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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).
The UTV upgrade is, unsurprisingly, not unlike the DishPlayer upgrade. In fact, it is pretty much the same. Surprised this was not found earlier, unless it is drive specific, and early attempts tried the wrong drive type.
The upgrade itself is pretty painless. I do not have a UTV myself, nor have I upgraded one, but I do follow the forums. It is pretty much just putting it in and letting it download software. Only catch, from what I see, is the drive cannot have anything on it. At all. Not even an unused partition. While (In theory) slower than the TiVo upgrade, it is easier, and harder to end up with useless hardware. But I believe there is only space for one drive in UTV, so you can only get half the space of a TiVo.
As it is, the TiVo upgrade these days is pretty painless, and is only likely to get less so. If you can swap drives in the unit, it is only a little harder to do the necessary PC work. Of course, it does require a PC. And with the drives that come prepared for TiVo upgrade, it is actually just as easy to upgrade TiVo, and much quicker to boot, involving only a few seconds to add the new drive, instead of hours to download software to install.
This just must be illegal!
Kind of like chewing a pencil. That was not the intent of the maker, therefore reverse engineering the wood is a violation of the DMCA as well?
I give this a week before you hear about DMCA implications.
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CodeRed, the lower user #. No relation to SirCam.
I tried to upgrade my VCR as per the instructions, but it didn't work. Can somebody help me?
Actually, maxtor has a drive utility to change the loudness of the drive. This will have a small impact on the performance (probably won't make much of a difference when used by a tivo), but from what it sounds, that'd be worthwhile. You'd have to put it in your computer and run the utility, but it's probably worthwhile. See noise utilities for ibm and maxtor drives.
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.
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?
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.
All this applies only to the TiVo, which are the only PVRs I have experience with.
Faster drives are contraindicated due to the heat that the drives give off. The extra speed doesn't help the TiVo write or read the mpeg data on the HD, and wouldn't help anyway.
The bottleneck's the processor and lack of RAM (PPC603, and 16MB, IIRC), and, of course, the lack of a second tuner.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
in DOS, you could use the debug.com
What a blast from the past! I remember that. Yeah like 4 or 5 bytes and then whoosh!
That calls a system BIOS program to do the dirty work does'nt it?
I used to actually enjoy typing in debug listings from magazines like Compute!, to muck around with the utils, etc. I remember a util called prune that was a deltree before the days of DOS deltree, which did a great job of pruning dirs and also fucking up file systems every now and then. : ) I guess thats what you get with 50 byte programs without error checking. ; )
Before that though, I was even sicker, back when Compute! mag was a C64 magazine, they had literally pages and pages of multi column HEX listings for utils and games. Some of the games were actually pretty good arcade games, considering thier size. First you had to type in the assembler in BASIC (really just a check summing program) and save it (to tape for me), then use it to enter the HEX listings, the "assembler" could inform you when you got a line wrong, based on the checksum.
Man those were the days.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
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!
Not to mention that 40GB of music(thousands of tracks) or data isn't exactly shabby, and if it isn't enough for you, it's certainly easy enough these days to add the drive to a RAID. And who needs "disk utility software?" Just do for the appropriate drive then add a DOS parition table using fdisk.
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.