Format it Yourself

Note: Opening your ReplayTV box voids the balance of your warranty with ReplayTV and ReplayTV may refuse to repair/swap your unit should it fail..

You're in the business of ReplayTV upgrades, why provide Do It Yourself Instructions?
Upgrading a ReplayTV unit yourself involves taking apart 2 of the 4 most expensive items most people will ever buy, your computer and your ReplayTV unit. (The top 2 is your home and your car, the Plasma Displays have crept into the No. 3 position for many people). Many people are comfortable with opening up their computers and video components but most are not. Hopefully we will be able to help everyone from the novice to the adept. Thanks to e-mail inquiries, we basically told our competition and everyone else who has asked how to do the upgrades so why not tell everyone before they ask? Besides, some people are selling these directions and tools as part of upgrade kits that they e-mail to the buyers.Some are available as CD kits. These are freely available to everyone. So here they are in one convenient location, free as they should be. While we use the free tools to provide a service, it is unacceptable to charge for the tools and the know how.

Upgrading your ReplayTV unit involves modifying your personal computer to connect the new hard drive and the ReplayTV hard drive, downloading the software called RTVPatch for Windows 2000 or Linux, making sure the new hard drive is verified, and running RTVPatch to copy the ReplayTV software to your new drive. After that is completed, you will remove the drives and install the new drive into your ReplayTV unit and put your computer back together again. It's really very straightforward if you are comfortable doing everything above.

I want to do the upgrade but I need more information about doing the upgrade and my ReplayTV in general?
AVS Forum member PRMan has compiled a FAQ that is very comprehensive. Click on the link below to access this document:

ReplayTV Upgrade FAQ

Here's another useful FAQ from Sourceforge.net:

Sourceforge ReplayTV Upgrade FAQ

Directions for running RTVPatch can be found here:

RTVPatch Instructions

I have decided to do it myself and I have read everything, what first?
Obviously, buying a hard drive is the first step. We have had tremendous success with Maxtor 5400RPM drives ranging from 40GB to 160GB. Note that legacy ReplayTV units can only access up to 137GB on a single hard drive, the other 23GB is wasted space. We have used Western Digital and Seagate hard drives. The Western Digital drives tend to run quite a bit warmer and noisier than Maxtor and Seagate in our experience.Stay with 5400RPM drives, the 7200RPM drives run hotter and besides, the ReplayTV performance is not improved by the faster spin rate. You will be paying for a feature you don't use and might even harm your system. Now that there are drives with 8MB cache, these drives help improve the performance during instant replay and guide navigation. Also, beware of WHITE LABEL Drives. These are gray market drives that were initially delivered to computer system builders but were dumped on the open market. Most of these drives don't have a manufacturer's warranty and their 30 or 90 day warranties are only through the reseller. Yes, the warranty line goes up the food chain but they don't lead back to the manufacturer.

Click here for an example of a fully warrantied drive and a white label drive. Note that the white label drive does not have a serial number nor does it have a warranty or manufacture date.

I have the drive(s), now what?
Make sure you have the appropriate software to do the upgrade. You will need the latest version of RTVPatch. You can download there files from www.sourceforge.net. If you are running Windows 2000, use the GUI version of the program. If you are not, you will need the Linux version. This version creates a boot floppy and you will have to do your upgrade using the command line. Download the appropriate software for your system. The "large cluster" version of RTVPatch is available for download on this site: Download LC RTVPatch. Please note that if you use the large cluster RTVPatch, you will not be able to preserve your existing recordings.

Please go to our software page for convenient access to the software you will need.

I have the drive(s) and the software, what's next?

Click here for tips on hard drive jumpers for the most commonly used drives.

Documentation for running RTVPatch can be found here: RTVPatch Instructions

You will need to take your computer apart as the next step. If you are using Windows 2000, you will unplug everything from the secondary IDE controller on your computer. We recommend using the backup and restore method for Windows 2000. This will help avoid changing drive jumpers since this method uses only the single master drive on the secondary IDE port. No need to muck around with drive jumpers. You will remove the drive from your ReplayTV unit and plug it into your computer's secondary IDE controller as the master drive. Boot up into Windows 2000 and run RTVPatch. At this point you should see your both your Windows hard drive and your ReplayTV drive on the RTVPatch window. Select your ReplayTV drive as the source drive and select Backup. Save the image file on your hard drive, you will need approximately 302MB or 505MB of space for the RTV2/3K and RTV4K software.

After this is done, exit RTVPatch and shut down Windows. You will then remove the ReplayTV drive and install the new drive in it's place. This is where you have to make a critical decision. Should you or should you not low-level format the drive? We strongly recommend that you do. If the software did not come with your drive, you can download the PowerMax V3.03 software from Maxtor. We have found that the Maxtor Powermax software works for other manufacturers' drives and does a nice job with the low level and read/write verification. Please note that this step could take more than 24 hours so be patient. You will also need to create a boot floppy for this procedure. You should also consider turning off Write verification and Acoustic Management on your hard drive if it supports it. AMSET V4.0 and WVSET V4.0 are also downloadable from Maxtor.

You have now properly prepared your drive for your ReplayTV unit. Now, boot up into Windows 2000 and start RTVPatch again. You will select the new hard drive as the destination or target drive. Click on restore and select the file you just saved earlier. After you have completed this, you will have to Patch the target drive to make the entire capacity usable. Exit RTVPatch and shut down Windows. Remove your new ReplayTV drive and reinstall into your ReplayTV unit. Put your computer back together again and put your original drive away for safekeeping.

Is this it?
Just about. Plug your ReplayTV unit back in and start enjoying the fruits of your work.

Do you offer technical support if I have problems?
You can certainly e-mail us for help or go to www.avsforum.com to get help from some very knowledgable people. We hope you understand that we can't provide phone support for Do It Yourselfers.