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I upgraded both my 5040 and my 5504's hard drives recently. Both machines' original drives had failed, so I really had no choice but to do the upgrade. I put a 320GB Seagate drive in one and a 300GB WD drive in the other.
I put the new drives in a FW case to format them via my iBook G3 800 first, then installed them into the Replay cases. The actual physical installation of the drives was simple - only PITA is all of the little screws to take out to get the case open. 
There are a couple of things to download and use via terminal commands (RTV patch and Replay OS). I had help (thanks Hwystar!!!) doing the formatting - we had to use a combination of a few different instruction webpages (Davester's posts to one site were very helpful). I can't remember if the linked pages from Davester up there were ones we used or not.
Anyway, the formatting just isn't as bad as it looks like, if terminal stuff scares you... If I was able to do it (admittedly with extensive coaching and step-by-step hand-holding), I'll bet you can do it too.
Most awesome part of it is having 300 + 320 HOURS of free space on my machines! I can record anything and everything and not worry about using up all my free space. Gotta love that. 
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Speedy Wrote:
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> Still not something I care to attempt and fail at,
> thereby risking my original RePlay drive, by using
> Terminal as described in the above links.
If you can commit to moving forward with a brand new drive, without any of your old shows on it, you can do this without touching your original drive. Just get an appropriate drive image and create your brand new drive from that.
When you boot up, it's like you just took it out of the box.
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joycee Wrote:
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> Most awesome part of it is having 300 + 320 HOURS
> of free space on my machines! I can record
> anything and everything and not worry about using
> up all my free space. Gotta love that.
DVArchive helps that. If you don't want to upgrade the drive, install DVArchive and point it to a large local drive with lots of empty space. Then set up automated actions that simpy move the shows off the Replay and into DVArchive.
Despite having 200GB drives, I still do the transfer thing with movies.
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It is quite possible to use a Mac to do the upgrade. I was able to do both of my ReplayTV boxes, and even copied over 40 GB of existing shows to the new 300 GB drives on each one of them, successfully, using OSXRTV_Patch. This was the CLI version, but it was not too hard to do, using term.app and a FW case. The hardest two parts of the job were locating the right information on how to go about using the software, then getting one of my ReplayTV boxes out of a large rack out from under a table in my living room.
It looks like Davester has posted more current information than what I used to do mine a few months ago.
If you have any questions about the process, post them here, or feel free to email me and I can probably help you with it. The CLI process is not that tricky at all, and if there is a GUI app now (which apparently there is, from skimming Davester's links) then that will probably make the job even easier.
I guess the main point I wanted to make is that it is not at all necessary to use a Windoze box to do this, and is probably easier to do with a Mac, IMO, because it is much easier to use FW with a Mac, typically, than to mess with FW on a PC, or have to physically install the drive in the PC case, and use DOS, etc. as used to be the case, at least when doing it with a PC.
HTH
hwystar
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elmo3 Wrote:
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>
> DVArchive helps that. If you don't want to
> upgrade the drive, install DVArchive and point it
> to a large local drive with lots of empty space.
> Then set up automated actions that simpy move the
> shows off the Replay and into DVArchive.
>
> Despite having 200GB drives, I still do the
> transfer thing with movies.
You're right about DVArchive, elmo! Back when I only had 40GB drives in my machines, I used DVArchive to offload shows onto an 80GB FW drive (that I happened to already have on hand) and later a 300GB FW drive (that I purchased to use with DVArchive). When the drives are connected to my network and DVArchive is running, they show up as additional Replays that I can access and choose shows to watch from/transfer shows to - way cool.
However, I use a laptop as my main machine, so I don't always have my FW Drives running and attached to my iBook. So for me, having huge drives in the Replays themselves saves me from having to get out the FW drives, boot them up and plug them into my laptop to watch shows from. In my situation, it's easier just having plenty of storage on the actual Replays.
DVArchive is an excellent tool, and worth checking out, Newt, if you haven't already.
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Yeah. Even *with* 300GB drives inside the Replay, DVArchive is indispensable.
As someone else said, owning ReplayTV is a reason to have a Windows box. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it sure comes in handy for upgrades, for sticking more storage online, and for doing some of the heavy lifting for the videos--for example, I use VideoReDo Plus to edit the Replay files to take out commercials. And there are some tools to put the edited files back into DVArchive, so you can store them and watch them without commercials even being there.
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joycee,
Already downloaded. . .just have to get the harddrive. . .
thanks everyone for the great info!
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