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Premiere Drive Upgrade Instructions - with all-in-one jmfs Live CD

800K views 3K replies 480 participants last post by  jmbach 
#1 ·
revision 104 - Nov-06-2010 - with Supersize!

**WARNING**
  1. Software is provided with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. Please read the licence terms (GPL v3).
  2. Opening your Tivo cover will void manufacturer's warranty.
  3. Although program is not designed to do (and actually attempts to prevent) data loss and distruction, it certainly has a potential to do so. It is ultimately YOUR responsibility to backup, stow away and otherwise protect your data.

If you like my work, buy me a beer... or milk... or a harddrive :D

OVERVIEW
This is a bootable Linux CD based on Slax distribution. It includes all software tools known to make a harddrive larger than the standard work in Tivo Premiere with expanded capacity.
Basic usage, suitable for most users who only want to expand their Tivo disk capacity, is fully guided, based on simple prompt-choice automated script.

Once again, for clarity's sake, if youd don't want to tinker, experiment and/or dig in the code or Tivo, the "USAGE BASIC" and some hardware is enough to set you up with larger Tivo Premiere drive!

It was ONLY TESTED ON PREMIERE DISK. Also, it was not tested and probably will not work on multi-disk configurations.

The full procedure of making a larger Tivo Premiere disk contains the following:
  • Taking the original disk out of the Tivo
  • Copying the original disk onto a new larger one
  • Doing modifications of structures on the new disk to make extra space available for Tivo
  • Installing the new disk back into Tivo.
This CD helps in doing steps #2 and #3 of this procedure.​

DOWNLOAD

Current: Download link (Mirror thanks coold8! :up:)
MD5 checksum:
Code:
a5ef24d6841f75c5c5cfd5fd703f6069 *./jmfs-rev104.iso.zip
Previous: Download link (Mirror courtesy of coold8 as well)
MD5 checksum:
Code:
c6241f5838cf5d1f4b451229b184f031 *./jmfs-rev68.iso.zip

REQUIREMENTS and PREREQUISITES
You will need:
  1. Your original Tivo disk
  2. New disk larger than Tivo's
  3. Computer that you can boot from CD or USB
  4. Jmfs Live CD
It implies that you also need an ability and willingness to:
  1. Open/close your Tivo box
  2. Take harddrive out of the Tivo and put harddrive back into it
  3. Connect/disconnect the original and the new harddrive to a computer using SATA or USB
  4. Burn ISO image on a CD or set up a bootable USB stick
  5. Boot up/shutdown a computer using the prepared bootable media
  6. Follow the guided prompt
  7. Wait for 2-4 hours for process to finish

USAGE BASIC

  • Download CD disk image (ISO). For basic usage you only need the "jmfs-*.iso.zip" file. Sources (jmfs-src*.zip) are also in the folder for those who want to build themselves. (download link above)
  • Unzip the ISO and burn it on CD
  • Connect a Tivo disk and a new large disk to a computer. SATA or USB - does not matter, it will work either way, but SATA is faster.
  • Boot that computer from the CD burned in step #2.
  • The guide will be started automatically, follow the prompts.
    • If you are upgrading from stock drive, you will need to do: Copy, Expand, Supersize - in that order.
    • If you are supersizing an already expanded drive, just do Supersize.
If you ever find yourself in a shell (command prompt) you can:
  • Restart the guide by
    • "/root/guide.sh" command
  • Shutdown the system by any of:
    • pressing Ctrl-D
    • "exit" command,
    • "logout" command
    • "poweroff" command
  • Reboot the system by any of:
    • pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del
    • "reboot" command
During the guided process there is a log file created "/root/log.log". If you experience any problems or errors please check that file for any extended error information. It would like to ask for assistance, please copy the log file somewhere, where you can access it later (e.g. mount an external USB drive or existing partitions and copy it there).

USAGE ADVANCED
You are in the root shell, no need to "sudo" anything.
You need to know your disk names. The source Tivo disk and the targer where you want to copy or the one you want to expand. To find harddrive names in the system:
  • run "fdisk -l" and make note of the device names and capacities (for ex. "Disk /dev/sda: 2000.3 GB").
  • run "hdparm -i <device>" (for ex. "hdparm -i /dev/sda") which will output the disk model (e.g. "/dev/sda: Model=WDC WD20EVDS-63T3B0")
All disks are made read-only on boot, so if you are planning to copy and/or expand, make your target drive writable by "chmod u+w <target drive path>" (e.g. "chmod u+w /dev/sda").

There are scripts included to run tools separately, outside of the guided prompt:

  • mfsadd.sh
    Expects 1 parameter - target drive for expansion (e.g. "/dev/sda").
    Drive must already contain copy of the original Tivo disk.
  • diskCopy.sh
    A "shortcut" for "ddrescue", expects two parameters: source disk and target disk or file name
    (e.g. "/dev/sda /dev/sdb" or "/dev/sda /mnt/sdb1/tivo.img").
  • mfslayout.sh
    Prints the layout of a Tivo disk. Usefull for testing/making sure the disk is OK.
    Expects 1 parameter - Tivo drive name (e.g. "/dev/sda").
  • jmfs.sh
    Base script to run a class from jmfs package. All arguments are passed to executed class.

BUILDING
You need Apache ANT 1.7.1 or above and JDK 1.6 or above.
The ANT build script is included with sources. The targets are:
  1. build (default)
    only compiles the sources.
  2. clean
    deletes all built files, so all sources will be recompiled
  3. package
    compiles and creates packages - jar, bin.zip and src.zip for distribution.
 
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#2,102 ·
ggieseke, I would like to try your compressed Premiere image. I just bought a Premiere without a hard drive installed, and this seems like the easiest way for me to get it working. I can't PM as I don't have enough posts yet.
What model number is it? The only image I have so far is for a TCD 746320, which should work fine on any 746 series. A few others like jmbach have gotten it to work on a 748 series because it recognizes that it has the wrong (or possibly outdated) software and updates itself, but there still may be some issues there - we're not sure yet.
 
#2,105 ·
MFSCOPY on the JMFS tool or Live MFS or WinMFS for that matter will work, any Linux Live CD will do it with dd.

Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024
(In from disk a, out to disk b)

BUT I'll bet you don't have a bad disk. Mine has done the freeze/reboot dance and I'm thinking the disk is OK. After I restarted to TV to clear HDCP confusion, my Premiere has stayed up but I've still gotten signs of impending failure with drops and slowdowns.

One suggestion so far has to been to see how solid the operation is when you keep the Ethernet cable unplugged as much as possible - with the SD menus. The HD menus will complain endlessly about no net access.
Is the blocksize option on the dd command important when you're cloning a disk?
 
#2,106 ·
Is the blocksize option on the dd command important when you're cloning a disk?
That depends on whether the source drive is in good shape or not.

Although if it has any problems at all you're better off using

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

but to go back to your original question, the larger the block size specified the fewer reads and writes will be necessary and that means you'll be done sooner.

As long as you don't set the block size too high.
 
#2,107 ·
That depends on whether the source drive is in good shape or not.

Although if it has any problems at all you're better off using

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

but to go back to your original question, the larger the block size specified the fewer reads and writes will be necessary and that means you'll be done sooner.

As long as you don't set the block size too high.
Well my source drive is in good shape. I did a clone with no parameters of a 1.5 TB disk and it took over 16 hours. The new drive is still questionable to me even though I ran all the tests I could and they all passed. BTW, this was a clone of Windows 7 c: drive. The resulting drive was not bootable and I think I may know why. There is probably a security mechanism related to Windows licensing that encodes something specific about the drive, such as the S/N, so that someone couldn't just clone drives and sell them. I ended up trying dd because the Acronis cloning software which came with the drive (DOM 2009) failed with the error "MFT bitmap corrupted". I ran chkdsk on my c: drive and received no errors, so I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact I'm running Windows 7 and the software Acronis software's date was sometime during Vista and something in the Windows 7 environment broke it. I'll probably call Seagate tomorrow if I can't find a resolution on my own. BTW, dd_rescue and ddrescue; there are 2 different utilities? When I saw someone write dd_rescue, I thought they just made a typo.
 
#2,108 ·
Well my source drive is in good shape. I did a clone with no parameters of a 1.5 TB disk and it took over 16 hours. The new drive is still questionable to me even though I ran all the tests I could and they all passed. BTW, this was a clone of Windows 7 c: drive. The resulting drive was not bootable and I think I may know why. There is probably a security mechanism related to Windows licensing that encodes something specific about the drive, such as the S/N, so that someone couldn't just clone drives and sell them. I ended up trying dd because the Acronis cloning software which came with the drive (DOM 2009) failed with the error "MFT bitmap corrupted". I ran chkdsk on my c: drive and received no errors, so I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact I'm running Windows 7 and the software Acronis software's date was sometime during Vista and something in the Windows 7 environment broke it. I'll probably call Seagate tomorrow if I can't find a resolution on my own. BTW, dd_rescue and ddrescue; there are 2 different utilities? When I saw someone write dd_rescue, I thought they just made a typo.
Is/was there a GigaByte brand motherboard involved in any of this?

Did you do the non-bootable cloning inside of Windows?

dd

is a Unix command line utility that actually came from somewhere else, which is why the syntax is different from most of the Unix command line stuff.

It's available on just about any of the bootable Linux environment cd's.

The Linux command line utility

dd_rescue

is on the MFS Live cd, and is much more flexible than

dd

Another Linux command line utility is

ddrescue

which is apparently what the jmfs cd uses for the copy part of what it does.

It, too, is more flexible than

dd

You might find

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

to be interesting reading.
 
#2,109 ·
Is/was there a GigaByte brand motherboard involved in any of this?
No, thank god. I read about those nightmares in this thread.

Did you do the non-bootable cloning inside of Windows?
No, I booted to SLAX.

dd

is a Unix command line utility that actually came from somewhere else, which is why the syntax is different from most of the Unix command line stuff.

It's available on just about any of the bootable Linux environment cd's.

The Linux command line utility

dd_rescue

is on the MFS Live cd, and is much more flexible than

dd

Another Linux command line utility is

ddrescue

which is apparently what the jmfs cd uses for the copy part of what it does.

It, too, is more flexible than

dd

You might find

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

to be interesting reading.
Thanks. I know this is the wrong thread to be discussing cloning a Windows 7 drive... I appreciate the patience.
 
#2,110 ·
No, thank god. I read about those nightmares in this thread.

No, I booted to SLAX.

Thanks. I know this is the wrong thread to be discussing cloning a Windows 7 drive... I appreciate the patience.
Maybe it's got something to do with the whole advanced format and GPT instead of an MBR thing.

Other than that, I got nothin'.

Unless it boots enough to read the S.M.A.R.T. data, including drive model and serial number, and realize that it's not on the same drive on which it was originally installed and balks at that, though I'd expect it to give you some kind of screen saying you had to re-validate the installation or something.

Okay, now I really got nothin'.
 
#2,111 ·
Maybe it's got something to do with the whole advanced format and GPT instead of an MBR thing.

Other than that, I got nothin'.

Unless it boots enough to read the S.M.A.R.T. data, including drive model and serial number, and realize that it's not on the same drive on which it was originally installed and balks at that, though I'd expect it to give you some kind of screen saying you had to re-validate the installation or something.

Okay, now I really got nothin'.
The manual which came with the DiskWizard software indicates that during cloning under Vista, the Vista OS disk will be needed for security purposes. Since Windows 7 is just an upgrade of Vista, I suspect the same thing would be true if I had the right version of DiskWizard. Therefore, merely cloning the disk leaves something out, some piece of security verification that I truly own the Windows 7 which I'm copying. BTW, other than not being bootable, the disk looks identical to the original. dd reported no errors. Also interesting is dd runs silently and there does not seem to be a switch to have it do otherwise, so once I executed the dd command, it just sat there for 16 hours doing its thing with no output to the screen.
 
#2,112 ·
The manual which came with the DiskWizard software indicates that during cloning under Vista, the Vista OS disk will be needed for security purposes. Since Windows 7 is just an upgrade of Vista, I suspect the same thing would be true if I had the right version of DiskWizard. Therefore, merely cloning the disk leaves something out, some piece of security verification that I truly own the Windows 7 which I'm copying. BTW, other than not being bootable, the disk looks identical to the original. dd reported no errors. Also interesting is dd runs silently and there does not seem to be a switch to have it do otherwise, so once I executed the dd command, it just sat there for 16 hours doing its thing with no output to the screen.
Whereas

dd_rescue

has a verbose option

-v

which causes it to constantly be putting updated figures on the screen.

ddrescue

probably does as well, but I don't have any experience with it to speak of.
 
#2,113 ·
Ok, now I am a little confused. I went to Seagate and downloaded their latest DiskWizard software. I ran the clone option and this time didn't get that bogus error (MFT bitmap corrupted). It went ahead and cloned the disk for me and it is bootable! However, it did NOT ask me for any verification of ownership of the OS. So, either

1) dd should have worked, or
2) DiskWizard is automagically doing something that makes the drive bootable.

:confused:
 
#2,114 ·
What model number is it? The only image I have so far is for a TCD 746320, which should work fine on any 746 series. A few others like jmbach have gotten it to work on a 748 series because it recognizes that it has the wrong (or possibly outdated) software and updates itself, but there still may be some issues there - we're not sure yet.
Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.
 
#2,115 ·
Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.
May we presume you used the jmfs cd to do the expansion?

Pity you didn't use a 2TB drive, as it's a one-shot only deal.
 
#2,117 ·
Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.
Glad it worked. That software is basically just the Windows equivalent of dd with a Microsoft dynamically expanding VHD as the target drive. Since the "amost virgin" source drive the image was based on still had huge chunks of space with all zeroes it compressed down fairly well.

Running it as administrator and doing a C&DE afterward is normal.

The next generation is still a work in progress but it's almost there. It can take any Premiere drive (even a 2TB XL4 with months of recordings) down to about 2.7GB, and zipping the resulting image knocks off another 30-40 percent. Once I tweak the "What Not to Backup" code a little further and run a lot more tests it should be ready.
 
#2,118 ·
I was going to use JMFS Live 104 Boot CD to upgrade my drive, but I get no Video (or it hangs, can't tell) on boot up.

I have an ASUS M5A88-M MOBO with integrated video. I tried going back to factory setting on the board, but no luck. I see the linux loading message (first two lines) then nothing.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
 
#2,119 ·
I was going to use JMFS Live 104 Boot CD to upgrade my drive, but I get no Video (or it hangs, can't tell) on boot up.

I have an ASUS M5A88-M MOBO with integrated video. I tried going back to factory setting on the board, but no luck. I see the linux loading message (first two lines) then nothing.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
See if the MFS Live cd v1.4 and the Ultimate Boot cd will boot on that board.

Then we'll have more info.

And you should have those cd's on hand for GP anyway.
 
#2,120 ·
Thanks for the quick reply!

I had an MFS 1.4 CD available and it only boots part way in text mode. Here are the last few lines .....

Intel machine check reporting enabled on CPU#0.
using C1E aware idle routine
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
ACPI: Core revision 20080926
weird, boot CPU (#0) not listedby the BIOS.
..TIMER: vector=0x30 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1
CPU0: AMD FX(tm)-4100 Quad-Core Processor
Booting processor 1 APIC 0x10 ip 0x6000

I will try ubcd shortly.

I have tried disabling APIC and shutting down two of the four cores with no luck.

Thanks in adavance for any more suggestions.
 
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