How-To Upgrade your TiVo

[llogan]

Yeah, that was my thinking. Going to take the former primary (30 GB) and add it to one of the other tivos to replace a 15. Going to take the former secondary (15 GB) and use it in my computer. of course I'm building a new HTPC so....who knows

[One Way]

What's an HTPC? A High-Tech PC?

Anyway, can someone tell me how long it takes for the TiVo System Information to correctly report the newly upgraded capacity? I have a couple of Sony SVR-2000 (standalones) and just tried to upgrade them about ten times. (It was so many times that I have all of Hinsdale's HOW-TO commands memorized!) The first nine times or so, I tried the single drive upgrade with a proper eleven partition backup (v2.5.1). Each time at STEP 11 of Hinsdale's HOW-TO, after putting the drive back inside TiVo the second time, System Information still reports 9-Best/32-Basic hours of capacity. Finally, in frustration, I gave up after simply adding a B drive and System Info still reported 9-Best/32-Basic... grrrr! Even restarting the unit didn't help. I unplugged the unit from AC power and just let it sit for a day. After plugging it back in to AC power, I checked the System Information just out of curiosity, and it FINALLY showed 32-Best/120-Basic!

Now I'll have to find time to go back and retry the A drive upgrade to see if it takes it properly. However, it's NBA playoff time and finale week in the U.S. My wife is on my case to record all the season finales. I'll probably have to wait until next week to try again. :)

Anyway, is there a way to see the increased capacity sooner? Or is it just wait and see?

Also, does anyone have any recommended easy way to gracefully shut down the TiVo instead of simply unplugging it? I felt bad unplugging the unit each time while I was performing those upgrade attempts. I know one way is probably to go through the serial port and tell it to dismount / shut-down. Anyway, thanks for the input, y'all!

[One Way]

If I may ask another quick topic/question regarding Hinsdale's HOW-TO...

Is STEP 9 mandatory or just advisory? If you know that the backup you're restoring from is good, can you skip this step in the future and just apply TiVoMad?

Thanks again!

[llogan]

One Way, this link will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about HTPCs (Home Theater PCs).

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=26

In a nutshell, a home theater PC allows you to take incoming video/audio signals from devices such as your DVD player, DirecTivo, etc., enhances the signal and outputs the improved signal to your display device (computer monitor, plasma screen tv, rear projection tv). I personally don't think such a device is warranted unless you have an HD ready TV capable of displaying the higher resolutions.

Originally posted by One Way
What's an HTPC? A High-Tech PC?

[threshar]

This past weekend I put an 80G maxtor drive into my at&t tivo. It went very smoothly except for a couple of snafu's - #1: my 80 pin cable had 39 pin ends. Had to use a normal 40 pin cable. This works, but I am gonna replace with a proper 80 pin cable. It seems to work fine with 40 pin though. #2 - didn't jumper the tivo drive to slave right. read the diagram backwards. oops. but after that I boot up and voila! 143 hours of joy!

[EricG]

Just finished adding an 80G drive to my DirecTiVo. Man was that easy! Thanks Hinsdale, what a great set of instructions. It took longer to disassemble and re-assemble the PC than the TiVo upgrade.

[One Way]

Thanks to the link for HTPC, llogan...

I just wanted to thank Hinsdale for his HOW-TO. It is a great piece of work. It seems like he updated it again today! :)

Should I ask questions about STEP 9 outside of this thread?

[nmiller855]

I took the easy way out. I sent my first SAT-T60 to Hinsdale with a pre-purchased hard drive. I already got it back and sent the second one to him. I kept trying to talk myself into doing it myself but the thought of screwing it up was more than I could stomach. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[granoff]

Ok, here's a silly question.

I have a Sony SA SVR-2000 (30 hours), unmodified.

Is it an absolute, guaranteed, foregone reality that my unit has ONE drive in it?

I am really tempted to upgrade, the biggest hassle being wrestling the unit out of my A/V cabinet, but I am afraid of what, if any, surprises await me (even with what appears to be a 100% fool proof procedure from Hinsdale).

Thanks,
-Mark

[hinsdale]

Originally posted by granoff
Ok, here's a silly question.

I have a Sony SA SVR-2000 (30 hours), unmodified.

Is it an absolute, guaranteed, foregone reality that my unit has ONE drive in it?

I am really tempted to upgrade, the biggest hassle being wrestling the unit out of my A/V cabinet, but I am afraid of what, if any, surprises await me (even with what appears to be a 100% fool proof procedure from Hinsdale).

Thanks,
-Mark

100% - SVR2000's have only been manufactured with single 30 or 40GB drives.

[Gutless]

Wow, everything worked great. I just had one thing to add. My Series 2 came with a Ultra DMA cable (which only had enough connectors for a single drive). The only cable I had that had holes for all the pins on the motherboard connecter was a non-Ultra DMA cable. The Series 2 won't even boot without the Ultra DMA cable, even if I try it with just the original drive by itself.

I took an Ultra DMA cable and performed the suggested modification to punch a hole in it with a candle-heated paper clip. Works like a charm.

The bottom line is Series 2's MUST use an Ultra DMA cable. Hope that saves other people some headaches.

Thanks again,
Gutless

[nichols_eric]

I added a 120GB drive to my 14 Hr Philips. I now have 163 hours at basic! Now I need to scour the forums for all the other features that I never used before :). Thanks Hinsdale and everyone else!

[wanzong]

Just wanted to echo the many folks who have expressed their thanks to all the people who worked so hard to develop the tools and procedures for upgrading TiVos!

The upgrade of my DSR6000 to two 120GB drives was completed successfully... despite one of the new drives not working out of the box. After replacing it, all went well! Up to 225 hours... gotta love it!

Thanks again!!!

Mike

[feldon23]

Notice the slight, but significant change to my signature.

Thanks hinsdale, Tiger, Kazymyr. You guys do rock. :)

Went off without a hitch. I ended up copying and pasting all the relevant bits from hinsdale's guide into a blank Word document.

[Robin]

Yet another sucsess!

Yesterday we added the 80 GB drive from Staples to our 20 hour Phillips SA, giving us 120 hours in basic <happy dance>.

Everything went smooth as silk.

A tip for getting the case off: Two people. Neither my husband or I could easily get it off ourselves, but with me bracing the back and him sliding the case, it was off in seconds. You could probably duplicate that with one person by bracing the back against something small (so the case won't hit it) and immoveable.

Another big "thank you" to Hinsdale and everyone involved in the guide and associated utilities.

[VoR]

What a memorable Memorial day this wiil be! Yet another Success!

Thanks for the easy to follow instructions hinsdale!!

Thanks hinsdale, Tiger, Kazymyr.

[EricG]

Upgraded my Second DirecTiVo last weekend.

Thanks Hinsdale, Tiger, Kazymyr !

Originally posted by EricG
Just finished adding an 80G drive to my DirecTiVo. Man was that easy! Thanks Hinsdale, what a great set of instructions. It took longer to disassemble and re-assemble the PC than the TiVo upgrade.

[efilnicafesin]

Just wanted to say thanks to Hinsdale and company for such an awesome guide. I just resurrected my dead SA Tivo with a new HD. You don't realize how much Tivo has enhanced TV viewing until you have to watch without it. The only problem I had was trying to sort through the "If you have this model, do this" in the guide.

I would also like to understand what I did while following the guide...What some of the commands mean and the switches in the commands. Is that part of standard Linux software or is there explainations for what some of the commands mean?

[peg4r]

Yessssss!!!!! (Celebration of adding an 80G Staples special Maxtor to my 30G for 128Hours at Basic and 35 at Best)
Thanks!!!!!(to Hinsdale, Tiger, Kazymyr and all others for their hard work in developing and documenting these enhancements)
Time breakdown - opening case (day and a half of intermittent attempts, finally succeeding on third try with cable puller) following the rest of the procedure (1 hour, 45 minutes).

I have never done anything with Linux and previous trips into the innards of my computer have been limited to installing a CDRom Drive and an old Bernoulli drive with SCSI card. I am a retired teacher, however, and am very good at both giving and following directions, especially ones as well written as Hinsdale's! You get an A+! If I can do this, anybody can.

Now its off to Radio Shack for some cable ties and rubber feet.

Margaret

[chippyt]

I DID IT!!!

I ordered the Staples 80GB HDD last week and received it yesterday via UPS. I have a Hughes DirecTIVO, I backed up the TIVO, tested the backup, then blessed and added the drive. I had a bum Y-power adapter, which took a little bit to fix. Then routing the IDE cable in the TIVO box was a pain. But the guide was perfect and it was very easy to do.

THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[jerrylin]

Wanted to say thanks to Hinsdale too.

Upgraded my DirecTiVo with two 80G drives from Circuit City (Memorial Weekend special price, $99 each). I tried the Staples special but Staples called and said they were out of stock.

Running at 146 hours now, looking good.

[EricG]

I had TWO Y-adapters where the pins came out. BOTH from RatShack. Hey? Whad'ay want for $3.99 ;)

Originally posted by chippyt
I DID IT!!!

I had a bum Y-power adapter, which took a little bit to fix.

THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mattmarkel]

Hinsdale is a God!!! And thank you to many others who posted their input on using a pc with XP and the great 120GB deal online. It took me 2 and a half hours to replace my original 30GB drive (that has been "stoppling") with the 120GB Maxtor from Fry's/Outpost.com. The pack-rat that I am, I had an old 2GB drive... unplugged my c: drive and replaced it with the old 2GB which was already FAT32... had to keep in mind which drive was which slave/master, etc. while following Hinsdale's instructions because my cd drive wasn't recognized when I moved it, and the rest was a cake-walk!
I've got 40 hours at the "best" quality or 145 hours at "basic"... couldn't be happier! Thanks again!

Matt Markel
Sony SVR2000 with 145 Hours as of today!

[neldyn]

Is there a maximum amount of GB that can be added to a Sony SVR 2000? Is there a ceiling per drive and/or in total?

[Nighty]

Thanks Hinsdale and everyone else!

I have successfully upgraded using the instructions without issue, save for a few of the self-inflicted kind....

[trojanrabbit]

Upgraded to a 145 hour TiVo with a new 120GB Maxtor A drive.

Any problems I had were due to operator error (mixed up drives, jumpers, brain not in gear) and the need to nearly completely disassemble my PC to get the drives in with the short cables provided.

Thanks to everyone involved.

[uvasabri]

It was much easier than i had anticipated. Thank you so much. Upgraded my 14hr with 2 80GB dives. Now running at 199 hrs.

[Nighty]

Upgraded my DTiVo this weekend, and everything went perfect. Replaced the A Drive, with a new 80GB drive.

Now have "Up to 69 hours, variable," doubling the original capacity!

Thanks again!

[EricG]

Nighty-

Why didn't you simply add the new 80G drive giving you a total of about 108 hours?

[alexander123]

Hello Gutless,

I too have a new series 2, but as it is my first tivo, I am a bit leery of opening it up, and voiding the waranty. I spent a pretty penny for it, and the subscription, so I I figured I would wait until the warranty was over.

Problem is I am having a hard time recording all the world cup games!

So...What drive did you upgrade with, and did it really go that smoothly.

Alexander123



Originally posted by Gutless
Wow, everything worked great. I just had one thing to add. My Series 2 came with a Ultra DMA cable (which only had enough connectors for a single drive). The only cable I had that had holes for all the pins on the motherboard connecter was a non-Ultra DMA cable. The Series 2 won't even boot without the Ultra DMA cable, even if I try it with just the original drive by itself.

I took an Ultra DMA cable and performed the suggested modification to punch a hole in it with a candle-heated paper clip. Works like a charm.

The bottom line is Series 2's MUST use an Ultra DMA cable. Hope that saves other people some headaches.

Thanks again,
Gutless

[tjd]

Just another "thank you". After looking in awe at the 20 pages of instructions, took a deep breath and upgraded without a hitch. It all became "obvious" as I went through the well detailed steps.

Thanks a lot.

[philgrocks]

Fry's has 120GB WD drives on sale for $109 so I figured what the heck. My DirecTV Tivo was asking to be upgraded... I used the instructions found here and I added that drive to my system.

30GB (original drive) + 120GB WD drive and I have 124 hours of storage! This is just fantastic!

I used an old 6GB drive to backup to using the mfstool and I am just amazed how well it went.

Lucky I have some Linux in my blood, makes it easier to understand what is going on.

Thanks so much! You guys are great!

[philgrocks]

Just added a $109 WD drive to my DirecTV TiVo. Followed these excellent instructions and it went without a hitch... Now my 35 hour unit reports 124 hours... I am a recording fool now!

Excellent software, excellent instructions.. Just well done!

Fantastic!

phil

[StuRothrock]

I just wanted to echo like other have concerning upgrading HDs. Many thanks to hinsdale. What an EXCELLENT howTo. Document and software worked as advertised.

[shawnbowlin]

My hacked Tivo died. I purchased it off ebay and was not smart enough to make a backup.

Can someone direct me to where I can get a system image so I can replace the primary drive. I have a Phillips.

Thank in advance!

[nnrelay]

Hinsdale,

I just killed my disk by mistake and wanted to
suggest a minor change to your otherwise fine HOWTO
to maybe help someone else avoid my fate.
When you boot TivoMad for the first time
- DONT ANSWER QUESTIONS -- hit ctrl-C to kill it.
Otherwise you'll do as I did and TivoMad your
original A disk before you've had a chance to
mfs backup it.

TivoMad's setup.sh ambiguously prompts
"Enter the device name of your TiVo A drive".
I thought it was asking for my original A drive
which was plugged in as hdc but, nooooo, it
expects your target new drive. Later, when
it says "Do you want to continue?" what it means
is "Do you want me to add partitions and modify
your "A" drive now?" . Blam. Too late.

Your howto does say "ctrl-C" the Tivomad script
but I had a momentary lapse and killed my A drive
before I could back it up.

Fortunately the good folks at ptvupgrade.com
sell replacement disks and were quick to reply
to my email.

neal

[nathan_h]

Is there anything special (different) about upgrading the AT&T branded series 2 unit? If I understand right, the housing of the AT&T branded unit and the Tivo branded unit differs...

Woops! My bad. I see that the main document refers to the series 2 units and assume that that means if there were special considerations, they'd also be called out in the body of the document.

[neldyn]

well, just being thorough and following the instructions to the letter. thank you to everyone involved in the creation of this how-to, the software, 9th tee and everyone else, especially hinsdale. i installed a new 120GB drive on my sony svr-2000 yesterday. everything went EXACTLY as advertised. no problems whatsoever. i am very impressed. it took me just shy of two hours to do the whole process. and now, i am the proud owner of a tivo with 173 hours and 37 minutes of recording capacity!!!!

thank you very very much!!!

neldyn

[cdo]

Using the guide provided here I have added a 120gb B drive to my Sony 30 hr standalone. Best quality now = 50h 42m and Basic = 184h 25m. Backup file of pre-upgrade setup on computer. By God, it worked. Thanks to all.

[Keyser Soze]

Thanks to all, upgrade sucess!

Had a few minor problems, but they were hardware related w/ my computer itself. Had to reconfig almost everything on it, to get the new drives in it.

Back up made with ease, came out to be 494 megs.

rearranged drives, and blessed new 120gb Western Digital, program showed it as 111gb.

Put it all together this morning, and fired it up... worked perfect.

So now I have:

Philips Series2 60 hour unit:

Best: 60he 25min
High: 98hr 5min
Med: 130hr 1min
Basic: 220hr 1min :D

Big thanks to all that have taken the time to put together the guides, programs, etc.

-k
###

[hinsdale]

Administrative note: Although I anticipated having the How-To updated to coincide with the release of Tiger's MFS Tools today, due to a small family emergency I have only partially completed an update which will encompass the added abilities of Mfs Tools 2.0. I expect to have the complete How-To update finished by Tuesday.

[Keyser Soze]

I hope all is well.

-k
###

[brettnordquist]

With the help of the Hinsdale upgrade instructions I added a $90 Seagate 80 GB drive to my Hughes DTivo this weekend bringing my recording time to 106 hours.

The most time consuming part of the upgrade was using Partition Magic to create a FAT32 partition for the backup. The only other slow down was finding the right size IDE cable which would reach to both my drives. Luckily I had a few extras around the house and eventually found one that fit.

The knowledge people are willing to share on this forum is nothing short of amazing. I've been reading people's upgrade experience for about a month now before I felt comfortable doing it on my own. I learned a lot from those who attempted the upgrade, ran into a problem, yet found the answer on the forums.

Brett Nordquist
Hughes DTivo

[hinsdale]

Although wanting to have the new How-To finished for the release on Saturday of Tiger's new Mfs Tools 2.0, due to unforseen circumstances, it was not finished until today.

I have posted the new How-To featuring Mfs Tools 2.0 along with the original How-To featuring TiVoMad, Kazymyrs Boot CD, Bless TiVo, and Mfs Tools 1.1.

I also created a batch file for the easy creation of the Mfs Tools 2.0 boot floppy.

Those with any suggestions, comments, errors etc are welcome to post them in this thread. The new How-To will be updated regularly as more thorough testing of options, command line parameters, etc are performed and any feedback is received.

[johnh]

In the UK TiVo Forum, Rob Bellis has pointed out that it is not advisable to upgrade a UK single disc 40Gb machine by adding a 120Gb as the B drive (a relatively simple upgrade). The reason given is that there will not be enough swap space to enable recovery actions such as fsck to complete in the event of a crash. Tiger says "Unless your old space + 1/4 your new space is greater than 140, then you don't need to worry about swap." If there truly is a serious issue here, ought this to be mentioned in your admirable guide?

[hinsdale]

Watching/ reviewing threads of hundreds of upgraders adding 120GB/160GB upgrade drives (for the last 6 months since the large drives were released) to their single drive units without increasing swap I have not seen a pattern or reports of any issues with the GSOD not functioing properly. I have also had several upgraded units (without swapfile increase) beyond 140GB hit the GSOD and recover without problem. I am not convinced that the increased swap file space is still required for standalones and may have been addressed in TiVo software changes in versions above 2.0. (although I have not tested this personally). I am also not sure that the swap file addition was ever required in the DirecTiVos or Series 2 (with 32mb RAM). That said, swap file addition only account for a few minutes of lost recording time and are not a bad idea to include when you have the opportunity.

Also when using Mfs Tools 2.0 as Tiger mentioned, swap file increases become even less important.

[klyde]

I set up a formatted 13gb drive as c: primary master with a dos system. I connected my master tivo 60gb drive to the secondary master and my B 60gb tivo drive to secondary slave.
I made a linux boot disk with mfstools.
I as others have not been able to make a boot cd with it, although the earler version I could.

I boot with the linux floppy and as per instructions type
mkdir /mnt I get: File exists
mkdir /mnt floppy
mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

I then get the message
Fat: bogus cluster size 41
VFS: cant find a valid fat file system on dev 02:00
mount: you must specify the file system type

please tell me what I did wrong
thanks

[hinsdale]

If you are creating and using the Mfs Tools Boot Floppy you do not need to mount the floppy

Use the makedisk.bat file to create the boot floppy at Step 4)
http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html

[Avian]

Something that NEEDS to be in the guide:

Upgrading a new (2.5 software pre-installed) Sony Standalone with a bigger A Drive requires that you use DTIVOMAD 4.0 (yes dtivomad). I just upgraded a friend to a 120gb drive after many frustrating hours trying to do it with TiVoMAD 3.

[hinsdale]

Not having a Sony 13 partition unit/image to test on I would be interested to hear more specifics on the upgrade you performed and your results using DTiVoMad 4 (loads DirecTiVo map) on a standalone. In theory I imagined that this might work but thought I recalled someone testing this without success when DTiVoMad 4 first was released.

If you can provide some more details, or if anyone else can attempt this and report their results I would be happy to offer this as an A Drive upgrade option for Sony 13 partition units in the original How-To. Mfs Tools 2.0 is another option for expanding A drives in the Sony 13partition units if you see the new How-To.

[Avian]

All I know is we imaged the drive over to the 120gig drive, loaded DTiVoMad 4, put the drive back in the tivo and it worked and reported somewhere around 130~ hours. He still has no problems with it, this was 2 weeks ago when we performed it.

[ISWIZ]

Thanks to the Hinsdale upgrade instructions and Tigers MFS Tools 2.0, I added a $107 WD 120 GB drive to my Hughes DTivo today during lunch break to bring my recording time to 146 hours.
Only one glich. The instructions mentioned using the 80 wire ribbon cable, "Dtivo may use the 40". I took that to "use 80" but it didn't work, before any tears fell I switched cables and this weekends Showtime Free Preview is toast.
Tomorrow we tackle my officemates Dtivo for lunch.

Thanks again to all who post here and share so much knowledge!

[watts]

Complete novice, successfully upgraded. Previous experience with opening up a PC limited to adding RAM. Can't wait to tell my brother that I used linux!

Thanks to all that made this possible!! Hinsdale, Tiger, you are the best!
I love my Tivos :D

[yknott]

Where can I get good deal on a 120 GB hard drive for my AT & T Series 2 Tivo

[xiaoyu]

Hi Hinsdale,

I have Philips HDR-112 (software version 1.2.1 ?) I use Kazymyr's Boot Cd. I have followed your instruction of How-To and, I have finished backup stage. After "Backup done!" I started the step 8. After I typed in the command for Boot Cd user, I received some unexpected message that is not on your instruction:
Usage: restore [option] Adrive [Bdrive]
Options:
-i file Input from file, -for Stdin
-q .........
-qq .......
-V size .......
-s size ......
-z .......
First I don't understand. Second anything I type in, I will get "command not found"
after I read the instruction again, I found I need special command due to restoring to non-Quanturm A drive (a WD drive). I try this command, but I got the following message: Invalid signature 0X33c0 on/dev/hdb
I don't have any idea now. Please help!
BTW, Can I use new Tager's Mfs Tool 2.0 bootable cd instead of Kazymyr's Boot Cd v2.6i?

Xiaoyu,

[vandoren]

I thought I was teckie enough til I read these posts. Can I have a TV Doctor-type shop do the upgrade of my Hughes DirecTiVO? It has dual tuner: does that mean it has two HDs? Finally(?), is it better to have one large or two medium HDs, or go all out for two large HDs?
BTW: when Hughes comes out with series 2 DirecTiVO, this original goes in the bedroom. Should I hold off and only upgrade the newer unit?

[ISWIZ]

Your Hughes has one 40GB drive. As you can see above, I added a 120GB drive. It is really quite easy following the directions posted here. Adding a second drive is the easiest and the bracket is already there for it. Good luck.

[ghstridr]

Originally posted by hinsdale
I Want a Large TiVo with Lots of Recording Time
Here is a recording capacity upgrade How-To for relative newbies that incorporates the newest utilites for hopefully a quick and painless TiVo upgrade experience (includes Boot Cd and floppy instructions).


I'm a reasonably experienced Unix user so my question may make it seem like I should know hte answer, but I'm just doing a sanity check as the Tivo itself is new to me.
Here we go:
I notice when reading through the new how-to that covers using the new 2.0 cd, all references to installing or backing up a second drive (B drive) are being referenced as /dev/hdb.

Shouldn't this be /dev/hdd if it's connected as Secondary Slave in a system where you have a Windows Fat/32 drive for your backups as Primary Master (/dev/hda), bootable cdrom as Primary Slave (/dev/hdb)? The readme's that I've seen all state that you are supposed to use the secondary IDE channel and not the Primary for any Tivo upgrades/changes.

[ghstridr]

Originally posted by ghstridr


I'm a reasonably experienced Unix user so my question may make it seem like I should know hte answer, but I'm just doing a sanity check as the Tivo itself is new to me.


DOH! Never mind, I was able to answer my own dumb questions!

[dsm363]

Any advice about upgrading to one large drive versus adding a second drive? Any difference in performance? Also, I've got a Mac so I would need to borrow someone PC to prepare the spare drive, right? Thanks.
Can't wait to upgrade.

[ghstridr]

Originally posted by dsm363
Any advice about upgrading to one large drive versus adding a second drive? Any difference in performance? Also, I've got a Mac so I would need to borrow someone PC to prepare the spare drive, right? Thanks.
Can't wait to upgrade.

After what I learned over the weekend, the answer is Yes, you need to borrow a pc and one with a new enough motherboard that will recognize the drives that you will be working with. I didn't do any performance measuring so I can't answer that question. As for advice, work slowly and make sure you understand the instructions. Since you didn't state what type of Tivo setup you already have, no one here can help you as none of us can read minds!

Good Luck!

[JofCoRe]

Just wanted to say thanx to Hinsdale for his great instructions on how to upgrade, Tiger for MFS Tools, Kazamyr for the boot cd, and anyone and everyone else who contributed and made upgrading a tivo so easy!

Thanx to the great instructions and tools, I now have a 149 hr DirecTiVo! woo-hoo!

thanx everyone!
(hopefully my drive won't go bad this time :P )


k

[luis]

Wow, what can I say? Fantastico!

Many, many, many thanks to Tiger, Hinsdale, Kazymyr, Dylan and all the people that have spent so much time and effort reverse-engineering TiVos, writing tools and documenting the procedures.

I bought a SA Series2 60 hours TiVo at BestBuy at the beginning of June. It was originally running 2.x and updated itself to 3.x a few days later.

I had a flawless upgrade in two steps, using MFS Tools v2 and the Hinsdale how-to:

1. Added a new B drive, using a Maxtor 120GB hard disk.
2. A few days later, replaced the original WD 60GB with a new WD 120GB hard disk.

Also connected a USB Ethernet adapter to the Series2 and verified that it can connect to TiVo using my DSL connection.

I can finally watch TV without cursing the networks and/or the cable company every minute, and without having to channel-scan every 10 seconds.

Again, can't thank everyone enough times, you guys are amazing!

Now, if I could just get the telnet daemon and a bash prompt to work on the Series2 ...

Luis en Miami

[Agrajag]

Hey guys, I'm thinking about foregoing a backup. I got lucky before with a SA (I made one but then it never actually worked, thought I never needed it). Am I NUTS?

If so, where can I even buy a tiny 1-2gb drive these days? I have XP and have a 100gb drive here for my Hughes DirecTV with TiVo receiver. Apparently that's major problem and I really want to get this drive added. I already have a Y cable though it sounds as if I also need a ATA133 cable.

[ghstridr]

Originally posted by Agrajag
Hey guys, I'm thinking about foregoing a backup. I got lucky before with a SA (I made one but then it never actually worked, thought I never needed it). Am I NUTS?

If so, where can I even buy a tiny 1-2gb drive these days? I have XP and have a 100gb drive here for my Hughes DirecTV with TiVo receiver. Apparently that's major problem and I really want to get this drive added. I already have a Y cable though it sounds as if I also need a ATA133 cable.
Yeah, yer nuts....even walnuts!:D
FOr the drive, goto to something like PriceWatch (http://www.pricewatch.com) and look at laptop drives. I think I remember seeing a laptop to pc adapter bracket at 9thTee (http://www.9thtee.com)

[prasadsw]

God bless Thunder woo-tang, and hinsdale !!
MFS tools is a lifesaver !!
:cool: :cool: :cool:

[Agrajag]

Originally posted by ghstridr

Yeah, yer nuts....even walnuts!:D
FOr the drive, goto to something like PriceWatch (http://www.pricewatch.com) and look at laptop drives. I think I remember seeing a laptop to pc adapter bracket at 9thTee (http://www.9thtee.com)

Laptop drives??? Ouch. For something so small and just for backup I was hoping to spend like $20!

[GatorDeb]

Question: Since this voids the warranty, isn't this taking a huge risk into a $650 purchase? I'd do it in a hearbeat, but I'm afraid that if the TiVo EVER breaks down (for, say, something unrelated) I'm screwed out of $650.

[luis]

Not really,

I am am pretty sure that I could fix anything short of a hard drive crash anywway or a hardwarwe failure.

For serious hard disk crashes, I have the individual 90 days warranty from TiVo plus the extended warranty (modulo the fact that the TiVo reports back to its masters the HD id's .....) => $250 or so in HDs are safe.

Worst case scenario, I have a couple of IDE drives, still under warranty for 3 years, so those can be replaced at any time, outside of tivo channels.

And if things got realy bad, I will de-upgrade the TiVo into the lowly 60GB it used to be and take advantange of the extended warranty to get it replaced (and repeat upgrade procedure :-)'

I have the original HD in storage, plus a couple of backups, just in case ...

Thanks,

Luis en Miami

[mikebridge]

just another thank you note. dad's bday present is installed and working fine so far. (knock on wood). 20-some-odd-hours to 120hours45minutes. now if the stepmom would stop accumulating all those KUID soap operas....
(and a thank you out to geko29 for coming over and looking semi important while i did most of the work. =p)

[NateF]

One more thank you to add to the bunch. The whole primary/slave/secondary thing threw me a bit at first, but I really just needed to step back a second and think about it. Upgraded AT&TiVo from 40 to 197 hours. Thanks to everyone who had a hand in creating the upgrade manual. It's a lot easier than it looks at first.

[llogan]

Don't know how I did it, but I killed a 120GB drive. I couldn't find (nor did I have the patience to deal with the Maxtor diagnostic utilities at the time) but it just wouldn't spin up. I had tested it successfully in the standalone Tivo and was in the process of 'blessing' it and the other drive and it just won't power up. Anyway, Maxtor's going to send me a refurb'd one, so I'm out the cost of shipping and fortunately I had a spare 120GB lying around. Other than that, my second successful, sort of, upgrade. First one was a DirecTivo 35 hours to 225 hours. This one was an upgrade to a 14 hour standalone unit to 245 hours basic (1x120gb and 1x80gb). Thanks!

[olav]

It worked, finally.... I found out that even though under windows my hda shows as one partition in order to get the command : # mount /dev/had1 /mnt/dos to work i had to go to hda2.
and obviously the mfstoools i copied onto c: wasn't helpful so i copied it to a floppy and after mounting the floppy everything came together.
so it took me about six hours, of which only less than one was actually needed for the backup etc. the other five where a walk in linux land. i might take acourse in linux after all ;-)

thanks a lot to the hinsdale guide, to all the software makers and testers, strugling with just one command line makes me shudder if i were to do something really complicated, and thanks to the tivo community.
even as a dutchman, whose countrymen don't even know what a tivo is i think that televisionwise this is the ninth wonder of the world.

olav
now the tired but proud owner of a tivo with 54 hours at best quality

[Agrajag]

Okay, I have two systems in my house and a 100gb drive just waiting to into a Hughes DirecTivo.

I have the cable. I have the interface cable.

What I'm lacking is an understanding of how I'm supposed to get around the Windows XP issue.

What are the exact steps I can take to bless this drive without XP screwing it up with its little stub file? I can format a floppy and boot from that, but that's going to have some form of XP on it, correct?

[altobeeper]

Thanks Hinsdale! Your intructions were extremely easy to use and worked flawlessly.

[tivoupgrade]

We've put together a new bootable CD that has latest MFStools, Turbonet/TiVoNet drivers, BlessTiVo and a bunch of the other popular stuff. In time, we'll get our scripts and utilities on there, as well. We've not released this to the 'general public' yet (ie you can only get to it from the specific link, below) so if any folks out there can download it, give it a whirl, and send me feedback, I'd appreciate it - there was definitely some booting quirkiness with my initial builds of the CD and I'd like to see it tested on as many platforms as possible.

Here's the link:

http://www.ptvupgrade.com/site/downloads/

Thanks,
Lou

[MrB!]

Another Thanks to all for their hard work on creating/documenting the upgrade process. New (1wk) 40hr AT&T Tivo took less than 30min to add a Maxtor 160Gb B-drive! (It took me longer to check-out at CompUSA last night!) My first Tivo and first upgrade so am very pleased (and proud). Your instructions and software could not be easier to use! Reported 216Hrs on first boot! If only I could afford to replace the A drive with a 160 as well! Unfortunately this is only going to give my wife more room to fill with Bob Villa re-runs <sigh>.

Only "catch" was that the IDE cables I have (all high density / fast) had that one pin "plugged" whereas the IDE connector on the Tivo and it's factory cable did not (ie: all pins present on connector on main board so cables would not fit). I used a clothes pin over an open flame to take care of that. Worked like a charm!

Next is the USB-Ethernet to connect over my cable connection.

Question#1: Can anyone tell me what other USB-Ethernet dongles they have used sucessfully? I saw a Linksys one at Frys for under $30. Are the drivers for these built-in to the Tivo?

Question#2: What is the device (possibly Sony) that will allow me to remote control my Tivo and "pipe" content throughout the house? We have 2x Coax runs to each room in the house - maybe that will help too.

Thanks again to all.
Cheers,
Mr B!

[RoscoePColtrane]

I finished upgrading my Tivo yesterday and I am now the proud owner of a ~198 hour AT&TiVo!

Tiger, thank you for the incredible job you did putting together MFS Tools 2.0. I used the floppy version and they worked flawlessly.

Hinsdale, thank you very much for the clear, concise instructions. I edited them down to just the parts germane to my install and used them as a checklist when I upgraded my box.

I also want to thank all the folks at TiVo who put together such a fantastic product. This has really changed the way I watch TV.

My upgrade of my 10-day-old AT&TiVo went very well. My only issues were pre-upgrade and involved setting up a computer that would work nicely. I am detailing the issues here, hoping I can help someone else who may face the same issue. My only available Win9x PC did not have an IDE drive, it only had SCSI. I ended up finding an old IDE drive, adding it to the machine, and formatting it with FAT 16. I then disconnected the SCSI drives and the CD drives (there were three). So for my upgrade the C: drive was a completely blank 2GB drive formatted with FAT 16. I wasn't sure whether or not this would work but the MFS tools reported a successful backup (without recordings) and when I restored my backup to the 'B' drive {120 GB Maxtor 5400 RPM (4G120J6)} the TiVo unit worked flawlessly. When the PC was powered back up with the SCSI drive connected I was able to see the tivo.bak file on the IDE drive and burn it to CD for archiving (total compressed size 101 MB).

I now have a ridiculous number of season passes and wishlists and I never have to look at Basic or Medium quality again!

Thanks again everyone!

p.s. MrB!, I purchased my USB to Ethernet adapter (and my IDE cable and power splitter) from 9th Tee. They shipped out promptly. You can find them here http://www.9thtee.com/.

[rick_indy]

Hinsdale,

More thanks!!! I wish everyone could write Linux how to's as easy as you do. I have successfully upgraded my Tivo HDR 212 with two Maxtor 120 GB following your instructions. So many "Linux Gods" write perplexing documentation that just assumes you were "born knowing" Your simple step by step can permit any computer novice to upgrade their Tivo. I have a hard copy of your documentation ready to go for my next upgrade. Thanks again for all your efforts

Rick

[Bill Reeves]

Two weeks ago, I discovered this site. Last week, I read in detail all about the upgrade process. Monday, I ordered my hard drives (2x120GB IBM DeskStar). Tuesday, I went to Home Depot to buy a Torx screwdriver. Wednesday, the hard drives arrived.

Tonight (Thursday): my Sony SAT-T60 DirecTiVo now reports 232 hours.

A huge thank you to everyone who made it possible - Tiger for the tools, Hinsdale for the how-to, and everyone who has posted here with additional information.

-- Bill

[MrLatte]

I guess I just need some encouragement!

I have an almost 2 year old Philips DSR6000 bone-stock at 35 hours. It has a really low S/N so I'm pretty sure it's a two drive model.

I've been thinking about upgrading by replacing the 2 drives with a couple of 120GB 5400 drives by following Hinsdale's new steps and using MFSTools 2.0. This all seems straightforward but I keep hearing people have booting problems and such.

Are people that are having more problems doing a 2nd upgrade or perhaps standalones have more potential problems with the swapfile and all that?

I hate to screw up my machine that's been rock-steady for this long. Not sure if I'm going to try and save my recordings or not. This time of year I don't have that many critical things on there that it's worth the extra time.

[Robert S]

MFS Tools 2.0 only seems to screw up swap partitions it creates, so if you use dd to copy your drives onto the new media and then use mfsadd to expand you should be fine.

It's not all that hard to fix your swap (http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=66256&pagenumber=2), anyway.

There are also concerns that MFS Tools 2.0 prevents TiVo recovering from a 'green screen' file system corruption problem. But I think MFSTools 2 is the only option for you anyway, so you'll either have to use it or wait for a fixed version of MFS Tools.

[mao64]

I was watching The Screen Savers the other day and heard them talking about upgrading Tivo. I didn't know this could be done. I have one of the original Tivo's, the one with the 14 hour recording time. I have just read a little bit of the instructions on how to upgrade and some of the comments from other people. I would love to do this if I can. But it still seems awfully complicated, though. Could someone please help me on this? I would like to do this if someone can convince me that it's not that complicated.

Thanks,

Mark

[Cpen]

Mark:

If you have a PC at home, and have ever opened it up to replace a hard drive or add a second hard drive, this should be a breeze.

You need to follow Hinsdale's instructions (link at beginning of this thread).

You basically remove and attach your tivo's hard drive to your PC and make a backup of it. Then you plug your new larger hard drive(s) into your PC and restore the backup to the larger drive(s). Then simply put the larger hard drive(s) into your Tivo - viola!

Because TiVo uses a Linux-based opperating system, you need to boot up your PC into Linux (using Tiger's MFS Tools 2.0). MFS Tools provides you with the proper copy tools to make a backup and restore it to a larger drive.

Spend some time reading and re-reading the Hisndale guide - then surf around here for a week or so, and you'll get the gist of it. I learned a lot by surfing this site to see where others ran into problems. If you have any questions, post them here.

If all of this seems too scary for you, you can either:

1. Order an upgrade kit - search google for "TiVo Upgrade". You'll get a larger hard drive(s) with the Tivo software already installed (you still crack open the TiVo to remove the current hard drive and plug in the replacement/upgrade hard drive).

2. You send your Tivo out to have someone else upgrade it for you (again, search google).

These two options will cost you more, but you still end up with MUCH more storage.

If you can do it yourself, I'd recommend removing your current 14Hr drive and keeping it as your backup (it's so comapratively small it won't add much, and gives you a VERY secure backup)

P

[grecorj]

Whoo-hoo!

Upgraded my Philips DTiVo last night & I'm now the proud owner of a 106 HR DTiVo!

Thanks to Hinsdale, Kazymyr, Tiger, weaknees.com, ptvupgrade.com, TiVo Community Upgrade Center Forum, and everyone else! Even a "shout out" to Leo on ScreenSavers for showing me that even if ya screw it up the first time, it ain't no big thing!

Upgrade was very quick -- minus making a backup (35 minutes), it was a 25 minute process. Within 1 hr I went from 35 HR ---> 106 HR. Nice!

:)

[ttb]

read ,read and more read the howto guide, here is a tip ,check and see if there is a local linux users group,maybe some of the members have tivos and have upgraded them,after all it is running linux.and if not linux users tend to be more savey than windows users,and would be glad to help you

[WB]

Thank you all! After several days of lurking, I have finally decided on an upgrade path for my single drive SAT-60.

After much concern over swap issues, and more importantly GSOD recovery with the new MFS 2.0 tools, and with a desire to keep all my saved recordings, and not have to loose them in the future due to failure (GSOD) or deal with another upgrade, I have decided to plow down and install two 120 Gigs in one shot. I will be using a method that has worked successfully for many here.

I plan to copy the image of my existing A drive using dd, then putting in back in and testing it. If all is OK, expanding it with DTivomad, blessing the second drive, then installing the pair and powering up. This upgrade has been reported by several as successfully producing a 230 hour SAT-60 box.

Good luck to all you upgraders out there. I know upgrading is a fun and challenging project for most of us, and serious too! I mean, I cannot live without my Tivo for even one day. :) I will report back after my upgrade is complete.

I recently posted the following information in another thread, but it may be of interest to some here:

Circuit City has a decent rebate on Western Digital's 120 Gig 7200RPM (WD1200BBRTL), good 8/04-8/10.
Retail price is $249.00, - rebate $80.00 = 169.00 (+ Tax)

Another good deal is at <http://www.googlegear.com> The same drive WD1200BB in the non retail package without the mounting screws, cable, and software. This is not a biggie for me, since I will get all that when I purchase the one above.
Their price is $159.00 + .50 , yes only 50 cents extra for FedEx 2nd day.

This is the drive with the 2MB buffer, not the special edition 8MB. I have 2 of the special editions in my server, and they are not too loud. The original Quantum 40G in my SAT-60 is definitely a wiener. Two of these WD's should not be any worse. I have seen many posts on installed 7200's without much heating issues, and some claim better performance.

I will re-use the mounting screws from my existing A drive, and the retail kit will give me a new cable, and mounting hardware for the second B drive.

I wanted to get this out for those interested in the rebate and pricing info.

[WB]

Here's my update:

After much lurking, and getting clues to some stumbling blocks along the way from many here, I successfully completed my SAT-60 Upgrade.

My original configuration was a single drive Quantum 40 Gig. I decided to go with two Western Digital 7200 RPM drives. Together, they are quieter than the original drive which had a nasty whine, however, they are definitely hotter. I went with the 7200's because there were some deals on them, and others had commented on a performance boost with the faster drives. Either way, I am already cooling the unit externally with a boxer fan, so I was not overly concerned about heat.

I should point out that I wanted to keep my recordings, and originally just wanted to add a B drive or replace my A drive with a larger one, but after looking around an reading allot, I saw my best bet was just to go to the max now, keep my original A drive as a backup, and not worry about how to upgrade down the road. Currently, MFS 2.0, which allows you to do these upgrades has been reported to have problems with swap, and recovering from GSOD.

After much debate over which tools to use, I went with the TiVomad CD image nuboot6.iso downloaded from the author's site at http://www.trevor.heartfield.zen.co.uk. I had to change the extension to .nrg for Nero burning software to recognize it as an image, and then accepted the Nero defaults.

My upgrade PC only had one IDE plug, (the CD is on a secondary, but with a funny smaller plug) so I had to make due. Here's what steps I did, mostly with info from Hinsdale's how to http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/, and notes I gathered from readme files from the various tools, as well as posts on this forum.

I Pulled my original A drive and put in in the Primary master slot, and put a new WD on the primary slave jumpered as slave. My original drive came jumpered as cable select. I left alone, since it came up fine as primary master.

I read that the image copy using dd goes faster with the noswap option, and it's fine to go this route in my configuration only for dd. I booted the CD and typed noswap at boot:, verified my drive sizes by shift / page up, logged in as root and used dd.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=32k - In a little over four hours, I had a 1221528+0 records in and records out match.

I jumpered my new WD back to master and put it in the TiVo to test the image copy, and it stuck on the powering up screen while rebooting every few minutes. I came back here and saw posts on a peculiarity of WD drives. I discovered that they should not to be jumpered at all if they are the only drive in the primary slot. I pulled the jumper and JOY. All is good! TiVo boots and works fine, still shows the original 35 hours.

Next I used DTiVomad4 to expand my A, and BlessTiVo to add my B. I found out that DiTivomad4 will not let you use hda, so I jumpered my new A drive to slave and put it on the primary slave, booted to the CD this time with bysteswapping on by just hitting enter. It's the default on this CD.

maddtb4/setupcd.sh - I originally just typed setup.sh, and it was asking for a second disk, so if you're on the CD, it's setupcd.sh

I removed the newly expanded A drive, and jumpered it back to master. It now will need to be jumpered since it will be installed with a slave.

I grabbed another new WD drive, jumpered as slave, put it in as primary slave and blessed it.
BlessTiVo /dev/hdb - Capital letters count here so be sure to do it like it's typed.

Installed both drives together into the SAT-60, and powered up.

Note: Do not boot up the A drive alone at this point If you boot without both drives in the machine, you must start all over!

I saw the reboot that is expected while the DTiVomad software does it thing. After that, it came up normal with 230 hours.

The speed of all operations are certainly much faster than the original configuration. In all areas, performance has been improved dramatically. I can't say if this is attributed to 7200 RPM drives with 2MB buffer, but I am certainly smiling.

I'm sure it will slow down when I load it up with more programs, but I'll have to wait and see.

Cannot report on temperature yet, since the cover is off while I wait for a new Sunon fan http://www.1coolpc.com/case60ho.htm. My original fan bit the dust. Actually, that's what started all of this. I had to get in there to see what was up with the fan. :D

I can't thank enough all of the posters that have helped me and so many others out here. It's the reason I'm posting my experience, as I feel I have to give back, and hopefully it will help someone.

Specail thanks to: Trevor, Tiger, hinsdale, Robert S, stormsweeper, and klincoln - for some of his testing which convinced me to finally stay away from MFS 2.0 right now, and go with the full upgrade and old tools.

Right now, I am very happy!

[LuigiMarconi]

Just wanted to say that your latest upgrade guide (and links to necessary tools) worked out perfectly.........again.

Thanks so much for your step by step how to!

I tried to boot to the CD but I could never get past the ACPI section and finally get to a hash mark.

So I downloaded the floppy instead and it worked fine.

I now have two 120GB hard drives running in an original 30hr Phillips single drive unit. This is the second upgrade I've done on this machine.

The system info says I now have 306+ hours of recording time. Amazing!!

I went ahead and kept my shows and that took a wee bit of time......but they're all there!

Thanks again!!

Dave Cerreta

[phone1]

I took the easy way out - ordered a pre-blessed 120 MgB drive from PTV - took about 20 minutes, even with an IDE controller cable confusion issue. (Never put the cover on and connect all the cables without booting first!)

Thanks Lou!

[schwachs]

What's the latest general thoughts...

I have a Tivo Series 1 (original tivo) that I'd like to update... should I use the methods described in:

"2) New Hinsdale-How-To featuring Tiger’s Mfs Tools 2.0 as an all-in-one upgrade solution"

or stick with

"1) Original Hinsdale-How-To featuring TiVoMad, BlessTiVo, and Mfs Tools 1.1."

Thanks!

[Robert S]

It depends how lucky you're feeling. The original Hinsdale uses well-proven tools which will give you a very safe upgrade.

MFS Tools 2.0 kind of works, but may corrupt your swap partition and breaks mfsfix, so your TiVo will drop dead if you get any file system corruption.

On the plus side MFS Tools 2.0 seems to cause the TiVo to slow down less. Try to do as much of the upgrade in one command as you can (get both x and p into the command) for maximum benefit, and do check your swap (http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69952) afterwards.

[TuneGuy!]

I've been reading a lot about swap file corruption and mfsfix failure when using MSFT 2.0 and I wonder if one of you gurus would mind looking at what I've done and telling me whether I might have a problem in the future? And I must admit to some memory failure and confusion after reading about a hundred posts on this subject.

I upgraded my new AT&T TiVo about two weeks ago using MSFT 2.0. It now works fine; daily calls, recording and playback all OK. With the kind of upgrade I did (described below), am I vulnerable to the GSOD if I get a corrupted file some time in the future? It seems to me (a Linux know-nothing) that it might not affect me even though I used 2.0.

I followed Hinsdale's instructions for adding a second drive to a single drive unit. I made an image of the original 40GB drive, tested it on my new Maxtor 120GB which worked fine, used mfsadd to expand the space and installed as directed, with the 40GB as slave. I did not use the -s switch to change swap size so it must still be 64MB and works fine so far. I am not worried about swap, but rather the possible disabling of mfsfix.

Here's my thinking: I really changed nothing on my 40GB drive other than tell it the new drive was there, so did I really break mfsfix? Or is mfsadd the source of the problems mfsfix?

My questions:

1) If you just ADD a drive to a one-drive TiVo without changing the swap size, does it break mfsfix?

2) Is the backup image I made of my original 40GB drive a good image? Would it be useful for correcting a future problem with file corruption?

3) Having used MFSTools 2.0 for this upgrade, where do I stand reference obstacles to a future upgrade of the original 40GB to a second 120GB?

Thanks a lot for your help and patience with a new guy.

John:confused:

[Robert S]

The problem with mfsfix does not appear to relate to the swap problem. (You can easily check your swap, instructions in the MFS Tools 2.0 fixes thread, but you would have serious problems by now if you had no swap.)

As far as we know at the moment, any partition created buy MFS Tools 2.0 can not be scanned/repaired by mfsfix, therefore, yes, if you get a filesystem corruption problem your TiVo will not recover.

Your backup should be fine, the problem affects the restore mechanism.

You should be able to expand your A drive. dd the current A drive on to the new drive and then expand with mfsadd.

Keep watching the fixes thread for the latest thinking on the problems with MFS Tools 2.0

[Merle Corey]

Originally posted by TuneGuy!
1) If you just ADD a drive to a one-drive TiVo without changing the swap size, does it break mfsfix?

2) Is the backup image I made of my original 40GB drive a good image? Would it be useful for correcting a future problem with file corruption?

3) Having used MFSTools 2.0 for this upgrade, where do I stand reference obstacles to a future upgrade of the original 40GB to a second 120GB?



The last day has been a busy one, and we've learned some new things. To answer your questions based on that new info:

1) Sometimes. If your new capacity is >140GB, 64MB is not enough swap, and you may be subject to the greenscreen loop. You're at 160GB, so you need additional swap. There are a few emergency mechanisms outlined in the fixes thread - if you're already looping, check 'em out. If you're fine right now, keep an eye on your TiVo and increase your swap when the opportunity presents itself.

2) The image is good. Heck, we even know now that the restore is good. It looks like most of the common problems people have been having with MFST2.0 have been swap related (either bad swap or not enough swap).

3) The future upgrade of the 40GB A to a 120GB A should be non-problematic. Once again, you'll need 128MB of swap for that config, but you need that for your current config anyway.

MC

[tivoupgrade]

for what its worth, our belief is that the required swap size is not a function of the size of the drives you install in your TiVo, but more a function of physical size of memory in your unit. typically, in unix systems, optimal swap sizes are 2-3 times that of physical memory - so 32-64MB is fine for a standalone or DirecTiVo unit. granted, there is the potential issue of corrupt filesystems not recovering from the 'green screen' when larger drives are used as the A drive; but it is not a 'given' that NOT having a 128MB swap size is going CAUSE such a failure.

on our kits, swap size is typically configured to be 64MB; we've had no issues to date, even on larger drives.

Lou
PTVupgrade

[Merle Corey]

Lou:

You are correct - under normal circumstances, swap should be a function of the amount of RAM in a system, not the amount of drive space.

A TiVo isn't normal circumstances.

The big issue, as you note, is fsfix. It actually does require a certain amount of memory be available per GiB. Since the system RAM is fixed (barring a little surface mount work on the 16MB units), it falls on swap to make up the difference.

You are also correct in that 128MB isn't needed for all large drive configs. The largest that is actually needed is around 122MB, and that's for a dual 160 (ie 256GiB of capacity) in a 16MB TiVo. 32MB units will require slighly less swap, but still not enough to make 64MB universally safe.

(And by "safe" I mean "provide enough swap to allow fsfix to run." Whether or not fsfix can repair what's broken is another matter.)

The problem is that a few fairly prominent people have recently suggested that 64MB is now universally safe due to improvements in the TiVo software and/or MFSTools. That is simply not true, but a lot of people put a lot of hope in it, especially because of the -s 128 bug in MFSTools 2.0.

We've now developed a rough working knowledge of the amount of memory fsfix requires per GiB of capacity - specifically, about 512K per GiB. A small part of that will come out of system RAM - on the 16MB SA's, it's about 6MB of RAM. The rest must come from swap, or fsfix dies on a signal 11.

I freely acknowledge that it may not be a linear formula, and that results may be inaccurate at the extremes...but we do know that 64MB is not sufficient for very large drive pairs, and that 140GB still looks to be the breaking point beyond which 64MB is no longer sufficient.

My assertion is not that 128MB is some kind of magic requirement. 128MB of swap is, however, large enough that it is universally safe.* It's also a nice round power of 2, it's exactly double the standard swap, and it rolls off the tongue much easier than "122MB." :D

MC

* Barring any kernel updates or future TiVo platforms allowing even larger drives.

[Merle Corey]

Originally posted by Merle Corey
and it rolls off the tongue much easier than "122MB."


There's something funny about that last paragraph, and especially that last statement, in light of the fact that today we've realized that the fix for the -s 128 "problem" is to use -s 127 instead.

Heh.

Anyway, the gist remains the same - 127MB is a universally safe value for large drive pairs, while 64MB is good for anything under 140GB or so.

MC

[Robert S]

Given the falling price of hard drives, and the awkwardness of increasing swap if you want to keep your recordings, I'll be advising everyone to use -s 127 - it costs 63Mb and insures against any future swap-related problems. Once you have 127Mb of swap you can use dd and mfsadd for future upgrades quite safely.

[JDTUC]

I got to the mounting the hard drive into the TiVo rather late in the evening, so I had to McGuyver it a bit.. I used the included brackets from the HD to give the HD "feet" and then hot glued it to the chassis of the Tivo unit. (Martha Stewart would be proud of my Glue Gun Skills.. Wonder if they have TiVo in Prison)

I went from 20 hours to 147 hours !!! Oh My goodness.. how wonderful, Now I can record all 24 hours of "24" on FX (Actually, I could do it 6 times, but who's counting)


Thanks again for the information

Joe

[Eraser]

More thanks to Hinsdale.

I had him upgrade my unit as I didn't want to do it myself. He set up the drives and I had them in just a couple of days. A couple of months later one of the drives we bad. I sent the good drive and a new one to him and he set those up at no charge. All I can say is that if everyone would do business like he does the world would be a better place.

Thank you Hinsdale.

[rich47]

With a lot of trepidation, I successfully swapped a 80gb hd for the 15 gb drive b in my Phillips dtv dsr6000r. I really didn't think I'd be able to do it but followed the directions carefully and got through without any problems.

Thanks to everyone for your help and advice.

I'll reiterate what others have said -- if you can add a hard drive to your pc, this will be no problem for you.

--- Happily enjoying my 96-hours of TiVo.

[Barmat]

Thank you all so much. Today I upgraded my DirecTivo with a 100 GB hard drive, giving me over 120hrs recording time. I followed Hinsdale's Mfstools ver 2 and the only problems I had were connecting the IDE cable wrong at the end .

Thanks to every one that worked putting this together.:D

[Slicker]

OK, I tread to read the entire thread, but wow, it's long.

Here's the situation:

I have a sony SVR2000, added an 80G B drive months ago, very successfully

now i'm getting the stuttering and freezes, and i can hear the clicking, so i think the original A drive is dying

I have an 80G here doing nothing, so I plan to replace the A drive with the new 80G, and would like to try to retain my recordings

The instructions seem clear, EXCEPT:

I will now exceed that 140G limit, so my swap won't be big enough. Since I am replacing a single drive (A) I will use Step 7 option 2 to do the backup.

Then, later I will use step 10 configuration #4, which uses dd to do the copy, not MFS, correct? Will dd give me a big enough swap file or not? This is where I get lost......

I am already in withdrawl from Tivo, and it's not even completely dead, so I would like to do this ASAP. Can someone please clear up this question for me? Will my swap file be big enought; do I have do do something to make it big enough?

Thanks so much. This forum rules!

[Robert S]

There's a reasonable chance that you will be able to dd your A drive to the new disk. You are correct, a 160Gb TiVo with 64Mb of swap will not recover from a green screen. dd will not increase your swap, it simply copies one disk or partition onto another.

You have three options.


Don't exapand (seriously paranoid!)
Expand and try not to worry. If your TiVo does green screen, use the emergency swap rescue wer're developing on the MFS Tools 2.0 fixes thread.
Expand and use pdisk to create a new swap partition. This is a similar hack to the emergency swap scheme, but can be left in place permanently (emergency swap must be removed once your TiVo recovers). Looking for guin^H^H^H^Hvolunteers to develop this.


I would definitely consider drive failure to be a more imminent danger than swap problems.

[Slicker]

OK, i think I'm going with option #2, expand and don't worry. (Is there a chance I got a bigger swap file on my first upgrade?)

So, other than the potential and less worisome swap problem, I have chosen the correct options above?

Thanks again, and really appreciate the quick reply

[Robert S]

You added a B drive with BlessTiVo? No change to swap there, all the swap is on the A drive.

As I said, the priority is to get the data off that disk before it fails. If you don't expand right away, you can think about doing #3 later - once you've expanded, the disk is full so there's no room for more swap.

[Squire_Pug]

Robert S,

I'm willing to be a guinea pig for option #3 above (adding a larger, permanent swap partition to my new A drive). What do I need to do? Thanks.

[Robert S]

Read the last few posts on the MFS Tools 2.0 fixes thread where gigageek describes how he made a swap partition on his inactive root partition and then swapped the numbers so the TiVo looked to the new partition for its swap space. (You need the inactive root partition for the next software upgrade, so it's strictly an emergency measure).

You'll be doing the same thing, but creating a new 128Mb partition instead of using the inactive root partition.

I'm not sure if you'll run into difficulties if pdisk thinks your drive is no larger than the original A drive. Looking at the TiVoMad script, it doesn't look like you have to do anything special.

You might want to back up your partition table before you start. Mount your FAT drive as per Hinsdale MFS Tools backup and do:

dd if=/dev/hdX of=/mnt/dos/tivo.tbl count=64 bs=512

Given this is as yet unproven, restore your backup to your new drive (only takes a few minutes if you don't take recordings) and make sure everything goes to plan before you use your 'live' drive set.

[Slicker]

OK, i figure now that I did it, I should again thank everyone involved, esp Robert S, for making it so eay.

Went from a Sony V=SVR2000 30/80 3.0 to a 80/80 3.0, and didn't lose my recordings. And the process took only 2.5 hours.

So, assuming I don't get beat down cause of the smaller swap file, I am once again funtioning, and hopefully will lose all that stuttering/freezing that had been going on lately.

I'll let ya know in a few days if it keeps working

Thanks again

[dwallyn]

hinsdale: I just rec'd a used HDR31201 with a 30 gigger. I have purchased a 120 gig from someone who has made the disk an "A" drive for me. If I wanted to add a "B" drive to this new "A" drive, is all I have to do is Bless the new "B" drive and add it to the case? Or do I have to also make a copy of the new "A" drive, even though I have the original "A" drive as backup? Please let me know hinsdale, or anyone who might know.
Thanks

[llogan]

You need to make a backup of your new A drive, then restore either to that same drive or a different one to make your new A drive and then bless your B drive.

[dwallyn]

IF I MAKE A BACKUP, ISHOULDN'T HAVE TO RESTORE IT TO THE SAME NEW DRIVE WOULD I. COULDN'T I JUST SAVE IT ON MY "C" DRIVE ON MY COMPUTER AND BURN IT ON A CDROM? ALSO WHAT SOFTWARE DOES THE COPY IMAGES AND RESTORING?

[Robert S]

RESTORING AN IMAGE TO THE SAME DRIVE IS A TECHNIQUE FOR PREPARING AN A DRIVE THAT WAS PART OF A SET TO TAKE A NEW B DRIVE. MFS TOOLS IS WHAT YOU NEED FOR CREATING BACKUPS AND RESTORING THEM. SEE THE TOP POST IN THIS THREAD FOR DETAILS. USE NEW HINSDALE AND MFS TOOLS 2.0.

[dwallyn]

THANKS ALOT ROBERT. YOU HAVE BEEN VERY HELPFUL. TO MAKE SURE I UNDERSTAND, I WILL MAKE A BACKUP IMAGE OF MY NEW "A" DRIVE, AND RESTORE IT ONTO MY NEW "A" DRIVE, USING MFS TOOLS 2.0. IT THEN CAN BE MARRIED TO A NEW "B" DRIVE ONCE THE "B" DRIVE IS BLESSED WITH BLESSTIVO. IS THIS CORRECT?

DENNIS

[Robert S]

DON'T USE BLESSTIVO, IT'S OBSOLETE AND CAN BITE YOU IF YOU USE IT FOR THE WRONG PURPOSE (LIKE THE ONE YOU PROPOSE). USE MFSADD, OR CONNECT THE B DRIVE WHEN YOU DO THE RESTORE AND ADD ITS NAME TO THE END OF THE COMMAND LINE AND MFS TOOLS WILL CONFIGURE IT CORRECTLY.

[domesticbeer]

Thanks Hinsdale and Tiger and esp Robert S.


Did my upgrade on my SVR2000 went from 30hrs to 119hrs by adding 2x 80gb maxtor hard drives.

[legalaliens]

Successfully upgrade of a two drive DSR6000 to a single (120 gb Maxtor) drive unit!

Thanks to everybody (especially Hinsdale) for the great instructions.

Philips DSR6000 - 109 Hours

[legalaliens]

Originally posted by grecorj
Whoo-hoo!

Upgraded my Philips DTiVo last night & I'm now the proud owner of a 106 HR DTiVo!

Thanks to Hinsdale, Kazymyr, Tiger, weaknees.com, ptvupgrade.com, TiVo Community Upgrade Center Forum, and everyone else! Even a "shout out" to Leo on ScreenSavers for showing me that even if ya screw it up the first time, it ain't no big thing!

Upgrade was very quick -- minus making a backup (35 minutes), it was a 25 minute process. Within 1 hr I went from 35 HR ---> 106 HR. Nice!

:)

Nevermind my original post - I saw some previous posts with 106 hours - 40 + 80.

[gannett]

Me too .. Success Using the most excelent notes
http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/

My Tivo is now up to 140 Hours (basic) with room for another 140h on a second drive when added. The backup image is on a PC in case of disk crash and the original 30+15 GB drives are in the cupboard as fall back position. The new 120gb Maxtor 540x drive was £1 a Gbyte from Insight.com/uk

The main process difference was that the CD tool automatically unlocked the Maxtor drives during the boot process so that extra step was not needed.


The process was very similar to that described in
http://www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/
but I had a 30 + 15 GB drive configuration rather than just a single drive as described.

The CD tool allows the migration from twin into a single drive unit so decided to go for a single 120Gb configuration and keep the original drives intact. This would be quieter and allow for a simpler aditional upgrade next time. The conversion process used kept all the user information ( thumbs, season passes) but not the recordings.

You will know this if you have read all the thread but here goes ...

The process is quite straight forward. You put the drives into a PC that has a 3rd dos drive and is booted off the Tivo tools cdrom. You then use a special backup tool on the CD to read the Tivo drives and make a backup image on the dos disk. You then remove the Tivo disks from the PC and put in the new drive and do the restore. After testing the restored image on the new drive in the Tivo you then put it back in the PC and use another software tool to expand the drive to its full size. ( Can be done in one step at restore time. ) Move the disk back to the Tivo, tidy up the loose cables and fix in the now spare B disk special bracket using some nuts to hold the disk mounting screws, reboot and check out the system information then grin inanely.

:D

It all went smoothly thanks to some assistance and the great notes linked to above.


Gannett

[Robert S]

Steve's diary was written just before MFS Tools 2.0 came out.

It's better to use MFS Tools 2.0:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xpi - /dev/hdb

(If you have two source drives, list the B drive after /dev/hdc).

Replaces both dd and TiVoMad, plus expands swap (makes adding that B drive safer) and uses a faster partition structure (TiVo hardly slows down at all).

If you do add a B drive, use mfsadd and not BlessTiVo.

[Slicker]

Just an update here. The fix I did (replace/upgrade my "A" drive) did NOT fix my problem. Stutter is back, though not as frequently, and doesn't crash the drive completely as often. I suppose it is possible my "B" drive is also failing, but as it is less than 6 months old, that is less likely. So, off I go, going to try to copy/replace my "B" drive, and see if that helps.

One thought I had... I still have my original Quantum drive (the one I removed for the upgrade) and am considering clearing it off, restoring from my backup, and popping it in by itself to see if I still get the problems. Of course, if the drive is really bad, this wouldn't work too well.

How can I test the drive? What tools do I use on the Tivo upgrade CD? (I have a bootable CD to work with) Also, how do I view the partitions on the "A" drive?

Thanks for any help

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by Slicker
Just an update here. The fix I did (replace/upgrade my "A" drive) did NOT fix my problem. Stutter is back, though not as frequently, and doesn't crash the drive completely as often. I suppose it is possible my "B" drive is also failing, but as it is less than 6 months old, that is less likely. So, off I go, going to try to copy/replace my "B" drive, and see if that helps.

One thought I had... I still have my original Quantum drive (the one I removed for the upgrade) and am considering clearing it off, restoring from my backup, and popping it in by itself to see if I still get the problems. Of course, if the drive is really bad, this wouldn't work too well.

How can I test the drive? What tools do I use on the Tivo upgrade CD? (I have a bootable CD to work with) Also, how do I view the partitions on the "A" drive?

Thanks for any help

It is just as likely to be a new drive as an older drive. You should download diagnostics from here and run the advanced factory test, if you have time, on both drives.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

Lou
PTVupgrade

[Robert S]

PowerMax often passes drives that cause TiVo to stutter. Unless you can find other evidence of which drive is failing (error messages in logs?), the only definitive test can be to put an A drive image on both drives so you can run them independently.

If you're restoring to the same drive you backed up from, don't use the -s 127 option as the expanded swap will make the image too big for the drive.

[Slicker]

OK, I can try to view the logs. I have put Tivo into backdoor mode and looked at the logs, but not sure what I should actually look for. Which log? And what evidence?

The strangest part of all this is that the same recording that stutters will work fine next time around. Usually, all I have to do is hit the Tivo button on first stutter, pop thru a couple of menus, and the restart the recording. That implies to me that the drive isn't bad, but I know it doesn't rule it out completely.

One other thought: has anyone surveyed which machines this happens to? I have the Sony, and while I love Sony products generally, I truely believe that Sony builds their products to fail after a few years. I've had non-sony TVs last for over a decade, and 3 different sony tvs blow out their tube within 3 years. So, is it mostly (or ONLY) sonys this happens to? Or is it evenly divided amongst the manufacturers.

[Slicker]

Oh, and after going to that page, there's a problem for me. I don't have a floppy drive. And the Maxtor page tells me I have to boot from a floppy.

I have an older PII 266 with a floppy. Will it work there?

[Robert S]

Yes, it'll run on most PCs. A few very new ones have IDE controllers it doesn't recognise.

[Slicker]

Two more questions before I try the suggestions:

1. is the Maxtor utility destructive? Will I lose my recordings by running it?

2. I have avoided the factory reset option, again because of losing recordings. If i reinstall my original Quantum drive, and do the factory reset on that one, I wouldn't care about recordings, since they are saved on the two new(er) drives. Do I have to restore my original drive before putting it back in if I intend to do factory reset?

Sorry to keep asking, but I am just very frustrated that I get so addicted to my Tivo, and recommend it to so many folx, and then all these problems start. I'm still suspicious of the 3.0 update, because I had ZERO problems before it.

Thanks again. And again, sorry for so many questions.

[Robert S]

Your problems do seem more like the problems others have reported after the 3.0 upgrade rather than a drive failure. I've suggested people reset Guide Data if they don't want to lose their recordings, but no-one ever came back to say if this fixed the problem.

If your original A drive has only ever been a lone A drive, you can plug it straight in. If it was ever married to a B drive, you'll have to restore the backup to make it a lone A drive again.

PowerMax's 'advanced' test isn't destructive. 'Low level format', as you might expect, is destructive.

[muchmore44]

I just want to say thanks to Hinsdale and Tiger for giving us TiVo users a way to maximize a terrific technology, as well as to Robert S. and Merle C. for refining the swap expansion/correction process.

Last night, I upgraded my Hughes DirectTiVo from 35 hours to 106 hours (went from 40 GB to 120 GB) and it couldn't have gone better! It took approximately 1 hour, 30 min, mostly because I was very, very careful - I could have done it faster, but I didn't want to take any chances. MFSTools 2.0 are the best!

I am the happiest guy in the world right now (at least until the next person upgrades a Tivo!) and wanted to thank you guys for all that you have done.

You guys are Saints!

Thanks,
Muchmore44

[Slicker]

OK, just an update, for those that may be interested.

You have seen my experience spelled out in a couple posts over the past week or so. Yesterday, I decided to simply unplug my Tivo for a while. It sat unplugged for maybe 3 hours, at which time I powered it back up again. (I'm not sure why I decided to try this, but I did. Usually, when I needed to reset the unit, I would unplug it just long enough for the drives to spin down.)

Since plugging it back in, I have watched live and recorded programs, including some recordings that stuttered quite a bit, and have had not a single hesitation. I realize that this isn't yet much of a result, but so far, this seems to have really helped a lot.

I will of course keep you posted. But I figure this information may be useful to other for the moment.

*crossing my fingers*

[Slicker]

OK, hopefully this will be the final update

Been 5 days since last update, and all is working fine. Have not had a single stutter since I left the unit off for 3 hours, and started it back up.

Still can't tell if perhaps Tivo snuck a minor update in on me that fixed the problem, since the version numbers are so cryptic. But, nonetheless, all is fine, and my 193 hour Tivo is working as it should.

Has anyone else seen the stuttering disappear?

[TechGeeNee]

Okay....I'm new to all this update business. I read on Tee9 web site that if you upgrade your DirecTivo, then your service may no longer download the guides or the software upgrades may not recognize the new hard drive......Is this true? Has anyone had their Tivo unit turn into a doorstop by upgrading the hard drive? I would like to have a fair amount of confidence that I'm not destroying my Tivo before I upgrade......will anyone reply?

[Robert S]

Will anyone reply? As this thread already has 383 replies, there seems at least some chance that someone might.

Upgrades are very safe. If you are concerned about the effect an upgrade will have on your machine, I suggest you order an upgrade A drive to replace your existing drive(s) - if you have any problem with the upgrade you can simply revert to the previous configuration.

Do read New Hinsdale before you order from an upgrade shop - preparing the drive yourself is easy and saves you money.

[TechGeeNee]

LOL Robert!! I love a man with a little gritt!!

Thank you for the reply. I just wanted to make sure there were going to be no ill effects with my service once the upgrade was done. At least until I get one of the Series II DirecTivo Combo's, I only have the one and I'd be absolutely LOST without my Tivo!!!!

If you say it's safe though, I'll take your word for it. I've seen several of your postings and you seem to know exactly what you're about!!

I'll get the HD and do it myself though. I build computers for a living so the procedure isn't an issue, just concerned about the Service results.

:)

[dpmiles]

Help I added a 120 maxtor drive from outpost.com to my DTIVO about 6 weeks ago and all went very well. However the new drive seems to making a clicking noise and the system freeze up. I can get it started by powering it up a couple of times until I don't here a clicking at boot and then it works. I think maybe the hard drive is going bad?? I would like to keep my show and settings what should I do? Can I copy the Second drive to a new 120 gig drive?

[Robert S]

Yes, use the dd method described in Hinsdale to clone your drive onto a new one - the new must be at least as big as the old for this to work.

Copying 120Gb is going to take a while. Check your DMA settings (http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72115) before you start.

[steve457]

Hi, I'm brand new to this forum, and am now about to attempt to upgrade my Sony T-60 DirecTivo. I've been reading this thread, but just want to make sure when I upgrade I do the right thing.

My plan is to replace the current A drive in my system with a new 120G drive (my machine only has 1 drive to start). I plan on using MFSTools 2.0, and follow the Hinsdale instructions. My question is:

1) Using MFSTools2.0 do I need to type the special command vmlnodma hdb=bswap to enable byteswapping? I read earlier that the byteswapping was broken using MFSTools2.0 and that I needed to do this, but wanted to make sure.

Thanks,
steve

BTW: This is a great forum! Tons of information!

[Robert S]

MFS Tools 2.0 has internal byteswapping, so you don't need to use the magic incantation if you just want to use MFS Tools 2.0.

Use byteswapping if you want to access the TiVo partitions with any other tool.

[hbracewell]

I have a Hughes DirecTivo that has been running with dual WD 80GB, upgraded using TivoMad, for about 6 months. I am experiencing increasing incidents of stopples and stutters in both playback and live TV viewing, leading me to believe one (or both) of the drives may be going south. Restarting the receiver seems to alleviate the symptoms for a while, but not for long. The receiver will occasionally restart itself when it gets stuck in a particularly bad stutter. Backdoors are enabled and I see nothing in the logs to point to any specific error or failure (although I am not that familiar with what I should see in these logs, in any case.)

Assuming I have to replace one or both of the drives (hopefully under WD warranty), I have a question that I have not seen answered elsewhere (but I might have missed it, so forgive me if this is a stupid question). Is it possible, using MFS 2.0, to make a compressed backup copy of a dual drive system, preserving recordings, then to restore this backup onto two new drives? Or is it the case that recordings can only be preserved by dd copying the drives to new drives of the same or larger capacity?

If a compressed copy can not preserve recordings, I will have to lose them, since I see no other option than to pull the drives and check for errors and probably replace them. Or is there sometihng else I should try first? Thanks for the support!

HBracewell
Hughes DirecTivo and Philips SA (312) both upgraded

[Robert S]

'Compressed backup' and 'save recordings' are mutually exclusive - although you can issue the command, you get a backup the same size as the total of your TiVo's disk space - not terribly useful.

Take a compressed backup ASAP before the problem gets any worse.

Run the Western Digital diagnostics utility (someone got a link?) on your drive to identify which one is failing. You may not have caught it in time, but if you have a drive available you can try using dd to clone the failing drive on to a new one. This will save your recordings.

It looks to me like you've got bad blocks on the failing drive and dd will probably crash when it hits them.

[NCYANKEE]

Thanks to all those who put together the upgrade instructions. Hinsdale, your instruction sheet was amazingly clear and complete. The process was actually even easier than it sounded. I started with a suspect drive in my original SA Philips 14 hour, which had been reset per Tivo customer support instructions. The system with the faulty drive had never been able to complete guided setup, so I was not sure if the upgrade/replacement process would work. Everything went off as smooth as possible.

Again, thanks everyone! Now I'm looking forward to getting the new Series II DTivo when it arrives!

Mark :)

[Slicker]

OK, problems again, and now I'm really confused.

My Tivo froze, so I had to pull the plug to reboot it. I am now in a reboot loop, get the first graphic screen, then the almost there screen. Then I flash a few colors, and I'm back to the Your tivo is starting up graphic screen. This cycle just repeats. I see no "green screen" that I am aware of. Are the color flashes before the cycle starts over what you're talking about?

Now what do I do? I don't really understand if I should be doing the MFS 2.0 fix, and even if I were going to try that, do I have to pull both drives and hook them up? Or do I simply pull the A drive?

I'm feeling (and probably sounding) stupid here.

Summary: Sony SV2000, 1st upgrade added 80G drive, then second upgrade (recent) replaced the original A drive with another 80G drive. Recordings remained intact during both upgrades.

NO GREEN SCREEN. Simply a reboot loop. What problem and solution should I be reading?

Thanks

[Robert S]

I've never actually seen a green screen, but it doesn't sound like what you're seeing.

This may not be a hard drive failure - your symptoms are not specifically diagnostic. However, I would start by running PowerMax on the drives to see if there's a problem with the drive hardware.

[tivoupgrade]

sounds like either a hard drive failure, or a software corruption failure. of course, if its the latter, it may be due to an emerging problem with one of the hard drives, anyway -- definitely run the PowerMax, and if it passes the quick test, you should also run the 'advanced test' as it shakes out most problems.

lou

[Slicker]

OK, I'll try that. Would be weird to have a second drive go bad. The drives in the machine are 6 and 1 month old.

If it passes the quick, and I do the advanced, will I lose recordings/passes/thumbs, etc? Cause if so, I may get another drive (was gonna get one to put inmy PC anyway), can try to copy the "suspect" Tivo drive over first, before I run the advanced test. When I replaced my original Quantum drive that was failing within the past month, I was able to copy it off to the new Maxtor with only minor recording loss.

If it is another bad drive, I would have to suspect the older of the two, I guess, which would be my B drive. But I will test them both.

I hope it's not another drive failure. Even with cheap drives these days, replacing drives so often will be a bit pricey.

Thanks. Wish me luck

[Robert S]

All the PowerMax tests except Low Level Format are non-destructive.

If it's at the mild stuttering stage you've got a good chance of getting your data off.

I would have to suspect the newer drive.

[Slicker]

I'm considering removing both large drives, and trying to get myself back to the original quantum drive, 30 hour unit. I did the powermax test, both the 90 sec one and the advanced one, and the original Quantum passed both. This makes me suspect that the B drive is a problem, and I of course will test that with powermax

What I need to know is if powermax finds errors on the B drive, will it repair them so I can simply pop it back in and all should work? or will I need to replace it, trying to copy the data on it so I can preserve recordings? (This assumes that the B test fails something, and powermax wants to fix it.)

Also, I attempted to restore my original backup from the Quantum drive when it was a virgin 30 hour unit. Told me the drive isn't big enough. Is that because there is still data on the Quantum? Can I do a low-level format on this Quantum drive, then restore it, and try the unit with the single drive to get me running (albiet with a smaller capacity drive) until I get a chance to replace the (hopefully-soon-to-be-found) defective B drive?

While I'm at it, I'll test the newest drive, which is currently an 80G maxtor acting as an A drive. It could be bad, even if it is only a month or so old.

[Slicker]

OK, one more thing. The first upgrade was a Western Digital drive, not a Maxtor. Will powermax correctly test this drive? I ask because this drive DID fail. It was the drive added in the first upgrade.

[Robert S]

PowerMax will only work on Maxtor drives (Quantum is now part of Maxtor so the current PowerMax will work on Quantum drives too), but Western Digital and Seagate have similar utilities (perhaps someone will post links).

As I said, I would expect that it's the newer drive that's failed - most fatalities occur in the first month - but both drives are pretty new.

You don't need to prepare you Quantum, just make a ordinary MFS Tools backup of your current drive set and restore that to the Quantum (don't use -s 127 or the image will be too big to fit). This will make it a lone A drive with your current data on it.

Depending on how attached you are to your recordings, you may also want to do this to both your new drives. PowerMax may not find a problem, but running them as lone A drives should at least tell you which drive is failing.

PowerMax does have a repair option, but I don't know how effective it is, or how compatible with TiVo. If you don't have any bad blocks on the failing drive you should be able to dd its contents to a new drive and fix the problem. dd tends to crash if it hits bad blocks (actually it's Linux stops the copy because it can't read the data - it's not a fault in dd). You can try dd'ing the disk to /dev/null (will take several hours) to see if dd can traverse the whole disk - if it fails there's probably no way to salvage your recordings.

[Slicker]

OK, found a diagnostic for Western Digital on their page, under support. Interestingly, although the drives have been working fine for two weeks, BOTH of them failed the non-destructive tests! I will be contacting Maxtor and WD to get advance replacements, hopefully allowing me to dd the drives to the new ones, and be back where I was with my recordings. (The recordings are not really that important, but there are quite a few things I haven't watched yet.) In the meantime, I have restored my original Quantum drive with my most recent backup, popped it back in, and after a dial in call, am back running again with what I thought was the original problem drive. (ARGH, 30 hours? No way that's enuf! :) )

I'm really wondering if heat had anything to do with the failures. Since two dif drives from two dif manufacterers failed, makes me think. Although, I have never had an above normal temperature in the machine (per system info, it has gone as high as 46C, but that shows as normal.) I guess it could be coincidence, and they are both under warranty. Anyone have experience with returning a drive that was used in a Tivo as opposed to a PC? Should I leave that detail out when I call them for advance replacement?

Thanks for help. Like I said, at least I have Tivo again, even if it is a lowly 30 hr machine.

[Slicker]

Oh, BTW, the link for WD diagnostics is
http://support.wdc.com/dlg/

And thanks again to Robert S for being so kind and patient

[Robert S]

46 seems rather hot for an SA, but the drives are rated to operate at 55 Celsius ambient, so who knows.

Neither WD nor Maxtor will have any interest in the type of computer you were using the drive in - the drives have failed, they're obliged to replace them.

[sacherjj]

Well, I am about 600 into 48111 meg of my upgrade to 2 x 120 gig...

If you have trouble seeing hda and hdb, make sure you plugged in the "Y" power adaptor to more than just both drives. :)

Much more painless than I thought. I hope it works...

Just one little tidbit for those of you contemplating cracking the case on your Tivo Series 2. There is no way to tell if the case has been opened. I am keeping my original drive and cable. If I have any problems, I should be able to replace the original drive and get services.

[comfysofa]

well - im sitting here and stuck already

all the drives are in the pc

[comfysofa]

well - im sitting here and stuck already

all the drives are in the pc - tried the qunlock command - twice but it doesnt work - swtiched the bios detection to manual.....but no change

Theres not much more that i think i can do.......

sitting here waiting with machine in pieces hoping someone has got a clue.......anyone...

Ta

Andy

[Robert S]

Have you turned the machine off?

[Ludvig]

I'm a new member of the TiVo community and want to relate my experience and thanks to this forum.

I had been looking at TiVo for some time and was put off on the entry price and the monthly charge. But while reading a thread in the forum about Kmart unloading the Phillips 212 units I rushed out and was luck enough to score two new units!

Got hooked up and ejoyed the freedom TiVo provides. I did find out soon that a 20MB unit was not enough and wondered what to do. Once again through the forum I read the upgrade information and decided to give it a try. I looked around for a 80b hard drive and wondered if the price was competitive and found some references to Newegg online sales (in the TiVo forum) and tried them out. Recieved the 80GB drive two days later without a hassel and installed it (with a little help from my friends) and now I am the proud owner of a 104 hr. Tivo.

Many thanks and I hope to contribute to this great group in the future.

Ludvig

[sacherjj]

comfysofa - I would up just turning the drives to None in bios. The only drive listed was the CDRom. When Linux Kernel boots, it doesn't use the Bios settings. See if that works for you. Shoudl be able to Shift+PgUp to view the kernel load to see if the drives detect.

Make sure that you didn't have the problem that took me two boots to solve, namely forgetting to plug power into the two new drives. :)

[Robert S]

If the drives detect as ~10Mb they're locked and no amount of fiddling with the BIOS will help. You have to actually switch the computer off for qunlock to do its thing, it does tell you do this, but a surprising number of people have a sudden attack of illiteracy at the crucial moment.

If the drive detect as ~32Gb then it's a BIOS problem. Strangely, on my machine the drives detect as 32Gb with the BIOS set to None, so some experimentation may be required. You can also use dmesg | more to review the boot log and even dmesg > /mnt/dos/tivoboot.txt to save it to a file you can read from Windows.

[comfysofa]

yup - it was that - actually this is the next morning........i hit the power to check the cabling and lo and behold it started up and found the correct size......job is now done - so far got 1 160 gig disc in.....the mfs tools said i have 109 hours but the tivo reported back as 145 hours - whats all that about then....... Right, next thing is another 120 gig disc in there.....but i take it thats just the mfsadd command which is a 2 second job. After this im gonna go for the network card upgrade - any one on here done that yet and is it easy ????

Thanks for everyones help so far

Andy

[steve457]

I just recently upgraded my T60 to have one 120gig drive. I'm wondering, how hard would it be to now add a second 120 gig drive? I used MFSTools 2.0, and used mfsbackup | mfsrestore -s 127, so I do have the increased swap on my A drive currently.

My question is, could I simply use mfsadd to add the 2nd drive? Or would I somehow need to have increased swap on the new B drive as well?

Thanks,
steve

[hinsdale]

If you already increased the swap file then you can just use mfsadd to add your B drive.

[Impala1ss]

I have an AT&T 40G, stand alone Tivo. I have read all the threads about adding a new drive to my Tivo. I have printed out Hinsdale's How to TiVo Upgrade. I'm going out to buy the new Hard Drive. I have more hardware experience than the avg. bear and have built my own computers in the past and added 2nd hard drives to them. I think I'm ready to go but after reading all the problems others have had I'm at the point of the old "paralysis of analysis."

Looking for the way of least potential for problems I am thinking that way would be to buy a 100+ g HD and simply use it to replace the 40g now inside. But I'm also thinking that while I've got everything open I should bite the bullit and add the new drive as a 2nd drive.

In my 450mhz computer, I have 2 HD's , a CDRW burner (about 2 yrs old) and a DVD player. They use up all the IDE plugs. I'm thinking I could make a floppy to use to start rather than the CD's (don't have to go into Bios that way) and disconnect the CD/DVD drives to get the power plugs to use. I guess I'd still have to identify how the HD's are configured - Master/slave or Primary Master/Secondary Master.

Once I figure those out I'll follow Hinsdale's instructions. Are there any other suggestions you guys could make? ANy areas that are really critical (I know all are) but which are the ones most non-techies make mistakes with? I know you have been asked a million what-if's but this is only my first. Thanks in advance. Don S.

[Robert S]

I would use the new drive to replace your A drive, but give it a few weeks to settle before you add the B drive. We've been getting a lot of reports of drives dying in the first few days of use and it's a lot easirr to fix if you haven't trashed your A drive. Also, you might find 120Gb is enough and not feel the need to add more.

The floppy is fine. You need to use qunlock to unlock the original A drive, but MFS Tools is the same on the floppy and the CD.

Use MFS Tools 2.0 as described in New Hinsdale.

[daryey]

I got the new drive and installed as per hinsdale directions when I powered up I got the GSOD (green screen of death) what should I do I am not computer savvy to use MFS Tools or even connect the drive to a computer?////

[chris_tivo]

Hi just had a go at upgrading my tivo and ran into problems. I followed the hinsdale and some other documents threads and did a dd of the drive (which took over 8 hours). Checked the drive in the tivo and the duplicate was working fine. I then ran the tivomad disk and followed the menu, unfortunately it gets to the boot screen (not as far as the please wait) and keeps rebooting. The only thing wrong I think I may have done is to to say 'yes' to will the tivo have two drives, when I only have one (at the moment). I tried running tivomad again setting 'no' this time but either its too late or something else is wrong.

Anyone any ideas. The drive was error free a couple of weeks ago I checked and is a really quite hassle free 60mb quantum U-series I've been using for the last 4 months. I'll trawl the groups and then try again anyway, but its a hassle waiting 8 hours for it to copy.

[Robert S]

daryey: Is the green screen staying up, or is it constantly rebooting? Green screens do seem to be relatively common during upgrades and not necessarily cause for alarm. Unless it's rebooting, just let it do its thing.

chris: Don't use TiVoMad, MFS Tools 2.0 is /far/ superior. I'm afraid you'll have to repeat the upgrade - another 8 hours - but this time, do an MFS Tools pipe:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xpi - /dev/hdb

This will copy your recordings and expand to fill the unused space on the drive in one step.

Use MFS Tools 2.0 as decribed in New Hinsdale.

[daryey]

Rob Its constantly rebooting

[Robert S]

This is an upgrade B drive that you've added to your A drive, or did you replace your A drive?

Unless you have the original A drive to put back into the TiVo, you're going to be a /lot/ more computer savvy by they time you've repaired this!

Can I suggest you start a new thread in the Upgrade Centre, this thread is really for comments directly relating to Hinsdale's How-to. It'll be a lot easier for me to follow your posts if you have your own thread - you're getting mixed in with others here.

[daryey]

Robert as per your suggestions

[Slicker]

I have received the replacements for my failed Maxtor and WD drives, ran the diags on them (which they passed) and tried to do the dd copy to preserve my old recordings. That didn't work, and I got nothing but errors with the B drive, and the A drive, although it said it completed, did the reboot loop when I tried it in the Tivo. So, since I can no longer even remember what was on the old drives, I did an upgrade, replacing my single (original) quantum drive with the two new drives, and am back to my 193 hour Tivo! I will be keeping the original quantum as is as a backup in case of further failure, but am once again a happy camper.

Thanks for all the assistance, esp to Robert S!

[Robert S]

You wouldn't expect the A drive from a two-drive set to boot on its own.

I would definitely take an MFS Tools backup from that old drive before you put it in storage.

[Jorossian]

I've decided to simply replace my single 40gb hard drive in my Hughes DirecTivo with a new 120 gb drive and eventually add the original 40 gb drive as a B drive at a later date. I plan on doing the "long way" and saving all my recordings as well.

Alltogether that would give me a 160 GB total....... only 120 for now, but I want to do this with the future upgrade in mind...

So I'm trying to decide whether to go the "dd" route or the mfstools route in bringing the image over to the new drive.

For my Hughes DirecTivo unit, Hinsdale's says that the threshold number for upgrades before requiring an increased swap size to recover from GSOD is "likely" 180. (~140 for standalones)

Am I pushing the envelope here by using the "dd" method to make the cleanest copy while not increasing swap? Or should I use the mfs tools option using the -s 127 line to give me a safer buffer zone?

I like the idea of having an exact copy using the dd option, but I'm nervous about eventually adding the 40gig drive to the 120 drive without adding more swap.

Can I get a recommendation from the TiVo gods?

[Robert S]

dd can be faster if you get the DMA settings right, but it's much better to take the extra time and let MFS Tools do the copy so that you can increase swap. As compensation MFS Tools can expand your image in the same step.

Although MFS Tools does the copy slightly differently, apart from increasing the size of the swap partition, the effect of the MFS Tools pipe with -Tao is the same as using dd to copy.

Anyway, you'll still have your old A drive if anything goes wrong.

[Jorossian]

I sure hope not.

But it might be good to see the difference in performance between using a dd transfer with no swap increase VS an mfs tools -tao transfer with an increased swap.

I may very well never add a second drive so the dd option is still intruiging to me. I assume I'm totally fine not adding swap if I were to stick with one 120 gig drive (for Hughes DirecTiVo anyway)

It depends. I'll probably do that first. If I have any problems I'll just go back and redo it at another time using mfstools and compare the results. Whichever I use, I'll be hanging onto my A drive for a while before doing anything further.

I've been thinking and I probably will stick with the single 120 gig drive and eventually buy a DVD burner instead of adding an extra TiVo drive. The prices should become quite nice next fall and it'll be a nice complement to the TiVo.

More bang for the buck that way. The biggest hard drive muncher for me is FOOTBALL GAMES. I record all the Detroit Lions games and tape them permanently, but I keep them on the TiVo for a long time because I hate having to transfer them to the crappy format of VHS. DVD will change all that and keep my TiVo nice and clean.

[Jorossian]

I did it!!! Upgraded my Hughes DirecTiVo from 35 Hours to 109 hours (with the option of upgrading to 140 hours in the near future if I want to).

Used Tiger's disk and Hinsdale's How-To without a hitch.

So far so good. 109 hours capacity and my original A drive is safely stored away along with an MFS tools backup image burned onto a CD. If I'm still happy with the results in a month or so the A drive will be added.

Some surprises:

- I never had to use Qunlock at all.

- I did the LONG method (-tao) of mfstools' backup and expand and it ONLY TOOK 1 HOUR (thanks to my Pentium 4 1.4ghz processor I suppose)

- it was easy as hell

Thanks to everyone who gave me advice during the last week (especially Robert S). I definitely would have done things differently had you not steered me in the right direction.

I'll let you all know if any quirks pop up.

~<very happy>~

[f0gax]

Thanks. Went in first time no problem.

I now have 144:54 at Basic and 39:55 at Best. (Maxtor 120G 5400 RPM)

Thanks again.

[Dancar]

Hinsdale:

Great HOWTO!

Now I'd like to correct something that isn't quite correct:

In the section for Windows NT/2000/XP users you write:

You will need to have/create a primary or extended fat32 partition on your primary boot drive connected as primary master

The setup on the computer on which I did my upgrade had the following setup:

Primary Master: Windows 2000 Boot Drive/NTFS
Primary Slave: Hard drive/FAT32

To eliminate the possibility of booting to W2K, which you warn against, I removed the primary master drive and replaced it with the OEM TiVo drive, connected and jumpered as primary master. The upgrade drive was cabled and jumpered as secondary slave.

I didn't change the cables or jumpers on the FAT32 drive or CD because I wanted to restore the computer to its original configuration as simply as possible.

When running MFSTools I simply changed the hd designations to match my configuration and it all worked fine.

So if MFSTools is unable to back up to a NTFS partition, then you just need to say that a FAT32 partition is required somewhere, and you need to adapt the MFSTools commands if it's not hda1.

[Robert S]

Some of that is a hold-over from the pre-MFS Tools 2.0 era when the back partition /had/ to be on hda because that was the only un-byteswapped drive.

If you know enough about how Unix addresses hard drives then you can vary things quite a bit. Hinsdale can't really include a Unix tutorial, though - people are welcome to post in the Forum if they need help with an unusual configuration - and needs to stay at it's current 'insert tab A into slot B' style.

There are plenty of traps for the unwary if you vary Hinsdale's instructions without knowing what they mean.

[Jorossian]

Robert S,

One week so far and absolutely zero problems with the upgrade.

I'm beginning to think 109 hours is enough.

But just in case - How long do you feel I should wait before considering adding the original A drive as a new "B" drive.

Is it worth it to hang on to the A drive indefinitely (in case of emergency)and just purchase another cheap Maxtor drive to add as a B drive?

I suppose it's all contingent upon each individual's risk limit. Am I being overly cautious?

[Robert S]

I wouldn't think there was any great advantage to hanging on to the original A drive indefinitely - as long as you've got a good MFS Tools backup you can recreate it without too much trouble.

We've been saying wait a month to add more, but I don't think we have the failure curves plotted out. My DOA happened after about 36 hours, so you're doing better than that already!

At some point you'll start to feel confident that your TiVo is stable after the upgrade and want to reuse the A drive. I don't think anyone's going to give you a concrete answer, it's up to you.

[Jorossian]

I figured that would be the answer.

I'm just happy to have come along at a time when the major swap problems of a few months ago were already hashed out.

The "experts" on this forum deserve a huge round of applause. I went into this just expecting to order an upgrade from an outside source, but came out with a whole lot of knowledge about the way my TiVo works and the confidence to do the upgrade cheaply and easily on my own.

It seems to me, now, that ordering a new "drop in" B drive from an outside source is a BAD idea considering you're adding a lot of recording capacity without doing a thing to the swap on the existing A drive.

But most importantly I learned that...........

...Damn I'm glad I didn't get the Ultimate TV reciever instead! =D

Thanks Robert, Tiger, HINSDALE and everyone that "asked the right questions" so I didn't have to.

[Antebios]

I DID IT! My first Tivo HACK! I took advantage of the Maxtor 80 GB 5400 RPM hard drive from Staples for $99, which is a good deal at the moment, and followed the instructions. One thing really sent me over the edge. I was at the step where I have to do the complete backup-restore(Tao)-expand step after I successfully restored the backup image from the original A drive and tested the drive and I kept getting the "not enough space on target drive (?)" error. I was like, "WTF?" After about an hour and a half I looked down at my new hard drive and saw "MAXTOR"! DUH! I kicked myself for wasting that much time. I rebooted with the QUNLOCK disk, unlocked, rebooted and everything was fine. I proceeded to do the slow option of copying my recorded shows along with expanding my drive. 2 1/2 hours later I was done. Put my drive back into the Tivo, put back all my AV/IO wires, crossed my fingers, powered on, prayed some more, BINGO!

My wife was soooooo proud of me! I was the hero of the day! No more stopples, skips, and especially freezes. She's now happy watching her Anna Nicole Smith shows and I'm happy watching The Simpsons and Enterprise.

Thank you Hinsdale! I can now call myself a hacker!

[Golfnut]

Thank you Robert, Tiger and everyone else that made the easy to use instructions on how to upgrade a Tivo.

bought 2 60 gig HD's and went from

Phillips SA tivo with 14 hrs to 63 hr tivo (replaced HD with 60 gig)
Phillips SA tivo with 30 hrs to 104 hr tivo (added the "B" HD with 60 gig)


only problem is I couldn't get the msfadd -x command to work - so I just blessed the new 60gig, added it to the tivo and it recognized the extra space.

I have two direct tivo Phillips single drives, and will probably add a 120 gig HD to that one next weekend - I need to only add the HD and not have to take the old HD out, since I can't for the life of me get the hd bracket off of the directtivo since the screws are so close to the power supply


blessing the tivo and now having to remove the HD that is in the direct tivo will be the best route I think

[ibx100]

Originally posted by Robert S
Some of that is a hold-over from the pre-MFS Tools 2.0 era when the back partition /had/ to be on hda because that was the only un-byteswapped drive.

If you know enough about how Unix addresses hard drives then you can vary things quite a bit.

Hi.. new to this forum.. I just burnt mfstools2.iso, and
took a look.. I notice from /proc/filesystems that it
supports amongst other filesystems, ext2... I've got
a Linux desktop setup and I can't readily lay my hands
on a FAT32 partition without creating one, so am I
right in thinking that it's OK to use mfstools to back
up my TiVo partitions to a file on one of the
existing ext2 partitions (and then burn that to CD)?

Rgds

[Robert S]

Yes, Ext2 is fine. Some of the partitions on the TiVo are Ext2 and you can mount those if you boot byteswapping.

[Kramer]

Many thanks to Hinsdale and Tiger. I just completed my first tivo upgrade, I turned my 14 hour into 84 hours. Thanks again.

[Deven]

Ditto. Many thanks to Hinsdale and Tiger. Mfstools rocks!

I bought two 120GB Western Digital hard drives from Circuit City ($99 after rebate) to upgrade my SAT-T60 and DSR6000. I had to borrow a computer to do the actual upgrade, because mine can't handle drives over 32GB.

The Philips DSR6000 upgrade was fairly straightforward, because it was a single-drive unit, with a 40GB disk. I made a backup of the drive (about 220MB compressed!) and restored the backup to the 120GB drive to test it. This restored copy worked fine, but of course it listed bogus recordings, so I deleted all the recordings, and the upcoming To Do list entries for good measure, then made a new backup without the bogus recordings; this is the one I will keep. (I also restored and tested this backup for good measure.)

I wanted to save all my recordings during the upgrade, so used the -Tao backup/-xzpi restore pipeline to copy the 40GB drive (with recordings) to the 120GB drive. (I also included the -s 127 option to increase swap.) I then installed and tested the 120GB to ensure that it was working, including the recordings. Once satisfied, I did the "mfsadd" command to add the 40GB hard drive as a new second drive, finally overwriting my original drive, once I was sure the new drive had the recordings transferred successfully. My original 40GB A drive is now the B drive, and the new A drive is the 120GB drive I just bought.

The Sony SAT-T60 upgrade was more difficult, because it was a dual-drive unit -- 30GB A drive + 15GB B drive from the factory. I followed the same backup procedures as with the Philips (again deleting bogus recordings to make a cleaner final backup), but the actual upgrade was problematic. I really wanted to use mfstools to copy, not dd, because I wanted to increase the swap space. However, the recommended procedure in Hinsdale's how-to required 4 available IDE ports, and I was using the boot CD for the upgrade, so I had to come up with a new procedure.

Luckily, I had a couple spare (borrowed) 80GB drives available during the upgrade. This was important to me, because it allowed me to safely test the ability to upgrade without clobbering my original drives first. (Remember, I did not want to lose my recordings!) I ended up needing both 80GB drives, but only because I wanted to test the upgrade without clobbering the original drives, in case it failed to copy the recordings successfully. One would have been enough otherwise.

To use mfstools without 4 IDE ports, I had to perform the backup and restore operations separately. Of course, this meant copying the data twice. (And because of my test, I had to make a third copy, because I wanted to reuse the old 30GB A drive as the new B drive.) I created a 50GB partition on the 80GB drive, to have space to hold the 30GB+15GB drives, with some room to spare. I created the partition as ext2fs, but FAT32 would have worked fine too.

To run the backup, I had the 50GB partition mounted on /mnt, and the original A & B drives on hdc & hdd. To avoid problems with files larger than 2GB, I used the "split" command to create multiple files:

cd /mnt; mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd | split -b1000000000

This created a bunch of 1GB files (xaa, xab, xac, etc.) consisting of the backup. (I could have used -b2000000000 as easily and had half as many files, but it didn't matter to me.)

I then shut down the machine, disconnected hdc & hdd, and installed the 120GB drive on hdc and my spare 80GB drive on hdd for the test restore. Again, I mounted the 50GB partition on /mnt, then ran the restore:

cd /mnt; cat x?? | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

This combined all the 1GB files in order, and sent them to the mfsrestore command, much as the normal backup/restore pipeline does. I tested this upgrade, and it worked perfectly. All recordings were in order, so I ran the restore procedure again, this time with the 120GB drive on hdc again, but with the 30GB drive (the old A drive) on hdd, instead of my scratch 80GB drive I used for testing. This was my third time copying ~45GB of data from drive to drive, at about 2-3 hours per copy, but again it worked perfectly. Luckily, I had set aside many hours for this upgrade!

Hisdale, feel free to document this technique as another option in your FAQ!

My Sony SAT-T60 is now 120GB+30GB (150GB total, "136 hours"), and my DSR6000 is now 120GB+40GB (160 GB total, "146 hours"), and I didn't lose any of my recordings or settings in the upgrade process. I finally have breathing room on my TiVo's! I can finally set ALL my regular recordings to "save until I delete", as I should have been able to anyhow... (Will I run out of space again? I don't know, but I hope not!)

[jimjoe]

I reviewed the instructions for upgrading drives on tivo at
http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/

All i want is to put a new maxtor 120gig into drive a in a new tivo that i've never used (and throw away the original drive).

1) Do i still need/want to connect to tivo and start my membership before I put in the maxtor i really want?

2) Is there a particular part of the instructions that applies to me where i can skip the part about backing up, moving exisiting programs, etc.

3) I assume i still need to burn the cd of the tools?

4) I assume even if i have win xp, I don't have to partition my default hard drive on my PC as long as i don't boot from that drive, and just tell bios to boot from my cd?

Thanks!

[Robert S]

If you copy the A drive to the new one, when you power up for the first time, you'll be in exactly the same state you would have been had you used the original A drive (with more recording space).

You might want to do Guided Setup and take the software upgrade before you move to the new drive - just to be sure your TiVo is OK. Doing this doesn't make the upgrade any more difficult, the MFS Tools transfer will take about the same time either way.

I recommend making a backup to put on a CD for additional safety, but it's not a vital step in the upgrade. You can put a small FAT partition on the new drive to make your compressed backup - MFS Tools will steam over the FAT partition when you upgrade.

You can modify the MFS Tools pipe to run more quickly:

mfsbackup -so - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xpi - /dev/hdb

Would only take about 10 minutes - although obviously it doesn't take the recordings.

[moonslice]

Thanks Robert! I now understand i do want to copy the info from the old to the new one, and i have to put both drives in my PC.

But...

When you say to put a small FAT partition on the new drive to make a compresssed backup, is that necessary?

Were you suggesting that as an alternative to partitioning my c drive? Is there any reason i need to partition any drive, as long as i boot up from the CD, or do i have to partition because i have XP on my c drive?

Do I do partition it from some command when i boot up from the tools CD i burned?

When you say MFS Tools will stream over the partition when i upgrade, does that mean it will erase it and give me back the whole drive?

If i make a backup on a cd (for safety), is that something i begin after i boot from the tools CD, or do i start winXP and somehow make a backup?

Thanks again!

[Robert S]

If you're running XP, the chances are you're on NTFS. Linux can read files from NTFS partitions, but not write them. Also, it would be a good idea to leave your XP drive disconnected at least until you have a backup.

You'll need to partition and format your new drive with DOS tools before you write the backup - you can resize the partitions on your C: drive, but it's probably better not to mess with it. Get an MS-DOS boot disk (from bootdisk.com if necessary). With only your new drive connected, run FDISK and FORMAT - with reboots as appropriate.

Once you've copied the backup on to your XP drive, you won't need these partitions any more.

MFS Tools will restore over everything on your new drive, there's no need to delete anything.

If you have a CD writer, use your XP CD creation software to write the backup file you created to s CD for safe keeping.

[moonslice]

aren't my mfs tools on the boot cd i burned according to #4 of the instructions?

#7 (backup) says...
Power up your PC with the Boot Cd in your cd-rom. Boot Cd users should hit <enter> to initiate the default boot option. Type "root" or simply hit <enter> to bring up # prompt. At prompt both Boot CD type the following commands to mount your C: drive:
mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
Then...
mfstool backup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

It doesn't say anything about partitioning any drive, so are all the tools on my boot cd?

Sorry for all the questions, but I don't want to screw up.

Thanks again

[bdkras]

OK, about to make the move to upgrade my single 40GB drive DSR6000 DirecTiVo unit with a Maxtor 120GB 7200 as a replacement A drive.
I plan on doing this using my Dell 8200 running XP.

Here's my basic question: Which of the Hinsdale upgrade methods will be best to use:
1) Original Hinsdale-How-To featuring TiVoMad, BlessTiVo, and Mfs Tools 1.1
OR
2) New Hinsdale-How-To featuring Tiger’s Mfs Tools 2.0 as an all-in-one upgrade solution?

I've read over (1) and it sounds pretty straight forward. However the footnote about booting from Windows 2000/NT/XP has freaked me out a bit. Best I can tell, whenever I have the TiVo drives connected to my PC, I'm always supposed to be booted from the CD (not XP). If that's the case, then I don't have to worry about it, right? As long as I only boot from the CD, I shouldn't have to worry about all this creating a fat32 partition stuff, correct?

If this is the case, to be safe I'd like to try booting my PC using the boot CD I created with nuboot6.iso. Any harm in just booting up with my original PC hard drives attached to make sure that my BIOS does indeed boot from the CD?

Thanks very much for the help. Just want to be safe rather than sorry.
Brian.

[bbackman]

All you all ( that's Southern USA speak for 'you guys') are fantastic! I just upgraded from a plain old SA 30GB to a SA 120G/30G and it was an absolute SNAP! I followed Hinsdale using Tigers MFS Tools 2.0. It even found my USB keyboard!

I've been lurking on this forum for nearly a year, 'till I could find a good price on an upgrade drive. I even found that info on this forum! - (Circuit City:WD 120G @ $129-$30 rebate )

Again, great work and thank you. Now, after I finish my obligatory recording of Franklin, Dora and Elmo, I can finally record MY shows!

Upgrading to TurboNet as soon as it arrives...

[Jerry_K]

Thank you Hinsdale. Your instructions and a floppy with MFS tools from Tiger made a novice an expert. One Phillips DirecTiVo goes from 30 and 15 to 80 and 60 without a hitch.

[Robert S]

bdkras: Use MFS Tools 2.0 (New Hinsdale) for everything. Follow Hinsdale's instructions - ignore the docs with MFS Tools 2.0.

Like moonslice, I suggest you put a small FAT partition on your new drive to make a compressed backup that you can store on your XP drive or burn to a CD. It doesn't take very long and is good insurance.

You will always be booting from a CD while you have TiVo drives attached, so if you have the XP drive connected with the TiVo drives it's best to make sure your PC is booting off the MFS Tools 2.0 CD (chuck out that nuboot.iso!) before you attach the TiVo drive.

moonslice: Of course MFS Tools is on the MFS Tools CD! You partition the hard drive to make a FAT filing system for MFS Tools to write the compressed backup to!

[Deven]

jimjoe, why would you want to toss the original drive? Why not do what I did? After replacing the A drive with a 120GB drive, I used the old A drive as a new B drive, for even more space! It seems silly to leave just one drive in there when you can have two...

bdkras, I just used MFS Tools 2.0 all the way. Worked like a charm. I don't know why you'd want to use the old tools when this one works so well... (Thanks, Tiger!)

Of course, I'd still test the new drive(s) before clobbering the old one(s), on general principle. (That's what I did, and the tests passed with flying colors.)

[bdkras]

Thanks very much for the advice. I'm upgrading right now. One additional question:

Since I'm now planning on using my original A (40GB) drive and making the new 120GB drive a B drive for a total size of 160GB do I need to worry about using the "-s 127" option to increase the swap size? I would assume not since the doc says that the threshold for DirecTiVos is approx 180GB and I'm only going to 160GB. Any harm in doing it anyway? Any way to increase the swap later if necessary? How often does it really matter anyway? (sounds like it's only necessary in the rare case that the TiVo repari utility GSOD is triggered). What situation would trigger GSOD?

Thanks!

[Robert S]

I recommend replacing the the A drive rather than adding to it. Use an MFS Tools pipe to copy your recordings if you want to keep them, otherwise just do a backup/restore. This allows you to use -s 127 to increase your swap and means that if your new drive develops a problem it'll be easy to fix.

After a month or so, once you're sure your new drive is OK, you can use mfsadd to add the old A drive as a B drive.

You are quite correct, the extra swap only makes a difference when a large TiVo green screens. Your upgrade will not take the TiVo over the threshold. Green screens are very rare - you may never see one. You can temporarily increase swap (see the Fixes thread) to 'rescue' a TiVo that's green screened with insufficient swap.

However, if you were to upgrade to 2x120 later on, it would be very easy if the 40Gb drive is the B drive and you have extra swap (use dd to clone the drive, then mfsadd to expand into the extra space), and trivial if you stay with just the 120Gb drive (run mfsadd to add the new one).

Anyway, if your new drive does fail, and you're trying to figure out how to extricate yourself from a twin-drive configuration, you'll at least have the comfort of knowing you were warned in advance...

[bdkras]

Robert,
Thank you for the advice. I didn't read your post until after I made the decision to keep my 40GB A drive and add the 120GB to it. I just used the mfsadd as in hindsdale and didn't use any -s option. It seems to be working OK and hopefully will stay that way.

Am I correct in understanding that no matter what, I can always start over by simply restoring the backup (tivo.bak) I made to the original 40GB Quantum A drive? So if I wanted to start over and do as you suggested, I could restore my backup to my original A drive and then set up the 120GB to be a new A drive?

Thanks again for your help.

[Robert S]

Yes, you can use the backup to turn any sufficiently large drive into an A drive for your TiVo.

I wouldn't worry too much about the swap. You're still below the threshold where your TiVo will experience problems if it green screens.

If you upgrade further (keeping recordings) you will either have to create a larger swap partition manually or rely on the rescue maneuver to get you out of trouble.

[clisbeek]

for a very non-techie person who loves her 2 year old Philips Model "HDR212BK01" and can't afford to buy the newest Version 2 TiVo, is there anybody near Boston MA that does house calls for memory upgrades like you all are talking about? I'm so bad, this old Compaq Armada laptop I'm writing this message on is owned by my employer and every time it acts up they reimage it and I lose all my Web favorites... obviously I'm a very lost puppy but I am willing to learn.

[dvdapex]

These instructions worked perfectly.

I had used some other instructions and they were filled with typos that turned this "under one hour job" into a 3 hour nightmare.

I downloaded these instructions and in about 45 minutes, I had a DirecTivo with 140 hr recording time.

Thank you very much!

[Robert S]

clisbeek, you need access to a 'proper' PC to prepare the drives yourself (your laptop doesn't have the right connectors for the 3 1/2" drives TiVo uses), so your options are a bit limited if you can't find someone to do the upgrade for you.

However, you could order a pre-prepared drive from Hinsdale or the other upgrade shops (weaknees, 9th Tee, etc). Unless you're desparate to keep your recordings I would go for a replacement A drive (or A+B if you want lots of space!).

If your TiVo is currently a single drive model (and the A drive hasn't been upgraded), you can order a 'pre-blessed' B drive which will add to your existing space without affecting your existing recordings. It will noticably slow your TiVo down, though.

Replacement/pre-blessed drives are very easy to fit and come with full instructions and often even the tools required to fit them.

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by Robert S


However, you could order a pre-prepared drive from Hinsdale or the other upgrade shops (weaknees, 9th Tee, etc). Unless you're desparate to keep your recordings I would go for a replacement A drive (or A+B if you want lots of space!).

Replacement/pre-blessed drives are very easy to fit and come with full instructions and often even the tools required to fit them.

And in some cases, support and a warranty is also included.

Lou

[MannyVjr]

I just want to thank every one involved on this Upgrade Guide.

I received my drives (120Gb Maxtor) yesterday and with my 5+ years old computer hooked them up, made a backup image of my 14hr SA TiVo (god bless that black box) and in less than 2hrs I had a 306hr (basic quality) - 84hr (best quality) without any glitches.

Thanks again.

MannyVjr

[tonyaldr]

Hi, all. I've had two 30 hour HDR312s, and I've never upgraded them but now one of them has a burned out modem. Can I combine the drives in the surviving one? Since they're both original TiVo drives do I need to do anything to either in order to get them to work together? Thanx!!

[Robert S]

No, just use mfsadd to expand the image on to the other drive.

Not tempted to try an external modem or TurboNet to get your TiVo working?

[jonb]

My 15mo old back-up made with MS tools is vers. 1.5 if I remember right. Is it good practice to repeat the back-up with every new major release. I believe 3.0 is current. In other words, will re-install from ver. 1.5 crash on the first daily call? I have lifetime sub. I can't find an answer to this in the how-to. It probably has been asked many times. Please point me to a link, if you don't want to explain again.

[Robert S]

Yes, it is a very frequently asked question!

Your TiVo will upgrade to the current version automatically on its first call.

[tonyaldr]

Hi, Robert. I didn't realize you could use an external modem. Can you point me toward a link that explains how to do that? Also, I'm confused - "just use mfsadd to expand the image on to the other drive?" What image are we talking about? Sorry, but I'm a complete novice and thought that if I had actual TiVo drives that I wouldn't have to do anything fancy to get them to work together.

[Riptide]

I have read through this extensively long thread looking to see if anyone has asked the same question and I apologize if it has been asked / answered already. I believe that I will be using Hinsdale’s Upgrade Configuration #6 to complete the process.

I have two standalone TiVos that I want to upgrade again. Originally both TiVos first upgrade occurred over two years ago.

The first TiVo was a 14 hr unit that was upgraded / married with a 60GB Maxtor (B). The original Quantum was then upgraded again with a second 60GB Maxtor making it a 120GB unit. The second TiVo was a 30 hr unit that was upgraded / married with 60GB Western Digital first then a second 60GB Western Digital in a similar fashion to the first TiVo. Both units have run perfectly and I haven’t had any problems. I kept many shows saved on both these units and am wanting to upgrade again in order to get more room.

Can I put in 120GB Maxtors in place of each of the 60GB drives and keep my shows intact? Will both the 60GB drives actually copy onto just one 120GB drive? Also, the 60GB Maxtor drives are slightly larger than the 60GB Western Digital drives… not sure if that will affect the process. In reading the Hinsdale notes (Upgrade Conf. #6), it appears that I may be able to do this, but it requires that I have four IDE connectors available. Since I would have to disconnect my CD-ROM drive in order to do this, can I extract the files from MFS Tools 2.0 in order to do this? I was planning on using:

mfsbackup –Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore –s 127 –xpi - /dev/hdb

so that I could copy the recordings and expand to fill any unused space on the drives in one step. Any suggestions or help is greatly appreciated and if I have left any important details out, just let me know.

Thanks

[Robert S]

Possibly. The problem is the number of partitions. You're limited to 16 partitions per drive and 6 MFS pairs in total.

The A drive starts with 11 or 13 partitions and so can only be expanded twice or once (probably twice in your case).

MFS Tools can shuffle the partitions around to make room, so if you upgrade from 2x60 to 2x120, that should work.

The command line would be:

mfsbackup –Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore –s 127 –xpi - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

And you'd have to boot off the floppy. Hinsdale contains a link to the MFS Tools 2.0 boot floppy, but you already have it on the MFS Tools 2.0 CD.

The floppy is the same as the CD except for the unlock code. Your drives shouldn't be locked anyway, but if they are you'll have to boot the CD or use qunlock to unlock them before preparing for the pipe transfer.

[ahartman]

Well, add my name to the list of happily upgraded DSR6k owners.

Followed Hinsdale's instructions - very easy and very straightforward.

Many thanks!

:up: :up: :up: :D

[remster]

Another satisfied customer here (doubly so).

I don't know if this has been done yet, but I put together some illustration pictures that could be added to the steps... copyright free, with my compliments. A small attempt to give back to the tivo community.


The pics can be found all in this directory: http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/

Mounting bracket for the new drive, made out of a very common recycled PC part:
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/bracket_3232.jpg

Just add some double side foam tape under it. When putting back into tivo, make sure to position other drive first so you don't stick the new drive in the other drive's footprint... once the tape is stuck, it won't move! The new drive can be removed with the side screws.
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/bracket_3233.jpg

How to remove the cover. Kneeling in front of the tivo, push forward with right hand, and push on back of the tivo with curled fingers of left hand, while pushing forward with the palm of the hand.
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/cover_3218.jpg
Alternate with the other side, slowly by slowly it'll move.
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/cover_3220.jpg

First fastener cut
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/cutfasteners_3224.jpg
Second fastener cut
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/cutfasteners_3225.jpg
Discard the fasteners
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/fasteners_3228.jpg

Showing where the 2nd drive will hookup in the tivo.
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/seconddrive_3229.jpg

If you don't have Torx wrenches, some allen wrenches can do the trick. It can be very hard to turn the screws, so see the pliers trick below.
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/allenwrench_3222.jpg

And if some screws are really tight, a pair of pliers can definitely make it a lot easier. Just make sure to squeeze real hard (so as not to slip), and move slowly. If you are real careful and patient, you can undo all the screws with pliers and fingers, no torx or allen needed. The pliers are also very useful for pulling safely the ATA cables from the hard drive (a frequent manoeuver) without messing up the cables.
http://vidalsmonami.hypermart.net/tivo/pliers_3244.jpg

[netmanmc]

I read through the upgrade doc but just wanted to confirm before buying a drive that 120GB is the largest I can go. Comments?

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by netmanmc
I read through the upgrade doc but just wanted to confirm before buying a drive that 120GB is the largest I can go. Comments?

This is incorrect. The largest drive that can be used in Series1 TiVo systems is 200GB right now. The largest we use are 180GB drives. The largest you can use without a significant software undertaking (or utilizing our services) would be the first 137GB of any drive larger than that (160GB would be the obvious choice).

Lou Jacob
PTVupgrade.COM

[elizc]

I'm considering getting a TiVo and am thinking that an 80-hr is the way to go. But from what I've seen, it's not upgradable. Should I get a 60 hr instead so it can be upgraded?

elizc

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by elizc
I'm considering getting a TiVo and am thinking that an 80-hr is the way to go. But from what I've seen, it's not upgradable. Should I get a 60 hr instead so it can be upgraded?

elizc

The 80-hour unit IS upgradable. Its just not so easy to add another drive because the mechanicals aren't set up to easily mount a 2nd drive. You can certainly add a drive using 9thTee's modified brackets (see link below), and you can also replace with a larger drive (up to 160GB, yielding 137GB of space).

Lou

[Riptide]

Thank you Robert for your guidance on restoring my hard drives. My new hard drives finally arrive last night so I began the pipeline transfer of my first TiVo. I transferred 2 WD 60GB drives to 2 Maxtor 120GB drives using the recommended string and the boot floppy. After hitting the enter button it started up the restore and then I got an error message (at about 0.16% of the restore). I was afraid that it had failed since it seemed hung on the error message then after about 1 minute it continued the restore. It took about 5 hours to do the complete restore and I plugged the new drives into the TiVo and it booted up fine, I quickly ran through some of the screens, checked the new record times, played the beginnings to a couple of shows, set the 30-second skip and programmed a show to record. Everything seems to have worked properly but I am still concerned about the error messages. The following is what I transcribed during the restore (hopefully I wrote it all down correctly… it was late in the evening):

Scanning source drive. Please wait a moment.
Source drive size is 15hours.
-Upgraded to 57 hours
-Upgraded to 127 hours
Uncompressed backup size 112473mb
Starting restore 112473mb
Uncompressed backup size: 112473mb
hda: dma_intr: status= 0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error= 0x40 { UncorrectableError } LBA sector=702498, sector=702272
end_request: I/Oerror, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 702272
hda: dma_intr: status= 0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error= 0x40 { UncorrectableError } LBA sector=702498, sector=702274
Backing up 112473 of 112473mb (100.00%)
Backup done!
Restoring 112473 of 112473mb (100.00%)
Cleaning up restore. Please wait a moment.
Restore done!
Adding pair /dev/hdc14- /dev/hdc15
New estimated standalone size: 202 hours (75 more)
Adding pair /dev/hdd4- /dev/hdd5
New estimated standalone size: 277 hours (75 more)
#

Should I worry about a failure with my new setup and the error messages? I am planning on doing the same thing to the other TiVo (upgrading a pair of 60GB Maxtors to a pair of 120GB Maxtors) this coming weekend.

Riptide

[Robert S]

As long as the upgraded TiVo works, I think it'll be OK. Although bad blocks can cause problems, I would expect the copy to be unbootable, or otherwise obviously faulty, so if if it works, I wouldn't worry.

Normally bad blocks cause MFS Tools or dd to crash, so I guess the sector read OK on the retry.

[ronsch]

I upgraded my Philips HDR31202 Tivo almost a year ago by adding an 80GB drive to the existing Quantum. Now I find it's time to expand some more.

I am planning on dual 120's and what I was wondering is can I use a combination of Upgrade configuration #6 followed by Upgrade configuration #1 to accomplish Upgrade configuration #5 using only 3 IDE ports? It would save deinstalling and reinstalling either my dvd-rom or cd burner.

I would just use configuration #5 option 2 but I would feel better with the larger swap file.

[Robert S]

I can never remember Hinsdales #'s!

You may not have enough partitions on the A drive to do it that way, although you probably have an 11 partition A drive, so it should work. Boot a byteswapping boot disk and check.

The alternative, probably preferable, would be to use dd to clone the drives on to their replacements. That does prevent you from increasing swap with MFS Tools, although you could use the manual swap technique from the third post in the Fixes thread.

[ronsch]

Thanks very much Robert!

Sorry about throwing around the configuration numbers like that but I figured it was the best way to avoid any confusion about what I was trying to accomplish.

I like your solution even better than mine. It will allow me to keep both the dvd-rom and cd burner installed. Given my model number and previous upgrade history, will the partition numbers given in post 3 of the Fixes thread be exact for my situation?

[Robert S]

I wasn't being too critical, but Hinsdale is too big to memorize, and has a maze of nested configurations and options!

I decided to assume that what you were suggesting was using MFS Tools to copy the contents of both drives to a new A drive.

The manual swap technique gives the commands for both 11 and 13 partition drive. By the time you get to that step it should be obvious which you have. The 13 partition drives are the newer ones, so I assume that yours is an 11.

[ronsch]

Thanks Again. We'll find out in about two weeks. I'll post my results.

[tornado]

The New How-To mentions software versions up to 3.0. Anybody use it on a Series 1 DTiVo with 3.1 yet?

As luck would have it, my in-laws' DTiVo got 3.1 last night before I could upgrade the B drive.

[Robert S]

It won't make any difference to upgrading the B drive - just dd it over and run mfsadd.

It's possible for upgrades to change the backup parameters (happened on the UK TiVo), but I think we'd have heard by now if 3.1 did that.

[tornado]

Thanks. I hadn't looked at the New How-To until today -- I didn't realize that we could preserve recordings until I did!

So should I still make a backup first or just dd the B drive? (It's a Philips 30/15) I'm paranoid enough to make the backup, but I'm wondering if it's necessary.

[Robert S]

The backup is not a part of this upgrade process.

If you don't have one already, taking a backup is a good idea.

[ronsch]

I picked up a pair of Western Digital 120's at CC yesterday. Price was $129.99 each but after I asked I got a $30 rebate certificate for each one. Apparently the $129.99 is the regular price for the 5400 speed 120GB models now.

[jcase]

I have a T60 that has 3.1 and has never been hacked.

Is there anything special that I need to do other then follow Hinsdale's how-to to increase the drive sizes?

Also, I would like to run turbonet and tivoweb are there specific instructions for 3.1?

I have already hacked a standalone so I have enough experience to be dangerous :D

Thanks in advance to the extremely knowledgeable people that make working with the TiVo such a pleasure.

[gadgetgrrll]

I just updated my new HDVR2 and wanted to thank you for the great documentation on the process. It was a piece o' cake!

Kathy

[gordonph]

Hi Folks,
I hope this has not been reported. I followed the new how to directions. I believe I found a small typo in a command line. It is about half way through the doc under section 8, in the part about restoring and expanding at the same time. The line reads...
mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc (restore/expand to single new larger A drive)

I believe it should be /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hdc
yes, very small, but it may screw someone up.

I'm still in the middle of my upgrade. I hope to add a new post tomorrow with a yipee!!!

thanks,
gordon

[OneReality]

I have a Sony SAT-T60 with a single drive that is stuck on the Welcome start up screen. After reading the posts on this forum it sounds like the hard drive is toast. Can you recommend a way to test this theory?

I have seen several references to upgrading from a working hard drive to newer larger drives, is it possible to simply replace the failed hard drive and add the missing software? Is there a guide for this. I do not need to retain any of the information on the old drive.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris

[hinsdale]

Originally posted by gordonph
Hi Folks,
I hope this has not been reported. I followed the new how to directions. I believe I found a small typo in a command line. It is about half way through the doc under section 8, in the part about restoring and expanding at the same time. The line reads...
mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc (restore/expand to single new larger A drive)

I believe it should be /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hdc
yes, very small, but it may screw someone up.

I'm still in the middle of my upgrade. I hope to add a new post tomorrow with a yipee!!!

thanks,
gordon

That's not a typo, see the instructed drive placement above:

With your new upgrade TiVo A drive as Secondary Master and new upgrade TiVo B drive (if any) as Primary Slave, you can use the following command to restore your Mfs Tools backup image to your new large upgrade drive(s) and expand them at the same time:

[ronsch]

Robert,

Not to beat this to death, but in regard to the issue in post #477, since I've already upgraded once using the original MFS Tools, wouldn't I now have a 13 partition Tivo assuming I started with an 11 and have to create 14 for the new swap partition and then get 15/16 by using mfsadd?

[RyanRubenstein]

I have 2 tivos. One of them is not booting. I tried to duplicate the A drive of the working unit into the non booting drive using dd.

After reading some posts do I need a "virgin image"

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks

[Robert S]

ronsch: Yes, that's what I'm thinking.

[Deven]

Originally posted by RyanRubenstein
I have 2 tivos. One of them is not booting. I tried to duplicate the A drive of the working unit into the non booting drive using dd.

After reading some posts do I need a "virgin image"

If they're both SAT-T60 models, you might be able to do this. If they're not the same model, it won't work. Even if the model is the same, you'd need a similar hard drive configuration -- the destination unit should have a hard drive at least as large (in exact number of sectors) as the source unit. If the source unit is a dual-drive system, the same would apply to the second drive. If the hard drive configuration is identical (same exact model numbers) and the TiVo model is identical, I think this may work, or at least I think I've heard of people doing such a thing successfully. (If this works, "dd" would also copy the recordings.)

If the destination hard drive(s) is/are larger, you should probably use "mfsbackup" and "mfsrestore" from the mfstools 2.0 package, so that you can use the full space of the new drive(s). These tools can either copy the recordings or omit them, making a small backup that isn't required to be a "virgin" system. (When I backed up my SAT-T60, I think the backup image was about 1.3 GB, but it was able to compress down to less than 250 MB!)

[pdvale]

Thanks for creating the upgrade documentation. The step by step process was very good and I was able to upgrade from 35 to 149hrs. :D

Thanks,
Paul.

[ronsch]

Robert,

Could you review and give any feedback you like, especially on Step 11?
I don't understand the need to mess with partition 9 and what effect renumbering it to 15 will have when mfsadd tries to create two new partitions?

Proposed Tivo Upgrade Procedure

1. Create MFS Tools boot cd.

2. Find last years qunlock floppy or create a new one.

3. Remove Tivo drives and insert in PC: Hinsdale Steps 5 & 6

4. Create divorced backup using Hinsdale Step 7 Option #2
mfsbackup –6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc/ /dev/hdb

5. Remove original Tivo drives and put in one of new 120gb drives.

6. Restore backup to test as in Hinsdale Step 8: mfsrestore –zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb Larger swap shouldn’t be required.

7. Place Original B and other new large drive in PC: Hinsdale Step 10, Upgrade Configuration #5, Option #2 - dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k

8. Test backup image: Hinsdale Step 9 while first dd is running.

9. Place Original A and tested new large drive in PC: Hinsdale Step 10, Upgrade Configuration #5, Option #2 - dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k

10. Remove original A drive from PC. Replace with new B drive. Boot again using byteswapping: vmlnodma hdx=bswap where x is wherever new A drive is located and y is where new B drive is located.

11. Create new swap partition:
pdisk /dev/hdx
C
14p
128m
r 14 8
r 9 15
w
y
q
mkswap –v0 /dev/hdx8
mfsadd –x /dev/hdx /dev/hdy

12. Install new drives in Tivo

13. Celebrate!

[Robert S]

It would be pretty obvious as you do it - you can press p at any time to print the partition table and see what's going on, and you're not committed to anything until you write the changes out.

r 14 8 moves partition 14 (the new one) down to number 8, this increases the numbers of all the higher partitions, so the old swap partition is now 9 and so on. r 9 15 pushes the old partition up to the end of the list, allowing the other partitions to drop back to their correct positions. You can just delete the old swap partition, but some people like to format it as Ext2 and use it for hacking.

Do let me know if this isn't what happens when you try it - I haven't had a lot of feedback since I wrote that up (it's a fairly specialised hack), just a few people saying it worked for them.

[ronsch]

I see said the blind man. So mfsadd then overwrites the old swap partition and 16 when adding the new app/media pair....

[Robert S]

I think you'll find the old swap partition actually ends up as number 14 (as I say, let me know what happens). If it does become number 15, then r 15 14 should move it down, or you can just delete it.

This has never been enough of an issue before!

[edrock200]

Hey Hinsdale,
Do you know if an image from one hdvr2 can be restored onto another using the clear and delete option after the restore?
thanks in advance,
-Ed

[ronsch]

Robert,

Will do. I suspect if it left the old swap as 15 then mfsadd might have a problem trying to use 14/16 as a new app/media pair. If that does happen I will do the additional renumber to move it back to 14 before trying the mfsadd.

[hinsdale]

Originally posted by edrock200
Hey Hinsdale,
Do you know if an image from one hdvr2 can be restored onto another using the clear and delete option after the restore?
thanks in advance,
-Ed

yes