WeaKnees Interactive Online TiVo Upgrade Instructions [Text View] - Page 3

maxcat

07-12-2005, 08:25 PM

The interactive upgrade instructions are wonderful. I am going to attempt my own upgrade soon. A couple quick questions from a first timer, though.

1) I have an 3 year old spare pc I can use. there's nothing in it but a floppy drive - I assume I can simply boot from the floppy, there's no need to have an optical hooked up to it, or a windows boot drive, right?

2) How do I prepare my upgrade disk prior to running through the how-to?

Thanks all.

Philly Bill

07-12-2005, 11:37 PM

How much space is needed on the FAT drive to save a copy of an image (If I decide to do so)?

winders

07-13-2005, 04:38 AM

Rockmin, this happened to me as well. And the instructions have not been updated/changed.

So, when I have a 40, and want to ADD a 300, what I do is

a) mfsbackup the 40
b) mfsrestore using the "-s 127 -r 4" switches (plus the other params)
c) mfsadd the 300

Works every time. It might or might not be overkill, but if it works, who cares.

Except that 127MB of swap space is not enough for the amount of disk space you have to recover from a GSOD.

Scott

slaponte

07-13-2005, 01:50 PM

I haven't hit a GSOD yet, maybe just lucky. I tried to read up on the swap space thread but I tell you that gets very complex in a hurry and haven't found an easy way about it. Some of us don't want to make a tesis on this, just get it to work (once) and go with our lives.

For what I have read, specifying other than -s 127 on the command creates a problem. Seems to me the MFS tools need some bug fixes, but also seems these are "free" "as they come" and well I guess we have to wait until they are fixed.

If you have an easier way to solve the issue please post it. Buying a 40/80GB and adding a second (300+) drive seems to be an extremely common upgrade.

winders

07-13-2005, 02:44 PM

Sergio,

Look here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=243725

Scott

slaponte

07-13-2005, 05:56 PM

Scott, I notice there you recommend a -s 192 and -r 3.
You then have to tpip it to fix the header.

But there you are replacing a 40 with a 300, here we just want to add the 300.

Same?

winders

07-14-2005, 01:56 PM

Scott, I notice there you recommend a -s 192 and -r 3.
You then have to tpip it to fix the header.

But there you are replacing a 40 with a 300, here we just want to add the 300.

Same?

Yes....

Scott

jdavies9

07-14-2005, 03:47 PM

I have a single drive Phillips stand alone Series 1 that I upgraded from the original 30 GB to 120 GB a few years ago (I put the 30GB drive on a shelf). I now want to add a 160GB drive as a second drive, while preserving my recordings.

It appears that in the Hinsdale instructions Configuration #1 (and Weaknees interactive) that all I need to do is run the "mfsadd..." command. However, since I am past the 180GB barrier, the Hinsdale instructions suggest I need to do either Configuration #2 or #3 to increase the swap space, but that assumes TWO NEW drives -- not adding a drive as in #1.

Is there a safe way to add the 160GB?

UPDATE: I checked the old Hinsdale doc that I used when performing the orginal upgrade to the 120 GB drive, and I DID use the -s 127 switch on the mfsrestore. So, does that mean I can simply use mfsadd now to add the 160 GB drive as my B drive?

bnm81002

07-15-2005, 06:19 PM

Working on an overhaul for the new OS on these units . . .

so when exactly will the new UPDATED instructions be up and running? thanks

weaknees

07-15-2005, 06:20 PM

Sorry - working on it, but it's taking a bit of time . . .

bnm81002

07-15-2005, 06:23 PM

Sorry - working on it, but it's taking a bit of time . . .

but you will announce it on this forum when it's all done, correct? :p

Captain Scarlet

07-15-2005, 07:09 PM

Sorry - working on it, but it's taking a bit of time . . .

Hmmmm. Must be like the Thomson PVR10UK S1 model instructions. That one is certainly taking a bit of time to resolve.

Philly Bill

07-19-2005, 01:36 AM

I burned the weaknees_lba_boot_cd.iso. When I boot my XP box with it.. it comes up quick to the "boot:" prompt I believe. and I press ENTER to continue and it loads up linux and looks like I'm on my way.

But when I boot it in the Pentium MMX box I want to use to do my upgrade it boots, then when I get the boot: I press enter.. but it just says something like 'loading linux' with one or two dots after it.. then reboots my PC!

I booted up the SAME PC with a PTVUPGRADE LBA CD and it worked fine. I prefer to use the weaknees CD though.

Any thoughts as to why it won't work on THIS PC but will on my newer P4 XP machine?

Bill

EDIT: Shucks I hoped that by this morning someone might have some ideas on this. Maybe I better dig out another PC and try with that one. :(

slaponte

07-19-2005, 01:56 PM

Hey Bill. I don't think which one comes up matters that much. You just want to make sure the MFS Tools are the latest (or the same between them). If they are, then the only (important) diff is the PVT ones included TPIP in it...

Philly Bill

07-19-2005, 03:13 PM

Yeah, I'm not worried about that TPIP stuff (as we discussed) but it puzzles me why one PC will boot with the weaknees CD but the other one won't (but WILL from the PTV CD).

Oh well, I'm about ready to give this thing a try I think. :) Maybe I'll get some guts to try it tonight or tommorrow. :)

Gerhard

07-20-2005, 09:42 AM

Folks,

I just want to be sure of something before I start this...

I've got an 80 hour unit that I upgraded to a 120GB WD Drive.

I want to simply copy that drive's information over to a 300GB large drive, and no loose my recordings, etc...

Based on what I'm seeing so far, it doesn't look like that's possible.

So far, it appears that I've got to perform a backup, and then some how expand the swap space to be more efficent with the new 300GB drive.

Is this correct? (If not, a few pointers would be greatly appricated!!!)

(I've got a TDC240080 unit.)

Gerhard

slaponte

07-20-2005, 11:02 AM

Gerhard, if you are replacing the 120 with the 300 then you should be able to. Just "pipe" the backup to the restore and the restore will expand and adjust swap as the flags state. It would be something like

mfsbackup -????? /dev/hd(120) | mfsrestore -s 192 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hd(300)
tpip -s /dev/hd(300)

This commands (I would have to look up the precise flags etc) will leave your 120 alone, just copy everything to the 300 and expand swap and space for you.

Keeping the 120 and adding the 300 might be more dificult.

weaknees

07-20-2005, 11:41 AM

Gerhard

07-20-2005, 12:31 PM

The problem here is in adding one more set of partitions to the A drive - that basically isn't possible. So if you want the extra space out of the 300 GB drive, you'd either need to add it as a second drive, or lose your recordings.

So I take it that that means the piping the copy will not work... or, more to the point, it only works with a non-previously expanded HD?

This is not a huge deal, I just wanted to attempt to save everything.

bralph

07-20-2005, 04:13 PM

Thanks slaponte,
I'll try that when I get home tonight.

To be clear, I should do the following:

hda=FAT drive, hdb=Stock 40gig A Tivo drive, hdc=CDROM drive, hdd=new 300gig B drive

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt

mfsbackup -f 9999 -1so /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hdb

mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hdb /dev/hdd

mfsadd -x -r 4 /dev/hdb /dev/hdd

umount -f -a -r

ctl-alt-del and power down

Thanks

Is this something I'll need to do too? I have a stock HR10-250 (HD-Tivo) and just bought a 300 GB drive from Newegg to add to it. I printed the instructions from the Interactive Guide, and they also simply say to run BlessTiVo on the new drive but makes no mention of any commands to run on the original drive.

winders

07-20-2005, 04:32 PM

127MB is not enough swap space for 300MB+ setups.....

Scott

slaponte

07-20-2005, 05:28 PM

Just running "Blesstivo" didn't do anything for me. You can try, but I seriously doubt it.

And yes, 127 is too small. I would say go with "-s 194 -r 4".
You will then have to TPIP it... (tpip -s /dev/hdX).

One issue I find with these pinned threads is that they are getting too long and too old for their own good. A good review/cleanup should be tried and a new thread pinned with the updated info. The one that "announces" the mfs tools is from 3 years ago!

Gerhard

07-20-2005, 09:26 PM

Well,

I found a 80GB drive laying around the house, and took my v4 TIVO OS and restored it to that drive.

I connected to the Tivo servers, and the image was updated to 7.1b-xxxxx

I then performed a Tivo2 backup using MFSBACKUP with the following command line:

mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

For the restore, I used:

mfsrestore -s 192 -bzpi /mnt/dos/tivo71b.bak /dev/hda

Then:

msfadd -x -r 3 /dev/hda

Then:

tpip -s /dev/hda

I then installed the newly copied too 300GB WD drive and booted the Tivo2 80 hour unit I've got.

It's now sitting at the almost there screen and had been for a LONG time.

Did I do something wrong?

...or will it just take a hour to boot the first time after the restore?

(This is really turning out to be a royal PITA... and it's never been before.)

Gerhard

slaponte

07-21-2005, 11:41 AM

Well, besides that you backup to tivo.bak and restore from tivo71b.bak (diff files), and assuming the new drive is on hda, seems cool.

This was last night. What happened then? :)

Gerhard

07-21-2005, 11:52 AM

Well, besides that you backup to tivo.bak and restore from tivo71b.bak (diff files), and assuming the new drive is on hda, seems cool.

This was last night. What happened then? :)

Dude... it's driving me nuts!

When I restart the unit, it just stays on the "almost there" screen...

I'm somewhat depressed about this... as I've never has this much trouble before!!

I could do a DD and copy one drive to the other... but then how do I address the need for larger swap space?

slaponte

07-21-2005, 12:40 PM

Gerhard

07-21-2005, 01:01 PM

You are going with just one drive, right?

We have to wait for better minds. It looks good to me. I would have used "-r 4", but thats just me. For the description of the -r flag on MFS it should work fine.

Another thing to try : above, you restore and then you expand with the mfsadd. You could try to expand on the restore

mfsrestore -s 192 -r 4 -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo71b.bak /dev/hda

Then if you try to mfsadd should respond with "nothing to add" and then

tpip -s /dev/hda.

Thanks man! I'll give that a try...

One other person commented that I had the new drive as HDA... and that in the past using the primary master as the new Tivo drive has been used to cause problems (byte swapping??).

slaponte

07-21-2005, 01:16 PM

Gerhard

07-21-2005, 07:48 PM

I only had one problem with HDA, there was a command that wouldn't run. Probably trying to keep me from screwing myself I guess.

Switch them around. You won't be writing to HDA, just reading, and put the new one on hdc. Or since you have an image created already, take off the 80 and put the 300 there. :)

Well... this is just plain annoying...

I've been able to get it to work... but I can not use TPIP!

I've restored the drive using my backup of the 120GB I had expanded the original 80GB image to.

(So, I've got a bunch of 80GB OS versions at this point.)

If I use MSFRESTORE -s 127 , etc...etc... Then it works just fine.

However, if I use TPIP -s, etc... it fails every time.

The problem has to be TPIP and it's relation to the swap space.

I know from previous comments that it really needs to be larger than 127MB given the size of the new drive (300GB)...

I've read that if you use MSFRESTORE -s 192... that swap header will not be configured properly for some reason... Is this true?

jpc112

07-22-2005, 11:42 AM

I have a TIVO TCD24008A. I think the HD died after 15 months. It's stuck on the Powering UP.... screen.

I want to purchase from WeaKnees a 160 hour replacement drive to replace the 80 hour it has. If I do so, do I just have to replace the drive as instructed? Is it basically plug n play with the Tivo recognizing it has 160 hours now? Do I have to mess around with any of the software settings I've read about in the thread...i.e. swap space, hda etc.?

If I wanted to save the data on the old hard drive is it possible to save the data on the HD and restore it to the new drive without it powering up?

Thank you,

Jim

gdavisloop1

07-22-2005, 12:21 PM

Hello,
re: -r 4
I can't find a "-r" option on MFStool 2.0.
If I restore without this option, will it simply limit my 300GB drive to 274GB?

re: -s 192
I though there was a bug and -s >127 would not work correctly?

I'm trying to put a 300GB drive in a DirecTiVo that's running 6.2 s/w.
That does have lba48 support, right?

Finally, does anyone have experience swapping to different drives in and out of the same TiVo? Ie, if I have to upgrade without saving my old programs (because apparently you can't upgrade from an upgrade), can I just put the old HD back in the TiVo whenever I want to access it?

thanks!
--Gary

Gerhard

07-22-2005, 12:32 PM

slaponte

07-22-2005, 01:35 PM

Thats what I understand also : the "-s 192" creates the swap but there is some problem with the headers. The "tpip -s" is supposed to fix them.

"-r" as documented on the README file :

-r scale
This option allows you to reduce the amount of RAM TiVo uses by
increasing the block size for the media storage created with the -x
option. The acceptable values are 0 to 4, corresponding to 1, 2, 4,
8 and 16 megabytes. The larger the value, the less RAM will be used
(and the faster menus will respond) but a (small) amount of storage
will be wasted by some recordings. At the extreme small end (-r 0)
some PVRs with a large amount of storage may not be able to perform
some tasks, such as self repair. (A.K.A. Green Screen) The default
is 2 (or 4 megabytes). Any TiVo created partitions are created with
a scale of 0 (or 1 megabyte). It is best to leave this option alone.

WHile the README states it is best to leave it alone, the "-r 3" and "-r 4" becomes necesary when working larger drives which were not as common back when the instructions were written.

superman199

07-22-2005, 03:07 PM

Ok, im gonna try to explain this as best as possible, and hopefully not sound like too much of an idiot. Im adding a hard drive to my tivo (80 Gig western digital). Going thru the instructions on the site, it says to use the following command

mfsadd -x /dev/hdX /dev/hdZ

But its coming up with problems... im not exactly sure which of the X's and Z'z to replace with b (the 2nd drive... my jumpers are all set correctly to SLAVE. Can someone please help? what should i actually be typing? i am using MFS2, if that needed to be known. Thanks for the help

slaponte

07-22-2005, 03:21 PM

Come on, Superman, you can do this :

IDE Channel 0 (primary) Master is hda, Slave is hdb

IDE Channel 1 (secondary) Master is hdc, Slave is hdd

There is not enough info on your description to type out the exact command, but you would:

mfsadd -x /dev/hd<orig tivo drive> /dev/hd<new added drive>

If it helps, what I do is after the boot do shift-pageup until you see the drive assignments, and I write in a piece of paper

example:

hda = original Tivo 40GB drive
hdb = new 300Gb
hdc = CD ROM
hdd = 8GB old DOS drive

And then I review my commands to make sure I got things right. Make the same list after you reboot with the proper assignments, then review the command.

superman199

07-22-2005, 04:02 PM

ok, so do i need to hook up the old tivo drive also to my PC when fixing the new drive?? I just wanna make sure i do this all right! :-) Thanks alot!

slaponte

07-22-2005, 04:10 PM

As far as I know, yes. The original Tivo drive has a set of partitions in it. What the command does is extend that set into the second (new) drive, so together they form a set.

superman199

07-22-2005, 04:12 PM

OOOHHHHH!!! thats what i was doing wrong! ok, ill try that when i get back home from work and ill let you know what happends! Thanks!

slaponte

07-22-2005, 04:21 PM

I have a TIVO TCD24008A. I think the HD died after 15 months. It's stuck on the Powering UP.... screen.

I want to purchase from WeaKnees a 160 hour replacement drive to replace the 80 hour it has.

For starters, I don't see a 160 replacement. I only see a 160 ADD which gets you to 200 hours at Weaknees.

Either way, replacement or add, the drives from Weaknees I understand come ready to install and run.

If I do so, do I just have to replace the drive as instructed? Is it basically plug n play with the Tivo recognizing it has 160 hours now? Do I have to mess around with any of the software settings I've read about in the thread...i.e. swap space, hda etc.?

Again, I don't see the 160GB "replacement", but basically yes, the drive comes setup and ready to plug and run. No, you don't have to do anything else. You basically pull your old drive, screw in this one, connect your cables and go for it.

If I wanted to save the data on the old hard drive is it possible to save the data on the HD and restore it to the new drive without it powering up?

Thank you,

Jim

NOW you are taking a more complex issue. Assuming the existing drive contents are viable (not corrupted), you would have to study and understand the whole backup/restore processes so much talked about around here. As you can see at the Weaknees site, they do offer you (for a fee) to do this for you (again, assuming your data is viable).

mrbuddy

07-28-2005, 06:51 PM

Kudos, weaknees! Just finished my upgrade (540040, +160GB) with your complete bracket kit. Couldn't have gone better.

jonmori

07-31-2005, 04:47 PM

Greetings all,

I just finished my first week with a 40 hour series 2. It finally upgraded to 7.1b early this morning so I was able to get the Tivo to utilize my Wireless Network.

I had the crazy idea of slapping 2 320GB drives into the Tivo but read somewhere that you cannot replace an original drive with a new drive that is over 256GB larger than the original.

Is this feasible, or should I scale down the plans to some smaller drives?

weaknees

07-31-2005, 11:36 PM

As long as you use the "-r 4" switch, those drives will work fine.

LarryInAz

08-01-2005, 12:33 AM

Where is this "readme" file from with the info on this -r switch?

slaponte

08-01-2005, 10:26 AM

Its the readme file from the MFS Tools :

-r scale
This option allows you to reduce the amount of RAM TiVo uses by
increasing the block size for the media storage created with the -x
option. The acceptable values are 0 to 4, corresponding to 1, 2, 4,
8 and 16 megabytes. The larger the value, the less RAM will be used
(and the faster menus will respond) but a (small) amount of storage
will be wasted by some recordings. At the extreme small end (-r 0)
some PVRs with a large amount of storage may not be able to perform
some tasks, such as self repair. (A.K.A. Green Screen) The default
is 2 (or 4 megabytes). Any TiVo created partitions are created with
a scale of 0 (or 1 megabyte). It is best to leave this option alone.

Notice it says to leave it alone. It is an older readme. The default, "-r 2" will work fine as long as the disk space you add is 274Mb or less... (I think 274 is the number, or just abouts). It has to do with the maximum size of an MFS file system created by the Tivo.

KwikSilvr

08-02-2005, 02:46 PM

I bought a refurbished 40-hour last summer and replaced the 40-gig drive with two 120-gig drives. Now I want to replace the two 120s with a single 300 gig drive. I'm not worried about saving recordings. Do I need to use the -r flag? If so, do I need "-r 3" or "-r 4"?

weaknees

08-02-2005, 02:58 PM

Best bet is to do it - the A drive would probably be OK, but the B will need it unless you go through a long alternative procedure. Use the "-r 4" switch.

bnm81002

08-02-2005, 07:05 PM

so are the NEW instructions available yet with the -r 4 switch included? :(

slaponte

08-03-2005, 11:17 AM

I think that is an issue here at the comunity. Some of the threads are VERY old and held as stickys. Newbies come, start to read and might not realize they are reading extremely old stuff. The MFS Tools 2.0 thread is up there, those tools are ancient!

Unless you read through all the way to the end you don't realize that a lot of the stuff is designed for small to medium size drives (per today standards).

More and more having 250Gb and more drives is more common, and they continue dropping in price. All the sticky threads need to be reviewed, updated, "trimmed" as it were. Because they stay on top and newbies always think they are current.

weaknees

08-03-2005, 07:57 PM

The Humax DRT-400 TiVo DVR with DVD recorder has been added to the site.

Michael

weaknees

08-03-2005, 07:58 PM

MAJOR UPDATE
------------------

OK - we've made major changes to the Interactive TiVo Upgrade Instructions (http://www.upgrade-instructions.com). The new kernels are now supported for the Series 2 Standalone and DIRECTV models. So if you have 7.1 or 6.2 respectively, the instructions support your configuration and the use of larger drives.

Now, this is a major change, and while we've run literally hundreds of possible configurations through the site to test, there may be a few combinations that cause issues. So if you find one, or if you aren't sure, please post here and we'll be sure to check them quickly, and either correct the situation or explain why it's correct.

Tell us how it goes!

winders

08-03-2005, 09:05 PM

Weaknees,

Your new instructions partially take into account large drives. You added the "-r 4" option to mfsrestore but did nothing to deal with the need for larger swap. Unless, of course, you don't care if folks don't have enough swap space to recover from a GSOD. Is tpip that hard to explain?

Scott

SteveInNC

08-05-2005, 05:06 AM

No joy for me. I have a HDVR2 with 6.2 and original Maxtor 40Mb. Since 6.2, I've been getting hangs. I bought a WD160 for a replacement. Initially, I used the Interactive Guide's instructions from a week ago, doing a "one drive to one larger drive and save programs". Ran into a bunch of bad sectors (expected), but the piped restore completed, showing about 170 hrs.

Attempting to boot the new disk, I got past the inital boot into the "almost there" screen, whereupon the unit rebooted. Second time into "almost there", GSOD.

The command used was:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdd

I started looking around in the forum and saw that the new instructions are up as above, and tried those.

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 124 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdd

A few hours later, the copy finished. Because of the comment in the post above, I started searching for tpip to see what that was about, finally finding someone that used it correct the swap header (my interpretation). Found a copy on the PTVLBA48-4.01.iso and ran it against the new image:

tpip -s --swapped /dev/hdd

Got what looked like a reasonable response, put everything back together, tried to boot, and got basically the same sequence: boot, almost there, reboot, almost there, GSOD

I'm now letting it sit to see if it can repair itself, but I'm not holding out hope. FWIW, the bad sectors were early in the original volume, around the 1% mark. While that drive was still rebooting successfully to full operation when I removed it, perhaps some critical blocks are trashed, so the mfsbackup just can't get the right stuff done. I'll listen to any hints :-). Did I screw up by doing the tpip on the second iteration of the volume?

weaknees

08-05-2005, 08:59 AM

Most likely, the original image is just corrupt, so any copies don't work also. If you dig around on the forums, you may be able to find a way to download an image.

miadlor

08-05-2005, 09:02 AM

The new commands.........mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -zxpi /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hdZ

I used the old............mfsrestore -s 127 -zxpi /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hdZ

on a S2 single drive 200gb...........Does this mean I have the default 4megs even though I didn't include -r 2 ?

slaponte

08-05-2005, 02:38 PM

Correct. "-r 2" is the default.

Steve, you only need tpip if you go over 127Mb swap. So if you use the -s 127 or -s 124 don't worry about tpip. Since you are going 160Gb you should need about 130Mb swap...

Miadlor, for 200Gb the "-s 127" should be more than enough. And yes the default block factor should work fine as well.

SteveInNC

08-05-2005, 10:41 PM

Just an update on my situation: I got Stan to point me at a 3.1b image and mfsrestored that to the WD160. Everything booted up, walked me through set up, and I got TV. The only outstanding issue was that I got Error #51 in the recording stuff. Searching the board I found the advice to "clear all" to sync up with the right serial number, which it's in the process of doing right now. I also don't have locals, so will have to call the 711 extension to re-ping the box.

I'm actually having to record BSG to video tape (shudder) off of my old Sony A2 while all of this is going on :).

Hopefully, the clear will fix the last problem, and I can get it to pull down 6.2 tonight. After that, I'll pull the drive one more time and make a backup image.

One question: given that the saved programs are recorded on a separate partition (my understanding anyway), is it feasible to pull only the program data off of my old failing drive and copy it to a partition on the new drive? Something like: mount both drives under Linux, copy stuff from A to B, without a full root copy et al. Given that the programs would be still on the same unit/card, the encryption should not matter.

I'm an old-school Unix systems guy, and used to have my hands in the hardware all of the time, but it's been awhile since I've jumped through these many hoops :)

weaknees

08-05-2005, 10:58 PM

The C&D Everything is what you need to fix the error #51.

Even if you did copy the program partitions over, you would be able to tell the TiVo that they're stored there, essentially, so it's pretty much a no-go.

SteveInNC

08-05-2005, 11:43 PM

"Darn" about those programs. I should have rolled them off to DVD-R beforehand anyway. I may still try at another time. The C&D took care of the #51. Called 711 and got my locals back. The box is on the phone now, so hopefully 6.2 will land by morning. Thanks for all of the help guys.

The only peculiar thing I've noticed is that the unit shows up as a HDVR3 in the System info.

weaknees

08-06-2005, 01:08 AM

Right - at one point, an update cause all HDVR2s to become HDVR3s according to the system info . . .

JBNY

08-07-2005, 08:21 AM

OK I read through this thread and did some searches but did not find my answer.

I have an new R10 that I just upgraded to a 160GB drive. Followed the weaknees instructions for upgrading the drive. With R10 options as follows

no backup
have fat partition
no 2000/XP
disregard recordings
not moving software.

Downloaded and burned the iso from the link given.

Everything worked fine. I used the following command

mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdd

came back with success and 179 hours available.

Put the new drive in the R10 and everything comes up fine but the hours shown in tivo are only 136 hours available.

I have software ver 6.1 on the R10, do I need 6.2? If I wait for the upgrade to download, will I then see the extra hours, or do I need to put the old drive in and wait for the 6.2 to be installed and then do the upgrade again.

Or did I do something else wrong?

Thanks much!
-Joe

weaknees

08-07-2005, 09:12 AM

That's about right - we typically get 140 hours from our Maxtor 160 GB drives. The 179 that was reported is a guess for standalone TiVos - not DIRECTV TiVos. mfstool doesn't know if the image is for standalones or not.

Looks like you did it all correctly.

Philly Bill

08-07-2005, 10:30 AM

Looks like you're fine. The 179 was for stand alone TIVO.

JBNY

08-07-2005, 12:49 PM

Thanks, great, that's what I wanted to hear.

Great job on the doc for the upgrade. I was done in about 45 minutes about 30 of which I was just making sure I was following things correctly.

bnm81002

08-07-2005, 10:35 PM

Grentz

08-12-2005, 10:45 PM

Also note software 6.1 on the R10 has the same features as 6.2 on the other Directv Tivos....you will not receive 6.2 for your R10 as there is no need.....

willbhome

08-14-2005, 07:07 PM

I didn't find any mention of upgrading the High Definition DirecTV Tivo to higher capacities. Is there anything about this yet, or are we stuck with the 30hr HD/200hr SD?

weaknees

08-15-2005, 12:00 AM

Try the utility - we have full support for that unit, and we've been upgrading those units for over a year. Just choose "HR10-250" as your model - that's the HD model.

Philly Bill

08-15-2005, 09:42 AM

Replaced stock 40GB with a new 300GB (copying shows and setting up a 192MB swap file) for the third TIVO yesterday.

Just wanted to say THANKS to weaknees for the interactive instructions.

SrLANGuy

08-16-2005, 06:25 PM

The Weaknees instructions are missing two very important things.

1) You create a backup, but you never test it.

2) When adding very large drives (LBA48), it doesn't have you increase your swap file size.

I have an HR10-250 and I'm adding a 300 GB drive. I want to know that my backup file can be restored and my TiVo will work. I also want to prevent problems by increasing my swap file to 275 MB (needed for a 550 GB TiVo).

Philly Bill

08-16-2005, 07:42 PM

I believe most of the instructions have you restoring to your new drive USING the backup you just created.

I don't bother though. I just copy from drive to drive using both commands and the pipe '|' and save the original drives for backup.

And yes, you should read THIS: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=251011

thread for a VERY long discussion on setting up the swap file. Its pretty easy but I guess automating it in the upgrade instructions would be tough without knowing the size of the new drive huh?

twash

08-17-2005, 12:23 PM

I went through the thread at: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...ad.php?t=251011

I GUESS I could do tpip if I had to, but it would be nice if someone would make it easier by summarizing what you would actually need to do for larger drives in just one post.

I just did an upgrade to my two R10's installing a single drive increase to 160 GB hard drives in each one. I expect the 127 swap is big enough. However I may want to install an even bigger drive sometime especially if I lose one of the 160's and it would be nice if I had a cookbook to follow.

It is very nice of Weaknees to furnish the procedure and I appreciate him and all who participated in getting it to where it is. I am sure that an additional procedure for tpip would be no great chore for people as talented as the people who are so willing to help on this forum.

slaponte

08-17-2005, 05:39 PM

The threads are long because of the long process of trial and error. Also, there are so many long (old) threads around here with old information it takes a long time (and not everybody does) to read the threads and pick out everything you need. Once deciphered, is very simple :

A ) Define your upgrade size
B ) Calculate swap space needed (1MB for every 2GB of disk)
C ) If swap needed < 128Mb, mfsrestore with "-s nnn" where nnn is the swap size. Done.
D ) If swap is 128MB or greater (250Gb disk or more), then

mfsrestore with "-s nnn" and "-r 4" (plus other flags as required)
tpip, to initialize the header.
Done.

Note on tpip :

tpip --version tells you the version you have

V1.1 : command is "tpip --swapped -s /dev/hdX"
V1.2 : command is "tpip -1 -s /dev/hdX"

Where hdX stands for the Tivo drive A.

I think the Weaknees interactive instructions are outstanding. I would hope they can be updated to include this and put many of these threads to rest. Times have changed. Drives 300Gb and bigger are now economically viable. The instructions need to be upgraded.

I would also like to know if anybody owns the MFS code and if it would be possible to fix a couple of bugs and re-issue the tools... Obviously tpip has the header we need, so it shoudl not be impossible to teach MFS to do this right.

azitnay

08-18-2005, 10:20 AM

The MFS Tools source code is freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mfstools/.

I've had the need to look through it for various things at times in the past, but I've never had the need for more than 127MB of swap, so I've never looked at that particular issue.

Drew

sjp2003

08-19-2005, 05:26 PM

* Lurker de-cloaking *

Just wanted to poke my head in and thank the fine folks who put this guide together. Upgraded my 80 Hour Series 2 yesterday with a 300GB Seagate and the whole process went amazingly smooth. What drove me to sack it up and try the upgrade was my Tivo had started to constantly lock up and was getting progressivly worse. You could hear the 60GB Maxtor struggling for it's life as the video would pause, chop and eventually freeze entirely. My Tivo now reports "up to 376 hours" and runs smooth as silk.

Thanks again! Now if only there was better programming to Tivo LOL!

* Lurker re-cloaking *

twash

08-19-2005, 06:34 PM

Thank you Sergio! I have attached your post to my Weaknees procedure.

nickadams

08-20-2005, 12:07 PM

I used the Weakness Interactive Guide as follows:

1) HDVR2
2) Replace 1 drive with 1 drive
3) Backup - yes
4)FAT PArtition - no
5)XP - yes
6) Boot from floppy (CD boot did not worK)
7)Disregard recodings
8)Moving software - no
9)6.2 - yes

By following the instructions, I sucessfully formatted the new tivo drive as a FAT drive; backed up from the old tivo drive to the new FAT drive; copied the backup file from the new FAT drive to my windows harddrive (c:); then per the guide, after booting from the floppy, I'm instructed to:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt

then:

mfsretore -s 127 -r 4 -zxpi /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hdz

I believe this to be in error as linux will not recognize the hda (windows NTFS) drive. This the error I believe exists.

To solve the problem, I again used the guide, with the indentical sets as above except I said "Backup - no".

THe guide requires:

mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/hdX | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdZ

It seems to be working. Thank you Weakness. 2nd tivo upgrade - your help is appreciated.

nickadams

08-20-2005, 12:50 PM

The upgrade in the previous post was to a Maxtor Diamond Max10, 300 gb drive. Everything seemed to work fine except the "New estimated standalone size: 147 (107 more). Should be closer to 300 gb.

I used:

mfsbackup -f 9999 -so /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdd

While I created a FAT partition on the new harddrive, I understand that MSFTools will write over it. I used the floppy (v. CD) software - does it not support 300 gb harddirves. One problem I did see was I have a Hughes SD-DVR40 not the HDVR2 that I thought (but the directions are the same). In any event, I understand that there are probelms with expanding the drive again (my inclination is to just try it again and see what happens). Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

w1n78

08-20-2005, 02:21 PM

Replaced the W and got the following:

invaid arguement
FAT: bogus cluster size 0
Can't find valid FAT filesystem on dev 03:01

Help! Thanks!

I am running Windows 98SE btw

I also tried change the number to 2 up 10 without any luck...

Any suggestions?

I'm getting this error as well

hda = original tivo drive
hdb = new tivo drive replacing original
hdd = cd rom

hard drive info: Western Digital 160GB drive

according to weaknees's guide it said to format the new drive to fat32 so i can back up my old data. so i used WD's utility CD that came with the drive. all is going well until i hit that error. any suggestions? i searched this thread and the error came up once but couldn't find a solution after it was posted

thanks

weaknees

08-20-2005, 04:50 PM

weaknees

08-20-2005, 04:51 PM

I'm getting this error as well

hda = original tivo drive
hdb = new tivo drive replacing original
hdd = cd rom

hard drive info: Western Digital 160GB drive

according to weaknees's guide it said to format the new drive to fat32 so i can back up my old data. so i used WD's utility CD that came with the drive. all is going well until i hit that error. any suggestions? i searched this thread and the error came up once but couldn't find a solution after it was posted

thanks

Can you see the newly formatted FAT32 drive from the Windows side?

w1n78

08-20-2005, 05:15 PM

Can you see the newly formatted FAT32 drive from the Windows side?

i didn't want to boot it on windows. i figured it out. there was a post by slaponte to create a "dos" directory and it worked. i'm now in the step where it restores the data from original tivo drive to new. if i have the 80GB tivo drive, how long will it take to transfer it over to my new 160GB. it's been an hour and it's only at 15%, is this normal?

thanks for the help

weaknees

08-20-2005, 05:20 PM

15% in an hour can be right if you are transferring with recordings. Our systems here generally move a bit faster, but they've been tuned for that type of transfer.

w1n78

08-20-2005, 06:03 PM

15% in an hour can be right if you are transferring with recordings. Our systems here generally move a bit faster, but they've been tuned for that type of transfer.

wow, so i'm looking at about 6 hour process :eek: lol oh well. thanks for the great guide and help :up:

will post if more problems arise

weaknees

08-20-2005, 06:11 PM

Sometimes we do copies from HR10s which have 250 GB drives - they take overnight. Hang in there!

nickadams

08-21-2005, 09:41 PM

Got the CD to boot - works great. Thanks Weaknees.

w1n78

08-23-2005, 12:00 AM

Sometimes we do copies from HR10s which have 250 GB drives - they take overnight. Hang in there!

ya to transfer from 80GB to 160GB, it took 11.5 hours. well worth it, now i have 173 hours of recording time :up: only thing is, i missed a whole day of show :o

thanks again for the great guide weaknees. if anyone runs into the same error i did, just create a new directory on the new drive and do the rest there

weaknees

08-26-2005, 12:46 PM

Sherminator -

Glad to hear it - what model is it?

dtebbe

08-26-2005, 09:23 PM

These instructions are outstanding! Used them for my HD upgrade and they were flawless! Top notch service!

DT

jwardm2

08-27-2005, 10:30 AM

Maybe this goes without saying, and so no one has, but is there any point to doing a backup and restore everything when moving to a new TIVO? If you have to run clear and delete everything won't you lose it all anyway?

If that's true, the weaknees instructions could warn you when that combo is selected. Might save some confusion.

Thanks

weaknees

08-27-2005, 05:18 PM

slaponte

08-28-2005, 10:11 PM

As one who has done this, it seems not to be worth the effort. I now have the original 80 with an added 300, but I might just buy a 420 and leave the one drive in there.

Is it doable? Yes. Is it worth the hassle? Probably not. Unless you really feel you need to have two 400Gb drives in there or something like that.

gobucks100

08-29-2005, 02:49 PM

In the link below, I documented my 40g to 250g upgrade of my hdvr2. I had several problems along the way but eventually got there. I had a few problems with the weaknees boot disc which I document in detail in the link but I was eventually able to complete the task. If anybody has any ideas on what was causing the problems and any solutions, it would be great to know. I searched for the problems I has having and found others who had similar problems but not much discussion on resolving the problem.

board wont let me put a link in yet so you will need to edit the below link into your browser to see.

tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=257041

wlewis

08-29-2005, 04:27 PM

About a year ago, I upgraded my dtv series 1 phillips 6000 to a 160gb drive. All was working well until last week when the picture began to freeze, and a unplug/plug reboot would sometimes get stuck at the powering up screen. I was able to pick up a new seagate replacement drive at circuit city for $50 after rebates, and went to work to replace the drive. When restoring the old to new, however, I kept getting an error message indicating that the new drive did not have enough space. Finally got the following command to work...

mfsbackup - Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -zpi - /dev/hdb

No "x" option on the mfsrestore. All seemed to work ok, and the process completed in about 3 hours. Everything is back up and running again. I have not seen any other post without the "x" option. Can anyone confirm that this is a valid copy, or might I see problems??

gracias...

slaponte

08-30-2005, 11:49 AM

If you went from a 160Gb to another 160, you didn't need the -x. The -x is to expand after a restore to utilize extra space. But if you restore a 160 to a 160 then there isn't any extra space, so no harm done.

If you had gone from a 160Gb to a 300Gb lets say, then you would need to expand to use the extra gigs...

Also, just a note but "-s 127" creates a 127Mb Swap space. With a 160Gb drive you only need about 80Mb.. so there is a few MB kind of "wasted" there but no harm done. And what is 47Mb in a 160Gb disk? Peanuts! :)

wlewis

08-30-2005, 08:21 PM

slaponte, thanks for the confirmation on the command. And yes, it was a 160 --> 160 transfer. All continues to work well. :rolleyes:

As far as I understand, the series 1 dtivos are limited to 137G. Is there anyway around this limitation? As you noted... It's a little frustrating to have that wasted space.

Also appreciate the pointer about reducing the swap space. If I get another harddrive failure, I'll be sure to setup the nest with ~80M.

slaponte

08-30-2005, 10:27 PM

The real question is not the Series 1, is it "does my version of software support LBA48". If you post the model and version of software, many here can tell you if it can go > 137 or not.

wlewis

09-01-2005, 01:51 PM

Thanks for the info... I've got a Phillips DSR6000R with 3.1.0c.

slaponte

09-01-2005, 05:47 PM

Minds more informed than mine on S1s, can you verify if 3.1.0c supports LBA48??

cassiusdrow

09-01-2005, 06:44 PM

From what I've seen, all S1s require hacking (kernel upgrade) to support LBA48.

dminches

09-03-2005, 08:39 AM

In the instructions it asks "Do you have a FAT partition on your C drive:"? Is this for the drive in the computer that I using to create the TiVo drive or is this for the new drive itself? I am running XP on a computer that's about 1 year old. How do I check to see if I have a FAT partition?

azitnay

09-03-2005, 11:47 AM

They're talking about the drive in the computer you're using to perform the upgrade (your Windows XP drive).

To find out if you're using FAT or NTFS, go To My Computer, right-click on C:, and click Properties. Look for "File system".

Drew

dminches

09-03-2005, 02:44 PM

Thanks for the response. One more question. The instructions ask "Are you moving this software from one TiVo to another." I assume the answer is "no" if you I am replacing the drive in one Directivo machine as opposed to moving the drive from one Directivo to another. Am I correct?

tibo

09-04-2005, 03:12 AM

upgrade went smooth as silk, only took about 45 minutes start to finish thanks to weaknees... kudo's guys, much better results this time. My first attempt was using hinsdales instuction and I pooched an 80GB maxtor, now it will only format and recognize 12GB.

the only thing I was concened with was the 127 swap size, I upgraded to a 250GB and had to get out a calculator to make sure it was right and of course the quick scramble to the forums after the first set of error msg's after you run the
mount /dev/hdW1 /mnt command (really need to warn people about that) I damn near had a stoke

Thanks again.

220 hours of couch potato fun

Bunny

09-05-2005, 11:21 AM

I have an hr10-250 which I upgraded a couple of months ago with 2 seagate 400gb drives. Unfortunately, at the time the whole swap file discussion had not started yet. As far as I know, I have a 127mb swap file, whereas I understand it shoul be 400mb. I have not seen the GSOD but I do suffer from the occasional stutter, which I think may be related to the swap file size. I can redo the whole procedure again but I rather not want to lose my recordings and I do not have a couple of spare masssive drives to backup to. Is there any other way to do this without doing backup and restore?

Thanks!

slaponte

09-05-2005, 03:04 PM

Hi Bunny. Answered on the swap thread. Yes, you should have 400Mb. No, I don't think you can resize without backup/restore.

Bunny

09-05-2005, 09:26 PM

Thanks, Sergio. Was afraid that was the case. I may be able to get the contents down to some 300GB and then with some compression may be able to backup to reasonable size. I guess that mpeg2 content does not compress well, right?

Patrick

tibo

09-05-2005, 10:18 PM

talking about swap size, I thought the 127mb was for anything upto 250GB drive, but the standard is 1mb for every 2GB, if thats the case, then should the swap file not be 200 on a 400GB drive...

I think I am lost and confused on this whole swap issue

HomeUser

09-05-2005, 10:47 PM

tibo, you have it correct 200M for a 400G drive or 400M for 800G (2X400G) drives

scooterboy

09-06-2005, 09:11 PM

tibo

09-06-2005, 09:47 PM

tibo, you have it correct 200M for a 400G drive or 400M for 800G (2X400G) drives

hehehe... I missed the whole 2X drive issue... :rolleyes:

azitnay

09-06-2005, 10:08 PM

Ok, I really want to use the Weaknees CD to upgrade a Humax DRT800 to a 300 gb drive, but I need help with TPIP. I want to take Sergio's advice and "copy" TPIP to my FAT32 hard drive but I have no idea how (don't know linux).

I have booted with the PTV CD (which has TPIP), and have mounted the CD-ROM drive and the FAT32 drive using the following:

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
mkdir /mnt/cd
mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cd

What's the exact command I need to copy TPIP to the FAT32 drive?

Thanks for any help.

I'm not too familiar with the PTVupgrade CD, but I'd assume tpip is either /bin/tpip or /usr/bin/tpip. So, since your FAT32 partition is mounted at /mnt/dos, you'll want:

cp /bin/tpip /mnt/dos

or

cp /usr/bin/tpip /mnt/dos

However, why do you want to use the WeaKnees CD instead of the PTVupgrade CD? They're both LBA48-compatible, and I wasn't under the impression that the WeaKnees CD includes anything that the PTVupgrade CD doesn't.

Drew

scooterboy

09-06-2005, 10:20 PM

However, why do you want to use the WeaKnees CD instead of the PTVupgrade CD? They're both LBA48-compatible, and I wasn't under the impression that the WeaKnees CD includes anything that the PTVupgrade CD doesn't.
Just because I've done all my previous upgrades with Weaknees instructions, so I'm comfortable with it. No other reason.

Thanks for the copy info! :)

Edit to add: your copy info worked perfectly - upgrade complete. Thanks again.

tivoupgrade

09-07-2005, 10:54 AM

Just because I've done all my previous upgrades with Weaknees instructions, so I'm comfortable with it. No other reason.

Thanks for the copy info! :)

Edit to add: your copy info worked perfectly - upgrade complete. Thanks again.

FYI, our CD is constructed to be compatible with both the Weaknees and Hinsdale guides.

slaponte

09-07-2005, 11:10 AM

Note : the idea was to use the TPIP from the web (V1.2) instead of the one on the CD. So what I did is boot on my regular PC, download, extract the TPIP, and copied that (in Windows) to where my image backups are. SO I have a dir

C:\tivobak\image40.bak

and now I also have

C:\tivoutil\tpip

THen, when I go back to boot from the Linux CD, and I mount my DOS drive, the newer TPIP is there.

All that said, the old one (V1.1) works as well.

Philly Bill

09-07-2005, 01:45 PM

FYI, our CD is constructed to be compatible with both the Weaknees and Hinsdale guides.

I've done ALL my drive upgrades using Weaknees instructions and PTVupgrades CD. Works great!

slaponte

09-07-2005, 02:05 PM

Add tpip V1.2 to the CD and the Weaknees CD would be perfect.

delshin

09-09-2005, 06:42 PM

I keep getting an error unable to mount Cd 1,2,3,4,5 then it kicks out. I wonder if I have something hooked up wrong. oh Bollix, am no good at this stuff. *laugh*

*edit*
Well I am at a loss, I was about to use MFS tools 2.0 and do a DD of my old tivo drive to an old 40gig I had lying around. I can't believe it worked *laugh* But hey got my picture back, so i'm happy.

jmattos

09-13-2005, 01:54 PM

I'm still a little foggy, let me work thru this here. I'm replacing the (40gb factory installed) drive in a 540040 that I bought with two drives that I pulled from my old 240040 (two 160 gb drives from weaknees).

I have pulled the drives out of the old tivo (2x160), and plan to stick them in my windows PC, and DISCONNECT the windows C drive

My question is do I need to run through this procedure twice since I only have two available bays for hard drives in my computer?

the first time though connecting the 40gb drive from the 540040 as the master and the old "master" from the 240040 (160gb) and reformatting it,

.....then he drive pulled from the 40gb drive from the 540040 as the master and the old "slave" from the 240040 (160gb #2) and reformatting IT?

the options I chose in the wizard are attached! :")

azitnay

09-13-2005, 02:05 PM

Why do you only have two available spaces for hard drives? Computers typically have two IDE channels that can take two IDE devices each, so even with the necessary CD-ROM drive, you still have room for three hard drives. Those three can be your original 40GB and the two 160GB's.

If there really is a reason why you can't connect more than two hard drives to the computer at once, you have two options as I see it:

1) Create a backup image from the original 40GB, and burn it to a CD. Then, connect the two 160GB drives and restore from the image on the CD.

2) Connect the original 40GB and one of the 160GB's. Do a mfsbackup | mfsrestore from the 40 to the 160 without expanding. Then, power down and put the other 160 in the 40's place. Power back up and run mfsadd -x to expand and add the B drive.

I like option #1 more, as you end up with a backup image at the end, which is always recommended. I actually don't even know if #2 would work... I think it would, but since it's not really the "normal" way of doing things I don't know for sure if there are any technical limitations that would prevent the last step from expanding fully.

Drew

jmattos

09-13-2005, 02:05 PM

as a follow up, is there any difference between the BASE software installed on a tivo that is designated the "primary" and the one designated a "slave" by the jumper configuration?

if not, I have no problem, I can simply do this twice, once for each drive.

weaknees

09-13-2005, 02:06 PM

Right - you basically need two passes:

One to go from the current A drive to the new A drive (either of the drives from the old machine). You'll need the "replace with one drive" option.

Next, you need the two new drives and the "add a drive" option.

weaknees

09-13-2005, 02:07 PM

jmattos

09-13-2005, 02:15 PM

jmattos

09-13-2005, 02:21 PM

Does the linux command I'll be issuing take care of formatting the drive? Im sure it has lots of crap on it now that I'd prefer to just overwrite.

fredfillis

09-13-2005, 02:49 PM

azitnay

09-13-2005, 10:21 PM

Does the linux command I'll be issuing take care of formatting the drive? Im sure it has lots of crap on it now that I'd prefer to just overwrite.

Yes, once you use MFS Tools on a drive, it will lose anything it might have had before.

Drew

azitnay

09-13-2005, 10:22 PM

Some of us great unwashed have limited 3.5 inch drive bays. I have no room to physically mount another HD in my old POS case. Not with 1 x CD, 1 x DVD, 1 x HD and 1 x Floppy. Sad but true :(

I can, however, plug in the power and IDE cables and just hang that sucker in the fresh air. Works for me.

Yeah, don't bother actually mounting these drives during your temporary upgrade configurations... I wouldn't necessarily let them literally hang off the cables, but if you turn your case on its side you should just be able to leave them sitting on top. Just be sure to keep from shorting anything out.

Drew

bigjohn

09-17-2005, 08:15 PM

Yeah, don't bother actually mounting these drives during your temporary upgrade configurations... I wouldn't necessarily let them literally hang off the cables, but if you turn your case on its side you should just be able to leave them sitting on top. Just be sure to keep from shorting anything out.

Drew

Last time I upgraded, I turned my PC on it's side and it overheated and emergency shutdown. All worked out well, but it was *scary*.

bidger

09-19-2005, 05:23 PM

Is there an alternative command for <shift><page up> to confirm drive capacity because I'm not able to scroll up with that key combination?

bidger

09-20-2005, 08:16 AM

bump

HomeUser

09-20-2005, 08:45 AM

Ttry "cat /proc/partitions"

fizzx

09-24-2005, 10:43 AM

Remove the power cable and gray IDE ribbon cable from the hard drive. Also, remove the ribbon cable from the motherboard. You may not re-use this cable, but you should keep it either way - from the online upgrade guide

Why can't you reuse the IDE cable???

weaknees

09-24-2005, 10:47 AM

Not sure which model that info is from, but generally, if you put two drives in a newer unit, you need a 3-position cable and the TiVos come with 2-position cables.

fizzx

09-24-2005, 10:52 AM

Not sure which model that info is from, but generally, if you put two drives in a newer unit, you need a 3-position cable and the TiVos come with 2-position cables.

SeriesII 540040

I'm just doing the single drive upgrade and the above part of the guide made me wonder what was special about the tivo IDE cable.

Perhaps that should be edited for future ref?

azitnay

09-24-2005, 11:16 AM

I think he's right, WeaKnees... If you choose 540040 and replace with one drive, it tells you that you can't use the original IDE cable, which is obviously untrue.

Drew

fizzx

09-24-2005, 03:47 PM

Did the upgrade today based off the WeaKnees guide with tweaks for the 320GB size ... went from a 40GB drive to 320GB drive :-)

Story and pics on my blog http://jpowell.blogs.com/jason_powell_church_it/2005/09/diy_tivo_hard_d.html

Only 2 small issues ... couldn't get the mount right to the tpip directory ... thanks to azitnay for the ./tpip command. Then I didn't look close enough when putting the jumper on the new drive...put it in Master (with slave) instead of just Master...DOH! I felt pretty stupid after that one :)

Tivo Community Rocks!

Thanks,
Jason

defucius

09-30-2005, 12:29 PM

Hi, i am a happy new owner of a 240040, and looking forward to upgrade it with a 200g hard drive. I am a little confused on the lba48 support. Does my tivo with 7.2 software support large drivers? I read this entire thread and thought it is "yes", but weeknees instruction does not confirm it. The weeknees iso image name does not have "lba48" in it like ptvupgrade's does, either. Can somebody help we erase my doubt?

The new drive I bought is a seagate. Does it have a quiet mode that needs to be turned on?

Thanks.

azitnay

09-30-2005, 01:05 PM

Yes, your TiVo running 7.2 supports LBA48.

Yes, the WeaKnees CD is just as LBA48-compatible as the PTVupgrade CD. The fact that its filename doesn't contain "lba48" is inconsequential.

Drew

defucius

09-30-2005, 04:32 PM

Thank for the clarification, drew.

One more question about the interactive instruction: it asks "Is your system software version older than 2.5". Is this referring to the linux kernel? If so, how do i find out? I've looked at the info screen multiple times, and did not find anything about the kernel? thanks.

nichols_eric

09-30-2005, 08:49 PM

I have the Samsung-S4040R and performed the instructions for doing:

Replace with one drive

Do you want to make a backup: Yes
Do you have a FAT partition on your C drive: No
Are you using Windows XP or Windows 2000: Yes
Would you like to use a boot CD or floppy: CD
Save or disregard recordings: Save
Are you moving this software from one TiVo to another: No
Do you have TiVo OS 6.2 or later? Yes

After performing all of the steps and hooking it back, I believd that all is well. However, the only problem I have encountered is that when I go into "read new messages," the unit is unresponsive. I have left it alone for long periods of time (hrs) and nothing happens. It still records like normal, just doesn't display messages or respond to the remote. I have to unplug it and plug it back in to properly use it again.

Any ideas why this screen would give problems? I have the original drive still.

azitnay

09-30-2005, 10:11 PM

One more question about the interactive instruction: it asks "Is your system software version older than 2.5". Is this referring to the linux kernel? If so, how do i find out? I've looked at the info screen multiple times, and did not find anything about the kernel? thanks.

No, it's referring to your TiVo's software version. You've already stated you have 7.2, which is certainly not older than 2.5 :).

Drew

defucius

10-01-2005, 07:46 AM

Thanks, again. And now I am a happy 229 hours (as reported) Tivo owner! Weaknees rocks!

Minor suggestion about the tivo version confusion:

The wordings are different for describing the tivo software version in step 3 as seen below:
Is your system software version older than 2.5:
Do you have TiVo OS 7.1 or later?

It's probably OK for most people, but it somehow leads me to think the first question is about linux kernel, and the second is about tivo software. Using the same wording and rearrange the order to have these two questions together would avoid this confusion.

weaknees

10-01-2005, 05:16 PM

OK - edited. Thanks for the note.

nichols_eric

10-04-2005, 11:35 PM

*bump*

I have the Samsung-S4040R and performed the instructions for doing:

Replace with one drive

Do you want to make a backup: Yes
Do you have a FAT partition on your C drive: No
Are you using Windows XP or Windows 2000: Yes
Would you like to use a boot CD or floppy: CD
Save or disregard recordings: Save
Are you moving this software from one TiVo to another: No
Do you have TiVo OS 6.2 or later? Yes

After performing all of the steps and hooking it back, I believd that all is well. However, the only problem I have encountered is that when I go into "read new messages," the unit is unresponsive. I have left it alone for long periods of time (hrs) and nothing happens. It still records like normal, just doesn't display messages or respond to the remote. I have to unplug it and plug it back in to properly use it again.

Any ideas why this screen would give problems? I have the original drive still.

weaknees

10-05-2005, 12:04 AM

Never seen that before. You could try a "Clear and delete everything" of course, but that may not be what you want. Does a dial-in change the situation?

nichols_eric

10-05-2005, 04:49 PM

Dial-in hasn't made a difference. Maybe I f'd up one if the linux commands, but I doubt it. Bummer, but I doubt I'll bother taking it apart for this :).

Never seen that before. You could try a "Clear and delete everything" of course, but that may not be what you want. Does a dial-in change the situation?

goony

10-05-2005, 09:57 PM

I have an unhacked SD-DVR40 with V6.2 software that has the same issue - when you go to 'Messages' you get a blank screen and it hangs forever... must pull the plug to get it to recover.

I leave this box with the phone line disconnected for days... I get the 'nag' screen when going into the menus, hit the 'OK'... it's when I don't have any pending message and go into the 'Messages' screen that I get the hang. Dialing in doesn't seem to help any either.

weaknees

10-05-2005, 10:31 PM

Spotty53

10-06-2005, 06:56 AM

From what I understand,
I have a series 2 Hughes SDDVR-80 tivo os 6.2 unhacked, I want to add a 320 gig HD to the original 80.
The kernel will NOT see anything over 137 gig?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
If true, is there a way to update my kernel?

weaknees

10-06-2005, 12:02 PM

The kernel in 6.2 WILL see larger drives.

nichols_eric

10-06-2005, 09:23 PM

I have to do this when I get home tonight, but I did find this when searching the web... This message seems too old (5-5-05) to be relevant now, but it can't hurt to try.

from http://customersupport.tivo.com/knowbase/root/public/tv2188.htm

We are aware of an issue with TiVo DVRs that have a TiVo Service Number starting with 540 or 590 that may cause the DVR to freeze when viewing TiVo Messages. This issue is solved in the newest TiVo software version, the Summer 2005 software update. To receive this software update, go to tivo.com/priority. In order to upgrade software service, you will need your TiVo service number. (To find your TiVo service number, go to TiVo Central, Messages and Setup, and System Information.) Please note that it may take up to three days to receive your software upgrade.

tv2188

AllAboutJeeps

10-07-2005, 11:08 AM

Thanks Weaknees! :up: :up:

Using your guide and disk, and following Sergio (slaponte :up: ) and Drew (azitnay :up: ) instructions on TPIP, I was able to get my 40hour SA upgraded with a $99 300Gig Seagate from CircuitCity last night! I did a

... mfsrestore -s 210 ...

figuring that if a 150 swap space would do the job, 210 would even be better :D ! Very painless, now I just hope to never see a GSOD!

Thanks to you all. Looks like it is time to upgrade my signature.

...danny

betz

10-08-2005, 05:33 PM

WootWoot!

Just took my 40hr tivo --> 340hrs using a 300GB Seagate drive for $99 from Outpost. Thanks to all who helps out on this forum. This is the first upgrade that I have done all by myself. It took me about 4hrs because I ran into some problems (burned CD incorrectly, etc). But your instructions are so easy, that even I could figure it out, and I know nothing about computer lingo (slaves, IDE, whatever). It took alot of time for me to figure it out, but I did! So THANKS SO MUCH!!!!!

:up: :up: :up: :up: :up:

DFNYC

10-08-2005, 08:46 PM

I have upgraded a number of TIVOS for myself and friends over the years....

Bought the Upgrade kit from Weaknees and a 200GB Seagate for $49 bucks from Compusa ! Now my Stock 54040 unit is upt to 272Hrs ! Screwing the drives to the bracket took much longer than these great instructions...Couldn't be more painless !

Thanks Weaknees ! :) :) :) :) :cool:

Sir_Jeeves

10-10-2005, 07:05 PM

When I first purchased the Pioneer 810, only the 57 image would work. I replaced the stock Maxtor with a Segate 200, and somehow, everything worked.

Since then, I have had a a couple upgrades, the most recent being the v7.x (tivo to go). The unit started to freeze/lockup.

Tech Support and others said that the swap partition needed to be increased.

So, now I'm back questioning if I need the 57 image, and WHICH CD I need... and what is this about LBA vs non LBA? TPIP? Is that on the some of the CDs? I came across a 810 5.2.1a that is suppose to be expandable and will work with a large drive, but I've also been told that one MUST have the 57h image.

My latest problem is that when I try to mount the source FAT32, i get a message that the OS must be specified.

What should the swap partion be for a 200GB, especially for the 7.x version....

:confused:

azitnay

10-10-2005, 07:13 PM

Your freezing problems could be caused by a dying hard drive.

To upgrade to a drive that's bigger than 120GB, you'll need an LBA-compatible boot CD (i.e. the one provided by PTVupgrade or WeaKnees). The original MFS Tools 2.0 CD didn't support LBA48.

The standard 127MB of swap (-s 127) should be plenty of swap for a 200GB drive. The standard is at least 1MB of swap for every 2GB of hard drive space.

If mount isn't working on your FAT32 partition, you're most likely not getting the command right (or don't really have a FAT32 partition)... Make sure you have the correct number on the end (i.e. mount /mnt/dos /dev/hda1).

Drew

Sir_Jeeves

10-11-2005, 06:17 PM

azitnay:

Thanks... I thought about adding the history, but here is what I did last year, upon receiving the unit...

Using one of the LBA-compatible CD's, I did replace the original with a WD 200GB. I can't remember what the swap size was and I thought I had increased it anyway.

I'm thinking about running the WD tools to see if there are any bad blocks.

In any event, I've COPIED my content (via Tivo 2Go) over to the PC, then I did a "ERASE everything" via the settings.

I still had problems with the freezing, so I did another ERASE, to prepare for a backup, then a restore, with an increase in the swap size.

I've heard about TPIP and didn't know if there was a way that I could adjust the swap partition without having to do a restore, so I was getting ready for the worst.

Next was trying to track down an OLD version of the 57h image, which, last year, was the only option as the 810h image would not work with a larger drive. Some say that there is a 5.2.1a 810h image floating around that will work, then I would get upgraded. Even though I'm on broadband, I thought I would just try and stick to what I have, but then again, if I have a huge swap partition, the HD is good, then maybe the software load didn't take, so I should redownload it, which is why I would have to backup to a previous version.

The CD/ISO/UTIL image that I am using is "weaknees_lba_boot_cd.iso", CRC32 $5D6CD04A.

Upon booting, with my 200GB WD (Tivo) as Master and my 60GB WD (PRIMARY-FAT32) as Slave, both are listed, although I thought one said [mac] when I SHIFT-PAGE-UP'ed.

Anyway, when I try to mount either one, I get a error message about a file format needed to be specified. Even when using vfat, I get the message.

I'll try more tonight, I found another sight listing "<vfat or msdos> defaults 0 2", which I'm sure indicates a primary/extended partition and which partition within the extended should be mounted, but since it's all FAT32, I'm a little stumped.

Maybe I'll change it to FAT/FAT16....

I'll pull some more hair out later tonight...
Thanks,
Mike

azitnay

10-12-2005, 11:10 AM

Are you definitely attempting to mount the correct partition (i.e. /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda)? You can run:

cat /proc/partitions

to see the list of partition options.

Drew

ashu

10-12-2005, 11:32 AM

or
dmesg |grep hda
to see which partitions were noticed at bootup on hda.

azitnay

10-12-2005, 11:35 AM

TMTOWTDI, indeed.

Drew

ashu

10-12-2005, 11:44 AM

Hence my sig :)

Sir_Jeeves

10-12-2005, 04:04 PM

Yes, I've tried both.

I looked back at my notes from last year and here is what worked - I need to organize a little better though...

Using MFSTools 2.0 CD>

1. vi /etc/fstab
add line "/dev/hda1 /mnt ext 1 1" (or replace the 1 1 with what is directly above)

2. mount /mnt

continue with the backup/restore. I did have "mfstool backup -9so /mnt/tivo.bak /dev/hd0" written down from last year...

I did a restore last night with a "-s 1024", figuring that I would OVERSWAP FTHOI....

The [mac] that was appearing was reflecting a "Apple Partition Map/Table" somewhere on the drive. I'm going to Low-Level Format the thing with SeaTools (hopefully), then redo the restore tonight, maybe a -s 512 or just be safe with a 1024 (gb) swap

LarryInAz

10-14-2005, 12:01 AM

I'm curious if I can add a 2nd larger hard drive to a 540080 TiVo by running the BlessTiVo command and without the need of putting both the original 80gb drive along with the 200gb drive I plan on adding? The reason I ask is I'm upgrading a friends machine who lives a long distance and I was hoping to get the Twinbreeze rack from Weaknees - bless the 2nd drive in my pc at home and then going to my friends house and mount the original drive and the blessed drive on rack and put it in TiVo.

I'm hoping this should work so I don't have to make 2 x 60 mile round trips to my friends house.
The other option is hauling my desktop machine to their house. I can't use their computer because it's an older Compaq that is a royal PITA to pull hard drives out and put new hard drives in. That's why I'm hoping I can simply bless a drive by itself and simply pop it in with the rack. :confused:

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

weaknees

10-14-2005, 12:29 AM

LarryInAz

10-14-2005, 12:33 AM

With any standalone TiVo running 7.2, blessing isn't possible anymore. The mechanism that makes it work is different in this OS and the unit just reboots until you remove the second drive. So bring the PC . . .

Thanks Michael, that's what I was afraid of. I was probably going to bring my desktop machine as a safety net but wanted to check anyway. My order for another Twinbreeze bracket is on it's way. :)

shibumi

10-16-2005, 06:24 AM

With any standalone TiVo running 7.2, blessing isn't possible anymore. The mechanism that makes it work is different in this OS and the unit just reboots until you remove the second drive. So bring the PC . . .
Does this include mfsadd -x /dev/hdX /dev/hdY if you're simply adding a second drive? I'm trying to do this with a 140-series that just upgraded to 7.2 and I get "powering up" over and over and over...

weaknees

10-16-2005, 10:03 AM

No - this is what does still work. Blessing doesn't, mfsadd does.

saldunn83

10-18-2005, 01:52 AM

Hey guys, just got tivo for the first time and i am already ready to upgrade...have a few questions.

I am replacing my 40gb with a seagate 300gb drive in my TCD540040 running 7.2 OS

1. In the instructions when you guys refer to FAT you do mean FAT32 right?
2. I have an empty 40gig FAT32 drive..can I use that as my C drive during the process to back up the OS rather than using the 300gb drive?
3. Will i be able to easily format a 300gb drive to FAT32?..if so, will the seagate software work?
4. Is there a need for me to do anything with swap file size ive been reading about?..if so how?
5. what is TPIP and Do i have to do anything with it during this process becuase the instructions say nothing about it?
6. Would there be a need to reboot after the backup if I have all the drives connected during the original startup?

Do you guys forsee any problems that I should be prepared for?
Thanks guys for your responses!

Sal

azitnay

10-18-2005, 11:57 AM

1) Yes, FAT32 is certainly the most common FAT partition nowadays.

2) Sure, that'll work fine.

3) You could, but you could also just use your preexisting 40GB FAT32 drive.

4) Technically, it's probably a good idea to increase the swap size beyond 127MB. Since you have a 300GB drive, 150MB is ideal.

5) If you give it more than 127MB of swap, you will have to use tpip. Search the forum for more information on how to use it.

6) I can't see why you'd have to reboot.

Drew

saldunn83

10-18-2005, 03:41 PM

Thanks for the response, I have a few follow up questions...

If i understand you correctly, I don't have to format the 300gb hard drive if i use my old 40 for the backup?...the weakness CD does the format when i do the restore?

would I have to increase the swap file size?...what would happen if i didn't?

The reason i am asking is because even though i am a computer technician and was a comp sci major at one point, i am a windows man and my knowledge of linux at the command line is minimal since the last time i used it was 5 years ago. So I am looking for the easiest way to go through this process without screwing up my TiVo

Thanks for helping me out

EDIT: Did some more browsing...when I restore the image to the harddrive can i just use this line to increase the swap file size?...
mfsrestore -s 150 -r 4 -zxpi /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hdz
Can it be that simple?

Thanks

azitnay

10-18-2005, 04:16 PM

Yes, MFS Tools 2.0 takes care of "formatting" your new TiVo hard drive when you perform the mfsrestore. It doesn't use anything like FAT32, BTW.

I can't say you absolutely have to increase the swap, since if you never see a GSOD it'll most likely not matter. Even if you do see a GSOD, it's debatable whether 127MB really isn't enough for 300GB. But if you're willing to take a couple extra seconds to run tpip, it might be worth it.

Like I said, -s 150 isn't quite all you need... You also need to run tpip. I've never had the need to run it, so I don't know the command-line off the top of my head, but a search of this forum should turn it up.

Drew

saldunn83

10-18-2005, 04:43 PM

Ok....i think i got it now.....

Hampster

10-20-2005, 03:23 AM

...I finally managed to use these procedures & utilities to upgrade my 540040 from a 40GB capacity to 200GB. I replaced the drive with a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 7200RPM 200GB drive (L01P200). Seems to be working great now...

This drive is just a little noisier than the old one, but it's in my living room, so you don't really notice unless it's at night and fairly quiet. I tried to hunt down the Maxtor amset.exe utility somewhere on the Internet, but couldn't find it anywhere.
Amset is a feature of a program call setacm, and it's located here:

http://service.maxtor.com/rightnow/downloads/setacm.exe

Michael
Following up on this link (finally) about 4 months later, I downloaded setacm.exe, unzipped it, copied it to a Win98 boot floppy, and ran amset.exe on this drive. MUCH better now. Despite the comment above, after 4 months it really got to the point of driving me nuts. Someone on another thread described the sound when the drive is seeking (which is just about 24/7 on a TiVo) as like a "geiger counter." Good description. When I ran the "amset /check" command, it said the drive was set to "Performance" mode. Figures - that explains the relatively loud clicks. After setting it to "Quiet" mode, I've noticed a huge improvement in sound reduction. No more TiVo/geiger counter combo device.

The impetus to finally do this was the fact that I replaced the 40GB drive in my other 540040 with a 160GB Seagate drive, and figured I might as well fix my first upgraded TiVo while I was in the process of mucking around with TiVos and computers in general. Having been down this road before, it was a breeze & I now have tons more space to record on both TiVos. And, this Seagate sounds like it's much quieter out of the box than the Maxtor was before I tweaked it. Thanks again weaknees!

jmattos

10-22-2005, 09:36 PM

Hey there

I've used the instructions before with great success, so I'm trying it again, but having a problem...

I bought a 540 series 40hr and immediately pulled out the drive and followed the directions for "replace a drive" (without having set up the tivo with the original drive)

after I replaced the new (200gb) in the tivo, it doesnt get past "powering up"

I have now replaced the 40hr tivo drive and am going thru the normal set up and I plan to recreate the 200gigger after that.

thoughts on this? could the 200 gig (maxtor) have arrived polluted by windows? is there a way to undo the horrible things that making a drive windows bootable does?

I never booted the computer with the 200gigger attached into windows either..

help?

meyerweb

10-23-2005, 04:24 PM

Hi: / help
I'm trying to use the Weaknees procedures and boot CD to replace the original drive in my 24004A with a 250 GB Maxtor drive. I can't get it to work at all. (I've also tried using the new drive to create a backup and save my old recordings without sucess. At this point, I'm willing to lose my old recordings, but can't get that to work either. )

I've got my new drive connected to the second master and my old drive connected to the second slave. The Win2K boot disk isn't connected at all. The messages during the Linux boot disk show the drives correctly (new as hda, old as hdb. I'm entering the following command, straight from the weaknees interactive upgrade insructions:

mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hda

I get a full page of error messages:

Second MFS drive: No such file or directory
Second MFS drive2: illigal seek
Second MFS drive: No such file or directory
Second MFS drive3: illegal seek
mfs_load_volume_header: Total Sectors (79358967) mismatch with volume header (569569280)
mfs_load_volume_header: loading anyway
mfs_load_zone_map: Primary zone map corrupt, loading backup
mfs_load_zone_map: Secondary zone map corrupt, giving up
mfs-load-zone_map: zone map checksum error
mfsbackup: backup failed to startup. Make sure you specified the right devices and that drives are not locked
restore failed: -: Success

Can anyone tell me what the problem might be?

Thanks.

edit ==> corrected a typo and put the "-" in the proper place in the command.

JamieP

10-23-2005, 04:34 PM

mfsbackup -f 9999 -so /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdaYour mfsbackup command line is saying to write the backup onto /dev/hdb. Is that what you intended? It looks like you dropped the "-" which says to write the backup to stdout.

meyerweb

10-23-2005, 04:39 PM

Oops, that's a typo. I did include the "-" before the /dev/hdb. And I checked it very carefully before hitting the enter key:

JamieP

10-23-2005, 04:49 PM

Oops, that's a typo. I did include the "-" before the /dev/hdb. And I checked it very carefully before hitting the enter key:The symptoms still look to me like a botched command line. I'd put the original drive back in the tivo to test to be sure it works. Then I'd try following the instructions again, taking the path that preserves recordings, if that's what you want to do. Be extremely careful to avoid typos.

jmattos

10-23-2005, 11:19 PM

omg im so embarassed it was a jumper setting. thank you all :)

DaveLessnau

10-24-2005, 03:43 PM

I've got my new drive connected to the second master and my old drive connected to the second slave. The Win2K boot disk isn't connected at all. The messages during the Linux boot disk show the drives correctly (new as hda, old as hdb. I'm entering the following command, straight from the weaknees interactive upgrade insructions:

mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hda

I don't know if it makes a difference with Linux, but are there supposed to be spaces between those dashes and /dev/hdb and /dev/hda? IOW, is it:

... -/dev/hdb | ... -/dev/hda

or

... - /dev/hdb | ... - /dev/hda

EDIT: Never mind. From other posts, I figured out that either the spaces are supposed to be there or it doesn't matter. Sorry.

miadlor

10-24-2005, 04:25 PM

I can't seem to find the break-down...............

What does the -r do again? I forgot exactly.
Does anyone have the key for mfs tools........I can't find it.

DaveLessnau

10-24-2005, 06:38 PM

I can't seem to find the break-down...............

What does the -r do again? I forgot exactly.
Does anyone have the key for mfs tools........I can't find it.

There might be something more recent, but from the archives here's a link to a thread I started years ago on it ("MFSTools 2.0 Parameters?"):

http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?threadid=82204

HomeUser

10-24-2005, 07:42 PM

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=2651877&&#post2651877

-r n (Mis-labeled -X in the usage, but -r is the actual parameter it looks for)
This specifies the scale for allocation block size in the partitions added with -x. A value of 0 is identical to what TiVo would use, and specifies 1mb blocks. 1 would be 2mb, 3 is 4mb, and 4 is 8mb. My theory was by reducing this number it would reduce the RAM requirement of things like GSOD (Allowing it to run without increased swap) and let menus and such run faster with more RAM available for other things. In practice, I'm not sure if it really does either of those things. Presently the default is 2 (4mb) but I am likely to change that to 0.

miadlor

10-25-2005, 11:08 AM

Thanks!

matt_auer

10-26-2005, 07:25 PM

I'm doing what should be a simple ungrade.
Replacing 40 gig factory with 160 gig new drive

I created the Boot CD I downloaded from Weaknees website and my PC boots from the CD but gets the 4 lines with error messages like:
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe etc, etc

When I issue the MFSBACKUP command, I get the same error message.

I burned 4 more boot CDs but all have the same bootup error.
Is there a special way to burn the boot CD or is does this error mean something else?

SteelersFan

10-28-2005, 09:36 PM

Just to make sure I am clear (I am a bit of a noob with upgrading but have done much reading):
1) I think I read that disconnecting the PC HD is safest, true?
2) If so, I will make the original Tivo drive hda and the new drive hdb, correct?
3) The directions for this setup aren't clear for how and when to shut down and power down when the upgrade is done. Do I do a CRTL+ALT+DEL and power off the PC?

BTW, here is my setup:
DTivo DSR704
Replacing 1 original HD with 1 new HD
Backup - No
FAT - No
Win XP - Yes
CD or floppy - CD
Save recordings - Yes
Move Tivo SW - No
OS 6.2 - Yes

Any help is much appreciated. :)

azitnay

10-28-2005, 11:04 PM

1) Yes, if you don't need the PC hard drive for anything for the upgrade, disconnect it.

2) That's fine.

3) The standard Linux "halt" command is one way to halt the system.

Drew

mportuesi

10-30-2005, 02:28 AM

Just wanted to write and say "thanks" for the instructions. I just upgraded my three-year old 240080 Series2 unit. I replaced the stock 80GB drive with a Western Digital 250GB drive, and the upgrade went flawlessly, including transferring all my settings, season passes, and recorded shows onto the new disk.

Advice for first-time upgraders: start at the END of the discussion threads and work backwards when looking for information. Some of these threads have been around a while, and the beginnings of some threads have out-of-date info.

SteelersFan

10-30-2005, 03:53 AM

How do I know when it is done with the upgrade? After I typed my command line it went to work for only a couple of minutes (I'm saving my old recordings) and now it is sitting at Weaknees#. Is this right? I didn't seem to get any errors.

Edit: I must have had a typo in the command line somewhere. It is now backing up and it looks like it will take a while (37963MB).

SteelersFan

10-30-2005, 04:58 PM

Well, it was very successful in the end but not without me learning a few things. I didn't know my older PC (PIII) couldn't detect large drives (I have a 40 GB original and a 120GB new drive). The second thing I learned was that on my newer PC (P4 with 2 CD drives), I needed to put the bootable CD in the master CD drive not the slave. After I got those things squared away, it took all of 2 minutes plus 6 1/2 hours of transfer time. As you might guess this was my first time doing anything other than dropping a preconfigured drive into one of my other units. Anyway, I thought this info might benefit someone new like me.

Christian Dad

10-30-2005, 08:23 PM

I used the Weeknees interactive website and it went smoothly.

I reconnected and powered up the Series 2 540 40 hour (now 189 hour), and it resets repeatedly. I get through the "sunrise" powering up screen, I get into the "just a few more minutes" screen, and then it reports that an error has been detected and it will take about three hours to fix, and not to unplug it. I figure this is TiVo detecting the new drive.

Withing a few seconfs, though, it resets.

HELP!!!

melgar

10-30-2005, 09:00 PM

Hi,

I started with a 40 Gb 24004A system about 1.5 years ago. I upgraded it to dual 160 Gb drives (320 hrs :) ) soon thereafter. One of the 160's is starting to fail...well really it's just plain failing :( . I want to upgrade again.

I've reinstalled the original 40 Gb drive into the 24004A and have upgraded the OS to TiVo 7.2.

Can I now get more than 320 hrs. using Weaknees' "weaknees_lba_boot_cd.iso" and do I need to follow the directions for a model 540xx machine or do the directions for the 24004A work as well?

I've got a 200 Gb and a 160 Gb that I want to install.

Also, I've got a backup of my original 40 Gb on a CD-ROM. The OS on that version is 4.x, I think.

To use the 200 Gb and the 160 Gb to their full capacity, do I need to use the now 7.2 OS upgraded original TiVo drive, or will it work with the backup of the original as well?

TIA for any help,
Michael

azitnay

10-31-2005, 09:47 AM

Yes, your 240 unit will need software version 7.x to take advantage of the full capacity of the hard drives.

Since you might not be able to pull a valid backup image off the current drive pair, you can always restore the 4.x image you have to a single drive without expanding, then let it download 7.x, and then add the second drive and expand to use the full capacity. It might also be a good idea to make a 7.x backup at that point, since you won't have to worry about doing that annoying dance ever again with a 7.x backup.

Drew

melgar

11-06-2005, 01:26 PM

Thanks...Did a back up of the original 40Gb drive after TiVo OS had upgraded to 7.2. Then I did the 2 drive upgrade of that, a 160Gb and a 200Gb drive. TiVo is back up and running with no hiccups. And I'm looking at 417hrs recording capacity...WOOHOO! Thanks azitnay for your help and to Weaknees for a helpful upgrade guide & software download...

Yes, your 240 unit will need software version 7.x to take advantage of the full capacity of the hard drives.

Since you might not be able to pull a valid backup image off the current drive pair, you can always restore the 4.x image you have to a single drive without expanding, then let it download 7.x, and then add the second drive and expand to use the full capacity. It might also be a good idea to make a 7.x backup at that point, since you won't have to worry about doing that annoying dance ever again with a 7.x backup.

Drew

daflea

11-12-2005, 07:07 PM

Hi, I'm upgrading a Hughes Series 2 from a 40 to a 200GB drive. When I run the lba_boot CD, I get through recognizing all drives down to

Partition check:
hda:

At that point, it just hangs. I can't type anything at that point. Any reason for that? I could use mfstools 2.0, but want to get the whole 200GB in use... Thanks!

azitnay

11-13-2005, 09:10 AM

I don't know, but you could use the following CD as an alternative to try:

http://www.ptvupgrade.com/products/software/lba48/index.html

Drew

hunters

11-26-2005, 11:27 AM

I have a previously upgraded through weeknees a 2 hard drive 10-250. It now reboots and stutters ALL THE TIME. I've been putting off the inevitable...one of the hd's is dying. So my question is how would I make a good image of my tivo and restore it to 2 working hard drives. I've looked through a lot of directions online, but none have really explained what to do about my particular situation with an exsisting bad hard drive. Any help would be fantastic.

Thanks

azitnay

11-26-2005, 11:41 AM

You can attempt an mfsbackup of the drive pair, but it may or may not work due to the failing drive.

I'm assuming you don't have the original drive that came with your unit? Obviously, you could get an image off that.

Worst-case, you can PM StanSimmons to see if he knows of an image for your unit, or purchase InstantCake from http://www.ptvupgrade.com/.

Drew

hunters

11-26-2005, 11:47 AM

Drew, The original drive that came with the unit is one of the drives in the unit. I added a 2nd hd.

I've already PM'd Stan for an image.

Fezzix

11-26-2005, 01:50 PM

I'm trying to update a Series 2 4008A from 80gigs to 250. I burned the weaknees CD and boot up fine, but when I do the command nothing happens. I've checked the directions on tivo.upgrade-instructions and put in the command mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdc and it just sits there. Any advise? I'm stuck. Thanks.

azitnay

11-26-2005, 04:10 PM

Does it just hang (requiring you to break the command), or does it immediately return to the prompt without displaying anything?

Have you verified that the old drive is definitely connected as primary slave, and the new drive is definitely connected as secondary master? What happens when you run:

mfsinfo /dev/hdb

?

You could always try the PTVupgrade CD instead.

Drew

Fezzix

11-26-2005, 05:36 PM

It was just going right back to the prompt. So I burned the PTVupgrade disc and it went through ok. 282 hours :). The best part was I got the drive changed before it failed, as I could hear it clicking and the TiVo was hanging at times. Seems to have full functionality, so it seems to be fine now. Thanks for the advise, not only directly but in all the previous posts.

jd043053

11-28-2005, 07:44 PM

I am having trouble getting my weeknees boot CD to boot up. I keep getting a boot failure notice.
I may have not burned it correctly (ie .iso)
I have another upgrade disc from 'TIVO Companion'. It boots up fine, but is not set up for large drives. I used it previously and it cuts off at 137GB. Only 161 hrs on 250GB drive.
Anyone have suggestions on either using 'Tivo Companion' to get full 250GB or help with weeknees Boot problem?
BTW - I have BASIC computer skills - take me gently- thanks

azitnay

11-28-2005, 08:40 PM

Did you burn the .iso as a file to a data CD by mistake? You can find out by putting the CD in while you're in Windows, and seeing if the .iso is just sitting on it as a single file.

If a Linux-based boot CD has only utilized 137GB in the past, it most likely uses a non-LBA48-compatible kernel, and thus it isn't worth worrying about how to make it LBA48-compatible.

Drew

jd043053

11-29-2005, 11:06 AM

Ok Thanks!

Now I have a bootable CD of weaknees, recognizing my 250GB HD, but now I am getting a 'No CD-ROM Found' after "trying to mount CD-ROM" tries 1-5. ??????

also, the linux commands printed from the upgrade site show spaces in the commands (mount /dev/hdw1 /mnt) I am just guessing NO spaces, right?

SteelersFan

11-29-2005, 11:34 AM

hawkeye1991

11-29-2005, 08:27 PM

Hi,

HDVR2. Tryting to replace the 40G drive with 120.

Trying to maintain only one drive

I connected the 120 drive to the primary master (to which my C drive was attached b4)

I'll boot from the CD and instruct to restore to hda. I'll have the jumper on the master (will cable select work?)

Will this work, or do I need to have the C drive on my computer acccesible?

Thanks for the patience.

chuck.

azitnay

11-29-2005, 09:39 PM

Assuming you're just doing a direct copy from the 40 to the 120, you don't need your C drive connected for anything in particular.

If you have an image stored on the C drive, though, that's a different story.

Drew

hawkeye1991

11-30-2005, 09:24 AM

Thanks FOr your response

The only image I have is for the SD dVR-80 ona cd. How dO I go about it? Do I need a HDVR2 image or will I be able to use the image I have.

If I can use the image I have, how do I do it. Transfer to a C drive and then move it over?

If I can't use the image what are my options for a image which I can add some bells and whistles (no phone line requirement, usb activation etc to?)

azitnay

11-30-2005, 04:14 PM

You said you're simply replacing the 40GB with a 120GB. You don't need an image -- just do a direct copy (mfsbackup | mfsrestore type of command) from one to the other.

Drew

alexgav

12-02-2005, 05:25 PM

No problems. Followed the instructions provided in the first post of this thread, did "Replace a drive with a new drive" thing including a backup, and everything worked great. I also saved all of my recordings from the old drive. Went from 40+ hours to 228 hours!

One iteresting bit of info: I set my drive to do "Cable Select" thing - and it booted up and is working fine.

I had a problem with a 160GB Western Digital drive two month ago where I tried the same thing and couldn't get passed the second screen "Almost there, just a few more minutes...". I tried to set that drive to both Master and Single mode (which are different for WD drives), and neither would work. I don't think I tried Cable Select though. Maybe that was the problem...

Anyway - everything worked perfect! The drive is kinda loud when seeking though, but I can live with it. I tried the IBM/Hitachi utiliy, and it reported that Acoustic Management was not supported. I've read somewhere on the web that Seagate may have their own utility, but haven't contacted them yet. If anyone has any 411 on that, lemme know please.

I am a happy camper!!! Thank you WeekNees. :up: :up: :up:

khyberman

12-04-2005, 09:16 AM

I want to upgrate from fatory installed version of 5.4 to 7.1 which I beleive is necessary for recognising the USB wireless card from netgear.

Please advice on how I cna upgrade? thanks,

weaknees

12-04-2005, 09:51 AM

Simply dialing the unit in should accomplish that. Do you have it connected to the TiVo service somehow?

azitnay

12-04-2005, 10:32 AM

I'd put it on the 7.2.1 priority list to be sure you get the latest and greatest:

http://research.tivo.com/72.1priority/

Drew

emanuel

12-05-2005, 10:07 AM

I successfully upgraded my TiVo series 4 from a 40 to a 120 drive. I am now trying to upgrade from the 120 to a 200. Everything looks ok except I get an error message for the kmod command.

When I give the command;

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb

I get the message that the backup target isn't large enough for entire backup.

Any ideas what I did wrong? I have the 120 TiVo drive on primary master and the new 200 gig drive on primary slave.

weaknees

12-05-2005, 10:12 AM

The problem is that you can't add another partition to the A drive here - you have already expanded it once. You'd need to do a backup without recordings so that mfstool can re-size your partitions.

emanuel

12-05-2005, 10:46 AM

The problem is that you can't add another partition to the A drive here - you have already expanded it once. You'd need to do a backup without recordings so that mfstool can re-size your partitions.ok, thanks for the fast answer!

Lacaramba

12-07-2005, 05:52 AM

I'm new to this discussion group and I must admit I am amazed that you seem to have taken on the world's problem when it comes to updating Tivo's. Your patients is wonderful and I really appriciate it a lot.

Now to my question. I am about to upgrade a HDR212 using my XP service pack 2 NTFS computer and when reading the how too you mention right after the warning about booting into XP and harming the hard drive to hit CTRL + ALT+ Del. On my machine it only brings up the task manager and does not shut down my XP machine. I guess I am confused because I think you meant to say boot the machine from the CD, not shut the machine down since your next statement is to type in a command. Hard to do that when the machine is down. I guess that part is kind of confusing to me.

WeaKnees, Michael, you guys are fabulous.

Here is what it said....

Windows 2000 and XP Notes

Booting into Windows 2000 or XP with a TiVo drive connected to your PC will overwrite key information on the TiVo drive. The TiVo drive then won't work in a TiVo. If you do run into this problem, you may be able to fix the drive using software called MakeTiVoBootable.

Also, if your boot drive is a Windows 2000 or XP drive, it may not have a FAT32 partition on it, and you'll need that for making a backup.

Hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE, wait for the shutdown sequence to finish, and power down your PC.
Issue backup and restore commands

At the prompt, issue the following command with hdZ as the location of the drive with the temporary FAT partition:

mount /dev/hdZ1 /mnt

etc.

azitnay

12-07-2005, 08:34 AM

The instructions do look to be a little flawed with respect to the CTRL-ALT-DELETE instructions... Typically, when you do a CTRL-ALT-DELETE in Linux, it immediately initiates a system shutdown, which stops all running processes, etc. It looks like the first CTRL-ALT-DELETE instructions may have been simply copied and pasted from the second CTRL-ALT-DELETE instructions (which pertain to shutting down the CD-booted Linux after performing the upgrade).

I know for a fact (because I just tried it) that Windows 2000 gives you a "Shut Down" option on the window that comes up after you CTRL-ALT-DELETE, so that is one legitimate way to shut down, and I'm pretty sure Windows XP has something similar. Regardless, you have to shut down Windows and boot into Linux via the boot CD to perform the upgrade.

Drew

rickbird

12-10-2005, 02:02 AM

I am stumped. I bought a new TiVo box with a 40 GB hard drive. I paid my $299 lifetime subscription. Then, I bought a new Maxtor 300 GB PATA hard drive, a new Seagate 300 GB PATA hard drive, and a Weaknees bracket.

I ran through the Hinsdale instructions but the software recommended would not copy the image to my Windows XP hard drive. After carefully reading, I realized that I needed a FAT32 drive so I flipped a new hard drive in my PC and formatted it with FAT32. The software copied the TiVo backup perfectly.

I then copied the files to the two 300 GB hard drives and installed the bracket with the hard drives in my new 540 Series 2 TiVo box. The system goes through the "Welcome..." screen, and then the "Almost there..." screen, then it shows a green error screen for about 30 seconds and then it reboots.

After reading the threads, I figured that one of the two hard drives was bad, even though both passed the hard drives' utility tests. So, I copied the image on the Maxtor drive alone and installed it in the TiVo box. It worked perfectly. I then copied the image on the Seagate hard drive alone and installed it in the TiVo box and *it* worked perfectly. Both hard drives work perfectly if they are installed alone.

I re-installed the image on the two drives with the Maxtor as the A drive and the Seagate as the B drive. The rebooting started immediately after I installed the drives. I re-installed the image on the two drives with the Seagate as the A drive and the Maxtor as the B drive. The rebooting continued...

I flipped the jumper to be Master/Slave and the rebooting continued... I flipped the jumpers to be Cable Select/ Cable Select and the rebooting continues...

I am at my wits end. My wife thinks that I am nuts for devoting so much time to upgrading the new TiVo box. I guess that I just want to brag about having over 600 hours on my new machine... Maybe I'm just nuts... :o

Any ideas?

weaknees

12-10-2005, 10:05 AM

I think the problem is the "-r 4" switch. If you are still using the Hinsdale instructions at this point, you should try ours (maybe you have since you've posted here, but that would fix this problem).

Basically, without the "-r 4" the mfsadd software will only work properly with partitions up to about 250 GB. So one drive has 40 GB worth of original partitions copied from your factory drive, plus one partition set of around 240 GB (most 300 GB drives are actually about 279GB).

When you add the second drive, mfsadd is choking because it is trying to deal with a partition larger than 250 GB. That's why the unit won't boot.

chalooch101

12-10-2005, 11:55 AM

anyone know of any special holiday coupon codes to be used at weakness.com for replacement hard drive purchases? thanks and happy holidays

rickbird

12-10-2005, 12:33 PM

687 hours on my TiVo!!!!! Oh yea!!!! Thank you very much!!! The correct command to restore the backup was mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdd for my setup.

Even though I purchased the upgrade bracket from Weaknees, I was using the Hinsdale instructions because I couldn't find instructions on Weaknees.com. Since you mentioned that the instructions existed, I carefully searched your site and found this link: http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com

Your instructions are awesome! Thank you for the quick response and the assistance. This is my second upgrade using Weaknees bracket kits. You provide high quality products and I appreciate the quick support! Thank you Weaknees!

687 hours of recording time! I love it!!!!!

Dimarc67

12-11-2005, 01:26 AM

Hi.

I'd like to replace the 40GB WD drive in my Series2 (240040). The factory drive bearings are singing away, and since this is the box in my bedroom, I'd really like to quiet things down. I already happen to have another brand new 40GB WD (Caviar SE), so we're talking a straight swap, and I'd like to copy all of the recordings to the new drive as well. Obviously, the procedure would be text-book, except...

Here's where I get a little stuck:
The only computer I own is an IBM laptop, including a dock with an available PCI slot. I've installed a PCI EIDE card in the slot, and connected the old and new TiVo drives as individual masters on each of the two new IDE channels (original TiVo drive is on channel 1). Since this is basically adding two IDE channels on top of what's already in the laptop, and if I understand Linux's drive assignment nomenclature, I would expect the two drives to be hde and hdg. However, they're not showing up in the bootup output. The only drives listed are the internal hard drive C: and the CD-ROM (hda and hdc, respectively).

It's really odd because the extra two IDE channels are listed in the information--hde through hdh, as predicted--it's just not seeing the drives. Perhaps a driver is needed for the extra IDE card?

At this point, I'm pretty resigned to having to lug the drives into work and using a desktop computer there, but I'd love to understand what might be the issue at home.

Thanks!

David
New York, NY

HomeUser

12-11-2005, 09:16 AM

Try a different boot CD

This short thread might be of some use
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=3055345&&#post3055345

Dimarc67

12-11-2005, 11:17 AM

Thanks.

jeff125va

12-11-2005, 03:28 PM

Is there a way to use these instructions to replace my A drive in my HR10-250, which seems to be failing? I added a 300GB Maxtor Quickview drive from Weaknees, and that seems to be fine. I'd like to preserve my recordings and/or my SPs, etc., but could live without them. If not, where can I figure out how to do that?

jrn

12-11-2005, 09:49 PM

I had my hard drive fail. I have purchased a new drive to put in it and have downloaded the instructions from the web but I can not see where to can get an image to load on the drive. If the old drive was readable I could use that but it is not. I guess I could order an imaged drive or it appears I can send it it to be imaged but that seems a bit pricey. Is there a place to get the image and do it myself?

weaknees

12-11-2005, 10:41 PM

You can try here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=62430

jlee3

12-19-2005, 08:42 PM

I just used your excellent instructions and your bracket to add a 300 GB B drive to my HR10-250 which had a pretty full A drive. How long should it take to boot up. I have been on the "Welcome. Powering up..." screen for 1/2 hour.
Thanks,

jlee3

12-19-2005, 10:51 PM

Thanks very much for the suggestion but I found the problem. I had the wrong drive in the A position. Extremely stupid pilot error.

weaknees

12-19-2005, 11:20 PM

I ran into some errors when trying to backup my current shows to a bigger hdd using the guide. I didn't find it listed anywhere but all the errors went away (and the backup/restore is going on right now) once I set a raw partition on the new hdd, no formating required. Does this sound correct?

So new at this, tia.

metalrms

Do you know what the errors were?

The mfstools software overwrites any partitions when it restores . . .

MickeS

12-20-2005, 11:32 PM

Hi all, thanks for an easy-to-use and well-written interactive guide. I have a question though!

I used it last week to upgrade my AT&T 230040 from 40+120GB drives to a 300 GB drive.
Everything went fine, and it was easy. I used this command line:
mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdd

However, afterwards I read on the board about the "-s" tag being for swap file space, and that it needed to be at least 1 MB per 2 GB of storage. That would mean at least 150 in my case. I didn't see anything in the instructions about that though. Is that not required in these instructions because of some other command line attribute, or is it an oversight? Is there anything I can do now to change it? DO I even need to change it?

Thanks!

/Mike

azitnay

12-21-2005, 08:48 AM

Lannister80

12-21-2005, 09:08 AM

It's only required if the machine ever goes into a GSOD (green screen of death) to try to repair itself. Even then, 127MB -might- be enough for your size drive (hard to say for sure).

The WeaKnees instructions seem to ignore this fact, and a lot of people agree that it's not a huge issue... If you do want to fix the swap, you'll have to look into a utility called tpip, because mfsrestore can't create a correct 150MB swap header on its own.

Drew

Under what circumsances would a GSOD appear on a TiVo that had previously been working OK? I've heard about lots of people getting them right after they do an upgrade or a hack or something, but once your TiVo is in an (apparently) stable state, can it randomly go bonkers like that? And if so, what kinds of repairs is it attempting?

azitnay

12-21-2005, 09:15 AM

The most common occurrence of a GSOD is probably due to hard drive failure, in which case it can be argued that a GSOD loop is the least of your worries. However, I have heard it triggering after software upgrades as well, so I suppose the swap problem can't be totally overlooked if a software upgrade on an otherwise-fine system can potentially trigger a GSOD.

You can think of a GSOD like chkdsk or ScanDisk... Fixing up problems with the filesystem.

Drew

MickeS

12-21-2005, 11:27 AM

Thanks for the reply. Will look into tpip!

JELaVallee

01-03-2006, 09:00 AM

Hi,

I've used the WeaKnees guide to upgrade two of my HDVR2 systems from 40GB to 120GB. I was helping a coworker do the same over the holiday using one of my original Tivo 6.2 stock 40GB drives as the source drive, we ran into a problem with the source drive becoming unreadable. Here's the setup:

/dev/hda - Original Tivo 6.2 40GB drive (Primary Master pin set)
/dev/hdb - empty
/dev/hdc - CD-ROM drive (Secondary Master pin set)
/dev/hdd - New Tivo Target 120GB drive (Secondary Slave pin set)

I booted to the CD/linux prompt just fine then ran msfinfo on /dev/hda and it reported fine with (~)40 hour capacity.

Then I ran this command:
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | msfrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdd

As per the instructions on the WeaKnees guide.

This ran for somewhere around 7 hours, but around 80% of completion, the original Tivo 40GB drive started making very "crunchy" seek/read noises for a good 10 minutes (~1%) and then stopped. Then around 97.5% it started up again. This time, actual errors were reported to the effect of "I/O error while reading device on IDE(0): /dev/hda2 not ready" (paraphrasing here) for /dev/hda2, hda4, and hda6. At one point it appeared to recover (and the noise stopped) but then went right back into it... Finally the whole operation failed.

When I ran mfsinfo on hda again, it could not read the device at all. When I ran it on the new drive it reported that the drive was Tivo ready but only for 40 hours suggesting that the mfsrestore process never got to the "x" expansion process.

Subsequent attempts to reboot/remount /dev/hda have been unsuccessful with the drive now making a regular intermittent "screach-screach-long-pause" sound which suggests to me complete read failure.

So, my questions are:

Is the mfsbackup|mfsrestore process intensive enough to cause an weakened drive to completely fail?
Is the second drive recoverable other than just re-running the upgrade with another source drive or an InstantCake solution?
Did I screw something up in my drive positioning/config?

Anyway, I'll probably revert to using an InstantCake CD now (as I have several friends/coworkers with HDVR2's who all want either expansion or enhancements) but just was looking for feedback on this and other's experience with disk failures.

Cheers,
Etienne

Castyn

01-05-2006, 02:00 AM

I selected an upgrade to a larger drive on my 40 hour tivo. I wanted to keep the season passes and recordings. After putting in:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdX | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdZ (I used the right drive names)

It backed up the tivo drive, then the screen went blank and has stayed that way for quite a while. Is this normal or should I reboot the computer and hope for the best? Your guide worked perfectly up until this point of my confusion.

Thanks!

HomeUser

01-05-2006, 08:28 AM

Screen saver, Press the "Any Key" :)

blacksurfer

01-08-2006, 11:04 AM

Weeknees,

I have a Philips DSR704 (bought as a reburb on Ebay six months ago) and yesterday the picture froze and the drive was making a clicking sound. I unplugged it and it froze on "powering up", I unplugged it again and read here for about an hour and plugged it in and did a complete erase and it seems to be working.

But after reading here, I would like to replace the drive (it's the 35 hr drive) with an 80 or 160 hour drive from you. I noticed your drives are all ready for install with no PC necessary. Do you sell the same drives cheaper if I wanted to install the software myself in my FAT32 PC?

rvahoviak

01-08-2006, 03:47 PM

HI trying to upgrade my drive using Mfs Tools 2.0. Have the original TIVO in Primary Master and New Blank drive in Primary slave. Jumpers seem correct for everything. When booting up the Mfs Tools 2.0 in the cd-rom it recognizes all the drives and them tries to mount the cd-rom a few times and failes. Then it cannot find the commands when I try and run the mfsbackup... command. Any suggestions? Thanks.

HomeUser

01-08-2006, 07:10 PM

The CD could be bad.
If you have an add-on IDE card check this message
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=3649790&&#post3649790

2004raptor

01-10-2006, 10:09 AM

I haven't read through the entire thread (yet) so if any of this has already been covered, I apologize.
My plans are to eventually upgrade 2 tivos. One is mine, the other belongs to someone else.
Regarding my upgrade, i believe the best choice would be to completely replace the current 40GB hd in the tivo and just save it for a backup.
With that said, I currently have a maxtor ide fluid bearing HD in my desktop pc that I use just to backup drive images, store music, movies, etc. It is not my main drive. I have been using it for ~2yrs. One idea is to replace the maxtor ide with a sata (my mobo has sata onboard) and use that maxtor for my tivo. Would this be advisable or since it's been in an XP environment would it be better to just get a new drive?

Moving forward, when I decide the hard drive situation and get my tivo finished, I want to do one for someone else. Can I do everything that needs to be done on my pc and just take the hard drive over to the other persons house and just remove/install? I just want minimal downtime for them.

I have only begun to look through the upgrade instructions via weakness's guide ( http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/index.php ) but already have a question.

My main hd is a WD 74GB Raptor formatted in ntfs. Do I have to have a FAT file system as my C drive to do this or is there anything special I need to do because of ntfs?
Just want to know a basic game plan of how this is done?
1. Download the Boot CD image of MFSTool 2.0 and burn to disc.
2. Connect the *new* drive to secondary ide slot.
3. Boot off the MFSTool cd.
4. Follow instructions?????

What basic steps did I leave out?
Thanks for any help?

sc0tt

01-10-2006, 05:37 PM

sholleran

01-10-2006, 07:43 PM

If I use weaknees Boot cd with MFSTools 2.0 and Large Kernel Support to
replace my HR10-250 original 250mb Drive with a Maxtor Quickview 300mb drive,
will the 300mb drive accept Tivo updates? or will the Tivo updates fail.
I decided not to use 'PTVupgrade LBA48 CD with MFSTools' because of that problem.

Also, My pc's 'C' drive is two SATA 74G Raptors configured as a raid device in Windows XP. Is there any way to reference that raid device in Linux and use it
to backup a Tivo image.

If not I still have an older PC with Win98 installed and 'C' drive setup as a raid device but it is Fat32 not NTFS. But once again how do I reference a raid drive
in Linux.

Since my HR10-250 supports large drives I will not have to use mfsadd to use all space on new drive? If follow Interactive Tivo Upgrade Instructions for HR10-250 and I should be ok since it does not mention mfsadd.
Thanks,

Scott

I just did the upgrade, struggled for hours due to my raid array. My recommendation is to throw the jumper to disable raid and pull the power off the raid hd's, so your pc looks to linux like a regular pc.

You're probably going to fdisk & format the new HD as fat32 to get the backup, I recommend making the fat32 partition 5GB - not 1GB as you'll read elsewhere - or so because I also found that once I made the backup I could not boot form the raid array with the near empty fat32 attached. I got an error that my primary hd did not have an OS and couldn't get the bios to boot from raid ahead of the primary master. I installed winXP (tivo drive removed) to my new, almost empty hd that had the backup in a second partition, used that XP to burn the backup to cd, removed the partition to avoid accidentally booting to xp, reattached tivo & finished the upgrade, re-enabled raid. Adds a little time, but worked.

sc0tt

01-10-2006, 08:00 PM

I just did the upgrade, struggled for hours due to my raid array. My recommendation is to throw the jumper to disable raid and pull the power off the raid hd's, so your pc looks to linux like a regular pc.

You're probably going to fdisk & format the new HD as fat32 to get the backup, I recommend making the fat32 partition 5GB - not 1GB as you'll read elsewhere - or so because I also found that once I made the backup I could not boot form the raid array with the near empty fat32 attached. I got an error that my primary hd did not have an OS and couldn't get the bios to boot from raid ahead of the primary master. I installed winXP (tivo drive removed) to my new, almost empty hd that had the backup in a second partition, used that XP to burn the backup to cd, removed the partition to avoid accidentally booting to xp, reattached tivo & finished the upgrade, re-enabled raid. Adds a little time, but worked.

Sholleran,
I decided not to use my pc with WinXP/NTFS/Raid and Booted a Linux cd on
my PC with Win98/FAT32/Raid. The raid array was recognized - one physical drive as HDE and another as HDG - it appears Linux sees the two drives as raid array device HDE1.

I still wonder if future Tivo Upgrades will work if I use Weaknees Linux Bootcd with MFSTools to replace HR10-250 250mb drive with 300mb drive.

Scott

sc0tt

01-10-2006, 08:10 PM

I just did the upgrade, struggled for hours due to my raid array. My recommendation is to throw the jumper to disable raid and pull the power off the raid hd's, so your pc looks to linux like a regular pc.

You're probably going to fdisk & format the new HD as fat32 to get the backup, I recommend making the fat32 partition 5GB - not 1GB as you'll read elsewhere - or so because I also found that once I made the backup I could not boot form the raid array with the near empty fat32 attached. I got an error that my primary hd did not have an OS and couldn't get the bios to boot from raid ahead of the primary master. I installed winXP (tivo drive removed) to my new, almost empty hd that had the backup in a second partition, used that XP to burn the backup to cd, removed the partition to avoid accidentally booting to xp, reattached tivo & finished the upgrade, re-enabled raid. Adds a little time, but worked.

Sholleran,

Another option could be to purchase Partition Magic and set up you pc as a duel boot system,one FAT32 and one NTFS for Windows or even have a Linux boot partition. I checked Partiton Magics docs and it does support Raid0 and Raid5.

Scott

blacksurfer

01-14-2006, 11:43 AM

My old 35 hour drive was freezing up, not powering up and making noise. So I bought the 70 hour drive replace kit from Weakness and had it changed in 10 minutes. Now the menu moves fast and it's quiet!

Dadygerman

01-17-2006, 11:23 AM

Good morning,

I'm trying to do my first upgrade (replace the 40GB drive in my SD-DVR40 with a 160GB), using the Weaknees instructions, but I get the following error 4 times during boot:

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k nls_iso8859-1, errno = 2

Twice after it has mounted the root and found the rescue CD-ROM, and twice after Mounting CD-ROM. Obviously, I get the same type of errors when trying the

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt

command. I've searched this thread and seen the same errors, but I did not find anyone's answer to the questions, which is why I'm asking it again. (ie. I'm not just throwing this out there without having already searched for the answer.)

I'd really appreciate help with this. Thanks!