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Ultimate TV (UTV) Hard Drive Upgrade
BubbaJoeBob writes: "I just read this thread over at the AVSForum that jeffm7 was able to upgrade his UTV 40GB drive to a WD 100GB drive. Other users are reporting that they were also successful using the WD 120GB drive." And aside from ending up with an apparently useless original drive, this sounds much less painful and involved than various homebrewed TiVO upgrades; according to posters on this thread, it's nearly plug-and-play (with a necessary download step in the middle).
Works fine here. Although this link is a little shorter and has what appears to be a session ID removed.
Of course there are differences. Pop over to the TiVo forums - http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/ - where there are plenty of people who have multiple PVR's of different makes. They'll be happy give you a feature comparison.
I wish HDs had DIMM slots for its cache, imagine HD with 512meg cache, no more seeks galore.
If not DIMM, then a SO-DIMM
this sounds much less painful and involved than various homebrewed TiVO upgrades.
Where is this guy coming from? I just upgraded my Tivo and was amazed at how painless the process was. Yes you do have to bless the new drive, but with the availability of utility boot disks and CD's it is trivial to do.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
the disk has been written to in an unintelligible way.
/dev/zero ought to fix it.
Yeah, dd'ing it with
So what you need to do is completely wipe the drive with a low-level format, i.e., writing zeroes to the drive.
A commonly used phrase, incorrectly used for ATA drives. "Low level format" comes from the days when it meant a real low level format, where tracks would literally be repositioned (old MFM and SCSI drives could do this). IDE drives are low level formatted at the factory and cannot be re-low level formatted outside the factory. IDE drives recalibrate themselves due to changes in heat, they calibrate off tracks or special encoding (gray code?) between tracks, written at the factory which are on areas that are not user writable.
Then you can repartition it as 0x07 if you want to be able to get productive use out of it.
HPFS/NTFS? Nah, 0x83 and 0xA6 for me.
Here is a link to Western Digital's utility that allows you to low-level partition their ATA drives (the WDC seems to be popular in these devices):
Since the popularity of ATA has taken over the desktop from MFM and SCSI, the "low level format" term has remained. However, in the IDE World, it only means "completely zero every user addressable block" on the drive and NOT "reposition tracks", since ATA drives don't need and are not capable of such a feat at even the leet haxor level.
The term is erroneous for ATA drives, however it has been so commonly used that even the drive manufacturers refer to thier zero-out tools as low level formatters. They're not.
I don't know if modern SCSI drive are capable of this or use the ATA method? Anyone?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
you always have a suitable backup on hand.
I nicer alternative, is to backup the drive from one of these units prior to usage, so that the data on the drives are in their most compressible state.
Just dd the whole drive, piping it through some compressor to a file on your PC. Hopefully, this will leave you with a file small enough to burn onto a CD.
I have assorted images for various OSes in my home, which I use for various testing purposes. You just have to remember to mark the partition type with fdisk (might not be required for all OSes to boot?) and then reboot to that OS with a boot manager like Smart Boot Manager (which seems to remember your many labels for the *same* partition, based on the type, but only one per type). Works nicely, and any OS, from QNX to W2K installs quickly without any fuss at all.
I'd like to just use these with VMWare, but it is so bloody expensive! I *might* have considered it, if it were half the price it is, but the current price is just outrageous.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
For those who are trying to decide between UltimateTV and TiVo, or who (like me) own one type of unit and are thinking about switching to the other, here's a pretty comprehensive TiVo vs UltimateTV comparison.
In a nutshell, TiVo beats UltimateTV in almost all areas.
One other bit of information that may be significant: UltimateTV requires that you have a DirectTV satellite dish -- it will not work with standard cable TV.
F 200 L 200 0
a 100
mov ax,301
mov bx,200
mov cx,1
mov dx,0080 (Note: use 0081, 0082, 0083 for 2nd, 3rd, 4th harddisk respectively)
int 13
int 3
(hit ENTER to enter a blank line here)
G=100
q
Yeah debug.com sure brings back memories. For a second I tbought the dd command had something to do with the post, not your .sig!
It is useless because it uses ATA Passwords (same as xbox) and the drive is *invisible* to PCs (including linux's fdisk tool). To use this drive, you would have to hack the password which I believe is 4 bytes and has a maximum of 2 fail attempts per power cycle. You would have needed to use a logic analizer to catch the PW exchange between the UTV and the drive to hack it.
The thing is, in the case of the DirecTV one and the UTV as well as DishPlayer and DishPVR, it isn't just an en/de-coder. They don't have an encoder, using the DBS encoded signal directly, which gets a much higher quality image. However, don't expect either company to release hardware any time soon to let you capture THAT to your computer.