Tivo Troubles

My beloved Tivo died over the memorial day weekend. yikes! Tivo is a digital video recorder, and even though that doesn't sound all that exciting, it's actually one of the best inventions ever made. It changes how you watch TV. I barely ever watch "live" TV anymore. I rather select one of the many things my Tivo recorded instead.

The biggest advantage is, that you can fast forward over all those annoying commercial breaks. As a matter of fact, I didn't watch much TV before I got my Tivo, because spending about 30% of your viewing time on ads was just too much.

One problem with Tivo is that you need to pay a monthly subscription in order to receive program guide updates, which is quite expensive at about $17 per month (heck - basic cable is cheaper). However, there used to be a way around this: Tivo partnered with several third-party manufacturers to provide tivo-dvd combo players. These sweet machines shipped with a free service called Tivo Basic. I therefore acquired a Toshiba SD-H400 about three years ago. The basic service is absolutely sufficient and the machine plays DVDs as well.

A look inside (hd removed)
After listening to the machine and a few quick searches online, I determined that the hard drive had most likely died. There are several tools and instructions available online to create images from your (working) tivo drive, often in order to re-image larger disks to increase storage capacity. I decided to give this a shot last night, opened the machine and removed the drive. It took a really long time to create a backup image and the drive made a lot of unhealthy noises during the process. The big disappointment when I tried to copy the image to a new drive: data corruption. It is 1:00am in the morning and I've hit a dead end trying to rescue my precious piece of home entertainment electronics!

The next plan of attack is to try Instant Cake, which provides a bootable CD that creates a new tivo image onto any hard disk without having to retrieve data from the original drive. Keep your fingers crossed that this works out and basic service will be maintained!

To be continued...