InstantCake Success Stories

[Lou Jacob]

A continuation of the original InstantCake Success Stories (http://www.dvrplayground.com/forum/thread/11196/InstantCake-Success-Stories/) thread archived at DVRplayground (http://www.dvrplayground.com/). Have a success story or testimonial to share? Please post it here.

If you need support or additional information on InstantCake, here is a good place to start (http://www.dvrupgrade.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12).

[Lou Jacob]

06/30/04 - Viewer writes:


Just a note to let you know that InstantCake was a success. Building the drive and installing it went easily, as promised. The slowest part was my own caution/trepidation about booting to the cd drive and hooking up the new drive to build it.

But following instructions, the process was easy. (installed 250 gb into Series 1 HDR112)

Thanks for a great product.
12/03/04 - kennet6565 writes:


I have seen so many people complaining, but not taking their time and reading the directions completely. I have purchased 3 InstantCake CDs and every one worked perfectly as advertised. One was for my 2 Series 1 DirecTV TiVo's with added 9thTee card, one was for my 2 Series 2 DirecTV TiVo's and one was for my 2 HiDef DirecTV TiVo's. All worked perfectly and I thank them for all their hard work developing them. Thanks guys.
1/10/05 - Dukietk writes:


I swear by Instant Cake, too

After baking the cake, it was easy putting the new drive into my Humax in place of the existing drive. Now I have a 200 GB drive that shows up to 229 hours of recording time.

Thanks PTVupgrade!!!
2/2/05 - hbockoven writes:


Happy with InstantCake

I bought the download ISO version on 1-29-05 after buying a very cheap SA S1 Philips at a pawn shop. Damn thing kept rebooting during the guided setup and some research pointed to bad drive and I learned about instant cake. That and a spare 60 gig drive I had laying around, UP AND RUNNING after some problems with my Dell (it likes cable select drives).
I am going to get a Turbonet card. Does the instant cake also include telnet and ftp services or do I need to put them in myself?
Sorry if this is covered. I never even thought of getting a tivo until I saw a very cheap one, so now of course I want to hack and learn it :)
3/28/05 - wvtivoman writes:


Well my cake is baked!!

I just baked my new 250 gig drive and was able to get it working on its' own. It appears to me that the the Direct TIVO 6.2 burnt both of my drives, neither of the two I had before are working.

From reading tivocommunity.com it appears 6.2 may be causing some serious problems. I think it's more than a coincidence that many of lost our drives within minutes after the update. Again it appears both my original and expansion hard drives are shot.

Anyway thanks for InstantCake I'm up and running with 120 hours for now.

BTW, I bought a Western Digital 250 gig hard drive today and the only thing I've noticed is it seems a little loud. Just thought I would throw that in there.
4/27/05 - malloys writes:


Another Success Story

We came home from vacation Sunday to discover our TiVo stuck powering up. Also found a number of fractional programs recorded. Hmmm. Not looking good for the 21-month-old upgrade kit we bought.

Monday, we managed to watch most episodes of programs recorded while we were gone. MTTF getting shorter and shorter. It became impossible to watch anything.

Tried to delete everythig from the reset menu. Hard drive seek noise goes nuts after about fifteen minutes. System is now useless.

Monday evening and Tuesday morning I read through web pages and forum postings on InstantCake.

Tuesday afternoon and evening I:

1. Ordered downloadable InstantCake for Series 1 Phillips DSR6000.

2. Bought a 120GB WD hard drive on the way home from work.

3. Found a freeware program to write ISO images to CD (ISO Recorder for XP (http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm) ) and installed it while

4. downloading the InstantCake image.

5. Burned the CD and tested that it would boot an x86 system.

6. Hauled out the old spare computer,

7. Disconnected main hard drive from primary IDE channel,

9. Connected new hard drive as primary drive on secondary IDE channel.

10. Booted CD and built new TiVo drive. This part took about 30 minutes.

11. Swapped hard drive in TiVo.

12. Booted TiVo with new drive.

IT JUST WORKS!

Yeah, I have a lot of settings to do on the TiVo. Oh well.

Total time without functioning TiVo: about 24 hours. I chose InstantCake with download largely to reduce down time, so this was a very satisfactory result.

Great service. Thanks, PTVupgrade.

P.S. I did read all the instructions several times along the way.


5/28/05 - sfcjim51 writes:


I just upgraded my RCA DVR40 with 80 and 160 gb drives. I did a clean and delete everything, and after running guided setup, I forced a callup and the next morning my software was upgraded to the 6.2 version. I now have 191 hours of record time and it works great! Thanks PTVupgrade team.
Jim OConnor


6/20/05 - jsmall1 writes:


Success!

I also wanted to let you know that InstantCake worked perfectly for me. I had a crashed WD harddrive on my Samsung Direct TV Tivo unit. I purchased a new Seagate 200GB drive at Fry's for $69 and used my home PC to install the InstantCake image. Everything worked perfectly and I'm back recording shows again. (Sure beat paying $140 for a new Tivo Unit!)

Jim


8/3/05 - demmikedem writes:


The hard disk in my series 2 died recently so I decided to try InstantCake. I couldn't
believe how easy it was. Just configure the CD and target drive properly, boot from
the CD and bingo, I'm back in business. I got a 120 gig drive for $40 and InstantCake
was $20. How sweet is that? Tivo wanted $80 just to look at it and you pay for
shipping both ways. Not!


8/24/05 - HansYepp writes:


Success

Just got through Using Instant Cake Downloadable ISO (ICAKE-S2DT-R10) to Upgrade a new R10 with a Maxtor Ultra16 16mb cache ATA/133 250gb Drive with the Ultra quiet FDB Motor. Setting up one of my PC's and running the CD/Formatting the Drive only took a few minutes. Installation and setup took approx. 1hr. Unit is still proccessing guide and such, but now reports 217hrs of recording time.

Very Easy to do and well worth the time ... :D

Thanx,
Hans


9/22/05 - warrenpeace writes:


I didn't believe it could be so easy.

I spent days, maybe weeks, on forums. Reading all night about how to create a new TiVo drive. I had a hacked Series 2 with version 4 software and wanted it to upgrade to 7.2 'cause that version supports Canadian customers now. The machine was stuck in a 'Pending Restart' loop and would never install the upgrade. Finally I sucked it up and paid the $20 for the downloadable ISO.

From burning the cd, setting up the PC and fiddling with it to get it to boot properly, to creating the image, to installing it in my TiVo, I had the TiVo booting in 30mins. No exaggeration. I couldn't believe how quick it was and how easy the interface was. I'm kicking myself for wasting all that time trying to make my own ISO and navigate around Linux when I had no idea what I was doing.

The best $20 I ever spent.


10/02/05 - kleptonuch writes:


Success !!!

Just wanted chime in and let all know that I just used InstantCake to revive (2) dead Sony SAT-T60 DirecTiVo boxes. It was absolutely seemless and both boxes were back up and running in under a half hour. Thanks a lot guys.



11/10/05 - devast8sjl writes:


One Word, AWESOME!

Got a GXCEBOTD with a bad HDD off of Ebay for $7, bought your software, imaged a 160GB drive, VIOLA!
New 135 hour TiVo for the bedroom. Nice work to the creators of ptvupgrade.


12/20/05 - nitetech writes:


Thanks for all the work you do

I have a Samsung SIR-S4040R which had just died on me 2 days ago. Directv had determined that the hard drive had failed. I decided to download InstantCake and try fixing it my self. I replaced the 40 GB drive (Western Digital, what a surprise) with a 60 GB Maxtor I had laying around. The program was easy and quick and the instructions were great. I replaced my drive in less than 20 minutes.
Some notes on the system coming back up:
After the system booted, navigating the menu system was extremely slow.
I did a "clear and delete all" (or so I thought) as the instuctions said to but since the system was running slow I don't think it took. I figured that it would take some time so I left it alone. Later (hours) I came back and the system was recieving programming but was unable to record but the sluggishness of the menu system was gone. It looked like there was old information in the system so I did another "clear and delete all". It seemed to work this time, I was getting a blinking record light. After it was finished I got the guided setup and I had full functionality I just had to wait 24 hours for all my programming to update.

Thanks again, it was $20 well spent

[Lou Jacob]

1/3/06 - wintivoland writes:


Three thumbs up!

After I figured out how to make the boot CD and my Dell desktop play nice with IC, the rest of the process was a snap. I upgraded a TiVo 540-040 with a Western Digital 250GB drive. I now have about 282 hours of basic quality storage. I'll have to go in every now and then to purge old programs; with only 40 hours I feared running out of space or having programs deleted before I had a chance to play them back.

The most time consuming part of the entire process was configuring the DVR and downloading the database and service update (from 5.3 with IC to 7.2.1 from TiVo). The actual time to bake the cake and swap the TiVo HDD was less than 2 hours. If I do this again, maybe I can do it in under an hour. Then I'll have to learn how to network everything together!

The TiVo DVR with rebate was $50, the WD 250GB HDD with rebate and will end up costing $70, and the Instant Cake download was $20. A 280+ hour TiVo for $140 is a pretty good deal. There's no need to buy a higher capacity TiVo (for a lot more money) because you can upgrade one yourself very easily.

Thank you PTVupgrade! ;)
2/15/06 - Virus writes:


InstantCake is fantastic. My HRD10-250's hard drive went belly up just a few weeks after my warranty was over. I didn't want to have to buy another one. For $99 I got a 250gb Hitachi 7200rpm drive and InstantCake and I was up and running. D* wanted almost $200 for a new one with a 2 year commitment. Thanks so much for saving my behind!
3/2/06 - nobody291 writes:


It took me awhile to get my nerve up to do it, but I installed a new hard drive in a Phillips 704 with instantcake and PTVnet 6.2. I would describe myself as being moderately skilled with computers (definitely nothing close to an expert)...I have done things like adding hard drives, a new DVD burner, memory, and flashing an upgrade to the BIOS. I have no experience with Linux (the operating system that Tivo uses) and none was required through the process. Some notes from my experience that might interest others:

1. The new hard drive was a 250 GB Maxtor Ultra16; my only minor complaint about it, is that it is noticeably noisier than the drive it replaced. I got it on sale at CompUSA for a good price, so I'm happy with it...but it might be a bigger deal to others.

2. The first hard drive I bought was one of the new SATA types...it's not compatible with the interface in Tivo (at least it didn't seem to be to me). I had to exchange it for an old fashioned ATA variety

3. I had problems using Roxio software to burn the image for the two CDs. I gave up on it and used the ISO recorder utility mentioned either in these forums or others linked from PTV's site. It is a simple application and worked perfectly. It's very likely that it was user error with Roxio, so others may not have the same issue.

4. I have a 4 year old Gateway desktop I used to create the hard drive. I had to change the boot order in the BIOS to get things to work right...this caused issues when I put my computer hard drives back in. It wouldn't boot from the master hard drive...to fix this, I had to move the BIOS jumper so that the computer would boot directly into BIOS config so that I could change the boot order. Things were back to normal after that.

5. I got caught up on a few things along the way...every issue was addressed in these forums or other forums mentioned on this site. There are a few step-by-step guides as well. I have a laptop that I used to surf the net to solve problems while my desktop was taken apart to "bake" the new Tivo drive. The process would've been more frustrating without my laptop.

6. The actual process of downloading the software, burning the CDs, creating the hard drive, and rebooting and configuring Tivo probably took 4-5 hours. If I was to do it again, it would take more like 1.5-2 hours with what I've learned. A lot of those 4-5 hours were spent on the troubleshooting described above. Additionally, I spent many more hours reading about the process on PTV's site and elsewhere.

I'm very happy with the end result...I went from a 40GB HD to 250GB and can't believe the length of my now playing list after just a couple of weeks. That alone was worth the effort...when you throw in the networking and utilities provided by PTVnet, it is awesome. If I think of other useful tidbits to add from my experience, I'll post more here.

-Eric Stearns
4/23/06 - outastep writes:

Easy as cake!

For weeks I've been digging through DIY forums, even posted a couple questions thinking I'd get the same half-a$$, cocky, "go read hundreds of pages of threads" barely hinting at the information I need for nearly all of it, no-help responses that tend to be the norm on forums, as if every new visitor should be just as comfortable with the process as a veteran TiVo upgrader. Well, that's what I got. No help at all, among those sites.

I'm sure I would've figured it out eventually, through more hours/days/weeks maybe of research and trial/error, but I have better things to do with that kind of time. All I wanted was to swap out my original disk with a big 300GB and "see" the whole amount. Simple, right? Not necessarily for someone who hasn't done it successfully before, and has no clue about Linux commands.

After having ptvupgrade.com's site come up in most of my Google searches, I decided to check it out. Confused about what version of IC would work on my Hughes SD-DVR80, I posted the question and had it answered (completely, coherently, and even nicely) within, I think, minutes, by the man: Yog-Sothoth. That secured the deal. While waiting for IC to finish downloading I read about PTVnet and thought I'd go ahead and do that too, while I had the drive out and connected to the PC (it just made sense). Again, Yog-Sothoth saved the day by recommending setting up PTVnet before IC. Thanks dude.

Setup went smooth as can be, and now my 70 hours record time is increased to 260~ish hours. No pain. I don't even think it took an hour to complete.

Excellent products guys/gals, and again, thanks to Yog-Sothoth for your quick responses to my n00b questions, and to Lou Jacob and others who've provided other helpful posts on your forums.
5/20/06 - Athlex writes:


Just baked my SVR-2000 with a pair of 250GB WDs. The unit's fairly old and I wanted to be sure to upgrade the drives before the original one died. (Didn't realize until after I bought IC that I didn't even NEED the original drive.)
Like KellyNG above, the drives didn't boot initially, but the workaround got the job done. I also have a cachecard. The IC install got the network portion working fine, but the drivers on the CD are over a year old, so I needed to manually update those in order to get the cache portion working.
Overall, smooth sailing. Tough part is going to be figuring out how to fill the thing. :)

6/18/06 - gbwtfo writes:


Yet another success story! About two weeks ago my SIR-S4120R began to spontaneously reboot, the frequency slowly increasing until last night the machine worked no longer. I attempted the "clear and delete" procedure, but it would never finish. The DTV tech was very helpful, but in the end all he could offer was a replacement (with 2yr contract!)
Presuming the problem to be the hard drive, I decided to give Instant Cake and PTVnet a whirl. Long story short, I picked up a 400GB Seagate drive from Fry's (400GB/ATA100/16MB/7200RPM for $160!) and after a few hours I'm back in business! Of course, now I have a few questions, but I'll post them elsewhere.

Thanks guys!
Greg

6/20/06 - Park Ridge Dave writes:



SWEET!
Hooo Boy! Thank you! Thank You!
I wanted to up the capacity of my DVR. I messed around for 2 days trying to remember what little I once knew about linux (not much to begin with 8-), then I got smart and bought InstantCake.
I was upgrading a Directivo (HR10-250) from 250 GB to 500 GB. I Popped the drive in an old Vaio box running Windoze 98 Se and 15-20 minutes later it was ready to test. It took way longer to reset and delete everything than it did to "bake" the cake.
Where I was having trouble was in getting the image and files saved to a FAT volume. I was stopped there due to lack of linux knowledge (My linux maven took a job on the East Coast and is no longer available to bail my sorry a** out when I get in over my head :-)
OK so I just went for The Suse 10.1 Linux distribution so I can learn how to "do it right" (I have some stuff I want to get off the 250 GB drive). In the mean time I have doubled my capacity for the cost of the drive and $20.00 for the "IC" download. If you want to save disk content, then study up on linux and be prepared to sweat a lot. If you just want to expand your capacity, "it don't get any easier than InstantCake!" I still have a "pristine" backup in the factory drive (it is my second drive since the first bombed out last year) a WD drive (I replaced it with a Maxtor Quietdrive 500 GB)
One Caveat though! RTFM (read the "FINE" manual) check everything "twice" before you do something you might regret! Other than that, it's easy! (I couldn't bring myself to say "as a piece of cake"). It's not for complete "noobs" but if I could do it anybody should be able to.
Thanks Guys!

7/14/06 - dmkli writes:


InstantCake saved my TiVo lifetime subscription on my Pioneer. I was so upset when my harddrive died after just a little over one year. I now have a 300G drive working in my unit. Thanks.

[Lou Jacob]

8/12/06 - BBV writes:


Another Happy Camper

I retuned from vacation to find my HR10-250 stuck on "Powering Up"
After a bit of web searching and determining my drive poohed, I stumbled on InstantCake.

$20 for InstantCake, $100 for a new drive, an hour of my time, and my TiVo is back!

Unfortunately, in the process I also discovered and purchased PTVnet which has opened a whole new can of worms, errr..."possibilities".
As a Unix idiot, I am more than pleased paying $20 each for your menu driven software compilations.

Thanks
-Bill

9/6/06 - VikingDude writes:


Thanks InstantCake. Here's my success story:

My AT&T 40hr TiVo died last night--just froze up solid. I tried a few reboots and no matter how long I waited, it wouldn't go beyond the "Welcome. Powering up..." screen.

After 5 years or so with the original 40GB drive, I figured I was long overdue for an upgrade. Luckily, Fry's was open until 9PM and was selling 200GB Maxtors for $55. With newly acquired drive, I figured "no time like the present" and downloaded InstantCake. Even though the shopping cart didn't indicate it, the download link was for the new version, InstantCake

2. This version comes with TiVo OS 7.2 which immediately recognized the entire drive and let me use my network connection for Guided Setup. Awesome!

Given how easy this was, I really should think about a 400GB drive...
10/9/06 - pump writes:


I'm up and running!! This is so cool!! I like to send a thanks, everything went smooth just like the instructions show. Now my friends are bugging me to do their dvr's. Now I need to get a big fat drive for my HD box.
Thanks again!!

JP
11/06/06 - Miles writes:


4/5 year old HDVR2 started freezing by itself, on both tuners, no loss of sound or picture pixelation, just like a pause - stuttering? Drive was at 50 degrees C for months. Started making rattling noises.

I decided that the drive was probably on the way out and I bought a 7200rpm 160Gig Seagate drive for $49 from RadioShack online and purchased the InstantCake image online.

I had a lot of problems and too many hours wasted as the IC instructions are not clear enough.

After several days, literally, I finally figured out that I just needed to swap the primary PC C: disk drive for the CDRW and put the new TIVO drive where the CDRW was plugged into (nearly correct).

The instructions say to install the CDRom as primary slave, but when you change the jumper to slave it still has to be connected to the slave connector on the IDE ribbon. This leaves the ribbon inoperative because nothing is connected to the master (tail end). I finally guessed that SOMETHING had to be connected to the master end, to complete the circuit, so I just connected an old DVD drive that I had in another computer.

Once the cdrom was connected as primary slave and something else as primary master, with the TIVO target drive as secondary master (old location for the CDRW), everything went smoothly, except that I tried several different CD burning tools (including Microsoft command line CDBURN.exe) before I finally downloaded a trial version of NERO and that worked, to burn the ISO (select make boot cd).

I also used about 8 new CDRW's before one actually worked and took the image.

The TIVO took about two hours to return to normal operations, after a clear & delete all, although the TIVO warned about this by itself, during setup.

I had spent a few hours searching this forum and no one has pointed out these little glitches in the setup instructions.

Thanks! We have our Directv TIVO back!
Miles.

12/15/06 - Chris G writes:


Hey All,
Just wanted to pass on my recent experience with InstantCake and PTVnet. I just acquired an HR10-250 from eBay and once I verified it was working ok, cracked the case and embarked on upgrading the storage and installing a set of basic hacks. After mulling over various do-it-yourself options, I opted to use PTVnet and InstantCake. Using PTVnet/InstantCake I was able to take a new 500GB drive and literally, within a few minutes, had sucessfully built and tested the new set up in the Tivo. I used PTVnet to kick off the process, swapped in the HR10-250 "special edition" version of InstantCake when requested and things were up and running with network access on 3.1.5f. A few FTP and telnet sessions later, I was able to run Slicer to upgrade to 6.3a while retaining the orginal hacks. Sweet. Next up is trying to use Slicer again to upgrade to 6.3b as soon as I get it. It would be great to have the special edition of IC updated to include 6.3b to start with.
Thanks for making this stuff available and making it work!
- Chris
01/02/07 - Dave Buchthal writes:


Ok, I'll jump in here. I have an HR10-250 and I've been having tons of problems with the recent 6.3 download. I'd hit multiple hangs and crashes every single day, and it was to the point that I couldn't trust TiVo to record anything.

I finally gave up on 6.3 and decided to install InstantCake and PTVNet on a brand new drive. I was quite shocked at how easily the whole process worked -- it took far less time than my DIY drive upgrade did a couple years back. The only hiccup in the whole process that I ran into is that TivoWebPlus thought I had Chicago locals until I repeated guided setup and then forced a reboot of the web server. If I had followed the directions and done the guided setup first, I'm betting even that would have worked without a hitch. Moving from DHCP to Static IP was seamless, as was turning off encryption on the recorded content.

Bottom line is that I pulled my TiVo at 9am expecting to spend a day with Linux hacking, but I was completely done and watching TV a couple hours later, with most of the time in-between spent dealing with my own cabling issues. Highly recommended.
4/16/07 - Gummer writes:


I'd just like to pass along my experience. I'm always suspect of promises made by code writers, having been burnt more then once. However, InstantCake worked 100% as advertised, I now have 304 hours out of a 320G drive! There were some issues getting a good ISO (my fault) and a Shuttle AMD-XP computer refused to run the script. Fortunately, my new Gateway AMD 64X2 had no such issues. (disable the SATA port)
Unfortunately, I'm also the proud owner of a DTV R-15. (not ready for prime time) I hope to keep my S2 TiVo alive until DTV crawls back and begs forgiveness from TiVo...

Thanks!
5/13/07 - Moriconi writes:


It was a week ago that I purchased and downloaded InstantCake and PTVUpgrade. (I also ordered the USB adapter which arrived this past Wednesday.) I burned them both to CDs and was ready to go. Then, all of the problems started to arise. Most notable (and aggravating) was the fact that I was receiving errors in decompressing InstantCake and loading it onto the hard drive. After spending nearly the entire day dealing with it, I threw up my hands in frustration and just set everything aside and mentally counted it as a loss.
When the USB adapter arrived in the mail, I put it on my Phillips DSR704 and - as expected - the lights lit up but (other than that) nothing happened.

Yesterday, I decided to try everything one more time as the USB network adapter looked so nice on my TiVo but was not functioning in its proper manner. This time, I decided to CAREFULLY follow the instructions and read EVERYTHING that the forums had on my situation.

Taking a step-by-step logical approach, I ruled out corrupted downloads of the software, bad burning to CDs, bad cables, etc. What I DID discover was NOT what I expected - a bad hard drive! Once I had obtained a new hard drive, it WAS "InstantCake."

The lesson - Take your time, be careful, pay attention to the details, and READ the posts that reference YOUR situation.
My Phillips IS hacked and performing wonderfully! Thanks so much for making this possible!
6/8/07 - frankphelan writes:


Just upgrade my HR10-250 to have two 750 GB drives using Instantcake. What an awesome experience! Absolutely no problems. Now running 6.3d and when my recording time showed "SD 1" ands "HD 1" I made a post and within minutes Lou replied with a link showing that this is a reporting bug in the TIVO software because it is not used to so much storage but the unit will work just fine. Many thanks to the team for making such a simple to use great product!

7/22/07 - datadoc writes:


I spent hours today trying to find a way I could get my DirecTivo back into operation, and then I discovered your website. From download to being back in my TV chair took only 20 minutes, including burning the CDROM and installing the 2 new drives. With over 300hrs of space, I might lose the use of my legs before I get out of the Lazy Boy.

Thanks again!

[69gm]

i have to say that using instantcake was almost toooooooo easy! i originally (a long time ago) had to "bless" the tivo typing in incredibly cryptic commands...while standing on my head and reciting the national anthem of bolivia...okay so not really, but that's what if felt like.

along comes instantcake with easy to follow instructions. have your hardware setup correctly? one or two drive tivo? okay, baking! that's it?! yup!

to date i have bought both the philips series 1 hdr IC and the sony svr 3000 IC. they both work fine. i have used drives as large as 500GB, no problemo.

like i said, it was almost too easy. the first time my cake was baked i thought, "there's no way that could be it. it was too fast and easy." so with skepticism i installed it into my tivo and "whoomp, there it is!" worked like a charm.

thanks for a great product. keep up the good work and as new tivos come out (HD TiVo) continue doing what you do.

thanks!

[Sprout]

Ditto - I was extremely pleased with how easy InstantCake was to use, and would recommend it to anybody looking for a fast, easy way to upgrade their drive, or to replace a drive that's failed (as was my case).

My only suggestion would be to put an updated version of TivoWeb (TivoWeb Plus) onto all the CD's; My SA Series 1 Tivo CD still had the older/original TivoWeb on it - I ended up having to re-image the drive after having it unlocked at the wrong time while trying to update TivoWeb, but eventually got it all working.

It was otherwise great having all FTP and Telnet all configured right off the bat as well - nice not to have to go digging around for all the other utils, and having them all installed together!

[MichaelFontenot59873]

My Samsung DTivo started to go on the reboot rampage the other day. I had thought the worst had happened and either the power supply had died or the motherboard was shot. While I am not the most tech savvy with TiVo stuff I am pretty good with most flavors of nix and computers. I remembered InstantCake from a conversation I had with a friend a few years back and decided to look it up. I figured that $20.00 was worth spending to see if the drive was bad or not. I replaced with a WD2500 drive I had sitting in my closet and presto all good again with more TiVo space than needed. Thanks Guys! I think I will not get the networking product and start playing with that as well.

[calljb1023]

I just want to let you know what a godsend InstantCake is. I had a totally hosed HDD in my Hughes SD-DVR40 DTivo and found out about this software while searching through the TivoCommunity forums.

I went and bought a Seagate 250 gig drive, InstantCake and PTVnet. Within an hour, I had a revived Tivo with a whopping 235 hours of programming storage and networking capabilities to boot!

I am so glad to get my DTivo back up again. I have an R15 in another room and I can't stand the thing. I did not want to give up my DTivo for another one of those pieces of garbage.

Thanks for a great piece of software. This was money well spent!

[Rick Travis]

I had a defective motherboard,(USB ports were garbled) so I replaced it and ran PTVnet with Instantcake. In less than an hour everything was up and running and Directv had remarried the access card to the new motherboard. I have the phone line plugged in because I want the upgrade to 6.3e. I have a new hard drive and I know I can reinstall PTVnet and it will work with 6.3e because it did on my other machines. Instantcake is a blessing for those of us who are time impaired.:D

[SebringTech]

I purchased Instantcake 6.2a for my Hughes SD-DVR40 because it's 40 gig hard drive just didn't hold enough movies for me anymore. I read through dozens of websites supposedly telling you how to hack the Tivo for a new hard drive, but they were all considered outdated. I finally ran across something that just worked. I read the very simple Instantcake directions, and within 1 hour total time I had pulled the old Tivo drive, setup a spare PC to do the baking, baked the Maxtor 200 gig hard drive I had as an extra drive, had the new drive in the Tivo, put the Tivo back together, and had the Tivo and the Programming Guide all setup and working. For the $19.99 this is well worth the money. I have no experience with scripting or programming, so to find something that works so well and was so user friendly was truely a godsend. Thankyou for the excelent product.


P.S. I had originally bought the Hughes DVR with the plans to upgrade it. I got the receiver, remote, and an access card for $25. Add that to the Instantcake software and for $45 I now can record approximately 189 hours :D Very satisfied!

[02132]

Is there anything more disappointing than watching TV after your Tivo dies?

I've had Tivo since 2001, and had to replace my series 1 Sony around 2004. My Humax, about a week ago, gave up the ghost, and started to restart itself continually, in an endless loop punctuated every few minutes by the Green Screen of Death. My hard drive needed to be replaced, and I decided to give it a shot.

It took me longer to find the correct Allen wrench to take apart my Tivo than it did to run InstantCake. I used a buddy's old desktop computer (I only have laptops), and replaced his hard drive with my new one. I got an error message, which I threw into the forum search function, and found that I had a "master" hooked up as a "slave." Unplug, plug, and re-run the software, and my cake is baked!

I paid just under $60 bucks for a new Maxtor 160 gig drive, and $20 for InstantCake. I locked up the lifetime service years ago, and with a storage capacity double what I had before, I really couldn't be happier, with my Tivo, or with the InstantCake product. If only fixing everything were this easy.

[alandra_lee]

Worked beautifully after a bit of troubleshooting. My dead Tivo has been revived!

As long as you have the ability to take apart you computer to hook the hard drive up, plus the patience to do some possible troubleshooting, you should be fine.

When my Tivo died, I grabbed an extra hard drive I had lying around, downloaded the software, and had the Tivo back up and running in just a couple of hours and only $20 poorer. Honestly, the software works like a charm and is a bargain.

[CAOgdin]

I wanted to add a second drive to my HUMAX T800. The Weaknees "TwinBreeze" platform was a delight (I enjoy well-designed products). But, their software recommendation (to use MFSTools 2) was pathetic; that product (and documentation) has so many bugs and limitations that it made me a perfectly unusuable backup.

I was in despair, envisioning lots of money being spent to send it off for repair.

Then, I found InstantCake. $20, a fast download, and an hour configuring a spare computer the way it needs to run, and I had a completely fresh, new installation...and hundreds of hours of TiVo capacity. Total time to configure the PC, build the TiVo system anew, and configure the new installation for my own preferences: About two hours (on top of the hour I spent installing the second drive).

Thanks for a great product which, although it requires me to build a rather weird configuration to get it to work (really, just moving around some connections and jumpers inside the PC, then put it back when done), is clean, simple and exactly as promised.

I've preserved my InstantCake CD, just in case I ever have to repeat the process.

I would not hesitate to recommend InstantCake to any person with the skills to open a PC and set up a specific dual-channel IDE configuration. If you know how to set "Master/Slave" jumpers (no Cable Select allowed), you can use this product.

[RaymondChen68287]

Thanks DVRupgrade...saw the how to video on cnet. got me motivated to do it, once i saw how easy instant cake was. my hardest part was finding a box with 2 ide ports. all of my boxes in my house are all sata. borrowed an old box from a friend, bought an 500 gig wd ide drive, purchased instant cake for series 2 tivo, downloaded it on first try, burned to cd-r, put in as instructions said. primary slave for cd, and secondary master for drive. set jumpers accordingly. booted it up. and away we went...had a slight delay cause the instant cake wasnt liking my usb wireless kb. hunted for an ancient ps/2 kb that didnt exist in my house, but was able to find a usb/ps2 adapter that came with one of my logitech's, that did the trick. instant cake baked the cake, torx 10 for tivo case, torx 15 for hdd bracket, swapped drives... nice to see my original 80 gig drive that came stock with the tivo was also a western digitial, so i copied the jumper setting on the original drive, which happened to be on cable select. and screwed it all back together, and booted her up. nice to see the welcome tivo screen. let it do its thing, went to system reset, and delete everything, set up my wireless network adapter to the wep settings and let it do the rest. now just gotta set up my seasons passes etc. it is showing in excess of 560 hours or something like that. taking its time downloading the guide. im sure it will eventually self update. the version on the cake does not seem to support wpa, as my last one did. i assume the tivo will self upgrade.

THANKS...WORKED AS PROMISED....overall under 1 hour. luckily i like doing this kind of thing. works great. didnt want to bother with all the command line stuff so i paid the 20 bucks.

Thanks again! :)

[Lou Jacob]

We received this earlier today; good to see that folks are happy with the product(s):

I would like to let you know that yesterday I purchased InstantCake and PTVnet for a Hughes SD-DVRXX and the install was fast and easy. After installing the new drive in my TiVo, it fired right up and was a fast clean install. I will definitely recommend you to my friends and family to upgrade their DVRs. I was planning on a full day of messing with .iso files and then installing the software, who knew for ~$40 I could be done and upgraded in about an hour. KUDOS! Instantcake really is a piece of cake!

-TG

[lifer3261]

Yet another success story and a well deserved Thank You... I have tried a number of times and ways to upgrade my series 3 to a 1tb internal. My original 250 was hosed.... I purchased and downloaded Instantcake, followed the on-screen instructions, with a few reboots caused by fat-finger typing, the prep and upgrade was fast and all space was available.... I'm glad I took the time to look dvrupgrade.com up. Saved me a good bit of coin and I have more hair since I didn't need to pull mine out.

Again, thanks for the product and it automated performance...

[vasilemj]

Well, DVRUpgrade has another satisfied customer. I have one of the early Series2 TiVos (TCD140060) and was starting to notice some hiccups with my unit so I decided to give Instant Cake a try. I previously had a professional (Hinsdale) install a 2nd 120GB drive in my unit a number of years back but thought I could handle it myself this go-around. Sure enough, things were a breeze. After clearing up a few questions regarding potential BIOS/Motherboard limitations (there really are none), I followed the step by step instructions that came with my Instant Cake download. I then followed some hardware installation instructions I found on Weaknees and everything was up and running again in no time.

Thanks for the ease of upgrading my system DVRUpgrade!

[DieterFassnacht72043]

Two days ago my Tivo crashed, so I was searching around what to do until I came to this site.

Being to cheap to buy InstantCake I downloaded a bootleg copy, which brought me two days of pain. To make a long story short after endless attaching and reattaching drives in my PC, trying all kids of software (I am Linux experienced) and almost buying a new power supply on Ebay, I finally decided yo buy the latest InstanCake. 30 minutes later my Tivo was fixed with a nice new 400 GB drive.

My lesson learned. Pay $20 for something that worked instantly rather than trying to safe this money but mess around for endless hours. Of course these software dudes also need to feed their families.

Thanks, for this awesome software.

[bisdal]

Hello everyone,
I just wanted to say that this procedure and the Instantcake SW works GREAT! I did quite a bit of homework before jumping in and I was a little skeptical going into this but I am now a believer! My original WD 160G TivoHD disk died after only ONE YEAR. Now I have a 1TB SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ SATA2 7200RPM 32MB cache disk running strong and being populated with data as I type ($99 with free UPS as of 1/2/09.) The Instantcake truly was "cake" and being a Unix guy I LOVED the easy interface.

Nice job! You have another very happy customer who will be recommending to his friends!
-Brad

[gonzoron]

Worked exactly as advertised! My Tivo S3's HDD crashed and burned. Replaced it with a 1TB WD drive using InstantCake with no issues at all. Watching TiVo again right now and loving it.

FYI, with an IDE DVD-ROM drive and a Sata HDD to "bake", it was not necessary to set the DVD-ROM to Primary Slave. I left it as primary master (on /dev/hda1) and had no trouble.

[encryptedbytes]

Tuesday morning I woke up to find my TiVo (a Pioneer DVR-57H) stuck in a reboot loop. It wouldn't even get past the first "Welcome! Powering up..." screen. I've had this unit for several years and have worn out the original 120GB drive and a 300GB upgrade drive purchased from Weeknees.com, so I am familiar with the signs of a dead drive.

I looked up the kickstart codes in the hopes that I could get the machine to boot normally, but unfortunately it wasn't even getting far enough that I could enter the code.

So I hit the web in search of a new drive. I went back to Weaknees.com where I had purchased my original upgrade drive. The drives ranged in price from $109 to $249 for anywhere from 160GB to 1TB. Money is tight these days so I decided I should shop around and see what else is out there. That's when I happened upon DVRupgrade.com. I found drives priced from $99 to $249 for 160GB to 1TB - pretty similar to what I found at Weaknees.com. But...

I also noticed InstantCake! After reading up on what it was and what it did I realized that this $20 investment would save me a ton of cash on the cost of buying a replacement drive because I could use it to prep and old drive I already had to run in my TiVo box.

I dug out all the old hard drives I could find in the house. There was a 300GB (my original upgrade drive from Weaknees.com), a 120GB drive (my original TiVo drive), another 120GB drive, a 30GB drive, an 11.5GB drive, a 3.1GB drive, and an ancient 2.1GB drive.

I knew the 300GB and one of the 120GB drives were dead as I'd won those out in the TiVo in the past. The next largest was the 30GB. Dead. Next, the 11.5GB drive. Good! The 3.1GB and the 2.1GB were also good. I marked the dead drives so I'd know not to bother with them in the future and resigned myself to trying to set up the 11.5GB drive to resurrect my TiVo box.

I purchased InstantCake for my TiVo model, downloaded the ISO, burned it to CD, and set up the drives as described in the instructions, but there was a problem. My board only has one IDE controller (all the others are SATA). Well crap! I set it up as close to the instructions as I could and booted InstantCake.

I found the "advanced" options in InstantCake, chose the settings that resembled my configuration, and baked my cake. There was no indication that anything was amiss so I removed the hard drive, slapped it back into the TiVo, plugged it back into my entertainment system, and fired it up.

To my pleasure, the machine made it past the screen where it had crapped out before. This was promising! It continued to boot and finally reached the Welcome screen and I was ready to go through the guided setup! I answered the questions about my television service, wireless network, channel changing method, and before long I was presented with my beloved TiVo Central screen - SUCCESSS!

Mind you, I am now running a drive that only gives me about 10 hours of recording capacity so I have to record everything at basic quality and can only record the very essentials, but on the bright side I am up and running again within a few hours, never had to leave the house, and did it all for only $20!

This will get me by for a week or two until I can afford a new drive. I'm eyeballing the 1TB drives and I see they can be had for $100 or less - $150 cheaper than a preconfigured TiVo upgrade drive!

I'm very pleased with my $20 purchase of Instant Cake. It will save me many times more than it's cost with the purchase of a new TiVo drive and the beauty is that I can do it again and again.

Cheers for DVRupgrade.com!

~ EncryptedBytes

[Carl]

All I needed to do was read the intro a little more carefully and find a old computer with a primary and secondary IDE slot all of my newer computers have only one IDE slot and a lot of SATA access. Thanks to Lou for pointing me in the correct direction. Great support for such a inexpensive product.

[derausgewanderte]

I initially tried to install a 160Gb sata drive with a sata2ide adapter that snaps to the back of the drive with no luck. It always got stuck at the welcome powering up screen. Apparently the partition mapping went wrong.
I then swapped the spare sata drive with an existing drive in the older PC (imaged the data on the IDE drive over to the sata drive using the sata2ide adapter was no problem on the PC). Then I baked the 160Gb IDE drive and the TiVo successfully booted up. We are now repopulating our season passes etc. worked great. thank you

[tbox]

My HD Tivo died two days a go and, like others, I was told it would cost $150 and up to either replace or fix. I did try to dd_rescue but the drive was trashed. I'm too impatient so I purchased the $19.99 ISO InstantCake image. I had a lot of difficulty *just* using the InstantCake cdrom because my computer has a RAID and I didn't have an IDE option - just SATA. This post details the steps I used to make a new TIVO drive using a computer with only SATA (no IDE).


First, unzip the ISO. I use Winzip. After downloading the .zip, unzip and you'll have another "zipped" file with the extension .ISO. Unzip that one and you'll see the files and folders.
Copy the InstantCake image to a flash/thumbdrive. Put it in the root of the thumbdrive for ease (but you can have other stuff on the drive). The image is found in your InstantCake files under /_images. It's the really big 000001 file.
Go over to mfslive.org and download their mfslive ISO (you'll need to register on their forum to access this file).
Burn the mfslive ISO to a cd. I use CyberLink Power2Go and chose the option "Burn disk image."
Set up the computer on which you'll be doing your work. Turn the computer off first and unplug the power cable. Then, unplug the computer's hard drive and plug in the new TIVO SATA drive. Make sure your BIOS is set up to boot to cdrom.
Start the computer with the MFSLIVE cd in the cdrom drive. After it finishes scrolling through all of the details about your computer, use SHIFT-PAGE UP/DOWN to locate the place where it assigned your new TIVO hard drive a sd* designation. Mine was sda.
Plug your USB thumbdrive in and you'll see the Linux system assign that drive a sd* designation. Here was the trick for me - my thumbdrive was sdb but I had to point to the first partition to mount it.
Mount the thumbdrive. I used this code:
mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /dos
Check that you can see your 00001 file by typing cd /dos and then ls.
Use the following command to transfer the InstantCake from the thumbdrive to your new TIVO drive:
restore -s 128 -xzpi /dos/00001 /dev/sda (<-or whatever your sd* is)


That's it! It finished rather quickly (~1minute?) and then I plugged the drive back into my TIVO. During setup, I called my cable provider (Comcast) and had them ping my cablecards. Done!

I hope this helps someone. This is basically a distillation of the procedure found here (MANY THANKS!!) (http://www.mfslive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1338&p=6150&hilit=instantcake#p6150), with minor tweaks. I did, however, want to post this for anyone having trouble with SATA-only components which can't mount the cdrom or other drives just using the InstantCake cd.

Good luck!

[SS6R]

To start I had an error issue that was not related to the InstantCake software. My computer was causing the error issue. The problem I was experiencing was resolved by simply trying a different PC and instantly InstantCake was a success. The new 500 gig Western digital drive in my toshiba rs-tx20 tivo works great. InstantCake was a money saver! what a success it is....Great product!!!!-Craig

[techpanda]

I was having problems with slow operation of my TiVo HD. I later learned that was an indicator of hard drive failure. Finally, my TiVo died with the Green Screen of Death (GSOD). After working with TiVo support to determine that it was hard failure. Their only solution was to replace the unit for about $300.

I was planning to upgrade the hard drive anyway to increase its size, so I had already obtained a replacement drive. Since I already had new hard drive, all I needed was a TiVo disk image. Doing a little searching, I found InstantCake. I purchased and downloaded it. In less than an hour, with the help of some tips on how to use InstantCake, I successfully created a TiVo image on my new drive in less than an hour. After replacing the drive in the TiVo, it successfully completed the initial setup and I have an operational TiVo again. The initial setup took much longer than creating the drive image with InstantCake.

Thanks for providing InstantCake and for the forum that ensured I had a successful install on my first attempt.