You guys usually seem to know the best deals out there for hard drives... my Tivo is taking a dump and I'll need at least a 120gb. Any good rebates out there?

Office Depot had a 100 GB Maxtor (that was really a 120 GB drive inside the box due to supply issues with the 100 GB models - see FatWallet) for $19.99 after two $40 rebates. The flyer was in my Sunday paper.

Outpost has a 200 GB Maxtor IDE drive on sale right now for $69 with no rebates. Even the Fry's ad in my local paper today had the drive advertised at $79, so the Outpost price looks pretty good....

Randy

The $10 difference in price between the sale at Fry's online and the sale in the store is lost to the shipping charges online.
It's up to you which is more convenient.

For what it's worth, I prefer a sale without a rebate- I'm too lazy to follow through and/or make sure they pay when they're supposed to.
Keep your eye on this space:
http://www.frys-electronics-ads.com/
or here:
http://www.newegg.com/

I agree, in many cases you are right (about the shipping charges at Outpost). But in this case, the Outpost folks are offering free shipping for this drive...Not bad for 200 GB...

Randy

http://shop3.outpost.com/product/3492233?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

If you don't mind rebates, there's this one. 250GB for $70. Not too shabby.

I'd be tempted, but I'm only putting SATA drives in my home PC now. Just last night I got all of them up and running, and I'm in heaven with 866GB. Yum.

Thanks everyone!

I found a 120gb for 50 after rebates at Circuit City, but some of your offers look more tempting....

My Tivo problem can be found here. Ends up I MAY have a problem with the unit itself and not the drive... still not sure but should be able to figure it out by tonight.

Grr...

I followed that person's advice (in link above) and did a "Clear and Reset" but I did it for just the To Do list and Now Playing Data. I had a screen that said "This will take an hour" and left it alone. I came back about an hour later and saw "Almost there, just a few more minutes" (meaning the unit had just rebooted) and then it went back into the "This will take an hour" screen. So, the Tivo is in a reboot loop even during the Clear and Reset phase. I might leave it a few hours to see if it can resume where it left off, but I have a feeling this thing may be hosed.

I'll try to install 4.01b on the drive if all else fails and try to see if I can do a HD check in the process. I heard the 6.0 causes reboots of its own... any feedback on this Rob? If the drive isn't the issue, then I've ordered a HDVR2 motherboard off of eBay. They guy swears it works, but it's just the motherboard. If I have bad RAM or something, that should help.

Damn, it really sucks when the Tivo goes down! It's the one my wife uses too, so she's stressed out. But at least we were able to pull her shows off of it via HMO.

Actually, I can't help you eventhough I have a Tivo with the same problems. I took it from my parents to use as a spare, thinking only the HD had to be replaced. I haven't really played with it yet.

If you haven't fitted a new drive yet, or reloaded another image, I think you should try that. That's definitely what I would do.

It looks like it's the Tivo itself... I just tried the stock 40GB drive with unmodified software on it... won't get past "Welcome. Powering up.."

I would recommend checking / replacing the IDE cable.

I know that if the MFS partition is bad that the TiVo will run the file system check on bootup. This can take a LONG time!!!! If you get a greenscreen you need to add more swap space to allow the file system check to finish.

Well... I may be in luck.

I tried a 2nd backup drive and it's working. So I may have had two bad drives, or the first backup may have still be jumpered as Cable Select now that I think of it...

Anyway, as I was dreading taking my PC apart to prepare another drive, I was wondering what the bare requirements were for building a "Tivo" PC. I would basically just need a motherboard that supported 200GB drives, builtin video, no sound, no ethernet, no modem, no hard drive, etc.

I just happen to have a PC at my house that a friend dropped off for me to fix (scarey thought huh) and I'm planning on using that to do my drive. His cables aren't as nicely tied up etc. Hopefully it will support a 200gb drive (since I can get one for like 20 bucks more than a 120gb). But I thought it'd be fun to get some of your ideas on a cheap, easy to open "Tivo Builder" that I could put together. Mini case would be best as long as I had room to work in there.