[XCSSA] Got an old Tivo for $5

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

(sorry to Tweeks about stupidly sending to the admin address)

Yesterday I got a Sony SVR-2000 (30hr, series 1) for five bucks at a  
thrift store. Of course it wouldn't start up. Open it up and mmm,  
Quantum Fireball. First thing I did was look at the chips on the  
drive to make sure they hadn't blown themselves out like Fireballs  
do. Nope, no blown chip. Of course it came with no remote (the  
remotes go for $80 or so on ebay!), but I got a One For All URC-6131n  
remote that supports it at Best Buy for just under $20.

After much work to get things set up, I managed to get an mfsbackup  
of the main partition. Doing a dd copy of the whole drive hung at 21  
gigs, which was probably the reason the thing was dead. Lucky me, at  
least the drive was alive enough to read the important stuff. I also  
checked the clock battery, 3.0 volts is a bit down but not enough to  
worry right now. I'm not amused that you have to remove the  
motherboard to swap the battery because of the way that its holder  
was mounted on the board, facing the side of the case.

And part of that "much work" was trying to unlock two hard drives  
from bad Xbox upgrade attempts. One happened over a year ago, and I  
thought maybe I did something else that fried the drive. Then when I  
got a drive out tonight for the mfsbackup, I decided I'd try it on my  
Xbox first. Boot Xbox with utils CD, lock drive, prepare drive,  
reboot, error 13. Oops, looks like its a bad idea to lock the drive  
if you haven't loaded the dashboard and stuff first--it won't boot  
the CD with the utilities you need to unlock it again! Fortunately  
the utility I locked it with had set the IDE master password to  
"TEAMASSEMBLER" and I was able to get both drives working again.

I hate using a 200GB drive when it'll only work with 128GB, and a  
7200 RPM instead of a slower (and quieter) 5200 RPM, but that's what  
I've got handy as a new drive. The cheapest I saw at Fry's today was  
a 160/7200 in a USB case for $70. It was a "dead drive" until last  
night anyhow, so "free" is better than $70. And I really don't want  
to put a previously used drive in something like this.

  - Bruce -