Second HR10-250 Upgrade Question

[jkast]

:confused:

I would like to know if the following is right and should work.

Last summer I upgraded by hr10-250 by adding a 500gb drive to the existing 250 gb drive using the Tivo Upgrade instructions and a twin breeze bracket from Weaknees. Everything worked well.

Now I want to replace the existing 250gb drive with a 750gb drive (Keeping the 500 gb drive I added last year).

Reading the Hinsdale instructions it looks like I can do a single drive replacement, copying the saved recordings by installing my existing TiVo A drive, jumpered to Master, and connected to the Primary Master IDE port in my PC. Installing my existing TiVo B drive, jumpered to Slave, and connected to the Primary Slave IDE port in my PC. The 750gb upgrade drive, will be jumpered to Master and attached to the Secondary Master IDE connector. The weaknees boot CD with large disk support will be on the Secondary Slave IDE connector.

After booting from the cd, I will verify drive sizes, then issue the folllowing command:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k

and wait hours for the copy to occur.

Once done I need to issue a command to marry
the new A (on hdc) with the B (on hdb)... but what is that command:

"mfsadd –x /dev/hdc /dev/hdb" ?

or

"mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hdc /dev/hdb" ?

or

"mfsadd (something else)"?

Thanks for your help with this....

[wscannell]

I am not sure what you are trying to do will work. After the dd copy, you will have an exact copy of the A drive on the new 750. The drive is married to the B drive because it is exactly the same as the original drive. If you put the two drives into the TiVo, they should work, however the amount of space that you have will remain the same.

Now you need to expand capacity. You should issue the following mfsadd command:

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

This should expand the capacity on the A drive to use the rest of the space. However, this is not a standard way to upgrade and there is a possibility that this will not work.

One problem that you have with this configuration is that the swap file will remain the standard size. For such a large capacity TiVo, the swap space should be increased. You cannot do this and save recordings with this configuration. I am not sure what size the swap file is on the HR10-250. It may be large enough to work.

[mr.unnatural]

Your best bet would be to make a backup image of both drives ands then restore it to both drives. If you have a backup image of just the 250GB drive you can use that and then expand it across both drives using the mfsadd command. Otherwise, you'll need to perform the backup and restore using both drives together since the original backup image would have to include both drives to be functional. You'll need at least the same total capacity or greater to restore the image to. Set up a larger swap file, as indicated above, and use tpip to activate it.

[wscannell]

Note that making a backup image will not save programs.

[mr.unnatural]

He's not going to be able to save programs anyway since he's trying to swap out his A drive with a larger one.

[jkast]

Thanks for the help! Let me report results.

1) The approach does appear to have worked.

2) It DID allow me to save all my programs. I do not appear to have lost anything. I have played parts of a number of programs that were previously recorded and all appear to be fine.

3) I did nothing about the swap ... Since I had previously done the Weaknees upgrade, I expect the swap is set to 127mb -- or whatever the "-s 127" parameter yields on mfsrestore. Clearly at 1mb per 2gb, I'm way short of what is needed for 1250GB of disk space. Hope this does not cause me a major problem in the future

4) There is a detail that bothers me: When I look in the system information screen on the hr10-250, It says I have space for "0 hours of HD and 0 hours of SD" recording. Now I can record new programs, I have reboot the box serveral times, etc. Still have the message. The mfsadd said I was adding 699 hours of recording time for total time over 1480 hours. That is the first time I noticed the word "over" as well. Am I just at a total number of hours that exceeds the field size on the output on the system information screen? Anyone have a hr10-250 that says it has over 1000 hrs of SD recording time?

One thing I worry about is that the device won't know when it is out of space and will get itself in some unrecoverable situation....

Please post if you have any insight into why I get those zeros on the systems information screen.