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Tivo HD Upgrade Instructions - using JMFS

211K views 656 replies 114 participants last post by  unitron 
#1 ·
I thought it might be helpful to separate out the users that are trying to upgrade a Tivo HD using comer's JMFS tools. The original thread is here and the tools were designed for the Premiere, but based upon the experience of several members (including myself), it appears to work fine for Tivo HD's as well. If you intend to expand only to a maximum of 1.26TB, then you're probably better off sticking with WinMFS and the instructions in this thread.
If you're a little adventurous and you want to expand and fully utilize a 1.5TB/2.0TB drive, then you can try out this recipe:
  1. Use an original 160GB Tivo HD Drive - if it doesn't have the latest software, install it back into your Tivo HD and force it to upgrade to the latest version (11.0j currently).
  2. Burn a copy of JMFS Live onto a CD (or run it from a USB drive) from the Premiere Drive Upgrade thread. Follow those directions to connect and boot up with (1) the original 160GB Tivo HD drive and (2) the new 1.5TB/2.0TB drive.
  3. Run the menu item to do the disk copy from your original drive to your new drive.
  4. Run the menu item to do the expansion of your new drive.
  5. If you want to verify the AAM setting, you can go to the command line in JMFS and use "hdparm -M <device>". A value of 128 indicates that the drive is set for the quietest mode.
  6. Depending upon the drive you're using, you may also want to use "wdidle3.exe" to check and if necessary, disable the idle timeout for your drive to prevent a "soft reboot" issue. Please refer to Section IV, #29 of the original upgrade FAQ for the full details.
  7. If you want to supersize the drive for the Tivo HD, then DO NOT USE the JMFS menu option to Supersize!!! This option will only work with Premiere drives. Instead, shutdown and then connect the new drive to a computer with WinMFS and use WinMFS to "turn on supersize". On a 2TB drive, the WinMFS supersize will increase your recording time from 288 hrs to 318 hrs.
  8. Install the new drive back into your Tivo HD and enjoy!

Updated 2/11/2011 (and caveat added 8/14/2011):
Thanks to some pioneering work by KenVa, if you wish to keep all of the shows on your current THD, you can possibly use a WinMFS expanded drive as a source (see teiland's posts starting here to confirm the state of your WinMFS source drive for some possible issues):
  1. Burn a copy of JMFS Live (at least v1.04) onto a CD (or run it from a USB drive) from the Premiere Drive Upgrade thread. Follow those directions to connect and boot up with (1) a WinMFS expanded, Tivo HD drive and (2) the new 1.5TB/2.0TB drive.
  2. Run the menu item to do the disk copy from your source drive to your new drive.
  3. Run the menu item to do the expansion of your new drive.
  4. If you want to verify the AAM setting, you can go to the command line in JMFS and use "hdparm -M <device>". A value of 128 indicates that the drive is set for the quietest mode.
  5. Depending upon the drive you're using, you may also want to use "wdidle3.exe" to check and if necessary, disable the idle timeout for your drive to prevent a "soft reboot" issue. Please refer to Section IV, #29 of the original upgrade FAQ for the full details.
  6. If you want to supersize the drive for the Tivo HD, then DO NOT USE the JMFS menu option to Supersize!!! This option will only work with Premiere drives. Instead, shutdown and then connect the new drive to a computer with WinMFS and use WinMFS to "turn on supersize". On a 2TB drive, the WinMFS supersize will increase your recording time from 288 hrs to 318 hrs. If you already did the "turn on supersize" step with your source drive, you do not need to do it with the new drive as well - that setting will have been copied over already.
  7. Install the new drive back into your Tivo HD and enjoy!

Notes:

Thanks:
  • Props to comer for building the JMFS tools and also to retiredqwest for being the pioneering, first brave soul to try out and document success with the Tivo HD (and particularly for using WinMFS to do the supersize)!
  • Thanks also to KenVa for showing us how to use an already expanded drive as a source for those that want to carry over their current recordings.
  • Thanks to teiland for identifying some additional issues with WinMFS source drives.
 
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#327 ·
About your second question, I think you probably can go >2TB. If I didn't already have two 2TB drives, I would have tried with a 2.5TB.
I finally succeeded, and can replicate, preparing a large drive for an HD Tivo.

At Basic Quality, a 2.5 TB drive yields 2965 hours.
At Basic Quality, a 2.0 TB drive yields 2776 hours.

I never could get Supersize to work in WinMFS. When I enable it, the Tivo constantly reboots. When I disable it, the new drive boots up fine and does not reboot constantly. I believe that my original failure was due to trying to Supersize in WinMFS. When I later went step by step, inserted the new drive in the HD Tivo and tested, Supersize (in WinMFS) was the only hang up.

I had ordered a WD25EURS before the huge price increase. Now, I will have to wait until the price comes down to get more drives.

Also, I learned that I could back up the original 160 GB drive using WinMFS, then restore it to the 2.5 TB or 2.0 TB drive using the swap size of 999. (Thank you to the person who posted that!!!!) Then, I expanded the drive in JMFS. I did not have the Apple partition problem, so I did not need the in-between step of using a 500 GB drive.

If you restore in WinMFS, do not Add or Expand in WinMFS. Just restore the 160 GB image. Then go to JMFS.

When everything was done, nothing that I tried could get Supersize to work in WinMFS. I had used this option many times for a 1.5 TB drive, but just could not get it to work on the 2.0 or 2.5 TB drives. I had to turn it off to keep the drives from rebooting.

I think that the 2.0 TB drive yielded 318 HD hours, which is the same that someone else reported who said they got Supersize to work. I think the 2.5 TB drive yielded 339 HD hours.

For the 2.0 TB drive I used a green Seagate that I got at Fry's.

Here is another interesting point. I believe, but am not certain, that the very first time I tried to format the 2.5 TB drive, JMFS told me that it 2.19 TBs had been used. Then I finally got Comcast to pair the cable card and repeated the process, I could not get more than 2.14 TBs.

As to the issue of WDIdle3, I did this on the 2.5 TB drive before realizing that this step was unnecessary. So, I could not undo that. I did not perform this step on the 2.0 TB Seagate drive, and it was not necessary.

Originally, I was using WDIdle3 ver 1.0. I also tried WDIdle3 ver 1.4. The more recent version did not prevent the rebooting, one way or another on the 2.5 TB drive. Only disabling Supersize, stopped the reboot problem.
 
#328 ·
I finally succeeded, and can replicate, preparing a large drive for an HD Tivo.

At Basic Quality, a 2.5 TB drive yields 2965 hours.
At Basic Quality, a 2.0 TB drive yields 2776 hours.

I never could get Supersize to work in WinMFS. When I enable it, the Tivo constantly reboots. When I disable it, the new drive boots up fine and does not reboot constantly. I believe that my original failure was due to trying to Supersize in WinMFS. When I later went step by step, inserted the new drive in the HD Tivo and tested, Supersize (in WinMFS) was the only hang up.

I had ordered a WD25EURS before the huge price increase. Now, I will have to wait until the price comes down to get more drives.

Also, I learned that I could back up the original 160 GB drive using WinMFS, then restore it to the 2.5 TB or 2.0 TB drive using the swap size of 999. (Thank you to the person who posted that!!!!) Then, I expanded the drive in JMFS. I did not have the Apple partition problem, so I did not need the in-between step of using a 500 GB drive.

If you restore in WinMFS, do not Add or Expand in WinMFS. Just restore the 160 GB image. Then go to JMFS.

When everything was done, nothing that I tried could get Supersize to work in WinMFS. I had used this option many times for a 1.5 TB drive, but just could not get it to work on the 2.0 or 2.5 TB drives. I had to turn it off to keep the drives from rebooting.

I think that the 2.0 TB drive yielded 318 HD hours, which is the same that someone else reported who said they got Supersize to work. I think the 2.5 TB drive yielded 339 HD hours.

For the 2.0 TB drive I used a green Seagate that I got at Fry's.

Here is another interesting point. I believe, but am not certain, that the very first time I tried to format the 2.5 TB drive, JMFS told me that it 2.19 TBs had been used. Then I finally got Comcast to pair the cable card and repeated the process, I could not get more than 2.14 TBs.

As to the issue of WDIdle3, I did this on the 2.5 TB drive before realizing that this step was unnecessary. So, I could not undo that. I did not perform this step on the 2.0 TB Seagate drive, and it was not necessary.

Originally, I was using WDIdle3 ver 1.0. I also tried WDIdle3 ver 1.4. The more recent version did not prevent the rebooting, one way or another on the 2.5 TB drive. Only disabling Supersize, stopped the reboot problem.
Where to start, where to start.

Running wdidle 1, 2, 3, or whatever version, is done to disable intellipark, or at least set the time before it kicks in to several minutes instead of several seconds.

The reason to do this is because if the TiVo soft boots (i.e., restarts without power being shut off), the drive notices the controller isn't talking to it, and if intellipark is working the way it comes set from the factory, after about 8 seconds of this it parks the heads and goes into a sleep mode.

By the time the TiVo has booted up enough to query the drive, the drive is asleep. The TiVo doesn't know about this, it just thinks the drive is absent or non-responsive, so it reboots again, which turns off the controller's request for the drive to spin back up, so it parks the heads again and spins back down, so that when the TiVo's ready for it again, it's not ready for the TiVo.

If it were a hard boot (pull the power plug and then stick it back in), the drive will be awake and spun up when the TiVo calls on it.

Since a TiVo drive is always working, it's always awake, so intellipark isn't going to cause it to reboot. But if it soft reboots for some other reason, like the TiVo got an update and needs to reboot from the alternate partitions or something, intellipark is going to keep that from succeeding.

The 999 was so that I could use an intermediate drive to get a larger swap size, and setting it to 1000 or 1024 left me with a little extra at the end which got turned in to an Apple Free partition, which prevents jmfs from succeeding, because it doesn't understand that an Apple Free partition isn't really a partition and doesn't need to be protected from being overwritten.

I discovered it by accident, and still don't fully understand how or why it worked.

And I don't understand how you're managing not to get bitten by the Apple Free partition problem, but congrats.

Intellipark is strictly a Western Digital thing, so you're correct there's no need (or ability) to do anything to the Seagate.

Were you trrying to use WinMFS, and then jmfs, and then going back to use WinMFS to Supersize, or using WinMFS, including Supersizing, and then finishing with jmfs?
 
#329 ·
I never could get Supersize to work in WinMFS. When I enable it, the Tivo constantly reboots. When I disable it, the new drive boots up fine and does not reboot constantly. I believe that my original failure was due to trying to Supersize in WinMFS. When I later went step by step, inserted the new drive in the HD Tivo and tested, Supersize (in WinMFS) was the only hang up..
I ran into this also with a Hatachi 2TB drive. I didn't bother posting about it since I seemed to be the only one having the problem.
 
#330 ·
I finally succeeded, and can replicate, preparing a large drive for an HD Tivo.

At Basic Quality, a 2.5 TB drive yields 2965 hours.
At Basic Quality, a 2.0 TB drive yields 2776 hours.

<snip>

I think that the 2.0 TB drive yielded 318 HD hours, which is the same that someone else reported who said they got Supersize to work. I think the 2.5 TB drive yielded 339 HD hours.

For the 2.0 TB drive I used a green Seagate that I got at Fry's.

Here is another interesting point. I believe, but am not certain, that the very first time I tried to format the 2.5 TB drive, JMFS told me that it 2.19 TBs had been used. Then I finally got Comcast to pair the cable card and repeated the process, I could not get more than 2.14 TBs.
It is interesting that you were able to get a TiVo to use a 2.5TB drive, since TiVos (running their current version of Linux) aren't supposed to be able to address any drive larger than 2TB (or maybe 2.19TB). But it would be more of a breakthrough if somebody could get a TiVo to actually use all of a 2.5TB or 3TB drive.
 
#331 ·
Can I use the JMFS boot disk to create a 2 TB drive from a winMFS created 1 TB drive that will work in an original Series 3? I'm wading through all this, but if anyone has a quick answer, i.e., yes/no it would help me before I start taking things apart and giving it a try.
 
#333 ·
Can I use the JMFS boot disk to create a 2 TB drive from a winMFS created 1 TB drive that will work in an original Series 3? I'm wading through all this, but if anyone has a quick answer, i.e., yes/no it would help me before I start taking things apart and giving it a try.
I think the latest thinking at this point is that you can't use all of a 2TB drive in an original S3, and I'm not sure if you can even use less than that if it's on a 2TB drive.

Somewhere around here, probably in the

Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784

in the S3 forum

there's some discussion about which models can use what size drive or how much space you can get maximum with or without adding an external, although the majority opinion seems to be that adding an external just increases your chances of drive problems.

At least the original S3 isn't limited to just the approved WD externals the way the HDs and the S4s are.
 
#334 ·
Great thread!
The OEM 160GB drive in my TiVo-HD was becoming erratic (it's mfg date was Sept 2007) so I followed the instructions on page 1 and on the Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ page (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784) to use a spare WD GreenPower 500GB drive I had on hand. Prepped the drive with the Wdidle3 and HDDScan (for acoustic management), imaged my OEM drive with Mfslive (run as admin in Win7), then wrote that image back to the new 500Gb drive- popped the new drive in the TiVo and it booted right up and has been flawless since last night.

Big thanks to the thread starter!! Bought that 500GB drive before the floods for under $50 :)
 
#335 ·
Well, I have a 2tb drive that I'm trying to use. So far, I've found:
- the USB/SATA adapter I have doesn't work on the 2TB drive, only the smaller one. As some posts have noted, it seems to have to do with the electronics on the adapter. Caveat emptor
- I've done both winmfs and mfslive to create a 1.2TB image that works. No problems in operation.
- I've tried using jmfs to copy the 160gb over to my 2tb disk, and then used the expand portion. After the long initial boot, it seems to work. But I have had some odd behaviors (thinks like hdmi cable "Viewing not permitted") but I'm not sure if thats the disk. One thing I have seen is that it creates a 1.7TB partition, and unless the new software can handle it, that is too large. So, I then tried:
- Using winmfs to create a 160gb image, a 1TB image, etc (lots of permutations) on my 2tb disk, and then tried to use jmfs to expand and create the last partition. My thinking being that we need to have less than 16 partitions, and no partition should be larger than 1tb.

Its the last scenario that has me stumped. Jmfs just doesn't seem to work with any disk that winmfs creates. If I use jmfs to copy over the image, its happy. But if I use winmfs to copy it over, it just fails the expand every time.
Thoughts on where to go from here?

Oh and final note. Somewhat handicapped. My native box is a laptop; have to borrow a desktop with SATA connections to do most of this playing.
 
#336 ·
Well, I have a 2tb drive that I'm trying to use. So far, I've found:
- the USB/SATA adapter I have doesn't work on the 2TB drive, only the smaller one. As some posts have noted, it seems to have to do with the electronics on the adapter. Caveat emptor
- I've done both winmfs and mfslive to create a 1.2TB image that works. No problems in operation.
- I've tried using jmfs to copy the 160gb over to my 2tb disk, and then used the expand portion. After the long initial boot, it seems to work. But I have had some odd behaviors (thinks like hdmi cable "Viewing not permitted") but I'm not sure if thats the disk. One thing I have seen is that it creates a 1.7TB partition, and unless the new software can handle it, that is too large. So, I then tried:
- Using winmfs to create a 160gb image, a 1TB image, etc (lots of permutations) on my 2tb disk, and then tried to use jmfs to expand and create the last partition. My thinking being that we need to have less than 16 partitions, and no partition should be larger than 1tb.

Its the last scenario that has me stumped. Jmfs just doesn't seem to work with any disk that winmfs creates. If I use jmfs to copy over the image, its happy. But if I use winmfs to copy it over, it just fails the expand every time.
Thoughts on where to go from here?

Oh and final note. Somewhat handicapped. My native box is a laptop; have to borrow a desktop with SATA connections to do most of this playing.
Can you get hold of a 1TB drive to use for a day or so?

What I wound up doing was copying the 160 to a 1TB (and increasing the size of the swap partition in the process) and expanding (adding partitions 14 and 15) with WinMFS.

For some reason MFS Live will leave a little extra bit of space at the end of that 1TB drive, which gets read as an Apple Free partition and defeats jmfs, but WinMFS uses all of the space.

Then I used jmfs to copy from the 1TB to a 2TB and then create the 16th partition, which was less than 1 binary TB.

The key is to not have an Apple Free partition (which is how the Apple Partition Map and stuff that can read it interprets unpartitioned space), because jmfs sees this as a partition and creates a 17th partition.

The HD sees this as a screwed up external drive, makes you divorce it, and that leaves you with a 2TB drive of which you can only use 1TB.
 
#337 ·
Thanks for your reply unitron. Yeah, a 1TB drive would make things easier, but no, no access. When I tried the jmfs on the drive, the expand just failed; didn't even create something with the extra 17th partition.

When I created the winmfs 1tb drive, it creates only 15 partitions, so I thought it would be ok. But for whatever reason, JMFS doesnt even try to process it.
 
#338 ·
Thanks for your reply unitron. Yeah, a 1TB drive would make things easier, but no, no access. When I tried the jmfs on the drive, the expand just failed; didn't even create something with the extra 17th partition.

When I created the winmfs 1tb drive, it creates only 15 partitions, so I thought it would be ok. But for whatever reason, JMFS doesnt even try to process it.
MFS Live has a thing called

pdisk

and

pdisk -l

will show Apple Partition Maps

(that's a lowercase L after the hyphen)

It also has a thing called mfsinfo that gives useful info.

WinMFS has mfsinfo, and it's version displays the partition map as part of its output.

Clues can be found that way.

Unfortunately, I don't know nearly as much about how jmfs works as I'd like to.
 
#339 ·
MFS Live has a thing called

pdisk

and

pdisk -l

will show Apple Partition Maps

(that's a lowercase L after the hyphen)

It also has a thing called mfsinfo that gives useful info.

WinMFS has mfsinfo, and it's version displays the partition map as part of its output.

Clues can be found that way.

Unfortunately, I don't know nearly as much about how jmfs works as I'd like to.
I could swear that I had done a winmfs 1tb upgrade, then did the msinfo and plist and saw only 15 partitions, no "apple free" ones after. I'm in the process of doing a winmfs 1tb, let it do its download to see if it cleans up any pointers and structures, then I'm going to double check with jmfs.

But all that aside, assuming that there are no extra hidden APM partitions, am I just barking up the wrong tree? And can any one tell me what it is about a jmfs copy that makes this work, vs using winmfs to copy/create the disk?
 
#340 ·
I could swear that I had done a winmfs 1tb upgrade, then did the msinfo and plist and saw only 15 partitions, no "apple free" ones after. I'm in the process of doing a winmfs 1tb, let it do its download to see if it cleans up any pointers and structures, then I'm going to double check with jmfs.

But all that aside, assuming that there are no extra hidden APM partitions, am I just barking up the wrong tree? And can any one tell me what it is about a jmfs copy that makes this work, vs using winmfs to copy/create the disk?
WinMFS only knows how to do expanding by adding MFS pairs, and TiVos seem to have a 3 pairs per drive limitation. The 160 already has 2 pairs, so that's 1,840GB left to fill going onto a 2TB. TiVos also seem to have a 1.1TB per partition limitation.

MFS pairs seem to be one fairly small partition containing I'm not sure what and one much bigger one where the actual shows get recorded. So there's no way to use all of that 1,840GB as just a single MFS pair.

TiVo also has a 16 partitions of any kind per drive limitation. If you copy the 160 to a bigger drive and add an MFS pair, that leaves you with 15 partitions, not counting any free space that gets counted as an Apple Free partition.

Unlike MFS Live and WinMFS, which both see an Apple Free partition as something they can overwrite with another MFS pair, jmfs sees it and preserves it as a valid partition.

If you can fully fill a drive with those first 15 partitions, jmfs can copy that to a larger drive and create a single MFS media partition, which becomes partition 16.

If you go straight to a 2TB from the 160 with jmfs, I don't know if it can create the 3rd MFS pair, partitions 14 and 15, and then add a single one or not.

What I do know is that if you do it that way you are stuck with the original size swap partition, and I didn't want to settle for that, which is why I beat my head against the wall until I figured out how to use WinMFS to fully fill a 1TB and then copy that with jmfs to a 2TB and add that 16th partition.

I spend a lot of time with MFS Live trying swap sizes just a little bigger or just a little smaller than my intended goal of 1GB, trying to keep from getting an Apple Free partition at the end, but it never happened. After about the 7th or 8th time I think I even heard it snicker at me.

Somewhere there's a thread where comer (the jmfs guy) talks about developing it, but it gets a little too far down into the weeds and makes my head hurt.
 
#341 ·
SO, I just completed taking my virgin 160MB drive THD, allowed it to upgrade to 11.0k, and then copied and expanded via JMFS to a 2TB drive.

Booted fine, ended up with the original 13 partions with the new 14th MFS media region 3 partition with size of 1.7TB. Wowza! Was a little surprised to see that not paired with an application region partition, but in reading through this thread, that is not unexpected.


My only concern right now is that the Swap size is still only 128MB. In looking back in this thread, almost all of the success reports are about initial setups.

I'm really nervous about this, but not sure how to get around it at this point, or if it is truly necessary.

It's a huge pain to get my devices re-paired by TWC, so before I plunge forward, thought I'd ask ... have many of you been running at 2TB with the original swap size?



I guess --- if I had to --- I could WinMFS or MFS copy a truncated 160GB image to a 250GB drive with expanded swap space only, and THEN JMFS copy and expand to the 2TB drive. But I've had this open for so long now my wife is going to have my head soon.
 
#342 ·
SO, I just completed taking my virgin 160MB drive THD, allowed it to upgrade to 11.0k, and then copied and expanded via JMFS to a 2TB drive.

Booted fine, ended up with the original 13 partions with the new 14th MFS media region 3 partition with size of 1.7TB. Wowza! Was a little surprised to see that not paired with an application region partition, but in reading through this thread, that is not unexpected.

My only concern right now is that the Swap size is still only 128MB. In looking back in this thread, almost all of the success reports are about initial setups.

I'm really nervous about this, but not sure how to get around it at this point, or if it is truly necessary.

It's a huge pain to get my devices re-paired by TWC, so before I plunge forward, thought I'd ask ... have many of you been running at 2TB with the original swap size?

I guess --- if I had to --- I could WinMFS or MFS copy a truncated 160GB image to a 250GB drive with expanded swap space only, and THEN JMFS copy and expand to the 2TB drive. But I've had this open for so long now my wife is going to have my head soon.
That larger than 1TB partiton worries me a little.

Do you happen to have a 1TB drive you could use as a middle man temporarily?

Based on my experience so far, the only way to expand the size of the swap partion is with the MFS Live cd or WinMFS (except perhaps for the guys who know enough to know how to create their own MFS partitions and such).

That, of course, means copying to a larger drive when you make the swap larger. Which means you'll need to let it also create the 14th and 15th partitions (the 3rd MFS pair) without leaving any space unused to become an Apple Free partition, because jmfs will recognize that Apple Free partition as the 16th partition and copy it along with everything else, and then create a 17th partition when it does its single MFS media partition thing, and when the TiVo boots, it'll think that 17th partition is a bad external drive and insist that you divorce it, which will leave you with that space unavailable.

I've found that MFS Live seems to leave a little space at the end no matter how I tweak the swap size, but WinMFS doesn't.

So, if you can use a 1TB temporarily, use WinMFS to copy the 160 to it with a new swap size of 1000, and expand, test in TiVo just to be sure, then use jmfs to copy it to the 2TB drive and add one more partition which will be under the alleged 1.1TB limit.

The old rule was a limit of 3 MFS pairs per drive and, when we were talking S1 and S2 IDE master and slave, 6 pairs overall, with a limit of 16 partitions of any kind per drive.

Somehow jmfs can bend that rule by creating a single MFS media partition without the other half of the pair and apparently there's something in the HD and Series 4 software that lets it get away with that.

The 16 partitions per drive rule seems to still be in force, however.
 
#343 ·
No extra drive available. I was thinking I could use win mds to restore and add a larger swap without expanding the drive and then use jmfs to expand. I don want to b a pioneer, but I thought the 1tb limit for partitions had been defeated in recent versions. Sigh...

That larger than 1TB partiton worries me a little.

Do you happen to have a 1TB drive you could use as a middle man temporarily?

Based on my experience so far, the only way to expand the size of the swap partion is with the MFS Live cd or WinMFS (except perhaps for the guys who know enough to know how to create their own MFS partitions and such).

That, of course, means copying to a larger drive when you make the swap larger. Which means you'll need to let it also create the 14th and 15th partitions (the 3rd MFS pair) without leaving any space unused to become an Apple Free partition, because jmfs will recognize that Apple Free partition as the 16th partition and copy it along with everything else, and then create a 17th partition when it does its single MFS media partition thing, and when the TiVo boots, it'll think that 17th partition is a bad external drive and insist that you divorce it, which will leave you with that space unavailable.

I've found that MFS Live seems to leave a little space at the end no matter how I tweak the swap size, but WinMFS doesn't.

So, if you can use a 1TB temporarily, use WinMFS to copy the 160 to it with a new swap size of 1000, and expand, test in TiVo just to be sure, then use jmfs to copy it to the 2TB drive and add one more partition which will be under the alleged 1.1TB limit.

The old rule was a limit of 3 MFS pairs per drive and, when we were talking S1 and S2 IDE master and slave, 6 pairs overall, with a limit of 16 partitions of any kind per drive.

Somehow jmfs can bend that rule by creating a single MFS media partition without the other half of the pair and apparently there's something in the HD and Series 4 software that lets it get away with that.

The 16 partitions per drive rule seems to still be in force, however.
 
#344 ·
Well, grabbed a hold of my friend's pc for a few hours and verified. My winmfs expanded drive (expanded to 1tb out of the 2tb on the disk) had only 15 partition in use, and couldn't see any other partitions. Not quite sure why jmfs can't expand and add the last partition to this disk.

Gonna beg borrow steal a 1 tb and do the one known safe way that I know of, i.e. create a 1tb disk, then use jmfs to copy it off onto the 2tb and expand it. I still have no idea of what that jmfs copy does, but it seems like its the one documented version that works.

In the meantime, since it will be a few days (and I'm not beholden to keep my shows), I just did what post 1 said to do, i.e. used jmfs to copy my 160gb drive directly, and expanded it. I'm just going to record everything in sight to see if I cant exceed that 1tb size and see if it still works.
 
#345 ·
Well, grabbed a hold of my friend's pc for a few hours and verified. My winmfs expanded drive (expanded to 1tb out of the 2tb on the disk) had only 15 partition in use, and couldn't see any other partitions. Not quite sure why jmfs can't expand and add the last partition to this disk.

Gonna beg borrow steal a 1 tb and do the one known safe way that I know of, i.e. create a 1tb disk, then use jmfs to copy it off onto the 2tb and expand it. I still have no idea of what that jmfs copy does, but it seems like its the one documented version that works.

In the meantime, since it will be a few days (and I'm not beholden to keep my shows), I just did what post 1 said to do, i.e. used jmfs to copy my 160gb drive directly, and expanded it. I'm just going to record everything in sight to see if I cant exceed that 1tb size and see if it still works.
Did you use mfsinfo in WinMFS to see the partition map?

If you look at the drive with pdisk from the MFS Live cd (a copy of which you should have even if you don't have a TiVo), it'll probably show a 16th Apple Free partition, which takes up the rest of that 2TB.

jmfs probably sees that 16th partition as well, and considers the drive already filled.

What jmfs does is copy the original drive using dd or dd_rescue or ddrescue to do it byte for byte, "Xeroxing" it, so to speak, and then fills any leftover space on the target drive with a single MFS media partition. Which means it copies the swap partition the same size it already is on the original drive.

The thing to do is use WinMFS to copy the original drive to a 1TB, expanding swap to 1000 (i.e., 1000MB, or 1GB, which is only about 15 minutes worth of video space, so you can spare it), and then let it expand into the rest of the 1TB by adding an MFS pair, partitions 14 and 15, and make sure that it completely fills the drive with no Apple Free partition at the end. You may need to reboot the computer and launch WinMFS again to be absolutely sure.

Once you've got the 1TB filled that way, power off, disconnect everything but the cd-rom drive (or dvd), the 1TB and the 2TB, and boot with the jmfs 1.04 cd and let it copy the 1TB to the 2TB, which will take quite a while, and then expand by adding that 16th MFS partition.
 
#346 ·
Did you use mfsinfo in WinMFS to see the partition map?

If you look at the drive with pdisk from the MFS Live cd (a copy of which you should have even if you don't have a TiVo), it'll probably show a 16th Apple Free partition, which takes up the rest of that 2TB.

jmfs probably sees that 16th partition as well, and considers the drive already filled.

What jmfs does is copy the original drive using dd or dd_rescue or ddrescue to do it byte for byte, "Xeroxing" it, so to speak, and then fills any leftover space on the target drive with a single MFS media partition. Which means it copies the swap partition the same size it already is on the original drive.

The thing to do is use WinMFS to copy the original drive to a 1TB, expanding swap to 1000 (i.e., 1000MB, or 1GB, which is only about 15 minutes worth of video space, so you can spare it), and then let it expand into the rest of the 1TB by adding an MFS pair, partitions 14 and 15, and make sure that it completely fills the drive with no Apple Free partition at the end. You may need to reboot the computer and launch WinMFS again to be absolutely sure.

Once you've got the 1TB filled that way, power off, disconnect everything but the cd-rom drive (or dvd), the 1TB and the 2TB, and boot with the jmfs 1.04 cd and let it copy the 1TB to the 2TB, which will take quite a while, and then expand by adding that 16th MFS partition.
Thanks again unitron. Yes, your plan is what I was figuring to do. There seems to be something magical about the jmfs copy off, so your plan is what I was doing, though I wasn't sure about the size of the swap. Im not sure about the 1GB swap though; I was planning on 500mb. I know conventional wisdom was bigger to avoid the GSOD, and there were some rule of thumbs to expand them, but 1GB seems excessive to me.

As for checking the drive, yup, I did. I used winmfs and took a look at the 1tb drive, as well as booting under jmfs and used the mfslayout.sh script. I was hoping to find the extra partition which I was prepared to smudge out (I forget the post, but there was one describing the APM layout and how to dd the partition, mod it, and write it back) but didn't. Argh.
 
#347 ·
Ok. So I don't have an extra drive. But I am using VMware and set up a 1tb virtual drive. So I use winmfs on the clean 160gb image and did a truncated image. Then used that image and applied it to the 1tb virtual drive with a 1024mb swap file. Mfs info did not show the apple free pseudo partition so I am now usin jmfs to copy the virtual 1 tb to the physicAl 2tb. This has been running for about 18 hours so far... Hopefully it will be worth it.

That larger than 1TB partiton worries me a little.
A
Do you happen to have a 1TB drive you could use as a middle man temporarily?

Based on my experience so far, the only way to expand the size of the swap partion is with the MFS Live cd or WinMFS (except perhaps for the guys who know enough to know how to create their own MFS partitions and such).

That, of course, means copying to a larger drive when you make the swap larger. Which means you'll need to let it also create the 14th and 15th partitions (the 3rd MFS pair) without leaving any space unused to become an Apple Free partition, because jmfs will recognize that Apple Free partition as the 16th partition and copy it along with everything else, and then create a 17th partition when it does its single MFS media partition thing, and when the TiVo boots, it'll think that 17th partition is a bad external drive and insist that you divorce it, which will leave you with that space unavailable.

I've found that MFS Live seems to leave a little space at the end no matter how I tweak the swap size, but WinMFS doesn't.

So, if you can use a 1TB temporarily, use WinMFS to copy the 160 to it with a new swap size of 1000, and expand, test in TiVo just to be sure, then use jmfs to copy it to the 2TB drive and add one more partition which will be under the alleged 1.1TB limit.

The old rule was a limit of 3 MFS pairs per drive and, when we were talking S1 and S2 IDE master and slave, 6 pairs overall, with a limit of 16 partitions of any kind per drive.

Somehow jmfs can bend that rule by creating a single MFS media partition without the other half of the pair and apparently there's something in the HD and Series 4 software that lets it get away with that.

The 16 partitions per drive rule seems to still be in force, however.
 
#348 ·
Ok. So I don't have an extra drive. But I am using VMware and set up a 1tb virtual drive. So I use winmfs on the clean 160gb image and did a truncated image. Then used that image and applied it to the 1tb virtual drive with a 1024mb swap file. Mfs info did not show the apple free pseudo partition so I am now usin jmfs to copy the virtual 1 tb to the physicAl 2tb. This has been running for about 18 hours so far... Hopefully it will be worth it.
A virtual hard drive? What did you store it on? I know you ain't got 2TB of RAM in one machine.
 
#349 ·
Have you ever used VMWARE or Parallels? WIthin your virtual machine, you create virtual hard drives. One neat thing is that you can define a hard drive, but until the space is used, the real size on the host machines hard disk it is much smaller. I guessed (correctly) that most of the 1TB space would be "empty" (or at least highly compressible), so it didn;t come close -- in fact I just checked and the actual space used was 895MB to represent the 1TB image.



SO the real test will be next few days. I completed the 2TB expansion and I'm running clear and delete right now, and I'll start some recording tomorrow if the annoying Time warner cable can be bothered to pair the cards tomorrow.


Just realize, I forgot to run WIn MDF to supersize and check the final partitioning.
 
#350 ·
So it all ended pretty well I think. My upgrade seems to be a success even though Time Warner took forever to pair the cable cards correctly. Took over three days.! Also it turns out I believe my 1.7 GB partition would have worked its I forgot that I was using a custom kernal --- Something we discuss on about on the other forum. But the takeaway is using a virtual drive as an intermediate step seems viable.
 
#351 ·
Well, still trying to take one for the team here. Before I do known copy to 1TB then jmfs to flow it onto a 2tb, I'm still trying out my direct 160gb to 2tb jmfs copy. Works, and I'm trying to copy everything in sight till it exceeds the 1TB barrier and see if it still works.

So far, about 260gb of programs recorded (so I know I'm at least using the >1tb partition). I've also had some weird behavior: the green screen of death (which it recovered from) and several reboots. My question is, is this bad behavior? Should I just give up the ghost? Or typical of a tivo?
 
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