Wed, August 25, 2004
My TiVo Dilemma—1:29 PM
As you may recall, my TiVo had a drive crash one Saturday morning in the middle of June. Fortunately (thanks Google, thanks TiVoCommunity.com), I was able to get it back up and running by Monday evening by pulling out both hard drives and replacing them with a new, larger drive (thanks WeaKnees.com). Originally, in the fall of 2001, I had inserted a new 70-hour drive shortly after purchasing TiVo, increasing the total recording time to around 105 hours. This was the first and last time I'd ever opened up my TiVo and hacked around inside it, and all I did was screw in a new drive and plug in a few wires.
Well, in the last two months, I've been sliding around on the guts of my TiVo considerably more than I ever thought I would! The extremely abbreviated version of the story is that the original, factory-installed 35-hour drive has failed and damaged itself beyond repair. The bonus 70-hour drive is presumably in fine condition with approximately two-thirds of my recordings on it (who knows which two-thirds), but because of something in the TiVo software, there's no way to make the new (June 2004) drive recognize the existence of this previous drive.
Now, we come to today. The two-month-old drive (approx. 105 hours) has been keeping me in shape for the last two months, recording The Daily Show and Letterman and whatever else, but it doesn't have anything on it that I can't live without. The 70-hour drive has stuff on it that I wish I could get back, but I don't know exactly which recordings are stored there and which were stored on the broken 35-hour drive. As far as any expert can tell me, my only option to get any use out of the 70-hour drive is to forfeit all the recordings, then set these two drives up to recognize each other – which will deliver to me a powerful 175+ hours of TiVo capacity. (That's almost enough for a whole Ken Burns special!) However, there's this teensy possibility that if I bought a new 70-hour drive, I could maybe copy the recordings from the existing 70-hour drive onto that and install the two 2004 drives into TiVo for lotsa capacity plus some of my old recordings.
So, my dilemma is this. (Not that you have the answers; it's just part of the story.) Do I forfeit all the recordings, get this process overwith tonight with one final hack into TiVo and one final mess of cables and parts of old PCs strewn across my kitchen table, then just start life new? Or, do I buy a new drive, wait a week (leaving town this weekend, so no time to play with the new drive until sometime next week), and go through all this craziness and expense just to preserve a list of shows I'm not even sure of? With the fall season starting in a week or so, it seems like a critical juncture. If I could just get a list of the recordings I might be losing, it would really make this easier!
