Re: Larger Hard Drive

PowerCycle · ‎03-27-2009

Transponder wrote:
This definitely sucks. I called and inquired about a DVR with a larger hard drive and at first they said it would be $100 charge which I was willing to pay. They then came back and said "Sorry" there is no way to do this. Then I was hoping I could just buy a larger drive and stick it in but now I guess not. Just doesn't seem fair that I have the 450 package, HD, U-Voice, and 18MB internet and can't get a DVR with a decent size hard drive. So much for being a good customer and ordering everything they offer at the max.

Sad to hear that... They actually just have it on a limited supply. They wont give it unless you are a new customer ordering initially for the larger drive. If you are an existing customer before they launched the promo, they wont give it to you.

However, there was someone on the other forum who mentioned about calling in to ask for a technician because his DVR is defective. Then when the tech was there already, he demanded to get his DVR replaced. And luckily, the tech happens to had the large DVR in his truck so that was what he got as a replacement with no extra charge.

RCSMG · ‎12-10-2007

I have read several posts where some people called and were told no by a csr and called right back and got yes from another csr. Then others have talked to prem techs in their areas and got one. Then there were those who got the larger hd because they were subscribed to the hd services. And have read where they were only for new installs. Your results may vary, but I say call back until you get a cooperative csr who can get that done for you.

texasguy37 · ‎05-18-2009

Transponder wrote:
This definitely sucks. I called and inquired about a DVR with a larger hard drive and at first they said it would be $100 charge which I was willing to pay. They then came back and said "Sorry" there is no way to do this. Then I was hoping I could just buy a larger drive and stick it in but now I guess not. Just doesn't seem fair that I have the 450 package, HD, U-Voice, and 18MB internet and can't get a DVR with a decent size hard drive. So much for being a good customer and ordering everything they offer at the max.

Which DVR do you currently have?

cheer · ‎10-20-2007

psbecker wrote:
Hi, I am new to this forum as I am considering switching to Uverse from Time Warner which is amazingly unreliable and a nightmare to deal with, at least in our area of Los Angeles.

I am really concerned by some of the problems being expressed here about max disk storage and the lack of a facility to move shows to/from a PC. Not to sound like a TIVO wonk, but I have one, and these facilities are both pretty much non-issues as they are both standard capabilities. This suggests that either TIVO is totally ignoring related legal issues or AT&T is playing games with its customers.

Neither. AT&T is a content provider; TiVo is not. They have different agendas, as such. TiVo doesn't have to worry about annoying content providers; AT&T most certainly does.

First,TIVO users can replace smaller hard drives with larger ones. Note that this does the warentee on the box, and also it is not easy to increase the size of the TIVO disk system because before swapping in a new or additional disk drive, someone must manually format the new disk drives and reinstall the operating system plus all the TIVO-specific software. The OS is a UNIX varient (Linix, I think) and you better be familiar with some rather obscure commands, so it is not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, there are professional organizations such as the curiously-named Weaknees here in LA which will do it for you. Cost is about $75 plus then new disk drives which you can either buy from them or provide yourself. I have upgraded to 1 TB and can keep a LOT of shows on that drive.

Well, the difference here is that you own your TiVo. You can void the warranty if you want. You don't own the U-Verse DVR; AT&T does.

You can upgrade the disk anyway if you want; search around the net for instructions. But since you don't own the DVR, it's a violation of the terms of service. You have been warned.

As for moving video to/from a PC, TIVO fully supports this function and even offers for free all the PC software to make it trivial to do. Note that it supports two-way transfer. You can upload any video from TIVO and it converts the files to mpeg format which make the video easily acessable by many video editing and playback programs. I use this to keep strip out commercials and then archive copies of favorite shows -- especially sporting events -- for viewing years later. Likewise, you can download your own video to watch on your TV. I have no idea how they have avoided the copyright issues.

TiVo files are protected by DRM. They are also not HD, so far as I am aware. They've had to make some concessions to mollify the cable companies. If Microsoft were to create such a facility for U-Verse, and the DRM restrictions satisfied the content providers, then we'd see it as a feature, no doubt. But this sort of thing is going to become more restrictive as time goes on, not less.

These two features have become so important to me that I will probably take lots of antidepressant meds and stick with TW/TIVO until AT&T resolves them, which I suspect they ultimately will. If they don't resove tham in the near future, they will find that they are not competitive. Note that DISH now uses TIVO as their DVR product, so these capabilities are available from that vendor also.

As others have pointed out, Dish does NOT use TiVo. DirecTV used to -- and will do so again soon -- but when they did in the past, the TiVoToGo and TiVoGoBack features were NOT available; nor was multi-room viewing.

Transponder · ‎02-26-2009

Which DVR do you currently have?

I'm not at home now to be able to check the exact model but I believe it is the Motorola 1216. It has a 160GB hard drive.

BabyDoc · ‎06-17-2009

I was told I have a large hard drive in my Motorolla DVR. How can I confirm that? Is there a special model designation for the larger drives?

randyl · ‎10-25-2007

BabyDoc wrote:
I was told I have a large hard drive in my Motorolla DVR. How can I confirm that? Is there a special model designation for the larger drives?

1216 = 160

1225 = larger hdd

my take

randy

PowerCycle · ‎03-27-2009

BabyDoc wrote:
I was told I have a large hard drive in my Motorolla DVR. How can I confirm that? Is there a special model designation for the larger drives?

http://utalk.att.com/utalk/board/message?board.id=thdvr&message.id=4317#M4317

psbecker · ‎06-19-2009

Hi Cheer,

I really appreciate your comments, but I have a couple of different understandings:

"TiVo files are protected by DRM. They are also not HD, so far as I am aware. They've had to make some concessions to mollify the cable companies. If Microsoft were to create such a facility for U-Verse, and the DRM restrictions satisfied the content providers, then we'd see it as a feature, no doubt. But this sort of thing is going to become more restrictive as time goes on, not less."

I currently have a TIVO Series 2 and while the files may be a proprietary format on the device, (.TIVO) they do not seem to be protected by DRM. I use the TIVO-supplied PC application called TIVO server that lets me move files in either direction between TIVO and my PC. Roxio Media Creator, a widely available audio/video package, can read and edit these files and convert them to .mpg files or even burn them to DVDs. Also, there is more than one legal codex that will let Windows Media Player play those files on a PC. I have never encountered any DRM issues. I am actually amazed at how easy this is to accomplish. Since my TIVO is not an HD model, I do not have any knowledge or experience playing with their HD files.

"As others have pointed out, Dish does NOT use TiVo. DirecTV used to -- and will do so again soon -- but when they did in the past, the TiVoToGo and TiVoGoBack features were NOT available; nor was multi-room viewing."

OOPS! My mistake here. I was confusing DirecTV with DISH. A neighbor of mine is a test site for the DirecTV TIVO and he told me that they currently are permitting file transfers at least for SD files. Didn't say what the deal is with HD as he is not using this feature. Also, I don't know about multi-room viewing with DirecTV, but I believe that TIVO feature as implemented for regular users is much worse than the ATT implementation because TIVO requires a separate box for each TV. (I do not use this feature.)

"You can upgrade the disk anyway if you want; search around the net for instructions. But since you don't own the DVR, it's a violation of the terms of service. You have been warned."

I have seen the write-ups about installing your own larger disk drive. While the actual swapout appears very easy if you are willing to risk the wrath from AT&T if caught, there seems to be a few concerns, including how the STB will perform with large number of programs and whether the most recent rollout of the ATT upgrade contains some sort of facility to block user-supplied drives. BTW, has anybody cracked open the new boxes to see if they have switched to SATA drives or are we stuck with PATA, possibly due to Microsoft Windows CE limitations?

Thanks to everyone for responding to me about this subject. I am a true ATT neophyte and appreciate all of your input.

cheer · ‎10-20-2007

For the record...the quoting system in this forum software is absolutely AWFUL.

psbecker wrote:
Hi Cheer,
I really appreciate your comments, but I have a couple of different understandings:

"TiVo files are protected by DRM. They are also not HD, so far as I am aware. They've had to make some concessions to mollify the cable companies. If Microsoft were to create such a facility for U-Verse, and the DRM restrictions satisfied the content providers, then we'd see it as a feature, no doubt. But this sort of thing is going to become more restrictive as time goes on, not less."

I currently have a TIVO Series 2 and while the files may be a proprietary format on the device, (.TIVO) they do not seem to be protected by DRM. I use the TIVO-supplied PC application called TIVO server that lets me move files in either direction between TIVO and my PC. Roxio Media Creator, a widely available audio/video package, can read and edit these files and convert them to .mpg files or even burn them to DVDs. Also, there is more than one legal codex that will let Windows Media Player play those files on a PC. I have never encountered any DRM issues. I am actually amazed at how easy this is to accomplish. Since my TIVO is not an HD model, I do not have any knowledge or experience playing with their HD files.

Admittedly it's been some time since I've played with them, but if I recall correctly, the TiVo software was set up with your "media key" (or somesuch). That was what allowed you to play the .TIVO files (codec doesn't matter necessarily; the DRM was handled by the .TIVO splitter); I think if you copy the .TIVO file to another PC that wasn't set up with your media key, it won't play. Of course, converting them to standard MPG files essentially removes the DRM (and as of a couple years ago, anyway, removing the DRM wasn't altogether difficult).

Of course, things may have changed. Since moving to U-Verse I've not kept up with developments in the TiVo community, and since I was a DirecTiVo user, I didn't pay that much attention to the TiVoToGo/etc. stuff anyway.

"As others have pointed out, Dish does NOT use TiVo. DirecTV used to -- and will do so again soon -- but when they did in the past, the TiVoToGo and TiVoGoBack features were NOT available; nor was multi-room viewing."

OOPS! My mistake here. I was confusing DirecTV with DISH. A neighbor of mine is a test site for the DirecTV TIVO and he told me that they currently are permitting file transfers at least for SD files. Didn't say what the deal is with HD as he is not using this feature. Also, I don't know about multi-room viewing with DirecTV, but I believe that TIVO feature as implemented for regular users is much worse than the ATT implementation because TIVO requires a separate box for each TV. (I do not use this feature.)

Before moving to U-Verse, I was a serious DirecTV/DirecTiVo user, and a TiVo hacker. I had half a dozen DirecTiVos in the house. At that time, none of the "advanced" TiVo features were available to DirecTiVo owners; specifically the Home Media Option (HMO) which allowed one to view photos, play music, etc. from a networked PC; Multi-Room Viewing (MRV); HME (the successor to HMO which allowed more advanced media handling and even allowed third-party applications to be developed for the TiVo); TiVoToGo; and so on.

However, depending on the model of DirecTiVo and version of TiVo software, some of those features were actually there but disabled. The TiVo hacking community learned how to enable them, so I was able to make use of HMO and MRV. Yes, it's a bit more cumbersome in the sense that each box has to be a DVR, and each box can only record two streams, so you had to do a bit of manual conflict management, and you couldn't manage the recordings on one DVR from another. On the other hand, I could record as many streams at a time as I wanted, provided I was willing to pay for enough DVRs (and the $5/mo box fees), and everyone had trick play for live TV (and dual live buffers). Plus, the TiVo hacking community had developed some nifty enhancements such as a web interface that was far, far more useful and useable than the one U-Verse has; direct digital extraction of recordings to a PC; and even an application called "tivoserver" that ran on a PC. It essentially set itself up on the network to look like another TiVo and built a catalog of all the videos on the PC. From a TiVo you would see it in your MRV list as another TiVo called "tivoserver" and you could select it and play any of the videos; they would be transcoded on the fly to the TiVo's slightly-nonstandard-MPEG2 format. It was buggy but still incredibly useful.

Sadly the HD DirecTiVo never supported MRV, and newer versions of the DirecTiVo code removed many of these features altogether. Most of the hacking community stayed on older code on the non-HD DirecTiVos to keep MRV, but in some cases upgrades were necessary to deal with guide data changes, etc. And while I do like U-Verse an awful lot, I miss the TiVos.

"You can upgrade the disk anyway if you want; search around the net for instructions. But since you don't own the DVR, it's a violation of the terms of service. You have been warned."

I have seen the write-ups about installing your own larger disk drive. While the actual swapout appears very easy if you are willing to risk the wrath from AT&T if caught, there seems to be a few concerns, including how the STB will perform with large number of programs and whether the most recent rollout of the ATT upgrade contains some sort of facility to block user-supplied drives. BTW, has anybody cracked open the new boxes to see if they have switched to SATA drives or are we stuck with PATA, possibly due to Microsoft Windows CE limitations?

I doubt it's a CE limitation so much as a hardware limitation. PATA is probably a bit cheaper, and from a manufacturing standpoint it makes sense to standardize on one or the other -- so far as I am aware, the only real difference between the two DVR models from a given manufacturer is the size of the hard drive itself. In any case, PATA is more than fast enough for a DVR (my old HD DirecTiVo with a 500GB HD never broke a sweat recording dual over-the-air HD streams (which are a lot larger than the HD streams we get on U-Verse).

Thanks to everyone for responding to me about this subject. I am a true ATT neophyte and appreciate all of your input.

Happy to discuss. I love this sort of thing.

dieselpower_1 · ‎02-15-2010

Been a uverse user for a couple weeks now. still have my dish setup plus external usb storage.. have vip1225 box with uverse. tried upgrading the hard drive today to a 2tb model. no-go. it creates both the fat16 and fat32 partitions correctly and puts most of the files on them but hte box continuously reboots with the 3 dots on the screen.. this repeats every minute or so for hours. i even tried a spare 1tb drive i had liying around and the same results.. i can put my original drive back in and the dvr works just fine. no problems as it did before. my VIP1225 has a SATA drive connected via a PATA/SATA adapter.

i made an image of my orginal hard drive for comparison. on the new drive there is folder on the fat32 partition called "TV2ClientCrashLogs". under that is a subfolder called "watchdog".

the difference is that on the orginal drive there are no files in this directly. on the larger drives it seems to create a error log every time the box reboots.

i've spent hours reading and searching this and uverseusers.com for solutions to this. Please don't call me a bad person and tell me i'm going to hell for trying to put a larger hard drive in my DVR. i've got no problem buying the box or additional storage but AFAIK that isn't an option available to me.

Specifically my question is can I put a larger drive in this vip1225, and if so, what am i missing?

I really want to keep uverse and cancel my dish but its a hard sell with such limited recording time.

Thank you for your time!

mibrnsurg · ‎07-15-2008

To get it to accept upgrades and reboots users have had to go 500G or smaller, anything larger, they won't

complete.

Chris

Please NO SD stretch-o-vision or 480 SD HD Channels
1-800-983-2811 to avoid Mr. Voice Recognition
YRMV IMHO Simply a U-verse user, nothing more

dieselpower_1 · ‎02-15-2010

Thank you very much. 500 is still twice what I have, just nowhere near what I wanted.

I'll have to get a 500gb drive and give it a shot.

dieselpower_1 · ‎02-15-2010

Well today i installed a Seagate Pipeline HD made for DVR's- 500GB

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=f26e34e653f6a110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&locale=en-U...

Still same old rebooting problem. it formats the drive correctly then after that's done it does it random reboot cycle over and over and over again...

any idea why i'm still having a problem since i'm come back to 500gb?

dieselpower_1 · ‎02-15-2010

well i was able to get the 500gig drive to work. i even imaged my 250gig drive to the 500, then stretched the fat32 partition to 480gb.. and ALL of my recording are STILL THERE.

SomeJoe7777 · ‎01-30-2008

dieselpower wrote:

well i was able to get the 500gig drive to work. i even imaged my 250gig drive to the 500, then stretched the fat32 partition to 480gb.. and ALL of my recording are STILL THERE.

Did you try that with a larger drive (e.g. 1 TB) ?

I'm curious if the limitation is that the STB can't use a 1TB drive due to the block count, or if it just can't format the 1TB drive.

dieselpower_1 · ‎02-15-2010

I tried that with a 1tb and 2tb drive.. i tried letting it format both of them as well as imaging partition on both. neither scenario worked. tried the same thing on a 750gig drive too.

i think the box itself is fine. whenever i let it format the drive it dos so properly- it puts the small fat partition on it then formats the remainder as fat32. i think its a software limitation imposed by at&t that is causing the issue. i doubt it has anything to do with block count as fat32 is technically capable of that much.

so is there really this few a people out there trying to add a realistic amount of storage to these things or have i just not found the correct forum? uverseusers is mostly dead with respect to this topic as well.

Did you try that with a larger drive (e.g. 1 TB) ?

I'm curious if the limitation is that the STB can't use a 1TB drive due to the block count, or if it just can't format the 1TB drive.

dzar_1 · ‎01-01-2008

Those of us who have been dealing with this for more than a few months, indeed, have stopped worrying about it (at least I have). Here's why:

1) It is against the usage policy to muck with the box and AT&T knows it when they querry your box on a support call and will give you a hard time even if your issue (like no Internet) is unrelated

2) Since there is no way to back up the recordings, and since many of us have experienced a complete loss of all recordings at AT&T's whim, we don't rely on the storage for our archive (we find other ways to save things).

dieselpower_1 · ‎02-15-2010

Hi,

I could care less if its against the usage policy to muck with the box. I have and always will be more than happy to buy the box outright. I'm not trying to steal the signal, get free PPV, etc. i am only attempting to increase the storage of the programming i legally pay for. I doubt at&t will send the cops after me. and if they do get mad i'm more than willing to take my licks.

as far as backing up the recordings i've been successful in imaging the hard drive and restoring it to a different drive while preserving the recordings. while that pails in comparison to a true archive like dish offers if i have to do that twice a year that's fine with me. its still a backup albeit a slightly more inconvenient one.

you mentioned you "find other ways to save things". do you care to elaborate?

thank you for you reply. since you never answered my PM i figured you stopped visiting the forum. I'm sorry you got discouraged.

the bottom line for me is that if i can't get more storage i won't be keeping the service. so i'm still going to try.

dzar wrote:
Those of us who have been dealing with this for more than a few months, indeed, have stopped worrying about it (at least I have). Here's why:

1) It is against the usage policy to muck with the box and AT&T knows it when they querry your box on a support call and will give you a hard time even if your issue (like no Internet) is unrelated

2) Since there is no way to back up the recordings, and since many of us have experienced a complete loss of all recordings at AT&T's whim, we don't rely on the storage for our archive (we find other ways to save things).

dzar_1 · ‎01-01-2008

dieselpower wrote:

Hi,
I could care less if its against the usage policy to muck with the box. I have and always will be more than happy to buy the box outright. I'm not trying to steal the signal, get free PPV, etc. i am only attempting to increase the storage of the programming i legally pay for. I doubt at&t will send the cops after me. and if they do get mad i'm more than willing to take my licks.

I'm with you, but they gave me a hard time about it.. The boxes fail too often for me to want to buy one (I think none of mine have lasted more than a year so far... things seem better, now, however). Just the "official" reason to not muck with it (and I do have the 320 GB version, now, so I'm ralatively happy)
One cannot simply copy files off the disk and do anything with them, but you can record them (in real time, ugh) to DVDs for archival purposes. I do this for the few things I cared about. Mostly, we record kids shows so they can watch them at more useful times for us. Hence, I don't need to offload them and I also don't care if I can only store 50 hours of them
I would love to be able to add extra disk space (at my expense) and also would love to be able to archive what I have. Alas, AT&T doesn't want us to do either for fear that we actually love the service too much!

psbecker · ‎06-19-2009

Hi Dieselpower,

Congratulations on getting a 500GB drive to work. I too have been surprised that this topic has sort of died off with nobody really seeming to be successful. I have been waiting to see if anyone would successfully upgrade their stb with a larger hard drive. Like you and a lot of others who want to make this work, I am not trying to steal anything, just want some more storage space, especially for HD shows, especially since it is such a problem to save the shows anywhere else. I would be more than willing to buy an external drive and hang it on to the USB port and even pay AT&T for the privilege, but for some reason they don't seem to be moving in that direction, so I would like to do what you have done.

Anyway, a few questions:

1. Did you just drop in a 500 GB drive and let the system do everything or did it require some tweaking to get it to boot, even though you would lose your current shows by doing this?

2. You said that you were able to image your old drive and restore it to the new one. What software did you use? And could you be a bit more specific on any changes you had to make to the file system to get it to work?

3. I seem to remember reading somewhere that we may be bumping into some operating system limits on both number of programs the system could hold and on the max disk space that it supported. Do either of these things ring a bell?

If you are uncomfortable describing on-line something that officially AT&T does not permit, you can email me at {edited, please PM member for email address}.

Thanks for any ideas here.

dieselpower_1 · ‎02-15-2010

Hi,

every drive i tried- 2tb, 1.5tb, 1tb, 750gb, and 500gb i first tried blank. every time the stb would not boot, but it would format the partitions correctly given the amount of free space. even the 2tb drive had about a 1.8tb fat32 partition after the small fat16 partition.

the 500gb drive started the same reboot cycle as all teh other drives but after about 5-10 cycles it finally came up and ran. when i was able to get it to work i used acronis trueimage to image my 250gig drive and restored it to the 500gb. then i used acronis disk manager to stretch the fat32 partition. doing this preserved the shows on the disk which was nice.

oddly enough it seemed as if i didn't get more recording time but its hard to tell as i don't want to delete all my recording and keep testing as my wife gets pissed when her shows disappear

when it reported full and started deleting older shows i pulled the drive and checked it and it was indeed full. however after putting it back i was unable to get it to boot again. perhaps i wasn't patient enough. i replaced it with the original 250gb drive and all is fine again. my next test when i have time will be to erase everything on the 500gb drive (got a seagate pipeline HD drive made for dvr's at frys for 59$) and let it format it and see if it works any different.

originally i did get it to boot with the 500gb drive being blank but it reset all my dvr settings (screen size, audio, etc) so i immediately yanked it and tried the image route which seemed to work.

being a dish subscriber for years i have a 1tb usb drive and while the wife likes uverse she HATES teh small storage allotment. if i can't get a perm. solution that i know works for sure i may have to revert back to dish to make her happy which is a shame as i do like the features of uvsere.

i paid the one time dish charge to use a usb drive and would do so in a heartbeat with uverse. i just can't fathom why they wouldn't let us do it. i truly belive it is more of a AT&T-imposed limitation rather than a problem with the dvr itself. fat32 has no problem with a 500gb partition. even if there was a recording limit of say 100 or 200 shows i could live with that as everything i watch and record is only in HD so it eats up space very very fast.

i really hope we can find some people that desire to continue with this.

dzar_1 · ‎01-01-2008

dieselpower wrote:
..

when it reported full and started deleting older shows i pulled the drive and checked it and it was indeed full. however after putting it back i was unable to get it to boot again. perhaps i wasn't patient enough. i replaced it with the original 250gb drive and all is fine again. my next test when i have time will be to erase everything on the 500gb drive (got a seagate pipeline HD drive made for dvr's at frys for 59$) and let it format it and see if it works any different.

I had a similar experience (had a 500 GB drive working just fine for momths. Then, one day, the DVR reset itself - after a forced AT&T update - and it would not boot at all. Nothing I tried worked... replaced the original HD and all was fine.

I know many people want to swap out the HDs but there is tons of evidence that this is contrary to what AT&T wants you do to and, as such, they do absolutely nothing to ensure anything but their two supported sizes/disks work.

Not that I'm an AT&T fanboy, but why are we still talking about this? AT&T doesn't care about what its users want! (OK, a bit harsh, but I don't know what else to say). We've been complaining about small HD sizes in the DVRs for at least two years, now, and their only consession was going from 250 GB to 320 GB (and I presume that's more due to availability and cost of drives than anything else). They do not enable the USB ports for external storage although doing so is almost certainly trivial.

I believe this endeavor is a waste of time. I can understand the frustration of everyone out here (I share it) but from my own experience, you only make your frusrtation worse if you try to upgrade the HDs. Maybe someone will report how they have had zero problems for 1+ years with a 500 GB drive (or larger) but I certainly couldn't make it reliable and gave up (as have others from what I've read here and elsewhere).

callmeox · ‎08-30-2007

psbecker wrote:

Hi Dieselpower,

I would be more than willing to buy an external drive and hang it on to the USB port and even pay AT&T for the privilege, but for some reason they don't seem to be moving in that direction, so I would like to do what you have done.

AT&T *is* moving in that direction, though I don't know the exact details beyond the surveys that AT&T has asked me to complete.

In my experience, stuff in the surveys winds up in the end product. As there have been multiple questions about adding an external HDD, don't be surprised when the option appears.

hpmsrm · ‎09-14-2009

I really don't think interest in expanding storage has waned....I just think that a lot of us who would love to do what you've done, D.P., are not astute enough in things technical to even come close to accomplishing what you have. And apparently you have access to several different capacity hard drives. Most of us less capable "tinkerers" do not. Congrats on getting the 500 gb version to work. I found the whole thread fascinating. Let us know if you do encounter any difficulties from higher up.

Need help? Call AT&T at: 1-800-288-2020 then follow recorded instructions.
A Veteran – whether active duty, retired, national guard or reserve – is someone who, at a one point in his/her life, wrote a blank check made payable to ‘The United States of America’, for an amount of “up to and including his/her life.” ...Author Unknown

z0ner · ‎03-16-2010

New customer, old hacker.

My slightly-older-than-30-day VIP1225 kept rebooting one day. I powered it off, waited about an hour, powered it back on. It worked for the rest of the night, but in the morning it was rebooting again. Sensing a drive failure I threw in a brand new 750GB, no dice. I have several 500 gig drives but decided to throw in my slim 320GB. Booted a couple of times and now it works like a charm.

Small upgrade, but 250GB to 320GB works just fine.

It kills me that I have two, three-year-old TiVO-HD's that I upgraded from 160GB to 1TB each, and now I have to settle for Windows CE and 320GB for both TVs combined. Plus I can't PAUSE LIVE TV FROM THE NON-DVR? Come on ATT, get with the program!

dzar_1 · ‎01-01-2008

Rememebr to remove your drive when the DVR fails and needs to be replaced. I'm on my fourth DVR, now. They are junk.

bcincotta · ‎03-25-2010

I am looking for some technical info on the VIP1225 DVR. any ideas where it can be found?

dhascall · ‎04-21-2008

I had a tech out on Tuesday because of DVR recording and freezing issues. He replaced my DVR but I got a standard sized one. dhascall's tip for the day - schedule your tech appointments for early morning. Supposedly each truck has 4 DVR's on board, each day. Two standards and two high capacities. I am not too happy about that. If he gave a high cap DVR to a non-HD household, well, hold me back.