Yeah, I would have posted an update in Oh Noes, Cantrip's TiVo is Dead!!!, but the forum Nazis would have bitched about bumping a thread that was one month and TWO days old. 

So, TiVo died about a month ago.  Have not watched a single minute of TV since then.  Yep, no episodes of LOST.  Boo.  -However, I have found I have loads of free time now to do things in a less-rushed manner.  Like masturbation for example.

Anyway, a hard drives have connectors that come in two common flavors. 

The older (flat ribbon) Integrated Device Electronics interface, or IDE connector, looks like this:



The newer (flat red cable) Serial Advanced Technology Attachment interface, or SATA connector, looks like this:



The problem I was having was connecting the two hard drives to any of my older project machines.  They all had at most two IDE connectors.  One each for the two IDE hard drives.  That left no additional connector for the IDE CD drive to run the cloning CD software. 

None of the machines or spare mobos I had had more than two IDE connectors.  Then I remembered that in my downstairs gaming machine (which by the way, I used for like a month, then stopped using it - damn OCD projects) had a CD/DVD drive that used one of the newer SATA connectors, of which the spare mobo has plenty of.  So I snagged it, and I now have the CD drive I need along with the two IDE connections. 

Here's a pic of my cloning rig:



Behind the box is the target HD.  It's an older 80 GB HD I had sitting about, but it was free.  I wiped it with Killdisk and now will use some cloning program to get the data transferred.  That is, if the HD is only MOSTLY dead.  If it's COMPLETELY dead, well, i'm screwed. 

Keep you kiddies posted later. 

Don't worry Cantrip - you haven't missed any new episodes of Lost and the rest are available for rent at Blockbuster.

The fans on all of mine blow out, just FYI.