Hack 22 Installing TiVo's Hard Drive in Your PC

With the drive out of the box, mount it in your PC, ready for booting into TiVo with keyboard and monitor attached.

At this point, you should have opened your TiVo [Hack #20] and pulled out your hard drive [Hack #21]. If you have a two-drive TiVo, you'll have both drives out of the TiVo, just itching to be backed up. Let's wire that drive into your PC.

Inspect the PC you've acquired for this task to figure out exactly where this drive transplant is going to be installed, What free slot are you going to connect this drive into? Don't forget, if you plan to back up your TiVo drive [Hack #24], then you need to have a FAT32-formatted hard drive installed. On top of that, if you have a CD-ROM drive, you must keep it connected if you intend to use a bootable CD version of the software mentioned in Section 2.4.3 at the beginning of this chapter.

If your TiVo has two drives, connect both to your PC.

Do not install your TiVo's hard drive as the primary master on the IDE bus. Instead, install it in any of the other three locations. None of the software we are going to use supports having your TiVo's drive as the primary master.

You'll also need to have the right jumper settings on each TiVo hard drive before you install it into your PC. Turn your hard drive to orient its label upwards and its empty connectors facing you. From this vantage point, you will see one or more small plastic jumpers on the back. Jumper settings can be a little confusing. To make your life a little easier, there are diagrams affixed to the tops of all TiVo drives—it just might take some time to get accustomed to them. Note that Western Digital drives have different jumper settings for "single or master" and for "master with slave." Just read carefully. If you need to change the jumper positions, gently remove the jumper with the end of a paper clip or tweezers and move it to the proper position.

Throughout the remaining hacks in this chapter, we're going to use hdX or hdY to refer to the location of a drive in the PC. In both of those notations, the X and Y are variables that refer to either a, b, c, or d, depending on where the applicable drive is actually installed. You Linux-users out there should recognize the naming scheme as the way your Linux box names its IDE drives. The rest of you shouldn't be worried; just refer to Table 2-4 for guidance.

Table 2-4. The mapping between IDE position of a hard drive and naming scheme

IDE location of the drive	Hard drive name
Primary master	hda
Primary slave	hdb
Secondary master	hdc
Secondary slave	hdd

When your TiVo's drive or drives are installed in your computer, note their positions on the IDE bus and associated hard drive names.