Dead or Dying hard drive

Hey guys,



I've got a Tivo HDXL with I think a 1TB hard drive that is dying or dead. I've read lots of posts and I'm still a little unclear on what I can do to remedy the situation. I've run through the service mode HD scans and at this point it's just not booting up. Even if it does eventually boot (I did this a few weeks back and it fixed itself) I'm worried the the HD is on a slow death march to the grave.



With that said I understand my options are to:

1) buy a new TIvo

2) buy a ready to use Tivo replacement drive

3) use my own HD and format it correctly and do the work myself.



I'm quite handy with PCs and have lots of extra drives around, so I'd like to take option 3. I have linux and Windows and mac systems at my disposal and can do lots of low level work, but I'm not sure of the specific instructions.



All of the intructions i've read say I need to buy some software to format the drive or buy the drive. Is there freeware out there that I can use to format this correctly?



more questions:



1) does my HD need to be working to create a replacement?

2) In either case will i lose all of my data?

3) can I backup data and recover it, if I get the drive to spin up?

4) what format is the partition scheme in?

5) what have I forgotten?



Thanks for the help and advice.