Adding a second drive... some questions

[MeStinkBAD]

Okay I have an HD-250 DVR and I wanna add a secondary 300GB drive to it. The drive is unformatted. I'm just not sure what has to be done to the second drive. Do I restore the backup image to it? I'm not really sure. Does anything have to be done to the second drive?

[funtoupgrade]

No drive prep necessary. Do you still have the original (non-upgraded) backup image?

[MeStinkBAD]

No drive prep necessary. Do you still have the original (non-upgraded) backup image?

Yes... nut this is the problems I keep running into.

When I try restoring a image, it says restore complete. Then if I reboot it says Partition table unrecognized. Like here, using MSFINFO this is what I get...

PTVupgrade /# mfsinfo /dev/hdb
MFS volume set for /dev/hdb
The MFS volume set contains 4 partitions
/dev/hdb10
MFS Partition Size: 256MiB
/dev/hdb11
MFS Partition Size: 16206MiB
/dev/hdb12
MFS Partition Size: 256MiB
/dev/hdb13
MFS Partition Size: 20991MiB
Total MFS volume size: 37710MiB
Estimated hours in a standalone TiVo: 39
This MFS volume may be expanded 4 more times

But during boot this is what I see...

Partition check:
hda: hda1
hdb: unknown partition table

This is what I know I should see (but don't).
hdd: [mac] hdd1 hdd2 hdd3 hdd4 hdd5 hdd6 hdd7 hdd8 hdd9 hdd10 hdd11 hdd12 hdd13 hdd14

Also when using mfsadd everytime it appears to corrupt the parition table.

Behaivor is not consistant. And it's really fustrating me. If someone could explain to me what the problem is, then please do so.

[MeStinkBAD]

Well I Figured out using pdisk -l seems to save the partition table correctly after restoring an image. But mfsadd still corrupts the first disk's partition table whenever it's used. Does anything need to be modified to the first disk in order for the second disk to be used? Otherwise I'm not sure how I'm going to make both disks appear visible.

[blindlemon]

You don't need to do anything to the "B" drive apart from run mfsadd on both drives at the same time to 'marry' them together.

Does your "A" drive work on its own? If so then you should be able to just add the new unformatted drive as a "B" drive by running

mfsadd -x -r4 /dev/hdX /dev/hdY

where hdX is your existing "A" drive and hdY is your new drive.

However, depending on how much swapspace has been allocated on your "A" drive you may need to increase that first. The easiest way to do that would be to re-image both drives from scratch using MFSTools. Alternatively, if you have recordings you wish to keep, you could do a "piped" backup-> restore from the existing "A" drive to the "B" drive, increasing the swap at the same time and then re-add the old "A" as the new "B".

How big is your existing "A" drive?