Removable drive?

[spook8000]

Ok, I've read alot about adding a hardrive to Tivos, so I know that part is possible, but I'd like to hear about this idea I have...
My Tivo is a series 1 Philips, v1.3 image, Pal tuner converted. 1 120Gb IDE drive installed. All working great,
BUT, I dont have a network card... Seems alot to pay considering ....
So, I have been toying with the idea of hacking my unit to install an
"IDE to Compact flash" memory card adapter.
The reason behind this is so I can move my media files to a compact flash card, and then process it on the PC.
The IDE to compact flash adapter allows the Compact flash card to be seen as a standard IDE drive on a PC, and does not require any drivers or support by the OS, ie it appears in the Bios as a standard ide drive..

So, I'd love to get your feedback on:

1. commands and process of "mounting" the "drive" so my tivo sees it as an writable/accessable area. I dont want it to be an area that the Tivo could use to record its shows, just a "copy to" area.

2. commands and process of "unmounting" it cleanly.

3. Any gotchas like formatting the drive etc... and reading it on the pc.

Many thanks in advance, I hope my idea is as easy to implement as I am thinking..

Cheers, Spook8000

[petestrash]

It seems a hard way to do things.

A 4GB CF card can only hold one movie. Transfering one at a time seems really tedious.

Plus the cost of the convertor + 4Gb card would be similar to the cost of a Terbonet card $80 incl postage.

I haven't even tried using an unmarried real IDE drive in a TiVo in the manner you suggest.

I do have a couple of single drive TiVo's which double as development machines. I use cheap drive caddies on these to make swapping drives quicker during testing and this also means their covers can remain on.

You might want to branch your idea into using spare drives instead of CF cards. This would likely be even cheaper as the drive caddies only cost $10-15 each set and you would most likely have a spare drive laying around. Even an old 20Gb drive would let you transfer more than 5 times the ammount of a CF card in one go.

Peter.

[spook8000]

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post. I think your idea of a drive caddy is a good one. How do you go about adding and removing it from the system though? I mean command wise.

Spook8000

[petestrash]

As I said in the last post I have never tried using an unmarried 2nd drive in a TiVo. So I don't know if the standard mount proceedures will work.

The caddies I have are installed on single drive S1 & S2 TiVo's, so I need to power down when swapping between drives.

Peter.

[spook8000]

Thanks Peter for your interest in my question, and your answers.
I have been thinking about the way that drives are married with the Tivo, and was wondering if a simple "mount" command may be able to do this?.. Do you know of any reference material about the command list that is available under the Tivo unix flavour?.. Maybe some further information can be found there.

Spook8000

[T1voZA]

I have been thinking about the way that drives are married with the Tivo, and was wondering if a simple "mount" command may be able to do this?.. Do you know of any reference material about the command list that is available under the Tivo unix flavour?

You can mount and unmount the partitions on your TiVo's drive via telnet. As long as your drive is formatted using a partition the TiVo is able to support there shouldn't be any problems mounting the drive, your best bet is just to stick it in and try.

To check the partition table on your 2nd drive, type the following:

pdisk -l /dev/hdb

You can mount a partition on your 2nd drive as follows (change hdb1 to the relevant partition number):

mkdir /var/drive2
mount /dev/hdb1 /var/drive2

To unmount the drive, simply type:

umount /var/drive2

[petestrash]

I agree with TiVoZA, neither of us has tried so just give it a go.

As far as formating the disc goes, just whack the current image onto the 2nd drive for the time being and see if you can access it.

Peter.