Upgrading drive, stuck at 137GB limit

[ymichael12]

So I followed the instructions on weaknees upgrade for my S2 24004A to add a second drive to my tivo (currently 40GB adding a 300GB drive).

I downloaded mfstools from the link on weaknees.

I then followed the instructions to add the 2nd drive without making a backup (first mistake)

So I made the mfs boot disk, connected the original tivo drive to primary master and the new 300 GB drive to primary slave to my PC. I disconnected all other hard drives (SATA and IDE) and only left my cd drives connected along with the tivo drives.

I started my computer with the mfs disk in, and my computer eventually got to the prompt.

I executed the command (mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb)

and it executed with no problems, I did glance at the new recording capacity (197 hours I think) but I did not give it a second thought.

I then put both drives back into the tivo and started it up....and everything worked perfectly. Until I looked at the recording capacity and realized that I was most likely running into the 137GB limit as I only had 58 hours on best and as I remember best is about 3GB/hour, so I should of had about 100 or so.

I quickly verified recording capacity vs. drive space on these forums and realized that I was not using the full drive, so I turned off my tivo.

I am trying to look through everything but can not find exactly what I need to do to fix my mistake. And I am now thinking that I should just create a backup and store it on a cd…

My plan is as follows (please let me know if I am making a mistake or should be doing something else)

1. Download the bootable ISO from sourceforge
2. Leave my CD drives (slave) and Fat32 (master) drive connected to the secondary IDE. *Does my FAT32 drive need to have windows installed on it? Or just be partitioned as a FAT32 drive (as it currently is)
3. Connect the original tivo drive (Master) and 300GB drive (Slave) to the primary IDE
4. Run the following commands
a. mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt
b. mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/hdc/tivo.bak /dev/hda /dev/hdb **(is this command even right since I do not have anything on my FAT32 Drive?)

now this is where I am not sure what to do….now that I have the backup….how do I expand the 300gb past the 137 gb limit…I
I have read about re doing the partition table on the B drive using pdisk, but maybe I can just use (mfsadd –r –x /devhdb) …..sorry just looking for some suggestions

[blindlemon]

If the CD you used to do the mfsadd was an LBA48-aware one then you should just need to replace the kernel on your original drive by running copykern - but if you do that (and even as it is at the moment) your swapfile won't be big enough (the 'default' swap of 64mb is only enough to allow recovery from a GSOD with drives up to around 130gb).

However, it sounds like you did the expansion with a non-LBA48 CD, so you need to re-expand and then copy the new kernel to get your TiVo to see the full size. As you have indicated, the partition table on your "B" drive may be 'stuck' at 137gb, so you would then need to manually rebuild it with pdisk to allow mfsadd to expand to use the full drive.

How important are your recordings? If you don't mind junking them, then the easiest course would be to make a divorced backup (as you have suggested above) and restore that to the new 300gb drive. (I'd personally remove the old 40GB drive at that stage as it is hardly worth keeping it bearing in mind the extra noise, heat and risk of failure that it adds to your your system.)

If your recordings are critical, then you will need to persevere with expanding the system in-situ as I have described. You don't have to increase the swapfile space, but not doing so leaves you open to problems if your system goes into a GSOD.

[Barryrod]

I downloaded the newest mfstools and it only saw 137gig of my 250gig drive. I then used the Weaknees boot iso with large disk support and it saw the whole 250gig. Worked great with Weaknees boot disk.