Really Large hr10-250 Question

[jkast]

:confused:
Over the weekend I upgraded my HR10-250 with a 750gb hard drive and a 500gb hard drive. Everything appears to have worked well.

But 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.

[jkast]

Showing the same message on the System Information screen as I am getting:

"Recording Capacity: Variable, up to 0 HD or 0 SD hours."

http://www.weaknees.com/tivo/hr-10-200.php


So I am going to relax and conclude everything (except the output format of the System Information screen) is working and will continue to work fine. No problems to this point.

[puffdaddy]

How much swap did you give it and did you use the MFSTools -r4 tag when expanding?

[jkast]

This was my second upgrade of the Tivo.... I followed the Weaknees instructions to add the 500gb drive in the first upgrade (which I believe had not effect on the swap size) and for the second upgrade I used a variant of the Hinsdale instructions:

I did a single drive replacement on the original 250GB Tivo drive (keeping the 500gb drive I added in the first upgrade). I copied 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 new 750gb upgrade drive, was jumpered to Master and attached to the Secondary Master IDE connector. The weaknees boot CD with large disk support was on the Secondary Slave IDE connector.

After booting from the cd, I verified the drive sizes, then issued the folllowing command:

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

It took a couple of hours... but worked.

Then I issued the MFSadd command (Yes, to your -r 4 question on expansiion.):

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

Then I put the new A and old B drives back in the TiVO. Everything appears to be working fine. Prior recordings were preserved and new shows are being recorded.

Do you think I have a big future exposure due to the size of the swap file? If so, is there a way to increase it at this point without the loss of the previously recorded programs?

[alk3997]

This was my second upgrade of the Tivo.... I followed the Weaknees instructions to add the 500gb drive in the first upgrade (which I believe had not effect on the swap size) and for the second upgrade I used a variant of the Hinsdale instructions:

I did a single drive replacement on the original 250GB Tivo drive (keeping the 500gb drive I added in the first upgrade). I copied 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 new 750gb upgrade drive, was jumpered to Master and attached to the Secondary Master IDE connector. The weaknees boot CD with large disk support was on the Secondary Slave IDE connector.

After booting from the cd, I verified the drive sizes, then issued the folllowing command:

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

It took a couple of hours... but worked.

Then I issued the MFSadd command (Yes, to your -r 4 question on expansiion.):

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

Then I put the new A and old B drives back in the TiVO. Everything appears to be working fine. Prior recordings were preserved and new shows are being recorded.

Do you think I have a big future exposure due to the size of the swap file? If so, is there a way to increase it at this point without the loss of the previously recorded programs?

Jim (or anyone else who can help), I'm thinking of doing something similar but replacing a 250/300 combo with a 750/750 combo (good deal at CompUSA). My purpose is to make a backup of the 250/300 and increase the capacity of the unit. I would like to transfer all info, including the stored programs, from the old drives.

If I were to try to replace both drives would I then use these steps?

1) Connect old drives exactly as you said and place the new master 750GB into Secondary Master position

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

3) Power off PC and Replace the master 750GB with the slave 750GB (but set as a master for now) into the secondary master position

4) dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k

5) Power off PC and Remove slave 750GB and set jumper to slave

6) Remove old 250/300 combo and replace with new 750/750 combo on the primary channel

7) mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb


Would that work? I thought that marrying the new drives together at the end was better because I then preserved the original 250/300 as a pair if I ever needed to use them again. The 250/300 will then be stored for any future emergencies.

Also, is there a better way such as using the mfstools 2.0 backup command?

Thanks for any suggestions.

[JamieP]

This minor display glitch is a known issue with any box upgraded to a total capacity of > 1TiB. You just gotta live with it. It doesn't cause any other problems, as far as anyone has been able to determine.

The most recent wisdom is that you should be okay with the stock swap size, but there are two schools of thought (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=3825639&&#post3825639) on that.

[alk3997]

Jim (or anyone else who can help), I'm thinking of doing something similar but replacing a 250/300 combo with a 750/750 combo (good deal at CompUSA). My purpose is to make a backup of the 250/300 and increase the capacity of the unit. I would like to transfer all info, including the stored programs, from the old drives.

If I were to try to replace both drives would I then use these steps?

1) Connect old drives exactly as you said and place the new master 750GB into Secondary Master position

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

3) Power off PC and Replace the master 750GB with the slave 750GB (but set as a master for now) into the secondary master position

4) dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k

5) Power off PC and Remove slave 750GB and set jumper to slave

6) Remove old 250/300 combo and replace with new 750/750 combo on the primary channel

7) mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb


Would that work? I thought that marrying the new drives together at the end was better because I then preserved the original 250/300 as a pair if I ever needed to use them again. The 250/300 will then be stored for any future emergencies.

Also, is there a better way such as using the mfstools 2.0 backup command?

Thanks for any suggestions.



Two more questions...

Does mfsadd with the -x option expand both drives or does it only expand the drive being added (the hdb drive in item 7 above)? If it only expands the second drive would a mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hdb /dev/hda be necessary to expand both drives in going from 250/300 to 750/750?

OK, one additional question...I'm assuming that it isn't unreasonable for a dd (disk to disk copy) of a 250GB to 750GB drive to take hours and hours of time. I'm currently passing the 11 hour mark. Wish there was some indication of progress beside the brightly lit hard drive read/write light on the case.

[alk3997]

Just to update for others who may try this in the future...

The master original hard drive took about 20 hours with the dd command. The secondary original hard drive took about 11 hours with the dd command. They are different hard drives manufacturers with very different buffer sizes, which I think helps explain some of the difference.

I did an MFSAdd with just the two new drives in place and got the GSOD. The MFSAdd utility had listed the drives as having 1140 hours of SD available. After the GSOD, I powered-off and then replaced the new drives with the originals. Everything seems to be working fine with the original drives.

Any suggestions? I assume I've probably killed my 750/750 backup when I shutdown during the repair process. I am, of course, trying to move the recorded programs to the new drives and preserve the old drives as usable backups.

[alk3997]

Ended up using the MFSLive disc for the backup. It worked perfect and the backup/restore only took approximately 3.5 hours. In addition, there is an excellent status line that keeps a running total of MB backed-up while the back-up is in progress. MFSLive is highly recommended for the back-up process.

[tsunami]

What model Seagate is the 750 GB at CompUSA?