Reconnect your TiVo to your TV and power it on. If it boots, you’re probably in good shape but you can go into the Settings area to double check your recording capacity (Figure 9). Mine showed 313 hours; that’s with an 80GB stock drive plus my new 200GB drive. Nice! The first thing I did was went into my Season Passes and changed them all to High Quality, Keep All Episodes, Keep Until I Delete.

Figure 9: TiVo’s calculated recording capacity.

Conclusions

My upgrade went very smoothly, with the exception of not having formatted my new drive to FAT32 before booting MFSTool the first time (that CD doesn’t have mkfs, the Linux tool for formatting, on it). No surprises, nothing strange. It was a lot less complicated than I originally thought it would be; I think the huge write-ups on other sites, trying to account for a dozen possible scenarios, made me think it was more complex than it actually was. So I hope this relatively simple and direct account of my own experience helps anyone who is thinking about doing this. Highly recommended! I’m willing to help anyone who wants me to.

- M. Rogers