Limit to number of times upgrading drive?

[pmrowley]

I know that there's a limit on the number of times you can upgrade a Tivo drive. I originally upgraded my 250GB to a 500GB in my Series 3. Is it possible to upgrade again to a 750 GB and transfer my recordings, or am I SOL at this point, and I can only add the external? (I wanted to go to 1.5TB)

TIA
-Pat

[HomeUser]

There is a fixed limit on the total number of partitions per drive. Expanding the drive just creates additional partitions. Check out MFSLive (http://www.mfslive.com) I think the re-expand option is/was in the beta version.

[captain_video]

Did you make a backup image of the 250GB drive or possible put the drive in a safe place and not use it for anything else? If so then you can simply create a backup image of the original drive and restore it to the new drive.

The limitation regarding the number of times you can expand an image depends on whether you're using the original image, expanding it, and then using the expanded image for further updates. In other words, if you cloned your 250GB drive to the 500GB drive and then expanded it you'd be OK since the original drive had not yet maxed out the number of available partitions. If you try to perform the same task with the 750GB drive by cloning the 500GB drive to it then you'd be SOL since the you would have maxed out the number of available partitions when you performed the initial upgrade. However, if you use the original 250GB drive and copied it over to the 750GB drive and expanded it you should be OK. To be on the safe side, I'd create a backup image of the 250GB drive and restore that to the larger drive rather than try and make a dd copy of the 250GB drive due to the size of the partitions involved.

[pmrowley]

Thanks to the MFSlive beta disk, I was able to expand the 16 partitions on the 500GB drive to a 750GB drive and transfer all of the data over. Then I added another 750GB external.

Happiness is a 1.5TB Tivo3.