Hi (fellow) Dave,
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I didn't know anything about TiVo until I came across the OzTiVo page by accident. That was on Thursday, by Friday I had been emailing with George and now my unit is ordered and should be delivered once the hard drive brackets come into stock :) .
Ahh. TiVo-itis. Fast onset too. Know it well. It gets worse. No cure :) .
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I have a 120 gb Seagate that I use as an external drive for my Windows machine, can I use this drive in my TiVo?
TiVo's require a Parallel ATA drive. If your external case is connected by USB/Firewire it's most likely to be PATA but if it's a Serial ATA (SATA) drive it won't work. If it's a SCSI case then it won't work in the TiVo.
Some more info regarding drives can be found here:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/vie...WhichTypeOfHDD
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I have read somewhere about a signature being written to the drive if it is connected to a Windows machine. Will the current image override this?
Restoring the OzTiVo image will overwrite everything on the drive. There shouldn't be any issue that it's previously been used for Windows (apart from that being an abuse of a disk drive in itself).
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Is there any thing I can do with the drive before the unit arrives? I know I can load the image onto the drive, but is there anything else I can do?
You could download SeaTools from the Seagate website and run a surface scan on the drive. Recommended because the TiVo doesn't like drive errors and performs erratically if it encounters them. By the way it took 9 hours to scan my 120Gb drive.
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I can see that this is going to be an interesting project and I hope I can rely on this forum and the mailing list for advise and help during the tricky stages.
While the is TiVo on its way, get to know the information on the OzTiVo website (particularly the BeginnersFAQ) so that you can avoid asking a FAQ on the list. Be warned though - this will make the TiVo-itis worse :) .
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I'm sure I'll be back :D
Read you then.
Cheers, Dave.