Questions about getting started

[cecilt]

A couple of questions from a newbie. I’ve been trying to find out all the info I can about upgrading my Samsung 4040R.
The questions that I have are:
1.If I make an image of my hard drive and put that image on another hard drive to use, store the original drive, then if anything goes wrong in the future can I re-install the original drive and everything go back to normal.
2.Does anyone know the quality of the video/audio captured on the hard drive of the unit? All I’m really interested in doing is increasing drive size, installing USB to Ethernet and transferring mpeg to computer to burn to DVD. I can already capture analog video/audio but would like to take that step out and DirecTV does not seem to be willing to enable this feature.

[Waruwaru]

1. Yes, by re-installing the drive, your Tivo will be just like the way you bought it (unless you broke something in the process, watch out for the white ribbon cable, don't boot Windows while you have the drive in PC).

2. Since you are taking the file directly off the hard drive, the quality will be as goog as it is on Tivo. Unless you re-encode the video, the video should be exactly the same. Much better (less time consuming too) than analog capture

[classicsat]

The quality is exactly that of the DirecTV picture sent by satellite.