"Expand of /dev/hd* would result in too many partitions"

[jemenake]

Okay... see if you can figure *this* one out.

I had a plain 40-hour 540-type series 2. As far as I know, it had never been upgraded before.

I migrated to a 80GB drive using mfsbackup/mfsrestore.

The drive ended up being really noisy, so I got a 200GB QuickView. Trying to use mfsbackup piping into "mfsrestore -xzpi ..." caused the programs to just dump me back at the prompt. So, I decided to use "mfsrestore -zpi..." and then use mfsadd later.

When I tried mfsadd -x /dev/hdm (yes... I know, I have a lot of drives on the machine I'm working on), it told me that....

Expand of /dev/hdm would result in too many partitions

Now, here's the wierd bit. When I run mfsinfo /dev/hdm, I get:

The MFS volume set contains 6 partitions
/dev/hdm10
MFS partition size: 256MiB
/dev/hdm11
MFS partition size: 16354MiB
/dev/hdm12
MFS partition size: 256MiB
/dev/hdm13
MFS partition size: 21563MiB
/dev/hdm14
MFS partition size: 0MiB
/dev/hdm15
MFS partition size: 37264MiB
...
This MFS volume may be expanded 3 more times

Note the "3 more times" part.

Now, if I run "dmesg | grep hdm", it shows a total of 16 partitions:
hdm: [mac] hdm1 hdm2 hdm3 hdm4 hdm5 hdm6 hdm7 hdm8 hdm9 hdm10 hdm11 hdm12 hdm13 hdm14 hdm15 hdm16

So, there seem to be, indeed, the maximum of 16 partitions, so why is mfsinfo telling me that I can expand 3 more times?

Now, keep in mind that the current drive is just to freakin noisy, so I'm not going to make the 200GB QuickView the B drive. The 80GB has got to go.... so badly that, if need be, I'll use the QuickView even in its truncated 80GB capacity.

What are my options here if I don't want to lose my shows?

What are my options if I *am* willing to lose my shows?

- Joe

[wscannell]

Since you originally had a 40 hour (40GB) TiVo, it was expanded once to 80 GB. Series 2 units may only be expanded once. There is a 16 partition limit as you have shown.

To not lose the shows, you can put the drive as you have copied to the 200GB in the TiVo. You will only have use of 80 GB. Alternatively, you can copy the shows you wnat to save using TiVoToGo to another TiVo or to a PC.

If you want to copy the drive and use the entire drive, you need to use a -s (shrink) and -f 9999 switches on MFSbackup. This copies only the necessary info and not the shows. It eliminates the extra partition, so you can use mfsadd or -x on the restore to expand the drive to 200 GB.

[JamieP]

So, there seem to be, indeed, the maximum of 16 partitions, so why is mfsinfo telling me that I can expand 3 more times?It's telling you how many more times you can expand if you add a second disk. There's a partition limit per disk, and an overall mfs partition limit. Mfsinfo is reporting the overall limit, not the per disk limit.