Loud TiVo

For the last couple of months my TiVo has been very loud. I'm always aware of loud constant noise around me. I wouldn't look at houses within two blocks of I-5, I gave up the speed of my P4 in favor of a much slower but almost silent Mac Mini, and I wouldn't spend time in the living room after the TiVo started becoming louder. It was getting very very irritating. I couldn't put up with it. But I wasn't sure whether it was getting louder or I was just becoming more aware of it. If it was the latter I was basically screwed because I love my TiVo and I would need to spend a lot of money to build out a silent system.

At first I thought it was the fan but I opened it up and noticed that all of the noise was coming from the harddrive. I then put it back together, reconnected it and did some research about hard drive. I couldn't find anything. The hard drive sound was a "Woo Woo" kind of like the deer horns on the front of cars. That didn't seem normal to me but I wouldn't really know because the only computer I had with a normal hard drive was my PC and it had so many fans that I had no idea what was making the noise. Then Laurel got her iMac. It was pretty frickin' quiet and it had a normal hard drive so I decided to try changing the hard drive.

I found a good doc describing how to do it and I had a spare 120 gig hard drive so I went for it yesterday. I burned the image from the site, added my Tivo drive to the PC, booted up, and ran the following commands:

  % mkdir /mnt/dos
  % mount /dev/hdb5 /mnt/dos
  % mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdd
  % mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdd | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda

The last command took all night to run. When I got home from work today I put the new hard drive into the TiVo, turned it on, and it worked. No noise! And it was faster since I went from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM and it was bigger since I went from 80 gigs to 120 gigs.