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Can I use WD25EURS (2.5TB) for 2.2 TB storage with Series 3?

9K views 39 replies 12 participants last post by  cniessen 
#1 ·
I currently have Series 3 with dual drives, 750GB internal and 1TB eSata.
I want to consolidate both into a single internal drive of maximum capacity.
I have read that 2.2TB is the largest filesystem possible on Series 3. It seems most people put in a 2TB drive, but you miss out on that last 0.2 TB of potential storage. Can I install a 2.5TB drive (WD25EURS) and get a full 2.2TB available? I'm fine with not accessing the remaining 0.3TB.

Furthermore, is WinMFS the best way to go? It seems to not have been updated in 4 years and the forum postings are also very old. Are there other tools or up to date resources?

I would like to copy everything, including recordings. Worst case I could truncate partitions and lose recordings, but I'd rather keep them if possible. I don't care how long it takes to copy. I don't want to lose season passes or cable-card configuration.

Any advice would be very welcome.
Thanks!
 
#27 ·
Do you have the updated source for the MFSLive disk (really, just the mfstools and friends)? Or is jmbach the only one with that?
I don't have the source, jmbach does.

He sent me an ISO from which I burned a CD. He used the Mint Linux implementation, and everything is done dropping down to the console.

The ISO is almost a Gigabyte in size, and with my upload speeds would take forever to upload anywhere, unfortunately.
 
#28 ·
Ggieseke has the more eloquent way of accomplishing this task. My modification of MFSLive tools was more of a brute force mod. I found the issue and modified everything potentially related to it whether it needed it or not.
 
#29 ·
Ggieseke has the more eloquent way of accomplishing this task. My modification of MFSLive tools was more of a brute force mod. I found the issue and modified everything potentially related to it whether it needed it or not.
I HOPE to have an easier way soon. Right now it's mostly just code running around in my head that hasn't leaked out through the keyboard yet. ;)
 
#30 ·
Ggieseke has the more eloquent way of accomplishing this task. My modification of MFSLive tools was more of a brute force mod. I found the issue and modified everything potentially related to it whether it needed it or not.
Can I get a copy of the source as it stands? I would be interested in knowing what the itch was that you were scratching. (Was it just converting everything that dealt with sectors from int32 to uint32? Or to uint64?) The only source code I have access to is the circa-2005 MFStools on sourceforge, which is pretty out of date at this point, and would probably be a painful starting point. I'd like to get the source so that I can better see whats going on, and modify the behavior if necessary.

Ideally, if I could get the original source and your modified tree, I can just diff it and see what you've done. Thanks!
 
#31 ·
Essentially you are correct. Have to change everything that is sector related that is a 32bit signed int to a 64bit signed int. Have to make sure the header files are changed as well. I am in the process of converting signed int to unsigned int and modify the logical decision points accordingly. It is much more tedious but, in my opinion, cleaner. I only modified two of the tools and one or two header files to get it to work for dougdingle. I probably won't have time to really work on it until Christmas. When I started programming there was no Internet so I haven't used things like github. Programming is a hobby and I don't have a lot of time for it. If you could make the signed int mod to all of the tools, that would help dougdingle with his last project. PM me with your email and I'll send you what I have.
 
#32 ·
If you fix MFSLive tools, there is a possibility that you can use the whole 2.5TB drive. The key for it to have a remote possibility of working is that the extended partition starts less than the 2TB limit and that it is less than 2TB in length.
 
#34 ·
You are probably right. Did not know if version 11.0m of the S3 software might have been compiled with that option.
Figured if it was attempted but failed then all that is lost is time.
 
#35 ·
If you fix MFSLive tools, there is a possibility that you can use the whole 2.5TB drive. The key for it to have a remote possibility of working is that the extended partition starts less than the 2TB limit and that it is less than 2TB in length.
Extended partition or expanded?

Isn't "extended partition" a DOS/MBR thing?
 
#36 ·
I am posting this in the hopes of inspiring others. And on a selfish note, because it would be great if someone came up with a way to do this with the internal drive having been increased in size once, so I could do my other S3.
In the described procedure, the copied media/app partitions that came from the external drive were "collapsed" into a pre-existing media partition, wasn't it (i.e., 13 was the pre-existing media partition, and 14 & 15 were the media/app partitions that were copied from the external drive. So if the TiVo can deal with a single (disk) partition that has not just the contents of a media and application partition jammed together (the coalesced partitions that WinMFS will create), but with multiple of each (since partition 13 at the end of the procedure is media,app,media in its contents, can this be taken further? Ie, could you collapse even more partitions together? So for your extend internal drive, can you just collapse the current 14 and 15 into 13, do the copy with miscopy, then tack those onto the end of the collapsed partition 13 (so it would be media,app,media,app,media all in one partition)? Have you tried that?

I was a little surprised that it was OK to collapse both 14 & 15 into a preexisting 13. I might have expected that it could deal with a concatenated media & app partition, but I'm a little surprised that it could deal with multiple concatenations.
 
#37 ·
Extended partition or expanded?

Isn't "extended partition" a DOS/MBR thing?
Don't ya know it's what I mean and not what I say. :p To be more precise, I meant to say is that the MFS partition that expands the recording space of the TiVo starts less than the 2TB boundary and does not extend more than 2TB in size. Now as previously stated, this may or may not work depending on what they did to the latest kernel.
 
#38 ·
Don't ya know it's what I mean and not what I say. :p To be more precise, I meant to say is that the MFS partition that expands the recording space of the TiVo starts less than the 2TB boundary and does not extend more than 2TB in size. Now as previously stated, this may or may not work depending on what they did to the latest kernel.
2.5TB -2TB means the original drive and its 13 partitions would have to have been 500Gb or greater, so only the HD XL would qualify in pre-S4 models.

Would be an interesting experiment though.

Now tell me how I can use a single 2TB in an S2DT. :)
 
#39 ·
could you collapse even more partitions together? So for your extend internal drive, can you just collapse the current 14 and 15 into 13, do the copy with miscopy, then tack those onto the end of the collapsed partition 13 (so it would be media,app,media,app,media all in one partition)? Have you tried that?
No, haven't tried that. I'm under the assumption that there's a delicate dance in the partition numbering/count/pointers between the internal and external drives, and that I couldn't just change the internal drive's partition count without messing up the recordings.

The various things we tried where we copied/moved large partitions around to try to collapse them all failed ( perhaps because of the procedures used). The two drive structure seems to be very insistent on form.
 
#40 ·
FWIW, I was not able to find sources for a recent version of pdisk that was TiVo-aware. Attached is a patch against the latest Apple version of pdisk

http://www.opensource.apple.com/tarballs/pdisk/pdisk-9.tar.gz

that makes it compile cleanly on a recent linux, and support the TiVo partition map (really, the funny TiVo block 0). You can't create a TiVo partition map from scratch, but you can edit existing ones, and this version will preserve the TiVo block 0.

This was compiled and tested on 32 and 64 bit versions of debian/ubuntu.
 

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