Installing drives in your TiVo
Here’s where the mechanical fun begins. Take the big black bracket you got in your upgrade kit and mount the hard drives on it as shown. The existing drive goes in the spot on the right, and the new drive goes on the left (Figure 5). Screws are provided in the kit. Make sure your drives’ jumpers are set for Master and Slave, exactly as you had them set in your PC.
Figure 5: The new hard drive (left) and the existing TiVo hard drive (right) on the new bracket.
Next, find the fan that came in your upgrade kit. Look for the little arrows on the side of the casing that indicate airflow; insert the self-tapping screws into the holes in the same direction as those arrows, and then put a rubber grommet on the end of each screw after it pokes through the other side of the fan. Install the fan on the circular hole next to the new hard drive (hdb). Unravel the power cord a bit and run it underneath the bracket and over to the primary (hda) hard drive and plug it in. Ignore the pictures where I have the fan plugged into hdb. I did it incorrectly at first.
Take the two long screws and two washers in your upgrade kit and stick them through the holes at the end of the bracket, near the fan hole as shown to the left in Figure 5. On the underside of the bracket, slide two white plastic spacers onto each long screw, and secure with a nut. Finger-tighten this nut as much as you can.
Now connect the blue end of the IDE cable in your kit to the motherboard of the TiVo and drape it over the front of the box. Drape the power cable over the back of the box. Grab your hard drive bracket and insert the tab at the end opposite the fan into the bracket holder in the TiVo’s chassis. Holding the other end up, thread the IDE cable through the slot in front of hdb (Figure 6). Lower the entire bracket into place.
Figure 6: The new bracket being inserted into the TiVo. Notice the IDE cable threaded through the slot by hdb, and the fan connector plugged into hda.
Connect the IDE cable so that the middle connector is attached to hdb, and the end connector is attached to hda. You may want to run the cable underneath the bracket in between the two drives to keep it out of the way. Again, watch out for that white ribbon cable running to the front of the TiVo. You’re right on top of it at this point, and you need to make sure you don’t disconnect it.
The rest of the connections (the Y-splitter, fan delay PowerTripâ„¢ device, and power cable) I performed exactly as described in the printed instructions with the upgrade kit. You can see my final connected setup in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Wiring complete. The IDE cable was tucked underneath the bracket, as was the PowerTrip and Y-splitter.
Once you have everything connected, take the two remaining nuts and washers and use them to secure the long screws on the fan end of the bracket to the underside of the TiVo. They will be poking through two of the square holes in the underside of the chassis (Figure 8). Once the bracket is secured, replace the cover.
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