About a year or two ago, I bought an extra drive for my TIVO from Weakknees (along with a kit that allowed the extra drive to be installed in my single drive TiVo). Over the last 6 months, one of the drives in the Tivo has been clicking (when the read/write head parks, I'm guessing). Now it's making little squeaks all the time. I was never sure which drive was dying, but last night the TiVo came up with a blue screen telling me the External drive cannot be detected, and is needed for the Tivo to function. I couldn't do anything, except unplug the Tivo and restart it. Upon doing that, it worked again, but still with lots of drive noises. I'm assuming it must be the second drive I added (since TiVo complained about the "external" drive").

I'm wondering how I put my TiVo back to original (so that it at least works correctly, until I can get a new secondary hard drive). If I unplug the secondary hard drive and reboot the TiVo, will it sort itself out, or will it even boot without the secondary drive now?

When I buy a new drive, should I buy a new, bigger primary drive, or add a big secondary drive, like I did last time?

Thanks for any light you can shed on this confusing (at least for me) subject.