Tivo s2 software replacement

If you get a V error then repeat step 11 above. You can check the capacity in the system settings. The new Roamio can accept a blank drive and during the booting process will automatically install the Tivo software on this drive including any hard drive space updates. This means that if you are happy losing your current recordings and season passes then all you need to do is purchase a new hard drive, such as a WD 2TB drive , open up your Tivo, remove the stock GB, drive, insert the new 1, 1.

You should then be good to go. Warning: The Roamio upgrade method is remarkably simple and has been a long time coming, however there are a couple of things you need to be aware of. Firstly this will result in you losing all of your current recordings and season passes so I suggest copying those off first with Tivo to Go [if your evil cable company lets you].

Secondly if you use cable cards with your Tivo you may need to re-pair these depending on how aggressive your cable operator is with authentication [ rarely required ].

Typically this is a simple procedure of calling your cable company - although note with some, like Time Warner Cable, talking with their customer service reps about cable cards can be a bit like pulling teeth so you may need to escalate the call to get to talk to the correct person.

Reports for Samsung Virgin Media customers in the UK is that the auto hard drive upgrade process works flawlessly without requiring any new pairing. Be careful not to touch the power supply. Note, the only screws holding the TiVo lid are those on the back of the case.

Sometimes the top can be a little stiff so you may have to slowly work it loose. Place it on an anti-static surface such as a piece of aluminum foil or an anti-static bag. Note, if you find that after 30 seconds all 4 lights on the front of the Tivo are flashing this likely means you are using the wrong power supply likely you switched with a Tivo Mini , switch back to the original Roamio power supply.

Repeat guided setup and you should then be good to go. You can check the new capacity in system settings. If your new drive is greater than 3TB in size the TiVo Roamio's auto format facility will unfortunately only format the drive to a maximum size of 3TB. To access the full capacity of the new drive it is necessary to either reformat it requires access to a machine running Windows or bless it Windows free method but limited to 4TB drives.

If that does not work you can also get it here , but I encourage you to try to register to download it from the TiVo community thread first in case there have been any updates. When you get to the first step of guided setup unplug your Tivo Roamio. Reattach the cables, place the lid back on and secure the case screws. Go through guided setup and you should then be good to go. It should be around HD hours for a 4TB drive.

Tivo Roamio with 4TB drive. If you do not have access to a machine running Windows then you can use the following method that involves 'blessing' your new hard drive prior to inserting it in the TiVo Roamio using a bootable CD or USB pen drive Image.

Note that this approach only works with 4TB drives e. You should also check that your SATA ports are enabled in the bios. Some old PCs ship with these turned off. For this process the only hard drives you will need connected to your PC are the original TiVo hard disk and the disk you plan to upgrade to. Also connect the power to these drives. If you are prompted with a boot menu during the boot process simply press enter to boot with the default options.

If you find yourself in some weird graphics interface then try rebooting and selecting text mode option 3. You should see a screen similar to that below, if you do not see the drives listed then it likely means that your motherboard's SATA controller is not supported by drivers included in the MFSLive boot CD. Make a note of the name of each drive. Make sure you get this part correct because if you mix the two up you could end up blanking your original TiVo drive and preventing your TiVo from working.

In this case the GB drive, the TiVo original, is drive sda while the upgrade drive a GB drive in this example is sdb. Note, depending on the number of shows recorded on your original TiVo drive you may see lots of partitions listed here such as sda1, sda2 etc. You can safely ignore these since the commands below operate on the complete physical disk in this case the letters before the number, so sda, sdb etc. At the prompt this type the command:. This step can take upwards of an hour on a dual core 2.

If you copy from the blank drive to the original drive you will wreck your TiVo. If you don't want to wait several hours and don't mind loosing all your current recordings then you can use the following command which will take only a few minutes:.

In my experience this command has no negatives and does not appear to impact TiVo's performance in any way. Issue the command:. The options here have the following effect:.

In either case you can safely ignore any warnings here. If you do get an error invalid command you can try the following to just set the acoustic management which may also fail on the latest drives and is nothing to be concerned about :.

For the majority of people this step is unneeded and can be safely skipped. Press and hold the power button of your PC so that it powers off. Then disconnect the old TiVo hard disk and put it somewhere safe in case you ever need to put it back in for a warranty call.

Then take the new TiVo hard disk and mount it in your TiVo. Screw the cover back on, plug it all in and power it up. Default capacity from the procedure above will be about HD hours or so. Finally if you have any comments, suggestions, come across any problems or have any questions please feel free to contact me at the email address above. Use the Premiere method described below. If you are more comfortable using Windows than Linux then you may prefer to use this method in place of the Linux boot CD method described above.

Doing so will blank your TiVo disk. You also need to make sure you are logged in with an account that has administrator privileges. The program is standalone and so does not need to be installed. Fire it up now just to make sure it is working. You should see the following screen. If you get any messages about initializing the new drives make sure you select No or Cancel.

This will bring up the following window:. Here you need to select your original TiVo drive under the A drive box - make sure you highlight the correct one - for a standard TiVo HD this should be the GB drive. Then hit the Select button. This allows you to reuse your original TiVo HD for something else and not have to worry if your new 'upgrade' drive should fail at some point. Here you just need to select the name of the file you want to backup to ad then hit start.

This takes about 5 to 10 minutes depending on your hardware. As the source drive select your original TiVo drive and under target select the new 'larger' TiVo drive. A note of caution here, avoid running anything else why this copy is running.

It won't actually effect the copy but if you drag something in front of the MFScopy window it will cease to update and you won't know how far it has got until it finishes and updates the window once more. I assume you do so hit yes. If you want you can enable the Supersize option under the tools menu. This supposedly takes space that would be reserved for downloading commercials and sponsored programs and instead makes it available for recordings further increasing your capacity.

Shut down Windows and power off your PC. If you purchased a 1TB WeakKnees drive for your Premiere or previously upgrade your TiVo yourself to an expanded drive you will need to use the original GB hard drive to perform the upgrade to your new drive. Virgin Media Tivo update Nov 11th I have now received multiple independent reports that this method no longer works for some Cisco based Virgin Media Tivos.

The common denominator appears to be that they are running software version With this version and perhaps newer versions? If and when a fix becomes available I will post it here. If your software version is older you may be in luck but I do not have the data points to confirm one way or the other at present.

Note the US version of the Premiere has no stickers or warranty void stickers preventing you opening the case. This can be fairly easily removed using a sharp knife and a hairdryer. If you do it slowly enough you will not damage the sticker and can replace it should you need to.

Image of the rear of the TiVo Premiere with the 4 case screws numbered. Image showing the original TiVo premiere hard drive removed.

As you can see TiVo use Western Digital drives like those recommended above. The haddrive was mounted on the left and was removed for this photograph. The power supply is on the far right and you should be careful not to touch this. The precise layout and menu structure of your bios will differ but mine is show below for reference.

Note you often need to press 'Del' or F2 at the initial power on screen to get into the bios settings. It is not strictly critical that you disconnect the other drives but it will prevent you from accidentally erasing them. The Western Digital drives are all 3. Next attach the original TiVo drive to the first SATA port and the new drive to the second SATA port It is not critical that they be on these specific ports since we will be given a menu to choose from in the drive upgrade program.

The first screen that should come will ask you about video modes. You can either wait 30 seconds for things to continue or press the space bar to continue. Don't worry about this. If the system locks up or fails to recognize the drives then it is possible that your SATA controller is not recognized. Updating your machine's bios may fix this.

If it does not please let me know the specs of your motherboard and I will see if Linux support is available and can be added to the image.

If you have an alternative machine you can always try this one instead. After about 20 to 30 seconds you should get presented with the main TiVo Premiere Upgrade command menu. We will ultimately go through all 3 options in the following order. Copy, Expand and then Supersize. The Copy option simply copies our original TiVo hard disk to the new hard disk. Expand then expands that copy on the new disk to fill all of the available space so giving us the larger recording capacity.

Finally the Supersize option modifies our new disk to have less space reserved for commercials and more for programs. Do you really want TiVo recording 20 hours of HD infomercials? Hopefully it will only show a single drive as above. You should check this has the capacity you expect for the original TiVo. In the case of the Premiere this is Press 'Y' then the enter key to accept this drive as the source drive.

If you get presented with multiple drives be sure to choose the correct on. At this point the program will present you with a list of available drives in the computer. In the example above you see two drives listed. Make a note of the 'device' identifier of the drive. The drive to be copied to is clearly drive 1 here so I press '1' and then enter. Double check this and if all is good press 'y' and then Enter. The program will then begin copying your original TiVo drive to the new drive.

You will see a screen similar to below showing you the progress. Be patient this step can take up to 3 hours. You can get an estimate of how long it will take by looking at the 'average rate' on the right of the screen. The rate shows the copy rate in kB per sec.

If the software fails to identify the new drive this may be an issue with the way your motherboards hard drive controller functions.

The simplest approach is to reboot and then skip the above steps and go straight to this expand option. Double check that the drive report is the correct 'NEW' drive and if it is press 'y' and then enter.

Then press 'y' and enter again at the confirmation page to begin the expansion process. This should complete in a matter of seconds showing you the approximate recording space on the new drive. In this case HD hours for a 1TB drive. Press 'r' and then enter to choose another operation.

This will take you back to the main menu where you can press 'z' and then enter to Supersize your disk. This converts excess space that your Tivo reserves for downloading commercials and other sponsored junk and make it available for recording programs. Make sure you enter the number for the 'NEW' drive and then press enter.

Confirm again with 'y' and enter. The process will take a couple of seconds and then should complete successfully. Congratulations you are now the owner of an expanded and blessed TiVo hard drive. You can now either press 's' enter to shutdown your machine or, if you want to carry out the optional step 12 below and turn on the power saving and acoustic management settings on the new drive press 'x' and then enter.

Type 'halt' and press enter and within a few seconds your desktop should power down. You can then disconnect the old TiVo hard disk and put it somewhere safe in case you ever need to put it back in for a warranty call or your new drive fails for some reason and you have to use the original drive to copy onto a new disk. Your TiVo Premiere should start to boot and after about 3 to 4 minutes display the initial lead in video. It 'may' then go into Standby mode with a blank screen.

Do not panic, just press the TiVo button on your remote to bring your new TiVo alive. TiVo Premiere with 1TB disk and supersized. There you have it. Fixing a Broken TiVo - Don't panic - it is simple. Has your beloved TiVo been freezing lately or more likely randomly rebooting? Is it outside of warranty? Are you pulling your hair out in frustration?

For those with expensive unit lifetime subscriptions this will help you breathe even better. In Often the drive is failing, taking too long to read a sector for example and this freaks the TiVo out. In most cases though the drive is not entirely past redemption and can still be read inside a computer in order to copy to a new drive. There are a number of ways you accomplish this.

First you need to purchase a new Hard Drive of equal or greater capacity that the current drive you have in the TiVo. Once you have that go ahead and open up your TiVo and remove the existing drive using the method appropriate for your model as described above.

Mount the drives in your PC using the Linux method described above. However, when you get to step 8 replace the command with the following:. The difference is the removal of the -x expand option here since trying to expand an already expanded drive will give you an error. This could take between 1 and 12 hours depending on how bad your existing TiVo drive it.

Hopefully though it completes successfully and you can the new drive back into your TiVo and it should magically start working again. For the latest TiVo models the best approach is to simply attempt a raw sector by sector copy of the old hard drive to the new. This works best if the two drives are identical models but can also work if they are simply the same size or the new disk is larger in size than the original disk.

Most disk copies fail when they encounter a bad sector so it is critical to do this in a way that ignores and unreadable sectors. We are essentially crossing our fingers here that any bad sectors on the failing disk are inside recorded shows rather than the TiVo's actual system software - this the most likely case since the shows take up Insert your Ubuntu Rescue CD or usb drive and let the system boot.

Double check that the drive models and capacities are those you expect for the source and destination drive. Let this run to completion. It can take between 4 and 24 hours depending on how bad your drive is. Store this image on a different drive so that it can be used for restoration in case you mess-up the DD command. Some users have experienced significant speed increases 10x by using raw devices when backing-up a drive.

Below is an example of a backup command using dd and raw device locations within Linux to copy a drive. Be sure you know which hard drive is connected to each raw device location.

This isn't a thoroughly tested as the method above; use it at your own risk. Some people believe that swap partitions larger than MB is necessary if total drive capacity exceeds GB.

In general, this has been proven to be unnecessary. However, if you want to create a lager swap partition, these are the step you'll need to follow. The -s switch used in the mfsrestore program determines the size of the swap.

However, the partition table has to be modified if a swap size greater than MB is specified. So this is a two step operation. People that use larger swap partitions generally follow the rule-of-thumb that 1MB of swap is needed for every 2GB of total drive storage space. So, if the instructions above say to use this command:. The exact command depends on the version of tpip being used. Type the following command:.

On some very early Series 1 TiVo models, the Quantum branded hard drive was locked. You must run the qunlock program to unlock it. The qunlock utility is included must be copied to a bootable DOS floppy disk drive. The downlowd and copy the qunlock. Next, turn-off the PC, disconnect your Windows drive, install the TiVo drive, turn on the PC it will automatically boot the floppy drive , and type "qunlock.

You will see some output telling you how to run qunlock based on how the TiVo drive is connected to your PC for example, you will type something like 'qunlock 2' if the drive is connected to IDE secondary master. Turn-off your PC. The drive should now be unlocked. This setting will decrease or completely eliminate the "ticking" sound that is audible when the drive is performing random seeks i.

Set the acoustic level to the quietest setting This will decrease drive performance slightly but not enough to be noticeable when installed in a TiVo. Jump to: navigation , search. Views Page Discussion View source History. Personal tools Log in. Navigation Main page Community portal Help.