So, less than 48 hours after getting the replacement TiVo, it started acting up. A few times an hour, the image would freeze, then the drive would emit an audible 'click', then it'd go back to normal. This came and went, but it seemes to be getting more frequent.

Then, sometimes the encoding would break down during playback. Ghost images, dropped audio, that kind of thing. I am going to assume that this is the same thing, only with the momentary freeze and click happening during recording instead of playback.

So, I considered my choices: call TiVo and deal with all that crap again. Or: take matters into my own hands.

Guess which one I chose.

So yeah, it cost a little more, but Friday afternoon, a 300 GB Maxtor Quickview arrived on my doorstep. Foolishly, I stayed up all night performing a TiVoToMy.

Lessons learned: There is a known issue with some linux kernels not getting past the partition check when probing Maxtor hard drives over 120 GB. This would have been a nice thing for the folks at Weaknees to mention, because I, thinking it was doing the mfs equivalent of an fsck, let it sit there and idle for six hours before I switched it off, did some googling, and found out. So, reboot with DMA turned off. (In case this page turns up in someone's Google search, the answer to your problem is to type "linux ide=nodma" at the boot prompt) Yay! Shell prompt!.

(Oh, another lesson learned: Frankly, cable select is your friend. Turns out that at least two of the drives in my host machine had their master/slave jumpers set, which rather limited my options in terms of how to wire up the drives without changing the laws of physics.)

So, I typed in the magic commands, and it began the transfer. Now, I don't know if it's because I had DMA turned off, or if it had more to do with the fact that 100 GB is a honkin' lot of data, but the instructions I was working from said "This process will take some time." As it turns out, "Some time" means "twenty-nine hours". So about 20 minutes ago, I finished bolting down the drive (Who in the world thought it would be a good idea to use Torx screws? Is it just to keep me out? Because it didn't keep me out. It just pissed me off.

The tivo is back up, and it hasn't clicked yet. I have tried watching some of the salvaged shows, and they still play back in the broken (2) way. For the moment, I choose to assume that this is because the drive hiccuped while recording, and is not a symptom that the brokenness goes beyond the drive. I'll know soon enough, I hope.

One thing I should point out to those who would do this at home: enlarging your drive like this will make the TiVo slower. While this gives me hope, in the sense that, if you will recall, TiVo has the processing power of a 386, so there is no fundamental reason I can't make a PVR out of the pile of ancient computers in the basement, it's a bit annoying, and I may add "increase the TiVo's ram" to my list of future projects. But that involves soldering. Soldering scares me.