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!!), 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!
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That was the trick!
