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).

Comments

Upgrade comparison...

[Tyger]

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.

Re:You need to low-level format old UTV drives

[Shanep]

the disk has been written to in an unintelligible way.

Yeah, dd'ing it with /dev/zero ought to fix it.

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?