Unplug your TiVo and allow a few minutes for the power supply’s capacitors to discharge. Grab one of the torx wrenches that came with your upgrade kit and remove the five torx screws around the outside edge of the back panel. Once they are all out, you can slide the top cover toward the back of the TiVo and then lift it free. Now, every single web site out there has this warning, so I’m not about to break tradition: WARNING: DO NOT TOUCH THE WHITE RIBBON CABLE RUNNING FROM THE MOTHERBOARD TO THE FRONT PANEL. IF YOU ATTEMPT TO START YOUR TIVO WITHOUT THIS CABLE PROPERLY SEATED, YOU COULD PERMANENTLY DAMAGE YOUR DVR.

Figure 2: The inside of an unmodified TiVo. You can see the white cable running to the front panel.

OK, now you need to remove the existing drive in your TiVo so we can back it up and configure it for use with your new drive. Unscrew the two screws holding down the hard drive bracket along the front edge of the TiVo (Figure 3). Disconnect the cables and lift the bracket free, then unscrew the hard drive from the bracket. You won’t need this bracket any more.

Figure 3: The screws holding in the stock hard drive bracket.

Install hard drives in your PC

If you’re like me, you probably have a couple optical drives in your PC in addition to one or two hard drives. Disconnect any hard drives you currently have—especially your main Windows boot drive. If you happen to boot into Windows with the TiVo drive connected, Windows will write information to it and ruin the TiVo OS. Never boot into Windows with your TiVo drive connected. Ideally, setup your existing TiVo drive as the primary master (which we will now call hda, using Linux terminology), and your new drive as the primary slave (hdb). You’re going to want to leave at least one optical drive connected on the secondary IDE channel so that you can boot to your MFSTool CD.

Once you have your drives connected, power on your system and verify they are detected, and boot to your MFSTool CD.

Next: Backing up your TiVo