So yesterday I posted about the Western Digital My DVR Expander Hard Drive and how you can add it to your TiVo® HD or TiVo Series3™ HD DVR to add up to 65 hours of high definition recording time or up to 600 hours of additional standard definition recording time to your Tivo unit. I have found out that the drive is only available at the Tivo.com website (where it is currently sold out) and at select retail Best Buy stores (not through the website, yet) for around $199.

Now the truth of the matter is that I have been using an external eSata drive on my TiVo Series3™ HD DVR for over 6 months without incident. Unfortunately, Tivo Software 9.2a just killed that. From what I’ve heard, I’m in the minority, with only a couple of people reporting problems similar to mine on this TivoCommunity thread. Sucks to be me. Here’s what’s happened so far:

- None of the shows show up it the Now Playing list.
- When I go to add it under the new menu option it says “The attached external storage device is already being used…”.
- In the System Information window it correctly identifies the drive in the External Storage field.
- However, in the Recording Capacity field it only shows the original 32 HD hours of the internal S3 drive.
- I have restarted through the Tivo menu 3 times.
- I have Rebooted the “Hard” way twice. (Unplugging both drives for 15 seconds and plugging them back in the correct order: unplug TiVo first, then unplug the eSATA drive, wait, then plug the eSATA drive back in and then plug TiVo back in.)

The external drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drive that I originally bought as part of a DVR expansion kit for the Scientific Altanta 8300 cable/dvr box.

In an act of desperation, I just went through and tried the Kickstart 57, Kickstart 58, and Kickstart 52 hacks (in that order). These are the hacks of last resort as they turn on Tivo’s built in diagnostic and repair programs and clean up database and directory problems, sometimes by overwriting information. No help.

Unfortunately, there is no way to go back to version 9.1 of the software. I also don’t want to disconnect the drive and then add it again from scratch because then I will lose all of the shows I can’t currently see, but that I know are on the drive.

I’ll let you know what I figure out…