my first TiVo hit 2 last year about this time I upgraded the hard drive. My experience with computers has me lerry of them over 2+ years, especially when they are run 24-7. I’ve seen drives last over 5 yrs w/o problem. Even an old Connor 400 meg last ~7 yr with tons of bad sectors. There’s a strong financial incentive, because this TiVo has Lifetime Service which is not long sold. A bad hard drive would end TiVo and the lack of a monthly bill.
I researched ultra quiet, cool hard drives and got a Samsung T SP2514. Speed isn’t important with TiVo’s because the hardware is much more limiting than the drive. In fact, I would get a 5400 rpm drive if they still made them. They’re much cool than 7200s. You also need a spare (if you have one) computer to do the copying. Faster is better, older is better (just not brand new). You’ll need a copy of mfstools from Hinsdale burned to a CD. They have a free boot disk image that you need to burn to disk. It’s only a 10.5 meg download.
Lastly and most importantly are the instructions from Hinsdale. This is just a walkthrough of what I did. These instructions are extremely detailed. Follow them if upgrading yourself. There are lots of ways to upgrade a TiVo. This one has the factor single 80 gig drive. It could be upgraded by adding a second drive or replace the 80 with a new one. The new drive is 250 gig and I’ll be replacing the original. Bridget will keep the old drive is a safe, cool place and it will server as a backup. If the new one fails, just pop in the old one. No experience required, anyone with a Torx screwdriver can do it.
For those with a desire to upgrade, but don’t feel the DIY spirit, 9thTee and Hinsdale sell upgraded drives or you can send your TiVo in.
Bridget dropped it off at Thanksgiving and I finally got around to doing it. Mine took well over 8hrs to copy, recordings and all. And you don’t want to screw up the original TiVo drive before it’s copied. It’s kind of a weekend thing.
I opened the TiVo and took out the drive. Put the TiVo drive cage on the new drive. You’ll need a Torx (star shaped) 10 bit. Open the computer you’ll use for copying, unplug all the drives except the CDROM. Plug in the two drives. Turn on the computer and insert the MfsTools Boot disk you burned earlier. Note the cables you put the hard drives on. The cable position determines the drive name; Primary Master=/dev/hda, Primary Slave=/dev/hdb, etc.
Go through the MfsTools prompts till you get a command line. The TiVo drive was on Primary Master with the new drive on Secondary Master. So, I used the following line to copy and expand the swap file to 200 meg. You can see it copying here.
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 200 -xzpi - /dev/hdc
Wait several hours until the copy is finished and put the new drive in the TiVo. Plug the TiVo in and pray 
.
Here are all the pictures I took.
Update 1:
So the above did not work. I tried it several ways. Nada. The process that worked on my TiVo last year was to use dd to completely clone one drive to the other then resize it. I was terrified of accidentally getting the drive names confused, since there was no backup yet. But dd was my last hope. During the process block errors were coming up every time and there was a faint clicking that told me the drive was iffy. After15-20 minutes I couldn’t take it and stopped the copy, turned off the computer, and plugged the TiVo drive back in to TiVo. GSOD. And the drive clicked loudly signally a likely death in the Maxtor family.
This was exactly the wrong outcome. It seems pretty recently Weaknees has start a blog answering technical questions about the Hinsdale instructions. I saw that some people seemed to be replacing dead drives (no upgrade attempt) with mail order Weaknees drives. So, I posted my issue and the answer was that my drive was likely dead and that a replacement could be ordered containing an unactivated TiVo image. Apparently, the machine key is held in the chips and not on the hard drive. Yeah, I ordered a 250 gig/270 hr.
It came in on Wednesday. Worked great! Nothing is on it at all. It was not necessary to download the USB ethernet driver for networking. No initial phone call was necessary. It immediately saw the network, internet, and TiVo headquarters. I set everything up and it seems fine. The other TiVos see it and it sees them. \
Not that I’m complaining. This is a rather expensive resolution, $170 vs or plus $70 for Samsung 250. No, I’m not returning it. Haven’t broke the 2 TB barrier yet. Everything worked flawlessly. If you do have weak knees or need rescue it’s a life save or a TiVo saver or a save my from getting a Dish DVR saver or keep my Lifetime Service saver. Anyway…
Here is the picture of the kit. I added pictures of Christopher’s Dish/TiVo connection and a couple more pics of the kit HDD. They are in the first link.