Wing Wong over at the Winged Power Photography blog has a great, and delightfully detailed, post on how to upgrade your Tivo's hard drive using a Mac and VMware Fusion.

Wing's problem was one that a lot of Mac users are familiar with: a specialized peripheral (in this case, a Tivo DVR), that needs specialized software to update it (whether we're talking about a Garmin GPS, Nokia cell phone, and so on), but which software doesn't run on Mac OS X.

In this case, when removing a drive from your Tivo (Because 40 GB of Battlestar Galactica, Mythbusters, and Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, just isn't enough!) in order to put a bigger one in there, to prep your new drive, and also to push your old content over onto the new drive, you need to run specific Linux-based tools from MFS Live .

In this case, VMware Fusion comes to the rescue, letting you run that Linux MFS Live ISO as a virtual machine, to prep your new, beefier drive, so you can spend even more time in front of the tube, catching up on email and your favorite shows (at least, that's what I would do with a larger drive...YMMV ; ) 

Most people think of VMware Fusion at the best way to run Windows on a Mac, but as Wing shows us, there are lots of mainstream reasons why VMware Fusion's ability to run Windows, Linux, and more than 60 other operating systems on the Mac, can be a total lifesaver.

Check out the full glory of Wing's post here, and when you've got your own neat hack or VMware Fusion story, let us know, and we'll make sure to blog it.  Hit us up at teamfusion AT vmware DOT com.