Ultimate TV (UTV) Hard Drive Upgrade 112
BubbaJoeBob writes: "I just read this thread over at the AVSForum that jeffm7 was able to upgrade his UTV 40GB drive to a WD 100GB drive. Other users are reporting that they were also successful using the WD 120GB drive." And aside from ending up with an apparently useless original drive, this sounds much less painful and involved than various homebrewed TiVO upgrades; according to posters on this thread, it's nearly plug-and-play (with a necessary download step in the middle).
Re:slashdotted alredy? (Score:2, Informative)
Upgrade comparison... (Score:5, Insightful)
The upgrade itself is pretty painless. I do not have a UTV myself, nor have I upgraded one, but I do follow the forums. It is pretty much just putting it in and letting it download software. Only catch, from what I see, is the drive cannot have anything on it. At all. Not even an unused partition. While (In theory) slower than the TiVo upgrade, it is easier, and harder to end up with useless hardware. But I believe there is only space for one drive in UTV, so you can only get half the space of a TiVo.
As it is, the TiVo upgrade these days is pretty painless, and is only likely to get less so. If you can swap drives in the unit, it is only a little harder to do the necessary PC work. Of course, it does require a PC. And with the drives that come prepared for TiVo upgrade, it is actually just as easy to upgrade TiVo, and much quicker to boot, involving only a few seconds to add the new drive, instead of hours to download software to install.
Drive noise? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Drive noise? (Score:4, Interesting)
wtf (Score:2)
Re:Drive noise? (Score:2)
My concern, of course, is if this is possible to make this change now that the drive is already installed. Anyone have any experience with this?
Re:Drive noise? (Score:1)
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not pirating though. The user is purchasing another, more expensive drive to replace the old one and in the process are probably voiding their warrantee.
The companies could probably legally prevent usage of their network with user modified hardware and certainly void any warrantee, though I doubt they would bother pursuing more money from a unit they would rather no longer support.
I imagine requesting more money for a user upgraded unit, would be like condoning user upgrades and validating them as still being supported units. Easier to just void them, rather than project an image that this practice is almost acceptable from their point of view.
Not everyone observes anti-static and electrical precautions and since the unit is not designed to be user upgradable, their legal eagles probably would have a fit at the thought of supporting the unknown. If they had thorough, easy to understand step by step instructions for user upgrades and the hardware was designed to make it easy, then it could be a different story.
Don't get me wrong though, if I had a TiVo, I would love to drop in a couple of 120Gb drives. Actually, I would rather have a network capable unit that I could just sym link to my NFS server, especially if I could have this as combined storage for multiple units around the house. Of course, I'm dreaming a bit here, I don't know if this is possible with any of them.
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:1)
So would I. Then there's the crowd that says "TiVo is only a mpeg en/decoder with lineups, it would be easy to duplicate." I wish someone would get busy with it. I'd be first in line to buy it.
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:2)
I could not find a description of that on the forum. But I did here [reser.org].
Basically the piece says 'take your Dish PVR apart, put in a bigger hard drive, reassemble'.
What I would really like to do is to modify the PVR so that I can use a removable drive. That might mean buying a new case.
Only thing they don't mention is putting two drives in - as has been done with Tiva (plural of Tivo). I would ideally like two 160Gb Hard Drives, or bigger.
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:1)
I want to say that this was brought up on the AVSFora a while back, when the new Maxtor 100GB drives came out.
----
Proud owner of a 160GB / 193 hour TiVo. Yep, over a week straight on any channel, if I were to want that.
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:2, Interesting)
The TiVo's OS is a Linux variant, one that allegedly assumes 512 byte sectors. This gives a 128 GiB (2^30) of storage per drive.
I think that this works out to over 310-320 hours(assuming 8.75/7 h / GiB), or just under TWO weeks straight of a single channel.
Just imagine all the Simpsons / Family Guy / Jackass episodes that would be! Not to mention all the HBO-only specials...
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:1)
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:1)
--MonMotha
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:1)
Re:Upgrade comparison... (Score:2)
Most people on the AVS Forum agree that you're better off with quiet, cool drives than fast ones. The consensus is that the "best" upgrade for most people would be two 5400 RPM 120GB drives.
Most people don't do this though. They take the existing 20 or 30GB drive and make that their "A" drive, then add a big "B" drive (80, 100, or 120 GB). 5400 RPM drives are preferrable since they tend to be quieter and run cooler.
Moderators Please Read This, or Goodbye Karma (Score:1, Offtopic)
I post this because I metamod a lot, and I get more dumb negative mods than good positive mods. Why waste points on obvious dreck? I have seen some great AC posts with great content, but no upmods at all. Look for those, that is what makes
Yes, this is off topic, and I'm going to get blasted out of my +1 bonus, but fuck it, maybe somebody will listen to me. Then I may get to read a nifty AC post with some info, rather than knowing mr. goatsex is buried 15 layers down.
Ut-oh (Score:3, Funny)
Kind of like chewing a pencil. That was not the intent of the maker, therefore reverse engineering the wood is a violation of the DMCA as well?
I give this a week before you hear about DMCA implications.
Re:Ut-oh (Score:2)
Help! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Help! (Score:1, Offtopic)
:)
hawk
*sigh* (Score:2)
for the younger folks: the grandparent post was a joke. Once AOL connected to usenet, there were some clueless statements, but even more trolls like the above. They would invariable end up swarmed with posts with nothing more than "me too" from aol.com addresses. Some offered porn, with instructions to post the request. Others offered improbable upgrades, such as impossible compression or speed, or, as the above pointed to, vcr or sattellite "enabling" for pay channels.
hawk
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
These theoretical "Kudos" would be calculated based on many factors. Activity of UID proportional to age, Sustained number of posts moderated highly, years of formal education (For no other reason than efficency of thought process). These "Kudos" points would then be plugged into an equation which, like the Karma system thoretically was supposed to do, would enable you to be hailed as "Enlightened".
There are a number of reasons which I will not get into that lead me to believe the moderation system is flawed. One reason I will mention, however, is taken directly off of Quit Slashdot Today! [washington.edu], which is: Technical opinions refereed by popular vote means lousy technical opinions.
For Instance - Since you've posted ~1600 comments, Have a UID you could sell on e-bay for lots of money, and are an established member of academia, you would get, say 6 karma points. Users such as myself who value the intelligent posts, instead of the opinions of 14 year olds caught up in the heat of the open source counterculture.
(These opinions are not neccecarily those of me. Being human, I am prone to sudden attacks of multiple personality disorder. One of these personalities has a particularly quixotic nature. He tends to post rants on slashdot all day.)
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
OK.
OpenBrainOS v0.1.1-SMP 2 lobes + FoldedCortex
Warm boot - Medulla Oblongata already initialized
Disabling math.o, Enabling sciences.o, Enabling opinionated_bastard.o
Entering runlevel 3
[root] brain:~#
Anyways.
[root] j00ve been 0wned:~# echo "DOH!"
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
But then, I've never gotten around to figuring out trn scoring, either
I used a scored newsreader on a mac for a while,which would let me flag people with insane adjustments, but the rest of the newsreader meant it was still easier to telnet to unix and use trn
I toy at time with a bbs-like system, modeled after those, but organized in rings. The whole world could see and join the outer ring, while each succeeding inner ring would be joined by invitation . . . I'm interested in as much to see how it would as for participation, wondering if it might restore the environment of old usenet (which was partially captured by a small fraction of the bbs's)
hawk
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
Now I occasionally hang out on comp.unix.solaris, helping where I can. There's just too much chaff and not enough wheat nowadays, for my taste. I've been wanting to give up on
I need to get back into usenet. Unfortunately, being the introvert I am, I don't want to get accustomed to a new group of people. In my opinion the time has come for slashdot to adopt a general forum. Just toss it over there --- with the ask slashdot, etc. That way we can discuss things we want to discuss, without being moderated down. Just rotate the boards once a day, and archive after 2 or 3 weeks like normal. That would stop flame..
Jeez, im ranting on and on and on and on about nothing inparticular. my apologies.
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
The "Imminent Death of Usenet" *did* happen after the perpetual december, but a few newsgroups survived, and there's still a couple of places for us, uhh, dinosaurs. I'd mention them by name, but not here
btw, it seems your wish was granted with the friend/foe system . . .
hawk
Re:Useless drive? (Score:1)
The people who read/mod the AVSForums are very big on backups... good group.
Re:Useless drive? (Score:2, Informative)
I nicer alternative, is to backup the drive from one of these units prior to usage, so that the data on the drives are in their most compressible state.
Just dd the whole drive, piping it through some compressor to a file on your PC. Hopefully, this will leave you with a file small enough to burn onto a CD.
I have assorted images for various OSes in my home, which I use for various testing purposes. You just have to remember to mark the partition type with fdisk (might not be required for all OSes to boot?) and then reboot to that OS with a boot manager like Smart Boot Manager (which seems to remember your many labels for the *same* partition, based on the type, but only one per type). Works nicely, and any OS, from QNX to W2K installs quickly without any fuss at all.
I'd like to just use these with VMWare, but it is so bloody expensive! I *might* have considered it, if it were half the price it is, but the current price is just outrageous.
Re:Useless drive? (Score:2)
I did this with my TiVo before even firing it up (was able to pull off the "warranty void if seal broken" sticker in one piece), but that produced a ~2.5GB backup that spanned five CD-Rs. Utilities are now available that can get your TiVo backup down to 150-200MB...they zero out any video data on the drives. Using one of these utilities would be better from a standpoint of making a small backup than doing a "virgin backup."
40 GB pretty small by todays standards (Score:2)
80+ GB drives are quickly becoming the norm, and the typical "power user" has several. Still, a 40 GB drive could be useful in a low-use machine, such as a DNS server or a PC built from scraps for a newbie.
Might need to low-level format the drive after yanking it from the recorder, but that's easy with any decent disk utility software. Do a google search, this is nothing new.
Re:40 GB pretty small by todays standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention that 40GB of music(thousands of tracks) or data isn't exactly shabby, and if it isn't enough for you, it's certainly easy enough these days to add the drive to a RAID. And who needs "disk utility software?" Just do for the appropriate drive then add a DOS parition table using fdisk.
Re:40 GB pretty small by todays standards (Score:1)
Re:40 GB pretty small by todays standards (Score:2)
My web/mail server at home has a pair of 4.3GB drives in RAID 0 for root and an 80MB (!) drive for boot. It still has a fair amount of free space on it...enough for what it does (and the 4.3GB drives are Seagate Barracuda fast-wide SCSI drives, so they're not exactly slouches). The firewall at work doesn't have a hard drive at all...it boots Coyote Linux from a floppy and runs from a RAMdisk.
My home workstation's equipped with a total of 145GB of storage (100 of it connected via FireWire for transportability), but it gets used for video editing. For most purposes, you don't need anywhere near that amount of storage...40GB, as you noted, is still a respectable amount of space for most people's use.
Re:Useless drive? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:New to the DVR scene (Score:3, Informative)
great capacity for HDTV (Score:2)
Re:great capacity for HDTV (Score:2)
I was under the impression that M$ UTV supported HDTV via DirecTVPlus/HD. But then, I could be wrong. I was also one of the many under the impression that the M$ XBox w/ HD breakout box would give me something better than plain 480i. Even 480p would be nice. *sigh*
You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:2, Troll)
Here is a link to Western Digital's utility that allows you to low-level partition their ATA drives (the WDC seems to be popular in these devices):
http://www.wdc.com/support/download/dlg/dlgdiag.zi p [wdc.com]
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:1)
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:1)
When a hard drive manufacturer sells drives to an OEM (like Dell, or Gateway, or your set-top box maker), they're sold as OEM drives with no end-user warranty.
Since we're usually talking about hundreds of thousands of drives, the drive manufacturer plans for a certain number of failures based on recorded failure data, and provides an additional number of drives in the same contract cost. Let's say the order is for 100,000 drives, and the expected failure rate is 2%. The drive manufacturer would supply 102,000 drives under the contract, obviating the need to provide warranty service. Any failed drives would be replaced by the equipment manufacturer, out of the stock of spares.
- Dave
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, dd'ing it with
So what you need to do is completely wipe the drive with a low-level format, i.e., writing zeroes to the drive.
A commonly used phrase, incorrectly used for ATA drives. "Low level format" comes from the days when it meant a real low level format, where tracks would literally be repositioned (old MFM and SCSI drives could do this). IDE drives are low level formatted at the factory and cannot be re-low level formatted outside the factory. IDE drives recalibrate themselves due to changes in heat, they calibrate off tracks or special encoding (gray code?) between tracks, written at the factory which are on areas that are not user writable.
Then you can repartition it as 0x07 if you want to be able to get productive use out of it.
HPFS/NTFS? Nah, 0x83 and 0xA6 for me.
Here is a link to Western Digital's utility that allows you to low-level partition their ATA drives (the WDC seems to be popular in these devices):
Since the popularity of ATA has taken over the desktop from MFM and SCSI, the "low level format" term has remained. However, in the IDE World, it only means "completely zero every user addressable block" on the drive and NOT "reposition tracks", since ATA drives don't need and are not capable of such a feat at even the leet haxor level.
The term is erroneous for ATA drives, however it has been so commonly used that even the drive manufacturers refer to thier zero-out tools as low level formatters. They're not.
I don't know if modern SCSI drive are capable of this or use the ATA method? Anyone?
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:3, Interesting)
What a blast from the past! I remember that. Yeah like 4 or 5 bytes and then whoosh!
That calls a system BIOS program to do the dirty work does'nt it?
I used to actually enjoy typing in debug listings from magazines like Compute!, to muck around with the utils, etc. I remember a util called prune that was a deltree before the days of DOS deltree, which did a great job of pruning dirs and also fucking up file systems every now and then. : ) I guess thats what you get with 50 byte programs without error checking. ; )
Before that though, I was even sicker, back when Compute! mag was a C64 magazine, they had literally pages and pages of multi column HEX listings for utils and games. Some of the games were actually pretty good arcade games, considering thier size. First you had to type in the assembler in BASIC (really just a check summing program) and save it (to tape for me), then use it to enter the HEX listings, the "assembler" could inform you when you got a line wrong, based on the checksum.
Man those were the days.
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:4, Informative)
F 200 L 200 0
a 100
mov ax,301
mov bx,200
mov cx,1
mov dx,0080 (Note: use 0081, 0082, 0083 for 2nd, 3rd, 4th harddisk respectively)
int 13
int 3
(hit ENTER to enter a blank line here)
G=100
q
Yeah debug.com sure brings back memories. For a second I tbought the dd command had something to do with the post, not your .sig!
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:1)
; ) Just having a dig at the Linux kernel developers, from the recent VM system changes and system instability and extreme thrashing slowdowns I seemed to be getting since upgrading to 2.4.10.
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:1)
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:2)
At any rate, yes, you can indeed, execute a true field low-level format on IDE, ATA, and ATAPI drives. You may need specialized software to do it, however. (OnTrac Disk Manager used to have this capability for a very large number of drives, but they no longer sell that version.) If you actually have the need to reinit an IDE drive, you might as well buy a new one -- the error requiring the reinit _will_ come back.
Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives (Score:1)
IIRC, on MFM controllers you could jump to the low-level formatting utility by entering the following at DEBUG's dash prompt:
I'm not sure if SCSI controllers ever had this feature, since most of them have a config utility that's accessible after POST when the BIOS is initialising the controller.
Actually, in the board, SteinyD (Score:1)
Tivo upgrades painful?? (Score:4, Informative)
Where is this guy coming from? I just upgraded my Tivo and was amazed at how painless the process was. Yes you do have to bless the new drive, but with the availability of utility boot disks and CD's it is trivial to do.
Re:Tivo upgrades painful?? (Score:2)
Re:Tivo upgrades painful?? (Score:4, Informative)
My formerly 40-hour TiVO now has a 130-hour capacity. I love it!
Re:Tivo upgrades painful?? (Score:1)
Re:Tivo upgrades painful?? (Score:1)
Re:Does size really matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Faster drives are contraindicated due to the heat that the drives give off. The extra speed doesn't help the TiVo write or read the mpeg data on the HD, and wouldn't help anyway.
The bottleneck's the processor and lack of RAM (PPC603, and 16MB, IIRC), and, of course, the lack of a second tuner.
What's so painful about a 10 minute upgrade? (Score:2)
It doesn't take 10 minutes to upgrade (add a second hard disk) to a TiVo. What's so painful about that?
This xmas, I found five 20-hour TiVo's at Wallmart for $129 each, added $100 40GB drives (making them 72-hour). They made excellent xmas gifts, and they don't require much work at all.
Re:What's so painful about a 10 minute upgrade? (Score:1)
Re:What's so painful about a 10 minute upgrade? (Score:1)
What's worse is a gift that costs $10 a month for as long as you want to use it. Now, if you got a lifetime sub for the TiVo's and gave them as a gift that would be wonderful.
Re:Mandatory Homebrew, DIY post (Score:1)
---
mgatny@umich.edu
Re:Mandatory Homebrew, DIY post (Score:1)
Maybe you shouldn't make ignorant remarks. (Score:1)
UltimateTV vs TiVo (Score:4, Informative)
In a nutshell, TiVo beats UltimateTV in almost all areas.
One other bit of information that may be significant: UltimateTV requires that you have a DirectTV satellite dish -- it will not work with standard cable TV.
Re:UltimateTV vs TiVo (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:UltimateTV vs TiVo (Score:1)
World Domination (Score:1)
I wish I could have something like that (Score:1)