Recently I decided to upgrade my Tivo.  There are two modifications I was interested in doing.  The first was expanding the the storage space with a new hard drive, and the second was installing an Ethernet connection.  My Tivo is almost three years old, and it's time to make a leap forward.

If you are interested in doing something similar, here are a few resources:

The Tivo AVS Forums - The central hub of all Tivo modification thoughts
TivoHelp.com - A comprehensive site for Tivo upgrade info
The Hinsdale How-To - A detailed how-to on modifiying your Tivo - Excellent
tivoftpd - FTP utility for your Tivo
tivoweb - web based control of your Tivo
Tystudio - video extraction utility for your Tivo
PTVUpgrade - makers of upgrade hardware for Tivos
9th Tee -reseller of upgrade hardware for Tivos

My one caution about modding your Tivo is to Read the Instructions.  Read everything fully before starting, then read them again.  Make sure you understand what you are doing before you begin.

If you break your Tivo, don't come whining to me.  Haxxoring is dangerous work.

First I had to pull the Tivo from it's dusty home under the DirecTV receiver.

The dusty Tivo in the study, I my special work stool.

Opening the box requires Torx bits.

Yes, I am going to void the warranty.
I like this picture quite a bit.

The insides of the Tivo.
Note the cabling for a second hard drive.

This is the bracket for the hard drive.  The blue bits are the rubber cushions to soften vibrations.
 

I hooked up the new 120GB drive and the old 30GB Tivo drive to the computer.

After booting off a special CD, I entered the one line command to
 duplicate the drive contents onto the new drive

It was just after midnight when I kicked this process off.
It was going to take hours, so I went to bed.

Early the next morning...

I used the expand command to tell the Tivo to use the full 120GB of storage.

I put the new drive back in the Tivo, reinstalled it, turned it on and hoped for the best.
Luckily, I was successful!

A week later I got the TurboNet card in the mail.
Here is the Ethernet card installed on the mainboard.
 

I had to load little more software onto the Tivo to get telnet and ftp running.
I didn't want to remove the hard drive bracket again, so I brought the
whole Tivo in and connected it to the computer.

 

I ran the install script off the boot CD.

 

Viola!  Telenet access to the Tivo!

The hardest part was running the Ethernet cable under the house to connect
the Tivo in the front room with the computers in the study at the back of the house.
Here I am, very dirty from crawling around under the house.