instantcake and 20 minutes = happy family

i'm having an excellent customer service day.  why?  well, my tivo series 2 busted last week (actually probably earlier, just haven't been in town) and i was pretty pissed as i still have "lifetime" service on it.  so i hunted around on tivocommunity.com and found that my problem looked like a bad hard drive.  everyone recommended getting a new hard drive and using instantcake to bring it life.  well, after conferring with the family cfo, i was able to procure the $20 to try it out.  why only $20 and not more for a new hard drive?  well, a while back i had upgraded my tivo adding a second drive bringing it to 200GB total.  i had a sneaking suspicion that the original 40GB drive was the problematic one and was going to attempt to salvage my secondary 160GB drive.  so i went to dvrupgrade.com and got the instantcake ISO download.  it was a 75MB ISO download.  i extracted and burned to a cd-rom.  then off i went to my trusty dell that is 8 years old. 

after a bit of RTFM'ing (your cd-rom drive needs to be primary slave and the drive you want to "bake" needs to be primary master), i booted the cd-rom and followed the very simple instructions.  basically i clicked enter about 4 times and got a message that it was "baking my cake" and wouldn't take long.  The only real status i saw was an extraction of about 694MB of "restore" as it was labeled.  man that's a nice and lean device.  after about 5 minutes, i was back at a shell with a message that said "power off and connect your drive to your tivo."

so i did...and powered up...and saw the "welcome, powering up" screen and waited with anticipation.  about 2 minutes later, tivo had life.  and life was good.  restarted setup, done.  download guide, done.  very, very cool.

instantcake lived up to every claim it had.  $20 repair and 20 minutes...man i'm happy.  i did lose all the season passes, but a small price to pay for disaster recovery.  oh, and by the way, i think it was my original drive, as the 160GB drive is doing fine right now.