Re-use of HDD out of Virgin "Tivo" box.

I have a number of boxes than VM don't seem to want back so I want to recycle them i.e re-use whatever I can inside. Problem is, they casing is held together with security screws. What have the people who have taken the drive out done to get into the box?
 
Skiking said:
I have a number of boxes than VM don't seem to want back so I want to recycle them i.e re-use whatever I can inside. Problem is, they casing is held together with security screws. What have the people who have taken the drive out done to get into the box?
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I actually used a small flat blade screwdriver, it worked fine inbetween the torx shape.

APM said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives

you can get a set of the 12 most popular for a few £.

I think the VM one could be a torx.
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Correct, mine was infact security torx from that link, (Difference between Torx and Security Torx is the screw has a indent in the middle, so the torx screwdriver you use has to have a cut out in the centre)
My issue was, two of the torx that needed removed require a long thin driver.

My set was too large, hence the above use of a very small flat blade driver. If you go this route, try on the visible easy access screws on the back of the box first to make sure the grip is sufficient.

My drive is working in my pc nicely, just needed formatting.
 
I'm pretty sure you'll find that you can't continue to watch content already recorded on the old box once you've taken it off the network and registered your new V6 box. This is the same as happens if the Virgin network goes out for any reason. There are a whole raft of features that stop working, including playback of already recorded material - although last time it happened, I did find a way to persuade it to play something back, but I can't remember how I did it now ... I sucks getting old ! I have a friend who works for them on the service side, and he confirms that this is the case. You can't transfer material from the old box to the new one either, although you can migrate your series link list via your account on the website within two weeks of registering the new V6 box.

I'm just waiting for my new one. In the meantime, I'm going to see if I can just real-time record some of my existing recordings (a whole load of Later with Jools Hollands) onto a separate hard disc recorder.
 
All VM recorded material is encrypted to that specific box I believe.

It would make sense if they could provide you with a key to transfer over your stuff from the old to the new box when you get them.
 
I can see that they want to preserve their copyright requirements by not allowing content to easily 'escape', but both the old and new boxes have Ethernet ports on them, and it would be a matter of some really simple code to allow stuff that you've legitimately recorded - and hence 'own' the copyright to for our personal use for ever - to be transferred across to the new box. I have Jools Holland recordings going back some years, and that I still watch from time to time. It is unlikely that the BBC will ever show them again, so once they are lost, that's it
 
I'm actually surprised that no one has managed to hack the embedded code to allow this. I think that the TiVo system is Linux based, isn't it ? Although the UK version of TiVo is not quite the same as the U.S. version, they are near enough I think. Certainly, the UK version, including the rather poor revisions that they made to it a couple of years back, is an adaptation of the American code, which is clearly evidenced by the fact that it uses the dreadful 'padding minutes' to try to avoid overlap conflicts, rather than making use of the metadata broadcast in the transport stream of UK digital programming.

Whatever happened to all those clever people that used to reverse engineer the various encryptions - both hardware and software - that were applied to early satellite and cable transmissions ?
 
i am not able to figure out how to open the TiVo box, the screws are not the regular types I have seen before. Can you please advice on the tools?

Deepanshu
 
I've just got the 1TB Samsung HD out of the Cisco Virgin tivo box, model before the V6. Couldn't find the right socket so I hacksawed off the plastic, not easy but the drive was well protected in a metal box. Four regular screws hold the drive. The edge of the inner metal cage can be pried open and holes made in the soft metal for a screwdriver to loosen. The SATA drive fits in a cradle I had from Amazon, a useful thing to own. Used Windows 10 Device Manager (as Administrator!) and using online advice I set up as a new drive. Only then did it properly show as a drive in Explorer. Works great so far and no you can't recover the Virgin media content. Contrary to what others experienced I was still able to view my programs after upgrading and before taking the box apart, possibly because I had disconnected it from the Internet. Content could also be copied from the machine via a SCART connecting cable called a VICE, a legal Macrovision defeater used by people who copy rare commercial VHS content to DVD and these are still obtainable. Personally I needed nothing off of the Virgin box and prefer to stay comfortably within the law. As Virgin didn't want the old tivo though I thought I'd make use of the HD. Recycle!
 
I'm a bit late to this party, but same issues - I wanted to make use of the redundant hard drives from our two TiVo boxes, 500GB and 1TB respectively.

I bought a USB caddy and plugged in the disks, but they didn't appear on the explorer. As always, a Google enquiry sent me all over the place - to lots of scary looking sites - and also to here. I read on this forum a calm sounding post thad said "they just worked", and therefore I was spurred on. And it's easy!! At least in Windows 10 it is.

1. Plug the disk caddy into USB socket
2. Open Control Panel / System and Security / Storage spaces: "Create a new pool and storage space". With the smaller drive I had to fool around with the capacity numbers before I could continue - no idea why - but it worked!! Very pleased.

One poster observed that these disks work hard in their original function, and I'm sure this is true. However as a backup disk, I think it's absolutely fine.
 
Regarding reusing HDD's from TV recorder box's.

The HDD's are normally optimised for video usage such as the Seagate pipeline. They are ok to use for video's, music or picture backup, but never to install applications or any data that requires high random IO.
 
I've come across this thread, and although it doesn't answer my question it covers other topics I had in mind, as it was the best option from my search for 'How to swap the HDD on a V5 Tivo / VBox ?' - and even though some of the answers on here are quite old.
[I'd also like to change the given picture for something else, or one of my own, but have had no luck in saving any changes I've made to this one. Any idea on how to do that ?]

Our VirginMedia Vbox is still the V5 (CISCO CT8620) and has been OK - I didn't take a note when we were given it, and we've not been given a V6 as an update ... until recently. The V5 was working well enough until our elderly cat one day a few weeks ago peed on it, the lights gradually went out until it died altogether. I asked for a like-for-like replacement but they sent me a V6. Rather than installing that straight away I have been trying to see if I can watch some programmes that I've recorded - or if I can download them to another device (some of the discussion above is very useful on that - and I almost certainly cannot) - as this is the last chance to see them, and they are not available on the iPlayer. However I have another V5 (from a throw-out) in good working order ... so wonder if there is any downside to swapping the HDDs over, to be able to view these programmes again [I've viewed the only YouTube demo of how to open the box up & remove the drive]. For instance - if anybody here thinks that the HDD may be matched to the motherboard, and can only be installed by a Cisco or VM tech ? Or I can just swap them over and hope for the best ?

I'd be grateful for any suggestions.
 
Colin Anderson said:
All you need is a bootable linux usb stick and a distro that has gparted included. Using this you can re-format the drives to ntfs and use them as you want.
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This. I had a couple of disks out of sky hd boxes and they both said they were locked when trying to delete partitions in Windows, but throwing Linux at it sorted it out.
 
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