Hard drives for upgrade

[PhatJD]

I see that the Maxtor Quickview drives are recommended to upgrade according to Weaknees. I haven't opened up my tivo yet (mine is a series two manufactured by tivo) but are there any other hard drives people recommend? Is it strictly an IDE HD that needs to be purchased? Also, Is there still an issue about receiving the full Hard drive space above 137GB?

Thanks

[RoundBoy]

I recently had this dillema buying a new HD for upgrade..

Unless you get a very out of date iso, the >137gb issue is moot... the PTV iso i spent $5 with the bundled tools (support them!) was just fine, and it saved me the trouble of hunting all over the place for what I needed.

As for HD .. the 'ideal' drive is a high availabiliy, low seek time, low noise drive. That being said, I ended up with a 160gb WD caviar drive from Circuit City because :

it was $40 after rebate
-and-
I could do in store pick up on my way home.

It claims to offer low noise modes... low heat ... and it sounds pretty quiet in my tivo now.

EVERYONE has had a HD die on them.. no matter what the brand... The only one I am wary of are the Hitachi (formerly IBM) 'deathstars' .. I know IBM only rated these drives at '8 hours of use a day', and I don';t know if hitachi changed this when they bought the HD line..

[PhatJD]

How do you make sure you don't get a very out of date iso? In fact what are they for and how do you get them? Is it used to ghost the OS onto the new drive? So during the installation process nothing else changes if you are using a 320 GB HD vs a 120GB? If you have an up to date iso that is.

[RoundBoy]

I admit I really only started seriously looking into this the other day, and most info is from 2004-2005 ...

http://www.ptvupgrade.com/support/lba48/index.html has a free ISO you can boot into that contains all you need to run the tools..

I *THINK* you would need to source the mfsbackup / mfsrestore tools seperately then.. unless you just get the $5 cd (you can download it)

That was worth it to me to have a handy iso I could rely on.

You need to boot into linux because to boot into windows with a tivo drive connected hoses the boot partiton info (just like windows does to any linux drive not accounted for in the boot manager)

from that OS on a cd, you can run the tools you need to backup the drive in a much smaller image, and restore it to any drive..

its basically step zero for ANYTHING you want to do to the tivo drive.. install hacks, upgrade, etc .. its really the only way in

[rpdre1]

I *THINK* you would need to source the mfsbackup / mfsrestore tools seperately then.. unless you just get the $5 cd (you can download it)


MFSTools (mfsbackup/mfsrestore) is on the free PTV CD.

[PhatJD]

Thanks for the help guys. It seems there is a lot of info out there. I just need to sift through it for my particular situation.

I read that you need to boot into a Fat drive to copy over the Tivo OS. I have a spare HD so can i build that up with XP formatting it at Fat32 and then use that as my primary drive?

[RoundBoy]

Yes, but if you are simply moving from the original drive to a bigger hd, then its really not needed. Just plug in and run one command.

[wscannell]

The FAT drive is used to make a backup of the TiVo software. It is a good idea to have a backup, but it is not required. You can put the backup on the spare drive.

Check out these instructions: http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/index.php

[PhatJD]

I was just reading the instructions for my series 2 24004A recorder on the link that wscannell posted. It seems like all you have to do is remove the hard drive and put the new one in for the tivo to work. Am I oversimplifying it or is that really all that needs to be done?

Roundboy mentioned that there was one command that needs to be run but I didn't see that command written anywhere.

One other thing. I was looking on newegg for a hard drive to purchase and a few of them have an Interface SATA 3.0Gb/s. Does anyone know if this is compatible with my series 2 24004A recorder?

Thanks again for all the help.

[wscannell]

SATA drives will not work in a TiVo - you need to use a PATA drive.

Software must be loaded on the hard drive before putting in the TiVo. Do not just look at the lines in bold in the instructions. You need to boot a Tools CD and run a Linux command to copy the old drive to the new drive. This command was extracted from the instructions for your unit:

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

Note that hdX and hdZ must be replaced by the actual drive names (see the instructions)

[RoundBoy]

wscannell's command will work, but if you want to keep all your recordings, you need to tell it to pull all sectors:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdX | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdZ

This will take a while. Make sure you hdparam to add dma mode and 32 bit transfer .. much faster