Swap hardrives, between Tivo's ??

[Hemi 6.1]

I have a Samsung Sir s4040r Tivo DVR, and a Hughes HDVR2 Tivo.

Just wondering if I can take the harddrive out of the Samsung and install it into the Hughes model? They have different brand hardrives, but the wiring is all the same.
And the Samsung has a 160 GB upgrade..
The HDVR2 Hardrive is shot .
But both models take the same power supply , thats why I was wondering if the hard drives could be switched.

 

[cfb]

You might have to hook it up to a PC and run mfstool or instantcake on it (or whatever the current tool is, I havent done tivo in more than a year) and zap the disk with a tivo software image thats compatible with the hughes, since I dont think the hughes and samsung run the same code.

But its possible it might work. You definitely wont be able to watch any of the old recordings after switching the drive over. You can always give it a try and see, nothing particularly bad will happen other than it may not work.

All that having been said, the old style 160gb hard drives are worth about $40 brand new. A 250 or 320gb drive would cost about $50-60. If you're going to all this trouble, you might just get a new, bigger drive, zap the s/w on it with one of the tools, and not have a used disk in the hughes that might drop dead on you in six months.

 

[Hemi 6.1]

All that having been said, the old style 160gb hard drives are worth about $40 brand new. .

Where can I get one for $40 new?
The Cheapest I've seen is $100

 

[Hemi 6.1]

Also Anyone With a Samsung s40**r Tivo DVR, can you tell me how I can tell how much recording space is left on my DVR. I can't find that anywhere. It just says 140 hours variable in the system info screen.

 

[cfb]

There isnt a free space indicator of any kind on the old tivo. Basically if you ran it with suggestions turned on and left it to record those the drive will be full. If you count the # of hours of suggestion recordings and delete them, thats how much free space you have.

Tivo always had a problem with a free space indicator, because the recordings were variable rate so you might have 50gb of free space or 20gb, depending on what you recorded.

I only looked at one place for the old 160gb ide drives, and they had it for $43.99
Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3160215A 160GB 7200 RPM 2MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 3.5" Hard Drive (Perpendicular Recording) -Bare Drive

 

[Hemi 6.1]

I only looked at one place for the old 160gb ide drives, and they had it for $43.99
Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3160215A 160GB 7200 RPM 2MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 3.5" Hard Drive (Perpendicular Recording) -Bare Drive

Yes thats an unformatted drive. Those aren't pop in and play.

 

[cfb]

Yeah, as I mentioned you'll need instant cake or mfs tools and about 15 minutes of time to put the tivo s/w on the drive.

 

[Hemi 6.1]

Yeah, as I mentioned you'll need instant cake or mfs tools and about 15 minutes of time to put the tivo s/w on the drive.

What is that? and how do I do it?

 

[cfb]

Depends on how shot the drive in the hughes is. If it'll work for 5 minutes, then you use mfstool to copy the tivo operating software from it to the 160gb drive (either the one from the samsung or a new one), and then use mfstool to expand the size of the tivo partition to 160gb.

If the hughes drive is completely dead, you'll need a tool such as instantcake that comes with copies of the tivo system software that can zap the 160 from the samsung with the hughes version of the tivo s/w.

Its POSSIBLE that the software on the hughes and samsung are identical, but often between different manufacturers of similar tivo h/w, they had different handling of the remote control, extra buttons, or some other feature.

winMFS is a free tool and can be used to copy the hughes code over if the drive is still barely alive. There are pointers to it and numerous upgrade guides at tivocommunity and I think weaknees also has some of it on their web site. Instantcake is an all-in-one tool that can blast any drive with any tivo image, but its hideously overpriced at $39, on the dvrupgrade web site. It used to be $20 and was well priced there, considering that 90% of the guys base code and learning came from people who offered it up for free to the tivo community.