More yak shaving - now with TiVo!

Let's set the way-back machine¹ 2-3 years ago. I had two TiVo units (a Series 2 and a DVD recorder) that were starting to act up. From the symptoms, it was very likely the disk drives (these run 24/7 in TiVo service, are the only moving part, and by far the most likely item to fail in a TiVo). I looked up the part numbers on them (both were 80GB units), found the model with the lowest price online, and bought a pair of them.

When they showed up, I grabbed a pair of USB-PATA² adapters, pulled the drive out of the Series 2, and hooked it and one of the new drives to the computer. I used the Unix "dd"³ command to just make a verbatim copy from the old drive to the new one. It didn't fit. It turns out that not all "80GB" drives are alike, and the one in the TiVo had a little more storage than the new one. Grump. So I pulled the drive out of the DVD recorder (which was the identical model drive), and copied that one instead. The copy completed without issues, I popped the new drive in, and it worked fine.

( but what about the other TiVo? )

¹fizzygeek and I just re-watched my old laserdisc copy of the original Tron movie tonight. And it struck me that I'd just used that phrase from the film (I wrote that text earlier today). Hee-hee!
²PATA: Parallel ATA, as opposed to the more current SATA (serial ATA) drives. Also known as IDE or EIDE.
³The "dd" command is the "convert and copy" command. But since the C compiler was already called "cc", it got called "dd", in typical Unix harebrained naming style.