Tivo Sata Hard drive to iMac

[tkowalski]

I took apart my sata Tivo hard drive(WD 1tb) and plugged it into my Thermtake Black Widow external hard drive component. In disk utilities it is recognized, it does fire up. I want to access whats on the drive, not format. I read something about how it powers up, there are no pins covered . I can hear it running. I have a similar WD USB hard drive in same component and it shows up on my desk top and disk utilities Any thoughts? P.S. There were some external plugs I removed from drive, but they look like what turns a USB into sata drive.

 

[LaWally]

From what I have read, Tivo uses the ext2fs file system, which is not readable by OSX. IIRC an open source driver for ext2fs is available on source forge.

Again IIRC I've seen reports that it is possible to simply plug in a TiVo drive, and mount it using the ext2fs driver ... I have not tried it myself, but would at least advise to mount the disk as read-only to start with so you don't mess anything up.

Sounds like an interesting project. How do you plan to pull the data once you get it mounted?

 

[farmermac]

You Won't be able to remove shows. You need to transfer them via the TiVo type software. You cSn save the file system via some windows based utilities for cloning and expanding purposes. TiVo splits the drive into many partitions for buffering, os, downloads, shows. Like 12-16 partitions.

 

[tkowalski]

Thanks for response. I have seen just the cable converters. Plug in sata cord. If I put back the drive in enclosure, will I not be able to access whats on the drive regardless if that would work?