TiVo Community Forum banner
  • TiVoCommunity.com Ambassador Program Now Open! >>> Click Here

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.
 
See less See more
#3 ·
Yes, you pretty much have the methodology on expanding the THD.

2 things bear mentioning...

1. Dual docking stations are not recognized by the underlying linux OS on the JMFS CD.
Is this what you mean by a dual docking station? *sigh* That's annoying. I bought one thinking it would work, it just hasn't arrived yet.

2. You can NOT expand a THD previously expanded drive as the source for JMFS. JMFS will add the new partition, THD will not see it. JMFS was written for the Premiere, not the THD. That it even works is fortunate, so as to break the 1.2 GB barrier.
Yup, I can (re)confirm that. I'll expand on it a bit, in fact, though perhaps this is in the other thread. The JMFS software reports success and 287 hours on expanding. But the THD on boot comes up to a "no external storage device found" page. If you :down::down::down:ENTER to confirm, you're allowed to divorce the external storage (which is really some odd side effect of trying JMFS to expand the previously upgraded drive which never did have an external drive).
 
#4 ·
[*]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.
2. You can NOT expand a THD previously expanded drive as the source for JMFS. JMFS will add the new partition, THD will not see it. JMFS was written for the Premiere, not the THD. That it even works is fortunate, so as to break the 1.2 GB barrier.
OK, this is an appropriate thread because I just today tried upgrading a TivoHD drive to 1 TB drive.

I *did* start with the orig 160 GB Tivo HD drive. But I *DID* use the JMFS supersize menu option.

The drive is currently working in my TivoHD.. but still has the same size (21 HD hours, 184 SD hours).

Is the fact that I used supersize the reason it didn't work? That's what I don't quite understand... I would kind of understand if it wasn't working at all.

I used supersize since it said it would use less advertizing space so I thought I'd get extra space even on just a 1 TB drive.
 
#5 ·
Is this what you mean by a dual docking station? *sigh* That's annoying. I bought one thinking it would work, it just hasn't arrived yet.
That is the one I have. It has something to do with port replicating using one USB cable. The Duet does work with Windows... FWIW

When I copied the THD drive I used a spare computer and connected the drives to the motherboard sata ports.
 
#6 ·
OK, this is an appropriate thread because I just today tried upgrading a TivoHD drive to 1 TB drive.

I *did* start with the orig 160 GB Tivo HD drive. But I *DID* use the JMFS supersize menu option.

The drive is currently working in my TivoHD.. but still has the same size (21 HD hours, 184 SD hours).

Is the fact that I used supersize the reason it didn't work? That's what I don't quite understand... I would kind of understand if it wasn't working at all.

I used supersize since it said it would use less advertizing space so I thought I'd get extra space even on just a 1 TB drive.
In step 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.
Remember, JMFS was written for the TP..... Comer does not even have a THD.
 
#10 ·
Thanks TIVOITIS for posting this procedure. It worked great!!!
Also, thanks to all that contributed to the hours coming up with the upgrades and procedures. I'll be donating soon!!!!

I tried just using jmfs exclusively and kept getting the the 21 HD hours on my 2TB drive. So with your procedure of combining the two methods, it worked for me. I now have 318 HD hours on my TIVO HD.

:D
 
#11 ·
I should have posted again last night. Redoing everything the same except NOT supersizing, my 1 tb drive now shows up expanded on my tivohd.

Now I'll have to do the old method to expand my s3 drive since jmfs doesn't work with s3.

So I'll eventually post in the main jmfs thread that it should disallow supersize for tivohd drives.

This thread should maybe become a sticky.
 
#12 ·
OK, this is an appropriate thread because I just today tried upgrading a TivoHD drive to 1 TB drive.

I *did* start with the orig 160 GB Tivo HD drive. But I *DID* use the JMFS supersize menu option.

The drive is currently working in my TivoHD.. but still has the same size (21 HD hours, 184 SD hours).

Is the fact that I used supersize the reason it didn't work? That's what I don't quite understand... I would kind of understand if it wasn't working at all.

I used supersize since it said it would use less advertizing space so I thought I'd get extra space even on just a 1 TB drive.
Sorry, I haven't been on the site in a little while, but yes, the JMFS Supersize causes problems with THD's. I think you have to drop to the command line to try repairing it, but I'm not even sure if I ever got that to work - I think I pretty much always had to start from scratch if I did the JMFS Supersize instead of using the WinMFS Supersize.
 
#15 ·
SA-SMCvic: Are you saying that you have a single upgraded 2TB internal drive in your Tivo HD? I'd love to hear that that is possible since I just experienced my external hard drive failing. previously I had upgraded my Tivo HD to 1TB internal hd and 1TB external hard drive. Now the external drive failed (which I see is a weak point in this upgraded scenario). Once I figure out if I can save my data in any fashion, I'd prefer a single 2TB internal hard drive.

Since the 2 drives are married, I don't know how I can try to recover data from a failing drive when it must stay married to another drive.

Thanks.
Lynn.
 
#16 ·
SA-SMCvic: Are you saying that you have a single upgraded 2TB internal drive in your Tivo HD? I'd love to hear that that is possible since I just experienced my external hard drive failing. previously I had upgraded my Tivo HD to 1TB internal hd and 1TB external hard drive. Now the external drive failed (which I see is a weak point in this upgraded scenario). Once I figure out if I can save my data in any fashion, I'd prefer a single 2TB internal hard drive.

Since the 2 drives are married, I don't know how I can try to recover data from a failing drive when it must stay married to another drive.

Thanks.
Lynn.
TiVo HD/HDXL 2TB Upgrade instructions: http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462179 (or you could scroll up to the first post of this thread ;))

You'll need to use your original hard drive for the 2TB upgrade. If you want to save your existing recordings you'll need to transfer any (that aren't protected) to another TiVo or to your computer using TiVo Desktop or KMTTG or a similar program and then transfer them back when you're done.
 
#17 ·
Now that I look at the first post on this thread, I note that it's for a basic TiVo HD (160GB HDD). I can't recall...has someone with a TiVo HDXL (1TB HDD) used jmfs to upgrade to a 2TB drive? I can't see any reason it wouldn't work, but it would be good to have confirmation. TIA
 
#18 ·
Rich - I have a basic Tivo HD. I upgraded with your wonderful guidance 1 1/2 years ago. I do have the original drive - is the upgrade to 2TB any harder than the upgrade I did using Winmfs?

Now the big problem is that I can't get the external hard drive to work - Tivo keeps saying the external hard drive is missing. I was hoping it would work at least once so I could transfer my recordings. (I did post about this on a separate thread - but haven't gotten responses:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8351241#post8351241

Thanks.
Lynn.
 
#19 ·
SA-SMCvic: Are you saying that you have a single upgraded 2TB internal drive in your Tivo HD? I'd love to hear that that is possible since I just experienced my external hard drive failing. previously I had upgraded my Tivo HD to 1TB internal hd and 1TB external hard drive. Now the external drive failed (which I see is a weak point in this upgraded scenario). Once I figure out if I can save my data in any fashion, I'd prefer a single 2TB internal hard drive.

Since the 2 drives are married, I don't know how I can try to recover data from a failing drive when it must stay married to another drive.

Thanks.
Lynn.
I upgraded a TiVo HD to 1TB and more recently a Premiere to 2TB. It is my understanding that the 2TB upgrade also works to expand an original TiVo HD drive, but you then have to use a different method to "Supersize" it (to recover those last few hours of recording space).

If your external drive is readable, you might be able to clone it to an identical drive using Acronis or something similar, but if you try that then use the bootable CD version. You need something that can copy raw data from one drive to another. The consensus seems to be that you should not connect a TiVo drive to a computer running Windows. (I've cloned drives with Acronis, but not TiVo drives.)
 
#20 ·
Rich - I have a basic Tivo HD. I upgraded with your wonderful guidance 1 1/2 years ago. I do have the original drive - is the upgrade to 2TB any harder than the upgrade I did using Winmfs?

Now the big problem is that I can't get the external hard drive to work - Tivo keeps saying the external hard drive is missing. I was hoping it would work at least once so I could transfer my recordings. (I did post about this on a separate thread - but haven't gotten responses:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8351241#post8351241

Thanks.
Lynn.
See my answer there:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8354416#post8354416

Best of luck!
 
#21 ·
Now that I look at the first post on this thread, I note that it's for a basic TiVo HD (160GB HDD). I can't recall...has someone with a TiVo HDXL (1TB HDD) used jmfs to upgrade to a 2TB drive? I can't see any reason it wouldn't work, but it would be good to have confirmation. TIA
I can't confirm if JMFS will work with the Tivo HDXL (like you, I imagine that it would), but since WinMFS can work, I'd recommend that first. WinMFS can do a truncated backup and restore from that truncated backup, so it would be faster and more efficient to use that. Duplicating 1TB via JMFS, especially through a dock and the documented time it's taken others to duplicate the 320GB of the Premiere implies it might take 36 hours or so to duplicate the THDXL's 1TB.
 
#22 ·
I can't confirm if JMFS will work with the Tivo HDXL (like you, I imagine that it would), but since WinMFS can work, I'd recommend that first. WinMFS can do a truncated backup and restore from that truncated backup, so it would be faster and more efficient to use that. Duplicating 1TB via JMFS, especially through a dock and the documented time it's taken others to duplicate the 320GB of the Premiere implies it might take 36 hours or so to duplicate the THDXL's 1TB.
So you're recommending creating a truncated backup of a TiVo HDXL's 1TB drive via winMFS and then using that image to upgrade to a 2TB drive with jmfs? I understand the time concept being superior but since a 2TB upgrade can't be done using winMFS I guess I'm not clear on how or if that would work...or how it would work for folks wanting to save all of their recordings as well. Or am I confused (nothing unusual)?
 
#23 ·
L. David - thank you for the guidance about cloning with Acronis (if the drive is even readable) - and booting from the acronis bootable cd (and not letting windows run). So first I'll have to see if my drive is readable - not sure how to do this other than putting the drive in another enclosure (or esata dock?) - connect that to the Tivo HD - see if the Tivo can find the external drive?

Thanks.
Lynn.
 
#24 ·
L. David - thank you for the guidance about cloning with Acronis (if the drive is even readable) - and booting from the acronis bootable cd (and not letting windows run). So first I'll have to see if my drive is readable - not sure how to do this other than putting the drive in another enclosure (or esata dock?) - connect that to the Tivo HD - see if the Tivo can find the external drive?

Thanks.
Lynn.
If there's a problem with data corruption on the external drive, cloning it would just transfer the problem. If the drive itself is good and the enclosure is the problem, then putting it in another enclosure (probably not a dock per my other post) would resolve things.

In your case there's a very good chance that the problem is with the hard drive itself and not the enclosure since you're using an MX-1. The enclosure idea came from the experiences of folks using the original 500GB WD My DVR Expanders. Those enclosures seemed to cause about 50% of the failure rate. Your setup is different.

FWIW Windows used to auto-format drives back in the Win95 days or so. Now there's no problem connecting a TiVo drive to a Windows machine (something one must do to run winMFS of course). The issue arises if someone were to use Windows Disk Management to format the drive so that they could "see" the drive on their Windows machine via "My Computer". Doing that could/would wipe the boot partition making it useless to TiVo.

2nd FWIW, the free unix/linux programs dd or dd rescue can create an identical copy of a hard drive. But again, garbage in, garbage out or an unnecessary activity in this case.
 
#25 ·
So you're recommending creating a truncated backup of a TiVo HDXL's 1TB drive via winMFS and then using that image to upgrade to a 2TB drive with jmfs? I understand the time concept being superior but since a 2TB upgrade can't be done using winMFS I guess I'm not clear on how or if that would work...or how it would work for folks wanting to save all of their recordings as well. Or am I confused (nothing unusual)?
Hmm, maybe I'm confused. I was under the impression that a Tivo HDXL could be upgraded to 2TB using WinMFS because the original Tivo HDXL drive is already 1TB and can be expanded by a maximum of 1.1TB more, which could then max out a 2TB drive. In the case of the Tivo HD, we start with 160GB, so with WinMFS we would only be able to expand up to 1.26TB.

So my suggestion for Tivo HDXL owners (assuming that WinMFS does work in this situation) is to just use WinMFS. They can use the truncated backup if there are no shows they need to save or use the full copy (mfscopy) if they want to save their shows.
 
#26 ·
L. David - thank you for the guidance about cloning with Acronis (if the drive is even readable) - and booting from the acronis bootable cd (and not letting windows run). So first I'll have to see if my drive is readable - not sure how to do this other than putting the drive in another enclosure (or esata dock?) - connect that to the Tivo HD - see if the Tivo can find the external drive?

Thanks.
Lynn.
(I just saw your other thread.) I defer to Rich's judgment and (probably to a lesser extent) that of the TiVo tech. Rich is probably right that cloning isn't likely to get you anywhere, but when you have a clone in hand, even a corrupted one, you are free to "have your way with it" without fear of harming the original. Of course in your situation peace of mind would come only from having clones of both drives, internal and external.

One other thought, if money is no object: You could save both current drives pending some future breakthrough or insight and go ahead with your upgrade to a new 2TB drive (from the original 160GB) using Comer's JMFS. This would be like Dr. House putting the patient on ice to have more time for differential diagnosis. Once you've upgraded though, you would have to be pretty confident of success to take your TiVo apart again.

OK, one more thought: If money is really no object, this might be the time to consider buying a Premiere to use for the 2TB upgrade. Good luck!
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top