TIVO Series 2 

Upgrading a TIVO - what you need to know.

Hinsdale has a site full of helpful TIVO information at his site, you will find 3 options to choose from:

1) Is Tiger’s Mfs Tools 2.0 as an all-in-one upgrade solution.
This documents how to do the upgrade with the latest software. It does a good job of giving you all the information you need to the upgrade. Considering that he is also trying to sell disk drives he does an amazing good job of telling you all the information you need to do the upgrade yourself.

2) This option is for people who want to buy a hard drive ready to install, basically a plug'n'play upgrade.
If your not sure about your ability to keep your cool when your unix commands are not doing what you expect, then maybe this is the option for you.  To do the upgrade yourself you have to pull a PC apart, and change out the hard drive, if you don’t have a PC handy then this is your best option.  I ordered a drive from him and basically plugged it into my TIVO and it worked. 
you select your tivo model from a list of about 40 different models. Then you select if you are replacing an A drive, or a B drive.  Either one is $149.00  The drive he sends you will be a 80 gig drive with all the software it needs to plug in and run your tivo.

3) Option for the old instructions on TiVoMad, BlessTiVo, and Mfs Tools 1.1.
Not sure why the old instructions would work better, but here they are incase you want to try them instead of the newer tools 2.0.

The tivo community forums are very active with lots of people that know just about everything you could ask about a tivo.

However, the people there are really concerned about not doing anything or saying anything about trying to not pay for the TIVO monthly service, or violating the TIVO copyright on any of their software.  This does get to the point of being annoying at times.  But I understand that copyright issues are important and it's interesting to see people so concerned about a company making all the money they can.

There are many other sites about TIVO, but these are the most useful sites I have found.

One of the problems I ran into is that to up grade a TIVO you need an image of the disk drive.  If you just have one TIVO and your hard drive does not work any longer, then you don’t have the image that you need. 

In this case there are a couple solutions, you can order a disk drive from the Hinsdale site, or you can buy a new series 2 and take an image from the disk drive and use that to format your hard drive for your old machine.  Hopefully you wanted two TIVO series 2's because that’s what you end up with.

Link to Hinsdale's TIVO site

If you have questions about how to do an upgrade then the best place is to go to the forums at: tivocommunity.com