Mostly Harmless

Oh, the thing that’s like irony but is, in reality, only bad luck.

The ailing drives in my TiVo have lasted longer than the drive in the replacement ReplayTV.

And yet, thanks to The Internets and the local Micro Center, I once again have a functioning ReplayTV as of several minutes ago. (I should probably screw the case back on and get it out of the path of foot traffic before it is trod upon with extreme prejudice.)

The Replay drive died (or became so full that it refuses to boot, which is an actual problem from what I hear) on Thursday night. It was in a perpetual “booting an OS is too hard” cycle. I found some disk images on the ‘net and tried using an old 60-gig drive as a replacement. For some reason or another that didn’t work so I picked up a 200-gig drive ($89) from Micro Center yesterday along with a spiffy multi-lingual USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA adapter cable ($29). Because swapping drives in and out of portable cases gets tedious after a while, for one thing.

The USB to IDE/SATA cable is nice because it can be connected without removing the drive from the Replay. I used that little feature to re-image the 60 GB drive a couple of times before moving on to the new 200 GB drive, which worked like a champ on the first try.

Had I known the new drive and disk image thing was actually going to work I might have spent the extra $50 to get the 320-gig drive instead (which was the original drive size). I wasn’t really keen on spending the cash for a 400 or 500-gig drive either, since it isn’t the primary DVR at this point anyway. And apparently there are ways to make a dual-drive system if I’m so inclined at some point in the future. (Replayfaqs.com)

One thing that amuses me, somewhat, is that I configured my ReplayTV in about 15 minutes starting from a blank drive. It spent a few minutes pulling down the TV listings and it was ready to go. This is in contrast to the Comcast DVR (Motorola DCT-6412) which was accidentally unplugged (twice!) while I was moving the Replay. If you unplug the Comcast DVR it will (1) take a few minutes to determine that DVR functionality is enabled, and (2) spend all night downloading the TV listings.

If the Comcast DVR can’t reach home base, e.g. if the cable signal is out entirely, it will not enable the DVR and you can’t even watch any previously recorded shows. At least with the TiVo and Replay you still can watch old shows.

And, speaking of P.O.S. DVRs, it’s not like the Comcast box won’t occasionally forget to record something… so now I’ve missed the first 5 minutes of “Drive.” Dunno what the hell was up with that, it’s the Replay that I’ve got to reload the DST fix on and that’s working just freakin’ fine thankyouverymuch.

Anywho, I don’t know how bad the old Replay drive is. I can use the extractor application to list all(?) of the recorded programs on it so I think I can pull those off… sadly I don’t have the free space on my other drives. 1.3 terabytes doesn’t last as long as it used to.

Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed