How-To Upgrade your TiVo

[edrock200]

Originally posted by hinsdale
yes

Once again, Thank you!

Used your instructions a second time for the the HDVR2 (used them on the Hughes series 1 combo box the first time) without a problem!

[Jim Wiese]

All,
I just wanted to post my thanks to all who support this forum, as well as my upgrade notes. First off, kudos to all of you in this forum. Secondly, here are my notes about upgrading the AT&T Series2 Tivo TCD230040 (40 Gb model).

1) I purchased the Tivo using the AT&T link for $199 ($20 Shipping, $20 handling) - $50 rebate = $244 + tax. I origionally purchased this because I thought that it would be great to use the serial port to change channels, then realized that my ATT box didn't have a serial port (General Instuments).

2) I purchased the 80Gb Western Digital WD800BB to expand the Tivo, and it is very quiet and the heat is quite low ~ 19C. I did the most research on this and for the price vs. size, I thought it was great (~$107 )here (http://www.googlegear.com) ). The closest competitor was the barracuda, but it was reported to be realitivley loud.

3) After thinking about it for a while, I purchased the hard drive bracket from 9thTee (http://www.9thtee.com), which was a life & time saver. (Kudos to Mark for some great response time and tech support)

4) I had quite a quandry over how to connect the Tivo to the out side world. I researched the options for this quite a bit because the phone jack was no where near my Tivo. After realizing that the ethernet over power line option was ~$160 and the remote phone jack was ~$64, I purchased the Linksys 100M USB to ethernet adapter and the Linksys WET11 wireless bridge to my home network. This combo was ~$140 and I thought it would be best for future investment opporunities (ie sharing videos with Tivo).

5) I burned 2 CDs with Nero and some other shareware program, but couldn't get the MFS tools 2.0 to boot off of the CD, so I went the boot floppy route instead. As well, and important note, if your hard disk has a large about of *volitle* cache, use the "sync" command before rebooting, it took be 2 hours to figure this out. This will basically synchronize the cache with the disk (I thought this was only pertinent with SCSI, but I was wrong).

6) Don't try to use NTFS, even in read mode, just format partition on your disk with FAT32.

7) Use #401 as the dialing code to dial over the 'net.

8) Plan for about 6 hours to upgrade the first time, and don't forget to print out everything you need before disassembling your machine. Read all of the documentation first, espesically the one about *not* booting into Windows XP with the Tivo disk in (barely read this one in time).

9) 40 Gb + 80 Gb expansion disk gave 132 hours total.

10) Someone should build a windows GUI to take care of the upgrade process (not to upset any Linux bigots), just to make the process easier.

Lastly, I hope this helps someone upgrade their next Tivo...

-Jim

[lifetap]

I'm sorry if this was addressed already.. I read thru several pages and haven't found anything about it.

Is there a reason the Tivo drives are set on different controllers? Wouldn't it be easier to set up the system drive on primary master with the cdrom drive as primary slave? That would leave open the secondary primary and secondary for Tivo drives.

I guess I'm asking if there is a reason the above wouldn't work. I have a system with win98 I plan on using, currently the setup is everything on primary controller. Was leaving secondary for expansion if needed but could connect two 120gb there to upgrade..

Hope that made some sort of sense...

[Knouse]

Originally posted by lifetap
Wouldn't it be easier to set up the system drive on primary master with the cdrom drive as primary slave?When I did my upgrade, my Dell had hard drives with W98 on primary master and W2K on primary slave, a CD-ROM as secondary master and a ZIP on secondary slave. I wondered why the instructions called for the CD-ROM as secondary slave. What does Hinsdale have as his secondary master? In any case I printed out the instructions, highlighted the parts that pertained to my setup and changed the drive references to put the CD-ROM as secondary master.

[Leeb]

Originally posted by lifetap
Is there a reason the Tivo drives are set on different controllers? Wouldn't it be easier to set up the system drive on primary master with the cdrom drive as primary slave?

It is my understanding that as long as the devices are jumpered correctly that it doesn't matter where they are set in the IDE chain... master, slave/ primary, secondary, etc.

With the devices configured exactly as hinsdale recommends then your command lines are exactly as written in his instructions... no need to convert them for your device configuration and risk errors.

[lifetap]

OK, Thanks guys. Thats what I thought.. Just wanted to make sure. Wife giving me my gift tonight, will be upgrading it about 5 minutes after. TCD230040, replacing with a 120gb...

[Robert S]

Be aware that most TiVo boot disks byteswap primary slave and both drives on the secondary bus, but not primary master. You therefore can't attach a TiVo drive to primary master. This applies to most TiVo hacks, but not upgrades.

If you're using MFS Tools 2.0 to upgrade, no disks will be byteswapped, so it doesn't matter how you connect your drives.

[lifetap]

Well,

The upgrade went flawlessly. Powered up the system.. looked well so opened the case... Two things I noticed was that the HD mounting bracket was loose and that the power supply board was cracked around one of the standoffs. This is interesting because the system arrived in a second box that had no damage and the nice orange tivo box looked great as well. Wondering if quality control is slipping there.

Went with a backup and restore/expand, took about 5 minutes total time. The mfsrestore claimed I now have 122 hours. Currently the unit is dialed in downloading the first program guide so I can't verify on the unit.. Will give it a try tomorrow for the Farscape marithon on Sci-Fi..

[Joe Schmuck]

While converting my TiVo Series 2 80 hour DVR I ran into a few problems. I did overcome these but would like to know the proper solution.

When booting the MSF 2.0 tools (msftools2noj.iso), I was unable to use the "Shift + Page Up" to view the bootup information. The instructions tell you this is possible and I should verify the drive capacities were proper. To overcome this problem I just skipped it and hoped it was working. My TiVo drive was a WD Performer so I figured it wasn't locked. I was right because I was able to recover the data and create my TiVo backup.

My next problem was I was installing a new Samsung 120Gig hard drive. This item is so quiet that I didn't think I plugged it in. I need another one of these. I was going to reuse my original TiVo drive as a secondary drive. Here's the rationale and if I'm wrong, I hope someone points it out.

1. The docs say that I cannot restore my original backup to my drive and use the -s 127 parameter. It won't fit. Well this presumably causes a problem when I add the 120 gig HD with the rebuilding process should the GSOD occur.
2. I restored my image to the 120 Gig HD with the -s -127 parameter.
3. I attempted to use the TiVo drive as my secondary HD but kept getting errors from mfsadd saying the drive was too small. I don't know what happened here.
4. After fooling around with it for too long, I replaced the "B" drive with a new 60 Gig HD I had laying around. All worked fine.
5. Installed the drives and all works.

So, my problems were the original TiVo drive was unusable. Could it have been locked? Maybe it was sun spots? I understood the docs to say that the drives would be erased by mfstools when performing the operations.

As for the mounting of the "B" drive, I had to manufacture a mount. It was easy but it took me about 3 hours with a nibble tool and 1 minute with a drill. I used a Gateway 3.5" drive bay mount. This is a removable carrage and I cut it to form. If you have something like this and a nibble tool or appropriate tool for cutting metal, I recommend this. Otherwise I would opt for the installation kit from 9th tee. The pictures there gave me the idea for the mounting. It was very easy but I did have one side-effect, my finger is sore from rubbing up against the nibble tool.

Now if someone could give me feedback as to what I did wrong for the "SHIFT + Page UP" and what I need to do to install my 80 Gig TiVo original, I would love it.

Also, the Belkin USB - Ethernet adapter works great. No problems what so ever.

Joe

[josquin941]

I've read through the latter part of this thread, and don't think I've seen this particular Q asked.

I'm upgrading a Model 230 from a single 40 gb A drive to a single 120 gb A. Using MFSTools 2 (which is fantastic!) and the new how-to, I ran the backup, ran the restore, and ran the add. When I insert the 120 gb drive, the TiVo will boot, but after it boots, it sits at a black screen. If I hit the TiVo buttion, I'll get the TiVo Central menu, but there will be no green background and the TiVo won't respond to keypresses. (However, if I let it sit long enough, it will go back to live TV, and I can repeat the whole process over again.)

With the original drive inserted, everything works fine... including a nice animation that plays after the TiVo has booted. I assume that the big difference between the two drives is that the animations (and maybe the screen backgrounds?) aren't being copied, or maybe they're copied but corrupted?

In reading this thread, I've seen a few references to a mfsrestore -zpi command, *not* mfsrestore -bzpi. Perhaps I'm byteswapping when I shouldn't be, and that's causing some corruption? I'm not really sure; however, according to my reading of the how-to, I should be using -bzpi:

mfsrestore -s127 -bzpi ... (Any Series 2 units)

Next, I think I'll try restoring without the -b, and/or doing a piped backup/restore with -Tao (to get the video files too). Since there's nothing on the drives, this should be fairly quick, I would imagine.

Anyone have any thoughts? My dog is getting a little confused watching me traipse up and down the stairs, gingerly carrying some box full of electronics, singing "If I Only Had A Brain".

Thx in advance!

[josquin941]

Never mind... a little -Ta, a little pipe, and all was well in the world. The TiVo is happily humming away.

Is it a bug that TiVo (basically) hangs when backed up and restored using files and no -Ta option? I tried restoring in both byte swapped and non-byte swapped modes, but neither worked.

[JMaceW]

Thanks a million for making this upgrade so easy. :D

I purchased a Western Digital 120 GB drive at CC for $150 (after rebate). I upgraded my Phillips TiVo 30 hour unit. It now shows that it has 180 hours and 36 min (Basic Quality). This is freakin great. Now I can keep my 24 shows and Simpsons forever. (well maybe at least until the DVD's come out)


Thank you,

Jason (Happy TiVo owner) :up: :up: to eveyone that helped put this stuff together

[Big-bill3]

I'm planning to do an upgrade of a Thomson Tivo (in UK)
and have been reading the How to document.
At the end there is a Section Headed "I have Windows NT/2000/XP:"

Sorry I don't understand the significance of this section.

These special instructions for XP et al - which section in the "how to " document do they refer to?

I'm trying to get to a situation where I understand the steps I have to take. The family will cane me if I get it wrong, especially as TIVOs are no longer available in UK.

Is there anyone in UK who has done this successfully (or not) who I may talk to?

(john.horsley@iee.org)

[Leeb]

In a nutshell it is telling you not to boot into Windows XP while Tivo drives (new or old) are connected to your computer. You want to always boot from the MFSTools CD-Rom when you've got the Tivo drives connected.

[mdh]

Hinsdale

Thanks for the guide. I used it to upgrade my AT&Tivo. I had previously gone from 40 to 80 hours using a replacement A drive from you (after my original A had failed). My goal was to make a backup and do a preserve recordings upgrade to a 120G drive (and keep the 80 as a spare)

The backup went fine, but when I tried to use the Upgrade #3 copy it failed with an error message that the backup target was not large enough for the entire backup by itself. This is a confusing message when going to a larger destination drive! By doing the copy without the -x and then mfsadd I found the real problem is there is no partition table space to add the extra 40G (since the drive had been expanded once already there were 15 partitions in use).
Doing the full copy forces the MFs tools to keep the original partitions the same sizes, so it can't do the expanation that it does in a restore that does not have recordings.

Since the mfsrestore error message is a bit confusing you may want to add a couple of lines to your How-to to Say that doing the Upgrade #3 from an already upgraded drive may not work. (mfsinfo does not help since it says the drive can be upgraded three more times and does not point out that the other three mfs pairs have to be on another drive.)

Thanks
Mark

[dark strider]

Originally posted by Big-bill3
I'm planning to do an upgrade of a Thomson Tivo (in UK)
and have been reading the How to document.
At the end there is a Section Headed "I have Windows NT/2000/XP:"

Sorry I don't understand the significance of this section.

These special instructions for XP et al - which section in the "how to " document do they refer to?


They refer to the note warning you not to boot into these OSs with your tivo drives attached and powered up, as the signature bytes on the tivo drive might get screwed up, and then you're back to a re-formatting of the drive and restoring from the backup you *surely* have..

go for it. The family will get over it...<smile>

[mcarlton]

Hinsdale,
Thanks for the excellent How-to. Third successful upgrade done this weekend.
Mike

[Joe Schmuck]

Well my upgrade lasted about 5 days before the Western Digital drive died. This is a drive I just purchased 2 months before and had never been used. The model is: WD600AB-00BVA0. It's only a 60 Gig model but with it paired up with the new Samsung 120 it worked fine, well until yesterday.

"CLICK CLICK CLICK" that's the noise the drive was making. It was awful!

Maybe it's just the drive just had to be the 2% that fails, I don't know, but I do know the drive was much louder than the Samsung drive.

Solution: I did what I didn't want to do, I placed my original TiVo 80 gig drive into the until as the "B" drive. I'm in a hurry since I'm leaving the country for 2 months and I need the TiVo to record a few programs I just must have.

Otherwise, my TiVo works great again.

[TiVoDan]

I am planning to upgrade to my Sony SVR 2000 to use a single 120 GB HD, and keep my original drive as a Backup. I don't care about saving previously recorded programs. What seems like the most obvious way to do it isn't in Hinsdales HOWTO:


1. Create MFS Tools boot cd.
2. Remove Tivo drive and insert in PC ( /dev/hda)
3. Insert new 120 GB drive in PC ( /dev/hdc)
4. copy files using "mfsbackup -so - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc"
5. Remove original Tivo drive from PC and put away as backup
6. Remove new 120 GBdrive from PC and put place in Tivo.


I'm wondering why this is not the recomended procedure in the Howto, and if there is any reason to do anything differently?

[Robert S]

I think he wants you to make and test a backup file. I would say that's a good idea, but it's not essential to the upgrade.

Note that the filename (in this case - (output to stdout)) is part of -o, so -os will produce an error. -o and -i have to go at the end of their groups, so -so <filename> will work.

[Joe Schmuck]

I was just wondering what I would have to do to create my own Bootable MFS Tools CDROM however with my TiVo.bak file included.

I was looking at the contents of the MFSTools CDROM and it seams to have files that look like I could create this new CDROM I'm desiring.

TIA,

Joe

[LENBO]

Another successful upgrade! This one was performed on a AT&T TCD 130040 unit. I added a 120 gb WDC drive. Followed the instructions to a tee. I used the MFS 2.0 boot CD burned as an ISO image.

My biggest problem was becoming reacquainted with my PC's IDE configurations. (OS is WinME. I have two IDE hard drives with two partitions each, one IDE CD-ROM, one SCSI CD-RW...lotsa cables.) I also had to replace my TiVo's IDE cable (the existing cable only had one connection) and power connector (I purchased a new 'y' adapter from Radio Shack for $4.59). Total time was around three hours - most of which was taken up by my reading and re-reading. Instructions are detailed and thorough.

MFS Tools reported a gain of 136 hours for a new combined total of 175 hours. Awesome. Puzzling though...TiVo reports the total capacity as 'variable - 196 hours'. Whatever. Thank you!

[gstrysky]

Dear Hinsdale,

I used your procedure to upgrade my Brand New Hughes HDVR2 to an 80 GB Seagate Barracuda drive, Model ST380021QA, which is billed as an almost silent drive. The Maxtor drive was torturing me with its loud high pitched whine, so reducing noise was my priority. I thought, for a few minutes, that something was wrong- upgrades aren't supposed to go so smoothly. I was kind of stunned. After starting up the HDVR2 with the new drive, I just started surfing Direct tv making sure every feature worked. Your directions were perfect. The next project is to quiet down the cooling fan!
Thank you,

gstrysky

[HeatherA]

Hinsdale,

Thank you for your step by step instructions. My DH upgraded my 14 hour TiVo to 109 hours this morning in less than 2 hours. Your instructions saved us about $300! I was going to upgrade to an 80 hour box, but we decided to try this route first.

Now DH and the kids have my old 30 hour unit and I'm pleased as punch over my expanded capacity!

Thanks again!

[PhredC]

My upgrade to a single 120 gig drive seems to have worked well except for one remaining issue. It has been creating the index for about 12 hours now. I am getting concerned since this is 50% longer than the 4 to 8 hours they estimate. It doesn't seem that the program guide should take longer to index with the new drive since that index shouldn't care about the drive size. The drive is also a 7200 rpm so it seems it should index faster.

Any thoughts? When I returned from the holidays the machine was rebooting every few minutes. That is what led me to trade out the drive. Then the reboot seemed to be related to dialing in to the mother ship. Rebooted almost every time I tried to initiate a call using 3 different dial-in numbers in case it was some strange server issue.

[Big-bill3]

My Thomson TIVO has a pair of 30Gb Quantums.
I'm looking at the Samsumg 120Gb unit.
Can I take the image from the pair of Quantums on to the 120Gb unit or do I need to keep two drives? In which case do I just replace one 30Gb unit with the 120. If so does it matter which one I upgrade, A or B?

Also with a Compaq Deskpro 4000 (PII-300) will I hit problems with the BIOS not recognising the 120GB drive?

[Robert S]

Assuming you don't want to keep your recordings, you'd just backup your current drives and restore that backup to the 120. If your TiVo was full when it took the ugprade to 2.5.5, the drives won't 'divorce', but you should find your backup works on the big drive.

If you want to keep your recordings, do an MFS Tools pipe to copy the recordings:

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

You could also use dd to copy the B drive (which will be a 15Gb drive, BTW) and then expand with mfsadd. But the pipe is probably better.

The Compaq should be OK. You might find that your C: drive isn't hda1. Look at the partition table for primary master to be printed at boot, which will tell you which partitions are valid. My guess is it'll be hda2.

[Big-bill3]

Thanks,

BTW from what I can see both drives are identical at 30Gb

[Big-bill3]

Sorry for the additional post.

One of the things I'm not clear about is, when I do an mfsbackup of drive a and drive b, where does this backup get saved and how much disk space do I need?

Am I correct in assuming that this line:
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -xpi - /dev/hdc
is two commands - one for backup and the other to restore? Sorry to be thick but I know little of linux.

Could you expand on the bit about partitions. I'm not sure I fully understand.

[MikeSTL]

hi, im wondering if there is a tivo.bak file out there. so you dont half to make a backup img.


Thanks,
Mike

[Robert S]

bill: If you want to make a backup file you have to follow Hinsdale's instructions. A UK backup should be about 360Mb.
The point about partitions was that Hinsdale assumes that your C: drive is the first partition on your hard drive. Compaq tend to do some things a little differently and your C: drive is probably the second partition. So you type hda2 where Hinsdale has hda1.

The command I gave you is a 'pipe' (the | character in the middle is called pipe and directs the output of the command on the left to the input of the command on the right). This allows you to copy the recordings directly from the old drives to the new one.

Mike: Yes, you can find TiVo backups on the net.

[Dadorama]

I think I have this figured out, but thought I would run it by the smart ones on the board.

I plan tonight to transfer all of my recordings, etc., from my Series 2 60 hour / 60 GB hard drive to a new Western Digital 120 GB hard drive. I have been extensively through new Hinsdale (the last updated version of December 16, 2002) and think I have most of it figured out. I have three questions, though.

1) Do the new Hinsdale instructions effectively cover the swap file issue? I think I know the answer is yes, but "no dumb questions"....

2) I have the whole process pretty much figured out. I am confident that I can get to the stage that I have all my stuff transfered over to the 120 GB drive. I have looked in my computer at home and know that the old 60 GB Tivo drive will be located on Secondary Slave (drive d in linux-speak) and my new 120 GB will be on Primary Slave (drive b in linux-speak). What I then want to do is go ahead and expand both drives so that the new 120 GB drive will be my TIVO A drive (with an expanded swap file, I presume) and the old 60 GB will be the Tivo B drive, giving me a total of 180 GB of storage space over the two drives.

Is the correct command going to be:

mfsadd -x /dev/hdb /dev/hdd


Apparently the mfsadd with the -x treats the first listed drive as the main drive (the new A drive in the Tivo) and the second listed drive as the B drive in the Tivo.

Asked another way, will this command make my 120 GB the Tivo A drive with the upgraded swap space and the old 60 GB the Tivo B drive?

3) Since I will have backed up the image to a tivo.bak file on my computer hard drive and tested it in the Tivo, is there any reason NOT to use the 60 GB drive right away? If I understand correctly, if the 120 GB drive fails, I can restore the tivo.bak file to the old 60 GB drive, drop it in the Tivo and I will be good to go (without my recordings, of course). Any reason to wait before I put the 60 GB to work?

Hope none of these are TOO dumb to ask. Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Dadorama

[Robert S]

Sounds OK to me.

[bigblock66vette]

Wow, I opened the box, read the 1 page paper , and opened up my Philips TIVO DSR6000 and bada-Bing, I now have 149 hrs. How cool is that? Anyway, Just another satisfied customer! Thanks

Will Robbins :up: :up: :up:

[mayweb]

Hinsdale,

My Samsung 120 MB drive is on its way and I am planning my upgrade to my HDVR2. I have a question with regards to the Host PC that I will be using for copying the drives. The Primary drive is one physical drive, but I have it divided into

primary
extended with
logical 1
logical 2

The LINUX boot CD shows them as hda: hda1 hda2 <hda5 hda6>

The question is: When following your instuctions, do I use "hda" or "hda1" where called for in the copy steps. The OS is Windows ME and the format is FAT32. I made the assumption that Hda1 was the OS space primary partition --- not sure if thats correct as I am still learning LINUX syntax.

[N27EZ]

I purchased a 120 gig drive for my new Hughes Direct Tive. Picked it up in Hinsdale. Installed it and it worked perfectly on a new unit right out of the box. Best of there is NO NOISE from the Maxtor drive. Dispite warnings that have been posted.

[Robert S]

'hda' is a mis-print in an out-of-date (but very popular) version of Hinsdale. I recommend you work from a current copy of New Hinsdale.

Assuming it's formatted as FAT, hda1 will be your C: drive. hda2 is an extended partition and won't be mountable. hda5 and hda6 should mount if you're short of space on the C: drive.

[Dadorama]

Two nights ago (per my earlier post, see about six posts above) I swapped my 60 GB hard drive over to a new 120 GB hard drive, saving recordings. I only have a PII 300 mz computer at home, but the copying process only took about an hour and 45 minutes. Very pleased there, I thought it would be more along the lines of 10 hours from what the Hinsdale docs warn about.

Unfortunately, I did not have a Y connector for my power supply (actually I did pick one up, but the helpful salesman at my local computer store gave me one with a wrong connector on it...) so I did not expand back over to the 60 GB drive again.

Picked up the RIGHT Y connector yesterday and expanded onto the 60 GB drive, now have right at 220 hours at basic with the 120+60 setup. Temp looks stable at about 41C which is about where it was before any upgrades.

I cannot say enough about how easy it was to use the MFS tools. The hardest part was all the jumper resetting and multiple connect/reconnect processes that I went through, but I followed New Hinsdale to the letter, including testing my backup image and all that, which certainly added to the re-jumpering etc. process.

What I found particularly useful for me was that before I started doing anything, I went through New Hinsdale and cut and pasted out into Word the parts that pertained to my upgrade, which shortened the 20 page document down to about six pages total, which included all explanations relevant to my particular upgrade. I then went through the Word document and got all my hard disk settings adjusted to the way I was going to hook up the hard drives to my computer. This made it that much simpler once I actually started hooking up and jumpering and the like.

I have not seen this particular idea mentioned in the threads. It was very helpful to me to do it this way and I would suggest it to anyone who is upgrading their drives.

Many thanks to all who participated in creating these tools and instructions and to all the participants on this thread to allow me to do this great upgrade.

[hinsdale]

Originally posted by Robert S
'hda' is a mis-print in an out-of-date (but very popular) version of Hinsdale. I recommend you work from a current copy of New Hinsdale.

Assuming it's formatted as FAT, hda1 will be your C: drive. hda2 is an extended partition and won't be mountable. hda5 and hda6 should mount if you're short of space on the C: drive.

Not sure what mis-print you are refering to robert? I believe its always read hda1 in all of my How-Tos.

[PhredC]

Your instructions on this forum definitely say hda1. The ones for the CD download say hda. I hda the same problem until I realized it.

[brahamt]

I have used these tools before, and just today I upgraded my new Tivo to 70hrs (I know not that impressive).

Just wanted to thank all of the people who made this possible. The tools work great.

Eventually I'll upgrade my HDVR2, but the Sony's work great now.

[sdsu89]

The Hinsdale how to and MFS Tools were great and easy to follow and use, Thanks!

I have a hdr112 that I've had for a couple of years and finally upgraded by adding a 30GB hd. Everything went flawlessly until I put in the command to unmount the drive. Once I put the command in a error occurred (wish I had written it down) but it was content to continually scroll up the screen until I forced the computer to reboot. I tested the image on the Tivo; no problem, put it back on the computer and put in the commands to marry the 2 drives and finished; no problem.
Question is: Is there a problem in that the drives were not unmounted? Everything works great, but it is bugging me not knowing if something will come back to bite me.
Thanks

[RonV]

For the last 30 days my Sony SAT-T60 HD was whining like a bearing was going bad. I found that Compusa had Maxtor's 200GIG hd on sale for 199 after rebates. This was actually cheaper than a 160 wich was going for 249. I also understand there would be storage unusable above 137 GB due to OS/TiVo constraints.

But one thing the drive came with a 133/ATA adpater that I could installed in my PC to take advantage of a 80 GIG upgrade I did to that a few weeks ago since the mother board only supports 33 MHz transfers. About a 20 dollar trade off I guess.

Doing the upgrade was the easiest thing in the world using the MFS software and Hinsdale instructions. I was worred about the swap flag setting on the restore commands but I used them as documented and it copied everything just fine from the 40 GB to the 200 GB drive. I reviewed the size of the drive under the boot CD just to confirm that only 137 GB was identified as documented and it was. It took about 2 hours to transfer eveything to the new drive.

I installed the new drive in the TiVo and after booting and turing on live DirecTV the drive chugged like it was cleaning up somthing for about 30 minutes and then became very quiet. Verified that every menu worked and my thumbs and season passes were still there...they were! Powered off screwed everything back togther and powered back on and we are now at 137 Hrs of TiVo bliss.

This new drive is so quite that it seems like something is missing in our family room I guess we got used to the old HD noise. You should have heard how loud it was when I was copying the drive outside of the TiVo unit on my work bench. I'll store this 40 meg away just incase something goes wrong with the new drive.

Thanks again to everyone that made this upgrade so easy!

RonV

[Ezzie00]

Mad props to Hinsdale! Hinsdale is awesome. All bow low to Hinsdale!

Got my itty bitty 40 hour TiVo from TiVo.com, played for a couple of days just to verify it worked well. Enjoyed the experience greatly. Had a Western Digital 120Gig special Edition I got for Christmas just begging to be added to the TiVo so I got it together today. Only a couple things went different then the very thorough instructions from Hinsdale:

1. The power supply "Y" cable wasn't at Radio Shack, or Circuit City, but CompUSA had one for me.

2. TT-15 Torx was not needed (minor note)

3. The ATA 66/100 cable I had has one of the pins covered up. Supposedly so morons don't accidently put it on upside-down. However this motherboard has all 40 pins. The TiVo hard drive only had the normal 39 so I knew it wasn't being used. So I grabbed my handy-dandy dremel and a teensy bit and drilled through the cap on the ATA cable. Worked like a charm.

4. Didn't use the 9th tee solution for mounting a second hard drive in the single drive TiVo. Check out the pictures to see the half plastic fan grill, zip tie, and old 5.25" drive mount as the solution. Quite stable.

This forum rules, you guys are great, keep up the good work! 187 max hours of record time.... I am such a geek for having this much fun!

Pictures: -Sorry, first iteration seemed to fail... have to send you to the album.
http://photos.yahoo.com/ezzie00
Click on Transfer for TiVo pics!

l8r, :up: :D :up:
Ezzie

[edrock200]

Originally posted by Ezzie00
[B]Check out the pictures to see the half plastic fan grill, zip tie, and old 5.25" drive mount as the solution.[B]

Picture links don't work for me...

[TiVoAddict]

Thanks Hinsdale for the great upgrade procedure!

I had just one problem: I used a 36-inch IDE cable, which according to the cable vendor's web site was supposed to make installation easier. Well, the cable was so long I had to double over the excess. And worse yet, I got random Tivo reboots, roughly every 10 minutes.

The kernel log file showed tht I was getting drive read/write errors on both my old drive and the new drive after I installed this cable and did the upgrade procedure. The errors caused one of the programs to crash, and Tivo's recovery response was to reboot the machine.

I discovered that the official IDE spec allows cables up to 18 inches, only half as long as the cable I bought! Everything worked great once I replaced my cable with a short 18-incher. You may get away with two feet (24 inches), but stay away from the three-footers!

Cable length might be a good hint to add to the procedure documentation, along with the warning someone else posted about the filled-in key slot in an IDE cable creating problems.

David

[BrentLA]

Thank you so much for the guide.

My old series one 60 hour unit began skipping a bit in video and flutuating in the audio. When I would back up , it would play that section OK but then skip elsewhere. This didn't seem like a hard drive problem, but I tried anyway.
I worked great! I was afraid to try it since I'm no computer guru, but I followed each and every step and now have 141 hours by removing the dual drives and replacing with a single WD 120G 7200 rpm drive. I still have an open drive bay to expand up to 282 hours (yikes).

No heat problems and the menu finally works nice and fast like it should have. For all of you that are like I was - afraid to upgrade, Do it! It's well worth the couple hours effort if you can follow step by step directions.

Thanks again
__________________
Series 1 60 hour dual drive expanded to 141 hour single drive

[gt5059b]

Woo-hoo!!

I just upgraded my Sony SVR-2000 with a new 120GB WD1200JB A drive and used the original Quantum 30GB as the B drive (I swapped the two so I could do the 127 swap). Now i have 49 hours of Best Quality and 180 hours of Basic Quality. No more medium or basic recordings for me.

The only snag I ran into was when putting the two drives back in. I forgot to attach the power to the B drive. :p On startup, the unit kept going into that startup loop. After plugging in the second drive, I got the "Green Screen Of Death". So I went through the whole mfsrestore and mfsadd process again, but no problems after that.

I wanna say this is a great site and thanks to Hinsdale, Tiger, and all the others who made this upgrade possible.


Jay T.
______________________
Sony SVR-2000 (180 hours)

[Robert S]

If you'd left the TiVo plugged in for a bit longer the GSOD would have cleared itself - it's a repair utility, like Scandisk, not a sign that the TiVo is dead.

[kruss]

Hinsdale:

Situation:
One original 40GB DSR6000 working OK
One original 40GB DSR6000 with death screen

Purchased Maxtor 80GB hard drive (7200RPM) and used working 40GB DTivo drive to create a working 80GB Tivo hard drive. Installed in death screen DTivo, and it works as promised.

Upgrade process created and saved a tivo.bak file on Win98se hard drive.

When I reinstalled working 40GB DTivo drive the drive would stick "forever" on Powering Up screen. I then restored tivo.bak to this 40GB, but I still can't get beyond Powering Up screen.

What's next? Since the working DRS6000 is 80MB and old DSR6000 is 40MB I can't see how I can recreate a tivo.bak file that would fit on 40GB.

My PC has a 45GB hard drive and a CD rom on Secondary Primary cable.
Does it make a difference if the restore is to a drive on Secondary Slave instead of Primary Slave?

Should I consider trashing both 40GB drives? Money IS an object.

Thanks in advance.

[PhredC]

I'm no Hinsdale but did you forget to jumper the drive back to Main? That will cause the TiVo to never boot.

[kruss]

PhredC:

Yes, I changed the jumper from slave to master and the DTivo still is holding at the starting screen after more than 12 hours. My issue is really can I take a 40GB image and restore it to a 40B drive (eliminating "-s 127") as noted in the Hinsdale instructions for a single drive to single drive upgrade. I used "-zpi" not "-xzpi" so expanding should not have occurred, besides the tivo.bak image came from the same drive I'm trying to bring back to life. BTW, the tivo.bak file is 23MB, so it should fit without a problem, and the restore was reported as successful so the image should be OK, but it won't boot beyond the startup screen.

[Robert S]

That's your problem - your TiVo backup file should be well over 100Mb. You therefore have enough in the backup for Linux to boot (and get you to 'almost there), but the MFS partitions are corrupt and preventing MyWorld running.

You'll have to download a good backup.

[kruss]

If my source was from a 40GB drive and it worked just fine when restored to a new 80GB drive, why can't it work when it gets restored to a 40GB drive (without expansion)? The original image on a 40GB drive can't be 100MB, can it?

[Robert S]

MFS Tools will give you an error message if the image is too big to fit (due to -s 127, or the drive being smaller than the original), -x won't do anything if there isn't room for expansion.

I believe a single drive DSR 6000 backup should be about 121Mb (this is taken from a 40021Mb hard drive, so it's quite a saving in space).

[kruss]

Just checked my hard drive and the tivo.bak file is really 230.6 MB not 23 MB so why doesn't it restore properly? Starting with my 45 GB Windows C drive on Primary Master and the original 40 GB DTivo drive (jumpered as slave) connected to Primary Slave I get HDA as a windows drive, HDB as the DTivo drive and HDC as my CD-ROM. Sizes are shown full size, so I don't need to run gunlock 1. What commands should I use from the # prompt to restore my tivo.bak image file to the DTivo drive?

[koldfyre]

Last night I added a Maxtor 120GB to my Sony Tivo SAT20. It was very easy using the Hinsdale instructions.

Only snag was not having enough free space on the PC C: drive- so I had to use Partition Magic to expand the partition. My PC hard drive has a small 1Gig c: and large D: & E: partitions so it just took some time to do this.

Thanks for all the info on these posts and to Hinsdale !!!

[boomboom69]

how big can the hard drives be. I've got an HDVR2 and am thinking of replacing the harddrive and adding another one. I found 2 120gig HDs that I was thinking of using but was wondering if I could go bigger.

[tivoupgrade]

you can use 2x160GB hard drives which will yield a total of 243 hours...

Lou

[Knouse]

Originally posted by tivoupgrade
you can use 2x160GB hard drives which will yield a total of 243 hours...How do you overcome the 137GB barrier?

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by Knouse
How do you overcome the 137GB barrier?

On Series1 units, it is done using a modification to the linux kernel; on Series2 units, we are currently not supporting drives yielding more than 137GB. IE 2x160 == 2x137

Lou

[theguru1974]

Are there any mirrors for the hinsdale how-to? I can't get the page to load.

Thanks!
Eric

[rxtn]

Thanks for all the good information and software.

My TIVO upgrade went OK: Added a 120GB Seagate ST3120023A because that is the quietest drive on the market
right now -- in fact you can barely hear it with your ear on it -- yes I'm sure it was running.

Now I have 3 questions:

1. Can TiVo Inc see that I suddenly have more capacity my
box after it dials in?
2. Can the swap space only reside on the A drive?
It looks like the swap space can only be increased by
restoring a backup.
3. What's the point of having a "warranty void if seal is
broken" sticker on the back of the box if it doesn't break
when the box is opened?
I guess I didn't void my warranty.... but are there any
stories of vendors refusing to repair an upgraded Tivo?

-Raymond

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by rxtn
Thanks for all the good information and software.

My TIVO upgrade went OK: Added a 120GB Seagate ST3120023A because that is the quietest drive on the market
right now -- in fact you can barely hear it with your ear on it -- yes I'm sure it was running.

Now I have 3 questions:

1. Can TiVo Inc see that I suddenly have more capacity my
box after it dials in?
2. Can the swap space only reside on the A drive?
It looks like the swap space can only be increased by
restoring a backup.
3. What's the point of having a "warranty void if seal is
broken" sticker on the back of the box if it doesn't break
when the box is opened?
I guess I didn't void my warranty.... but are there any
stories of vendors refusing to repair an upgraded Tivo?

-Raymond


ANSWERS:

1) yes
2) yes
3) you voided your warranty. vendors will still repair units. i wouldn't be so bold as to claim a warranty repair though - its not ethical. if you have a failure, chances are it will be disk-drive related; and of course, you can fix that yourself.

Lou

[weaknees]

Edited: no accurate mirrors out there.

[SEC55]

Originally posted by tivoupgrade
On Series1 units, it is done using a modification to the linux kernel; on Series2 units, we are currently not supporting drives yielding more than 137GB. IE 2x160 == 2x137
Where is that mod posted?

[Robert S]

PTVUpgrade haven't posted their mod. If they've modified GPL software (which I assume they have), then the GPL requires them to release their source to the people who purchase their drives without imposing restrictions on what those people can do with that code. But we don't know of anyone who's purchased one of these drives at the moment.

Todd Miller has posted a patched kernel (see the sticky thread in the Underground) which does allow you to see the full size of the drive, but it prevents the indexer functioning correctly.

[KingCurly]

I've just tried the hinsdale guide. Upgrade from single 40GB to dual 120GB.

When I put the discs in the Tivo, it does not boot. I get an unstable black screen with white dashes at the top (in the vertical blanking interval). I try my original disk. Exact same results.

Does anyone know what I can do to get my precious TIVO back working?

I have a UK SA Thomson TIVO.

[Robert S]

That's not a drive issue. Even with no hard drive plugged in, the TiVo will still display the 'Welcome, powering up' splash screen generated by the boot PROM.

How is the TiVo connected to the TV?

[KingCurly]

I'm connected via the TV scart on the back of the TIVO to my TV. I've tried a different scart cable, but it's the same. (I haven't change anything from before the upgrade!)

I've tried the RF out, but get snow!

I've press any button on the tivo remote and I don't get a light flash on the tivo like I would normally expect!

I don't get any "Welcome screen" either!

Any help please!!!

[ptlinva]

Now that I've finished celebrating, I wanted to THANK Tiger...THANK YOU SO VERY KINDLY! for his Mfs Tools product.

With Tiger's software, I was able successfully add an 80 gig drive to my TIVO giving me 128 hours total capacity!

Thanks again Tiger...you did a wonderful job!

[Gondola]

Another set of thanks from another successful upgrade. I didn't follow the directions completely at first and got very frustrated. But, I realized the restore from your backup WAS necessary, and now I'm a happy camper with a 60gb drive added on to my HDR212 20gb system = 80gb total.

[irish8990]

Thanks to Hinsdale & Tiger and all others on this thread.

Just added Maxtor 120GB as B drive to my Sony T-60 original 40 GB drive. No major hangups. Had to play with master/slave settings to get all drives acknowledged. That 3rd screw is indeed pesky, but finally got it off.

Appreciate the great tools and manuals. Off to enjoy 140+ hours. Thanks to all!!!!!!!

[CyberTiVo]

I just added a second drive to my 30 hour TiVo. When I turn it on it continually reboots at the "grey Almost there" screen. I followed the directions and everything seemed to work. I used "mfsadd -x /dev/hdc /dev/hdb". Any ideas?

[Knouse]

CyberTiVo:

I had the same problem on my first upgrade. Be sure to check both drives are strapped properly as master (A) & Slave (B), the IDE cables are connected and the power cables are connected.

[HomieG]

Thanks to tivocommunity.com and Hinsdale, I have successfully upgraded my HDVR2 to 105 hours. I used MFSTools 2.0 and the Samsung 120GB drive. A couple of notes:
1. It appears that the instruction documents on the MFSTools2.0 CD image has different command line instructions than those on the current Hinsdale web site. Most notably was when mounting the fat32 drive, needing to use hda1, not hda. In any event, this has been discussed previously on this thread. When I noted that my backup had failed, and confirmed that it did not exist on the fat32 partition, I went to the Hinsdale how-to's and noted the difference. Then the backup went OK.
2. Copying the original drive to the new drive, including about 15 recorded programs took about 35 minutes total.
3. Checking the specs on the original Maxtor drive to the new Samsung drive, I noted that the average and track-to-track seek times of the Samsung were quite a bit better than the original Maxtor.
4. I did have a slight problem when first bringing the HDVR2 back up after the upgrade. It would lock on 70% download from the satellite. I did a restart of the HDVR2 and all came back up fine after that.
Thanks again to this site, and Hinsdale and Weakness for all the valuable tips.

[MikeHerbst]

Howdy all, I've ordered a pair of 120G drives for my Series2 60Hr unit, and am readying to do the upgrade.

We have a bunch of stuff my better half won't like to lose, so I'll be doing Upgrade Option 3 (single drive to two new drives, preserving recordings).

On the copy/expand command for two drives, the syntax given in the new Hinsdale is:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi -dev/hda /dev/hdb



However, I see in Step 8 that the mfsrestore command syntax adds the -b option:

mfsrestore -s 127 -bzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb (Any Series 2 units - Boot CD or Floppy users command)

And the following note just below it:
Note: Series 2 units restoring a previously created backup image should also include the -b option in either command line used below (-xzbpi instead of -xzpi). It has been reported you may need to remove the “-s 127” if restoring a Series 2 80hr image (may not function with incr. swap)

So my question is, should I use the -xzbpi syntax when doing the backup/restore pipe command or leave off the "b"?

Thanks much!

EDIT: "Cookbook" steps aside, my ultimate question is "What's the significance of the 'b' command?"

[Robert S]

-b and -B tell MFS Tools what byte ordering to use. -B for Series 1's (default) and -b for Series 2's. Normally MFS Tools can figure it out for itself, but I think restoring an MFS Tools 1.1 backup to a Series 2 with MFS Tools 2.0 requires -b to get it right.

[Dawnathan]

Another successful upgrade! I went from a 40GB drive to a 120GB drive in an HDVR2. It took about 9 hours because I transferred all my recordings, but it went as smooth as silk with absolutely no problems! I'm comfortable mucking around in computers, so the physical drive hookup were no problem, but I know diddly-squat about Linux (through sheer laziness on my part, I must admit!). I used someone else's tip about reading through the instructions and marking what applied to my situation - that helped a great deal! So now I have an expanded TiVo and a *really* impressed hubby - not bad for a day's work! Now if only Suggestions would stop trying to record the 700 Club and Judge Wapner's nimal Court, I would be a happy camper! Next project - installing the multi-switch for the dual tuners!

Thanks again!

Dawn

[ProfessorRob]

I wanted to personally thank the guys at Hilesdale for providing me with such comprehensive instructions and tools.

I have no Linux experience, but was able to follow the instructions without a hitch.

I removed the 40GB hard drive that came with the unit and replaced it with two 80GB Western Digital Hard drives .... upgrading my recording time from the stock 35hrs to 174hrs.

I did run into one problem.

Unfortunately, I bought my hard drives before reading the forum. I bought two Western Digital 80GB 7200 RPM drives. These drives generate a lot of heat. Combine the added heat from the hard drives with the fact that I store my TIVO store in a closed audio cabinet with a glass door. There is no surprise that my Tivo overheated and shutdown.

I fixed this problem (I hope) by mounting two hard drive cooling fans (purchases from CompUsa for $9.99) under the drive bay of each hard drive & (this may be over kill) I purchased a $5 personal fan from Walmart and paced in the back of my audio cabinet to pull the heat off my audio components.

Since adding these two fans, I have gotten consistent Tivo internal temperatures of 44 degrees.


Rob

[ProfessorRob]

I wanted to personally thank the guys at Hilesdale for providing me with such comprehensive instructions and tools.

I have no Linux experience, but was able to follow the instructions without a hitch.

I removed the 40GB hard drive that came with the unit and replaced it with two 80GB Western Digital Hard drives .... upgrading my recording time from the stock 35hrs to 174hrs.

I did run into one problem.

Unfortunately, I bought my hard drives before reading the forum. I bought two Western Digital 80GB 7200 RPM drives. These drives generate a lot of heat. Combine the added heat from the hard drives with the fact that I store my TIVO store in a closed audio cabinet with a glass door. There is no surprise that my Tivo overheated and shutdown.

I fixed this problem (I hope) by mounting two hard drive cooling fans (purchases from CompUsa for $9.99) under the drive bay of each hard drive & (this may be over kill) I purchased a $5 personal fan from Walmart and paced in the back of my audio cabinet to pull the heat off my audio components.

Since adding these two fans, I have gotten consistent Tivo internal temperatures of 44 degrees.


Rob

[acropolis]

Let me be the next one to thank you for the guide.

Went from:

a) (Stock) Quantum QML-20000LC-A (30 GB)
b) Maxtor 96147H6 (61.4 GB)

to:

a) Western Digital WD1200BB-OOCAA1 (120 GB)

next step is to run the Maxtor disk integrity program on the Quantum and Maxtor to see which one is failing and add the other as the new b) drive. I can't wait to change my sig as soon as everything is up and running!

[coffeo]

Another thank you for the upgrade guide. Unfortunately, I'm running into a problem after 5 days.

Last weekend, I successfully upgraded Series 1 to original 30GB and new Maxtor 80GB. Everything worked fine for the first five days. Now, two days in a row I have found the screen frozen and TIVO unable to respond to commands. In both instances, a reboot brought everthing back to normal.

I'm still looking for clues that might help troubleshooting. I have not actually witnessed TIVO freezing, so everything is a guess. Last night's freeze appeared to occur during a recording since the red light was on and the program failed to fully record (discovered after reboot).

Approximately 23 of 34 hours stored (best quality). (Could this be an a drive problem?)

I've searched forum for potential solutions and have been unable to locate one.

I did backup my original drive, but would hate to go through the whole sequence if I could help it.

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

[weaknees]

This really does sound like a hard drive problem. You should check your drives in a PC with the appropriate manufacturer's software. Just know that even drives that pass the extended tests can cause problems in TiVos, but if you do show an error code, you can be pretty sure that's the problem.

Michael

[weaknees]

Let's keep the discussion here in the other thread you started.

[coffeo]

Regarding frozen TIVO, please use the following new thread to continue the discussion. Sorry for the confusion.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=102997

[bb330i]

Added a second WD 60gb drive to my series 2 Works great.
Thanks

[jwixted]

Just wanted to add my thanks to Hinsdale, Ingineer and the rest of the forum for your words of wisdom here. I successfully replaced the puny 40Gb drive in my Hughes HDVR2 with TWO 120Gb drives, without a hitch! Hooked all the drives up, used Option 3 from Hinsdale's guide at http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html, and took the family to dinner. When we got back, all was done. Slapped the new drives back in the box, plugged it in, and presto! 217 hours of recording time!

Some questions come to mind now:
1. Any suggestions on cooling? These new drives are 7200rpm, so they run hotter than the 5400's (was too impatient to wait for them to come in). Box has been reporting 48C for a few days now, and I know cooler is always better.
2. Is there a way to determine how much recording time is in use?
3. Is there a way to use Ingineer's BASH hack http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=90268&highlight=800 AND retain the stuff I've already recorded? Since my box has been upgraded to 3.1.0-01-2-151, I'll have to restore to the 3.1.U5-01-2-151 software...

Thanks again for everyone's help!

[ProfessorRob]

I replaced my factory 40 GB hard drive with two 80 GB hard drives. I followed Hilesdale instructions and backed up my factory 40 gb hard drive to an old 2 GB drive that I had around the house. Since I have the image of my original drive saved on the 2 GB drive can I now reformat and re-use the original 40 GB Tivo drive in one of my computers or should I hold onto it and the backup drive in case something happens?

Rob

[Robert S]

Yes, your backup can be usied to create an A drive image on any suitably large hard drive. I'd give your new drives a month or two to 'soak', but after that, there's no real benefit to keeping the original A drive.

[EE2909]

Just updated my Series 2 60 hr with a 120 GB Samsung. I made the Samsung my new "A" drive and the old drive 60 hr as the "B" drive with the likelihood of upgrading to another 120 GB in the future. With Hinsdale-How-To directions, I completed the upgrade in a little over an hour. Expanded TiVo works great.

Thanks again!

[chh1]

Another successful upgrade.

I successfully updated my hdvr2 with 120 GB Samsung. Now I'm getting another hdvr2 and I want to do upgrade to the new one also, the question is Could I use the OLD BACKUP to upgrade the new hdvr2?

Thanks!

-chh1

[OCDane]

Anyone successfully added a second 120GB HD to their Tivo Series2 ?

[njtaz]

I have just finished upgrading my Series 2 with a 120 GB Maxtor as a 'B' Drive. The upgrade went extremely well. The hardest things were mounting the second drive. I had bought the mounting equipment from 9th tee. Then also putting the cover back on my Series 2 TiVo. There is Styrofoam on the cover which I had to remove....Is this OK? what was it there for anyway?

[Joe Schmuck]

Originally posted by njtaz
There is Styrofoam on the cover which I had to remove....Is this OK? what was it there for anyway?

I think it was for ventilation to ensure the flow of air across the chips. It could have been for additional support of the top but I thought the top was quite sturdy.

Or, here is a good thought. It tells if you have installed a second hard drive into the unit. I pulled mine off very carefully and can replace it if required.

Good Job on the conversion.

Joe

[njtaz]

Yeah, I pulled it off carefully also. If needed I can put it back. I was surprised I was able to get off in one piece.

[MikeHerbst]

Well, another successful upgrade, thanks everyone!

My Series 2 60Hr is now sporting a pair of Samsung 120s.

The install went flawlessly, and even though we copied all of the recordings over to the new drives, the whole process still only took about 2.5hrs!

Thanks Hinsdale!

EDIT:

Since I had a couple of questions going into this upgrade, I thought I'd add a few observations that might be useful to someone else. I posted these in someone else's thread but thought they were appropriate here.

Observations are for upgrading a Series 2 60Hr with twin Samsung 120G 5400 RPM Drives ($119 shipped each from esystor.com)

1) Note on the Samsung jumper diagram that there are several configurations listed for "Master" and "Slave". There's one for "Capacity < 32", one for "Capacity >= 32" and one for "Capacity >=32 with Limit".

You want to use the jumper configs for "Capacity >=32". Note that these require BOTH jumpers in a specific orientation.

2) As others have said, note that the jumper diagram on the top label is upside down if you're looking at the HD from the top. Note the position of the power plug and IDE connector in the diagram before making jumper changes.

3) Both of my Samsung drives came pre-configured for Master (>=32) and had "Quiet" mode enabled in the HD bios.

4) In my TiVo unit I placed the "A" (Master) drive on the right and the "B" drive on the left (looking from the back of the unit). The IDE cable I ended up using was able to (barely) reach in the "correct" orientation (i.e. Black "end" on the master, grey-middle to the slave, and blue "end" to the board), but several other IDE cables in my stash would not. I later found a couple of more that would have fit even more easily, but I'd already buttoned the unit back up.

The moral of the story: some people have had luck with reversing the IDE cable, but if you want to eliminate possible problems, check to see if you have any cables that will reach the "right way" first. If you're like me, you've probably got a dozen cables lying around from various computer incarnations.

5) I was a little unsure about whether or not to use the -b switch on the mfsrestore command, since the syntax for it varied depending on which step in the instruction you were on. I went ahead and used the -b for both the "test" restore of the backup in step 8 (as indicated), and for the backup/restore pipe command in Option 3 of step 10 (-bxzpi instead of -xzpi).

6) With a fast processor and lots of RAM (1.2GHz, 1G RAM), I was able to copy over about 20Hrs of High-Quality recordings (using option 3) in just over an hour. The instructions imply this can take a REALLY long time, but if you've got a fairly new machine this takes about as long as making and eating a sandwich for lunch.

7) The MFSTools CD was able to see the Samsung drives as UDMA/100, and the Original 60G TiVo drive as UDMA/66. My ancient 3G HD I used for the backup (since I'm a Win2k user) was not UDMA compatible, which probably explains why the step 7 backup and step 8 restore took almost as long as the "real" upgrade which included copying all of the recordings.

8) With the new drives in place I read a steady 38'Celsius in the box, which is up a bit more than I'd like, but I will monitor it for any problems.

[jbaker]

Joe, what bracket did you use to install the drives in the HDVR2?

TIA.

Originally posted by jwixted
Just wanted to add my thanks to Hinsdale, Ingineer and the rest of the forum for your words of wisdom here. I successfully replaced the puny 40Gb drive in my Hughes HDVR2 with TWO 120Gb drives, without a hitch! Hooked all the drives up, used Option 3 from Hinsdale's guide at http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html, and took the family to dinner. When we got back, all was done. Slapped the new drives back in the box, plugged it in, and presto! 217 hours of recording time!

Some questions come to mind now:
1. Any suggestions on cooling? These new drives are 7200rpm, so they run hotter than the 5400's (was too impatient to wait for them to come in). Box has been reporting 48C for a few days now, and I know cooler is always better.
2. Is there a way to determine how much recording time is in use?
3. Is there a way to use Ingineer's BASH hack http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=90268&highlight=800 AND retain the stuff I've already recorded? Since my box has been upgraded to 3.1.0-01-2-151, I'll have to restore to the 3.1.U5-01-2-151 software...

Thanks again for everyone's help!

[jwixted]

I used the HDVR2 bracket found at 9thtee: http://www.9thtee.com/tivoupgrades.htm

Good luck! Let me know if you have questions...

[cliffe]

i followed the hinsdale instructions. and had a locked tivo drive only read 10 mb. so i used the instructions for qunlock now i have a tivo drive that is still 10mb but now my 80 gb new drive seas its
an 8mb hard drive. how do i reverse this?
what did i do wrong.my new drive is a 80 gb. maxtor.

[angrytaxman]

Thank you so much Hinsdale!!! :) You made the upgrade process so easy for everyone. If you can follow directions you can upgrade your Tivo! I'm so happy with the results, and you have every possible combination outlined! It's such a time saver. Thanks again!

[int1]

Ditto on the thanks! I added a Samsung 120GB 5400 RPM drive to my Series 2 60hr, and it was a cinch. Yeah Hinsdale and Yeah Tivo!

int1

[mrtickle]

Many thanks for adding the clear warnings about the swap file! Hopefully we'll have less people who fall into the dangerous trap of adding large B drives to existing A drives in the future :)

[southaven]

I recently ordered the 120GB A Drive Upgrade kit from Hinsdale for my Hughes DirecTiVo GXCEBOT. I recieved the kit within a couple of days. I came home from work, grabbed the package off the porch, powered down my reciever, popped the top of the TiVo and a beer, and was done within 10 minutes! Went through the guided setup and bam!, done. Only hiccup was I lost my local channels, but a quick call to DirecTV and they sent them through the DBS while I was on the phone.

Highly recommend Bill Hinsdale and his services!

A very happy 109 hour DirecTiVo user,
Wayne

[njtaz]

Since I've upgraded my TiVo my recordings automatically get that yellow circle and a day later I also get the yellow circle with the exclamation point. These recordings don't seem to be getting deleted and TiVo suggestions keep on recording. So it would seem the upgrade worked. But why am i getting the yellow dots and exclamation points so soon. I shouldn't be anywhere near having my second drive filled up.
Upgraded from 80 to 226 hours - Series 2.

[DaveLessnau]

The yellow dots and exclamation points aren't based on space available. They're purely based on how long the recording has been sitting on your Tivo. I believe the default is two days and it's marked for deletion. As you noticed, it's just MARKED for deletion. Nothing gets deleted until TiVo needs the space (in your case, that'll probably be annually :) ). There's no way to change the default Save Until date.

EDIT: Oops! I forgot about the Keep At Most setting. If your SP/ARWL is set with a KAM entry other than All, recordings will actually be deleted when that number is reached. The default for a new SP/ARWL is KAM=5 (I believe).

[mstroh]

Thanks Hinsdale! I upgraded my S2 tonight, it took 1 1/2 hours and I took my time reading and rereading. It was simple! One note, my original drive from my S2 needed to be set to "master with a slave" and not solely to "master" (while perfoming the upgrade) which are two different settings.

[FMK2]

I too thank you, Hinsdale! I upgraded my HDVR2 to a Samsung 120G drive in no time.

I love seeing that "Variable, up to 105 hours" notation in the Recording Capacity! :cool:

[solarie]

just finished my upgrade -- thanks for the great guide. was no sweat!

one thing you might find helpful (and perhaps someone else has posted it) -- for the SAT-T60s and that really hard to get screw that holds the drive/fan bracket on (the one that requires you to be a contortionist to get around the power-supply...) -- a 3/32 allens wrench works wonders. you've got to be a bit careful, but much easier than plyers or using a torx "at an angle". just an fyi...

again, thanks!

[tedster]

Just completed an upgrade from a 45GB UK Thomson Tivo (1 * 30GB and 1 * 15GB) to dual 120GB Samsung Drives with the help of the Hisdale Guide.

Had small issues with the upgrade (mainly the fact that I run XP and the Linux boot CD couldnt copy my image to the NTFS formatted C: drive).

Now have the backup image and the old drives in case of problems.

Now also have 84 Hours and Best Quality and over 270 at basic quality recording space!!!

[JD9900]

Well, I took the plunge, upgraded my DSR6000 to dual 120GB maxtor 5400 drives, and I'm in heaven. Hinsdale, thanks again (I know you've heard it a million times)! Your documentation and the organization of your web site had me up and running in about 3 hours, including a 40GB backup and restore to the new drives.


Thanks again!!!

Bob

[insomniackk]

I too want to thank Hinsdale for the upgrade notes and Tiger for the great MFS Tools. I wonder how many of us were upgrading our DTivos this weekend?

Easy and painless upgrade - I found that backing up the existing drive to the new Samsung 120Gb drive was the easiest process. I didn't even need the FAT32 drive at all! It took about 3hrs to backup to the new drive. I decided to go this route because I wanted to keep my "99 cent special" recordings intact ;-)

Thanks again and good luck to those who are about to upgrade theirs.

[jahf]

Ditto. The how-to + MFS tools made backing up and expanding my Series 2 -much- simpler than doing the same on my Series 1 a year ago. Thanks to all involved!

[abd4evr]

Did any of you upgraders add a 2nd HD to a TIVO 60hr series 2 (non sat- TCD 140060)? If so, is a drive bracket and power splitter necessary? I can't quite tell from the instructions, and I don't want to crack my unit 'til I know all the stuff I need.

Thanks!

[Joe Schmuck]

Originally posted by abd4evr
Did any of you upgraders add a 2nd HD to a TIVO 60hr series 2 (non sat- TCD 140060)? If so, is a drive bracket and power splitter necessary? I can't quite tell from the instructions, and I don't want to crack my unit 'til I know all the stuff I need.

Thanks!

As I understand it, your Series 2 unit is the same as my 80 Hour unit. If your gonna add a second hard drive then you will need some sort of bracket. I made my own but if I didn't, I'd go for the TwinBreeze version. It's very straight-forward and sharp looking. You will need a power splitter.

My suggestion is... If your looking to build a video library then by all means add a second drive, but if your looking to something a bit smaller but more than your 60 hour, use a single drive like the Samsung 120Gig. It's quiet and less heat in the case. And of course, Backup your original ! Save that puppy to 3 CD's if you must.

joe

[Ye Ha]

No mention of potential damage by accidentally loosening ribbon cable between front panel & motherboard.

Now my remote doesn't work. :mad:

Didn't see warning in separate post until after it was too late.

[weaknees]

Did any of you upgraders add a 2nd HD to a TIVO 60hr series 2 (non sat- TCD 140060)? If so, is a drive bracket and power splitter necessary? I can't quite tell from the instructions, and I don't want to crack my unit 'til I know all the stuff I need.
Actually, the 140060 (60-hour TiVo) has a bracket for a second drive already. You will need a power splitter and a new IDE cable.

The TwinBreeze™ will work in the following TiVos:

Hughes HDVR2
AT&T model 230040 (TCD230040)
TiVo model 240040 (TCD240040)
TiVo model 240080 (TCD240080)

(As of this post, the DSR-7000 and Samsung DirecTV/TiVo units have not been released.)

Before adding a drive to one of the TCD models, you might search around for the threads talking about the power supply in those units.

Please also do look for the "Warning" post. In a nutshell: Don't power up your TiVo if the cable running from the front of the TiVo to the motherboard is not securely fastened. If you do, you could permanently damage your TiVo.

Michael

Edited to add links:

Warning thread:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=105719

Power threads:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=104363

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=104815

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=103265

[schwatoo]

Now I have 182hrs in Basic quality and 81hrs in High (my new default).

Took about an hour. Excellent documentation & software.

The only real issue was getting the ATA cable to fit (had to rush out to CompUSA to find a shorter cable and even then had a bit of a fight - how short do ATA cables go?

Oh and for some reason getting the case back on after the bracket was fitted was a bit of a problem - from what I can tell the bracket (from <http://www.9thtee.com/TiVoMtgBracket-s2.htm>) shouldn't have interfered.

Now I'm anxiously watching the temperature rise: at a very healthy 38 degrees now.

[weaknees]

You needed a shorter cable? What model unit do you have? What was the problem with the longer cable - just not enough air flow?

Michael

[mikebridge]

just a thank you note to hinsdale, tiger, etc. upgraded from a single drive 30hour to a dual 120gig setup, 306hours, 24minutes. woohoo!

[Delta13]

Thank you, thank you! I just upgraded my HDVR2 to one of those Best Buy 100+20 drives - works great! It even runs a degree or two cooler than the 5400 40 Gb original drive.

I copied the entire drive (nearly full) over to the new drive, shows and all. If you're wondering how long that takes on your PC, it took about 8 hours using a spare P166 with 48 Meg of RAM.

Thanks to all who worked on the upgrades!

[abd4evr]

Thanks to all on this thread, and of course, those kind enough to write and post software to make it work! In case anyone else is upgrading a 1st gen series 2 60 hr, the bracket is already in (original bracket has space for 2 drives, all that's needed is a power splitter and a new IDE cable (comes with retail box drives).

I just added one of those BBY Maxtor 120 ("100+20") drives as a "b" drive and kept my 60gb as an A. I don't know if that was the best option, but it works and I didn't have to do any funky stuff. So far, temp is exactly the same as it was before upgrading. (I wonder where the sensor is, maybe it's upwind of the drives from the fan...)

One thing I ran into is that the command line (whatever it is in linux) for mounting hda before the backup step may not be correct in the 9th tee instructions (sourced from Hinsdale). I couldn't get it mounted right (kept asking for what kind of file system it was) and I checked Hinsdale's instructions, and there was a difference of one character. When I tried that, it worked. So if anyone is frustrated because they can't make it work, that might be the problem. (i'm a complete newbie, so forgive the naivete)

[pengster]

I proceeded with an upgrade from 2 drives to a single 120 GB and mfstools came through like a charm. Upgrade option #6 works great, even with just a floppy. Not sure why it says "limited", but it works with my series 1 phillips tivo.

Many thanks!!

[Robert S]

I think he just means that this upgrade isn't applicable to most TiVoes. Of course, if your TiVo does meet the criteria, it works like a charm.

[myoung5655]

thank you so much for your document. I used it alot this weekend while working over my system after I lost a slave disk...

I have two suggestions.

(incidently, it's the first hughes model).

the first suggestion is that you put into bold face text the fact that the master disk MUST be on the end of the ide cable. I completely missed this, and went through an entire second imaging process before I happened across it while rereading the directions to see if I'd missed anything. the result was the green immediately after "just a few more" message, then a reboot.

the next suggestion would be small section entitled, "You have no backup for a broken system, but all is not lost."

for me, the process was simple, once I figured it out. I found an backup image online, then used the command to write it to the disk, expanding and marrying the second disk at the same time.

it was beautiful once I fitured it all out, but it wasn't obvious that it was possible without the original backed up image.

thanks again for the document.

...myoung

[sleepX]

Upgraded my 40h S2 with a 120GB maxtor hd.

Works puuurfect!

Thanks all!

- SleepX

[ron_b85]

Yeii! Hinsdale's website is missing!?! :(

[hinsdale]

Originally posted by ron_b85
Yeii! Hinsdale's website is missing!?! :(

Just noticed this also.. am checking into it

EDIT UPDATE: Should be back up and running.. let me know if anyone is having difficulties.

[psywzrd]

I still can't get into the site. Can someone please post the url again so I know I'm using an updated link?

[hinsdale]

Originally posted by psywzrd
I still can't get into the site. Can someone please post the url again so I know I'm using an updated link?

I had a DNS server problem earlier today that has been corrected but may take awhile to correct for all locations, in the meantime you should be able to access using the following urls:


New Hinsdale How-To:
http://207.201.165.30/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html


Hinsdale TiVo Upgrade services:
http://207.201.165.30/hinsdale-how-to/upgradeservice.html

[deaklet]

Thanks to the amazing support of the tivocommunity, DH and I upgraded today. We had a GXCEBOT that didn't work with 2 drives--suspected power supply problem. We bought an HDVR2 from Tweeter for my b-day a couple of weeks ago and then marched to BB for a 100+20 GB Maxtor drive.

The hardest part was figuring out how to get the drive bay out of our HP Pavilion. I'm not real great with computer hardware, but I figured out the cabling and jumpering, and as soon as that was right, we were cruising! It was very fast, since we used a new HDVR2 drive as the backup--moved the GXCEBOT to the basement--and all is well. I do notice the louder drive, however, and will probably be searching for the "quiet utility" soon.

Thanks, all!

-Leslie

[ron_b85]

Leslie, go to maxtor.com and search for AMSET. :)

I'm still looking for confirmation to see if I *have* to remove my existing HD in order to just add the new 120G (to a S2 single-drive Sony)...

[weaknees]

With 120 GB going to a Sony SVR-3000, you really should remove the boot drive and use the new drive as the A drive so you can add swap space. Then, use the 80 as the B drive. More details are in Robert S's sticky post.

Michael

[ron_b85]

I don't mean to sound dumb, but what's a "sticky post"?

It appears that in order for me to make this brandy-new drive work, I do need to put some image on it (which means, I *will* have to back up the original 80G). It'll be a long, slow burn, since it's pretty much full, and I don't want to lose the data on it... :)

Thanks for the reply, Michael!

[weaknees]

A "sticky post" is a thread that stays at the top of the forum list - like this one.

Anyone, here's the link to the swap thread:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69952

Michael

[nichols_eric]

It's been awhile, but I just upgraded my second TiVo, an old DSR6000 with a new 120 Maxtor. Only problem I has was I had to borrow my neighbors computer, since I only am using 2000 and XP over here! Kudos Tiger and Hinsdale!

[weaknees]

Using a PC with XP or 2000 is fine as long as you don't boot that drive. Safest way to be sure is to physically disconnect it for the Linux work.

Michael

[Knouse]

Originally posted by weaknees
Using a PC with XP or 2000 is fine as long as you don't boot that drive. Safest way to be sure is to physically disconnect it for the Linux work. That's only one problem. You need a FAT32 partition. If your 2K/XP machine only has one drive with one NTFS partition you're gonna need a friend or a neighbor or a friendly neighbor.

[Robert S]

Or just put a small (2Gb is plenty) FAT partition on the drive you're about to use for the upgrade and use that for the backup phase.

[boomboom69]

I'm having some trouble. I had added a sendond HDD just a 8 gig HDD to a HDVR2 and it worked fine and now I bought a 120 gig to replace the 8gig HDD and I used hinsdales and did the dd copy methond in option 4 I think it is. But when I do the mfsadd command it just gives me the 47 hours that I had with the original 40 gig A and 8 gig B. I'm currently using the the 120 gig but it just wont let me expand it to use the full drive. any help would really be appreciated. thanx.

[weaknees]

Have you carefully checked the jumpers on the new 120 GB drive? What does it show as its capacity when Linux boots?

The easy answer is just to do a backup and restore to both drives. You'll lose your recordings, but this should be a no-brainer.

Michael

[boomboom69]

the jumpers are fine it works in the tivo but it's not locked otherwise it wouldn't even recognize the 8 gigs that is being used. It reports both the new drive and the original tivo drive with numbers and letters. it doesn't give a capacity.

[weaknees]

The Linux Boot CD should report a capacity in MB on startup. Can you look back through a startup sequence? You can use shift-page up to scroll up.

Michael

[marsb]

Im trying to upgrade my HDVR2 to 120+120 and after using

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda /dev/hdb

MY SCREEN HAS SCROLLING GARBAGE ON IT, And the whole computer is beeping like crazy while this garbage scrolls on the screen.

IS THIS NORMAL OR DID I DO SOMETHING WRONG?

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by marsb
Im trying to upgrade my HDVR2 to 120+120 and after using

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda /dev/hdb

MY SCREEN HAS SCROLLING GARBAGE ON IT, And the whole computer is beeping like crazy while this garbage scrolls on the screen.

IS THIS NORMAL OR DID I DO SOMETHING WRONG?

You cannot use the 'primary master' for Blessing or creating bootable drives for your TiVo. Try the following, instead:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

Connect your CD to /dev/hda and boot from it; connect your TiVo "A" drive as the primary slave, and all should be fine.

Lou

[marsb]

OK, so i need ALOT of help. Here's the deal... I want to upgrade the HDVR2 (40gb hd) to 120+120:

This is my setup:

hda --> fat32 windows formatted drive (no windows system on it - BARE)
hdb --> NONE
hdc --> Original Maxtor TIVO A drive
hdd --> dvd rom drive


when i try to backup the TIVO A drive to my fat32 drive i do this:

mkdir/ mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
mfsbackup -f 4138 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

AND I GET THIS ERROR MESSAGE:

/dev/hdc10: Success
mfs_load_volume_header:mfsvol_read_data: Input/output error
mfsbackup: Backup failed to statup. Make sure you specified the right devices, and that the drives are not locked.

WHAT DID I DO WRONG???

I have the Hughes HDVR2 DirecTivo by the way...

Help!



SECONDLY,
when i try to just copy the TIVO A to a NEW LARGER WD 120 drive, and add the 120 B drive using:

hda --> new 120 gb A drive
hdb --> new 120 gb B drive
hdc --> Original Maxtor TIVO A drive
hdd --> dvd rom drive

and use the command:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc

my screen pauses for a little bit, it tells me that it's checking the drive, and then a million things start scrolling on the screen (looks like garbage/code) and it keeps going and going and ... you get the idea (IS THAT WHAT IT's supposed to happen???)

Another thing that i could think of... i have WD 120 gb drives with 8mb buffers. I believe the BIOS is recognizing them at ATA66 (should i have it in 33 mode?)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[jwixted]

I did exactly what you're trying to do about 6 weeks ago. check out post http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?postid=1025015#post1025015 - Just follow the Hinsdale guide (link is in post) EXACTLY, and it'll work like a charm...

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by marsb
OK, so i need ALOT of help. Here's the deal... I want to upgrade the HDVR2 (40gb hd) to 120+120:

This is my setup:

hda --> fat32 windows formatted drive (no windows system on it - BARE)
hdb --> NONE
hdc --> Original Maxtor TIVO A drive
hdd --> dvd rom drive


when i try to backup the TIVO A drive to my fat32 drive i do this:

mkdir/ mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
mfsbackup -f 4138 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

AND I GET THIS ERROR MESSAGE:

/dev/hdc10: Success
mfs_load_volume_header:mfsvol_read_data: Input/output error
mfsbackup: Backup failed to statup. Make sure you specified the right devices, and that the drives are not locked.

WHAT DID I DO WRONG???

I have the Hughes HDVR2 DirecTivo by the way...

Help!



SECONDLY,
when i try to just copy the TIVO A to a NEW LARGER WD 120 drive, and add the 120 B drive using:

hda --> new 120 gb A drive
hdb --> new 120 gb B drive
hdc --> Original Maxtor TIVO A drive
hdd --> dvd rom drive

and use the command:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc

my screen pauses for a little bit, it tells me that it's checking the drive, and then a million things start scrolling on the screen (looks like garbage/code) and it keeps going and going and ... you get the idea (IS THAT WHAT IT's supposed to happen???)

Another thing that i could think of... i have WD 120 gb drives with 8mb buffers. I believe the BIOS is recognizing them at ATA66 (should i have it in 33 mode?)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.


Sounds like you need to check your jumper settings - if you are getting lots of errors and timeouts, you could have two drives trying to play the same role as 'master' or 'slave'....

Lou

[boomboom69]

Weaknees-- I don't have the cd version for some reason I can't make it boot off the cd. I use the floppy and it doesn't report the MB of the HDD when I plug in my samsung it does for it and just gives some alpha numerick number for my 2 maxtor HDDs'. I wouldn't think the drives are locked especially since I was able to dd copy the 8 gig Hdd on to the 120 but I just can't get it to expand.

[ron_b85]

Originally posted by marsb
OK, so i need ALOT of help. Here's the deal... I want to upgrade the HDVR2 (40gb hd) to 120+120:
...
SECONDLY,
when i try to just copy the TIVO A to a NEW LARGER WD 120 drive, and add the 120 B drive using:

hda --> new 120 gb A drive
hdb --> new 120 gb B drive
hdc --> Original Maxtor TIVO A drive
hdd --> dvd rom drive

and use the command:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc

my screen pauses for a little bit, it tells me that it's checking the drive, and then a million things start scrolling on the screen (looks like garbage/code) and it keeps going and going and ... you get the idea (IS THAT WHAT IT's supposed to happen???)



Well, yes, and no. :)
Actually, what you need to do is run backup, but *pipe* it to the 'restore'
command. What you did was say "back up my TiVo data, and send the information to .. THE SCREEN!" (the dash after "-Tao" says "output to file.. no filename specified; use standard-output!", which is your screen.)

I'm certain the scenario you're looking for is in the How-To guide...

HTH!

[marsb]

This might seem a really dumb question, but how do i *PIPE* it to the -restore command? All i've been doing with the backup command so far was type the first part of it, before the vertical bar, and pressing enter... and thats when it starts spewing out the garbage... (As you might have guessed i have no idea what i'm doing in linux/unix - so treat me like an idiot and explain it to me step by step without thinking that i know how to do something.) Is that how you pipe it??? or is there a way to get the whole msfbackup/restore command on the screen at the same time???

Thanks in advance.

[Robert S]

You have to do exactly what Hinsdale says - you'll find Unix is /very/ unforgiving if you make changes you don't understand.

If you want to make a backup file, you have to give a filename:

mfsbackup <options> -o /mnt/tivo.bak <drive>

If you want to use a pipe to transfer your recordings, you use the | character to connect the stdout of the backup command to the stdin of the restore:

mfsbackup <options> | mfsrestore <options>

[marsb]

that's what i was asking... how do i do the PIPE CHARACTER??? I think i hit every key on the keyboard, but can't seem to find it!!!

[weaknees]

Its a shift-backslash. The one just above your Enter key.

Michael

[dlambermont]

Hello all,

I purchased an upgrade kit from Hinsale a little over a month ago (120 Gig A drive replacement for my HDVR2) and was TiVoing happily until this past weekend. I started noticing "pauses" during playback which became more and more frequent. Even the animation behind menus would freeze for a few seconds, play for a few seconds, freeze again...

Anyway, I restarted the system, and it hung on the "Powering up. Please Wait" screen (tried this maybe 10 times). I took the drive out, installed it in a PC and ran Maxtor's diagnostics -- failed all of them.

So, now I am waiting for the replacement drive to arrive from Maxtor. Rather than shipping the drive back to Hinsale for reimaging, I'd like to try this myself. The drive came with a backup image on CD, so this should be easy. Trouble is, I'm having trouble figuring out where in the HOWTO to start, since this particular scenario is not covered.

I am familiar with Linux, but not with the MFS tools. Can someone get me pointed in the right direction?

[Robert S]

Just follow the instructions for restoring a backup image to an A drive. Copy the image from the CD to C:\TIVO.BAK and all will be as in Hinsdale.

[timmy1376]

I am trying to replace the factory HD which I think had some bad sectors on it with a 80 GB drive. I have a SAT-t60. I used the guide and copied from the original to the new one, but went to step 10 and did config 3. I got errors restoring the backup. Would a bad original drive cause that??

[scottara]

Can i perform the imaging and upgrade using a pc that doesnt have any version of windows on the C drive connected to the primary master, while the drive i am upgrading is connected to the secondary master as hinsdales instrs say?

What i am worried about is my main pc is running xp, so i dont think i can hook up the new drive to that pc on the secondary master and perform the upgrade right?

Please give me some insight...

[Robert S]

Yeah, all the software you'll be using is on the boot disk, so as long as there's a filing system on the disk, that's all you need.

Linux can't write to XP's NTFS partition anyway, so disconnecting the C: drive is a really good idea.

[scottara]

So i can use my pc that has XP running but shut it down, disconnect the C drive and connect the tivo drive i want to work on to the secondary controller and then boot hinsdale instrs and cd and i should be ok? I dont need a c drive connected at all or i need a c drive connected but if it is blank that is ok?

[weaknees]

You basically have it all right - but you will need a C drive or some PC drive if you want to make a backup during the process. If you don't want one (or already have one), then just disconnect your C drive, make sure no Win XP CD boots, and you should be fine.

Michael

[mhoeffner]

Thanks to Hinsdale, Tiger, etc., I was able to perform an upgrade effortlessly. I was able to expand from about 32 basic hours to 128 for just a little over $100.

Issues:

Getting the original drive out of the Tivo was a pain with the screwdriver that I bought (see below). I got it out, but only with great frustration.

I couldn't get my computer to recognize the new drive as either secondary master or slave. The computer's drive and the bootable CD-ROM made up the primary chain. Going into the BIOS setup and setting both secondary master and slave from "Auto" to "None" fixed it (something similar should be available on all other computers). Windows still wouldn't see the drive, but Linux from the boot CD did.

Unit:

Philips HDR312-01

New Drive:

Dell (Hitachi actually) 80GB 7200 drive (part # 340-3696) - shipped for $72

Misc:

9th Tee mounting bracket - shipped for $22

Radio Shack 17-Piece Ratchet Driver Set (catalog # 64-1904) - picked up for $9

Thanks again to everyone for sharing so much information here.

[weaknees]

So what was the problem getting the drive out? The Torx T-10 in your set should have made it pretty easy, no?

As far as the BIOS - Linux doesn't use its drive recognition, so setting it to none is the best answer.

Michael

[djtravis]

Upgraded my 80h S2 with a 120GB wd1200bb.

Works purfect!

Only problem was Mfstools2 would not run on my gateway GP7-866, but worked just fine on my old 200mhz pentium pro.
Hinsdale directions were GREAT!

Thanks all!

[mhoeffner]

Originally posted by weaknees
So what was the problem getting the drive out? The Torx T-10 in your set should have made it pretty easy, no?

The problem was that it was a ratchet set and there was only enough room on each side for me to turn it "one click" and more than half of the time, it would pop out from the screw before I had a chance to turn it since it was at an angle. I tried using just the bit without the ratchet, but I was too weak to budge it. :) A regular Torx T-10 screwdriver would have been a lot easier, but I figured that I might as well buy a ratchet set that I'm likely to use again in the future.

[weaknees]

Ah. If you have any other changeable-tip screwdriver, power screwdriver, or even a drill with the right part, you can use the tips in there - they are universal.

Michael

[bniven]

I read the Hinsdale note re: XP users not to boot with XP unless a separate FAT32 partition exists. My C: primary partition with XP loaded on it is FAT32, first extended partition is NTFS for data files. I have plenty of room to create a back up image on the primary partition for my factory 40GB A-drive. No second hardrive installed, so I will configure master/slave as recommended in instructions.

Want to confirm I can use the upgrade instructions as is. From my interpretation, I have no risk of corrupting the original A-drive during the process since the primary boot partition is FAT32 despite having XP on it.

[Robert S]

There are two problems with XP. One is that the Linux boot disk used to run the upgrade tools can't write to NTFS partitions (you seem to have this problem under control).

The second is that when XP loads it writes a signature to the boot block of any new hard drives it finds. Although this signature has no effect on a DOS/Windows/Linux drive, it makes a TiVo drive unbootable.

Do not let XP boot while you have a TiVo drive attached.

[tweis001]

Has anyone performed a drive upgrade after Ver 4.0?

I'm picking up a hard drive from Circuit City and plan on doing the upgrade but worried 4.0 will be installed before I get to it.

By the way, Circuit City Western Digital 120gb (WD1200BBRTL) for $10 after $150 in rebates.

[tivoupgrade]

Originally posted by tweis001
Has anyone performed a drive upgrade after Ver 4.0?

I'm picking up a hard drive from Circuit City and plan on doing the upgrade but worried 4.0 will be installed before I get to it.

By the way, Circuit City Western Digital 120gb (WD1200BBRTL) for $10 after $150 in rebates.

It should work fine. Please see here for initial observations:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=111669

[petegmi]

Originally posted by tweis001
By the way, Circuit City Western Digital 120gb (WD1200BBRTL) for $10 after $150 in rebates.

Holy friggin' smokes... I thought this was a typo or a joke, but this is for real! It's only until Saturday though that you get all the rebates ($10+$80+60) = $150 in rebates. Orig price $159.99, free shipping. So you're net cost for this HD is $9.99 No joke!!! But, only 4/24 - 4/26. Even if you don't need one, why not get one?!?!

Just My $.02 (with just 499 more $.02 you can get this hard drive!) ;)

[petegmi]

Nevermind . . . I just went to complete my order and they're alllll gone. :(

[6speedlt1]

I started reading about upgrades yesterday. My HDVR2 was installed today, and I upgraded with no hitches to 105 hours just now. Many thanks.

Luckily I did grab a WD 120GB disk for $10 from Circuit City :)

MarkW

[azitnay]

Here's to hoping we get that extra $60 rebate... I know they'll go through hell and back with me before I give up on it.

Drew

[tweis001]

I ordered a TwinBreeze bracket from Weaknees (should arrive today) and hope to get a chance to upgrade this weekend. I have standalone S2 80hr and I am going to add a 120 as the B drive.

I would like to test my backup by doing a restore to the new 120 drive and seeing if it works. After confirming my backup is good, do I need to somehow delete all the info from the 120 so I can use it as a B drive?

Would there be an advantage to using my 120 as the A drive?

Those that added a 120 to their 60 or 80 hour units - Did you update your swap size via the restore method? I assume you had to do the restore with the extra options back onto the A drive. Correct?

How important is it to increase the swap size?

[mike5335]

Just a quick report before I go back to my couch.

Got add-on kit from Weakness yesterday. The bracket, the power cooling kit and a 120 gig Samsung to add to existing 40 gig Maxtor.

Too chicken/lazy to change my desktop to a FAT machine, all the partitions are NTFS and, while Partition Magic will do it, I just didn't want the hassle. So, the price for the drop in kit seemed worth it.

All went well. It took approximately 35 minutes from start to acquiring satellites. Reports 141 hours.

Noise...my HDVR is (was) noisy. That was the main reason for getting the cooling kit (2 fans...one goes in bracket, one replaces the existing fan). I had tried a separate replacement fan, with no improvement. After the Weaknees kit was installed, disappointingly, the machine was noiser!

I ran it all night, no hitches. Temperature was 35 degrees, about 7 degrees lower than stock.

Today, I listened carefully, cover off, and the secondary fan was making the lion's share of the noise. I disconnected it. Voila! While the machine isn't dead silent, now, it is BARELY audible from 6 feet away...previously it could be heard from twice that distance. Temperature is now 45 degrees about 3 degrees warmer than stock.

Listening to the Samsung and the Maxtor drives, the Maxtor is a little noiser than the Samsung. But the stock fan and the add-on fan were the main noise culprits.

Great machine and upgrade....back to the couch.

[Robert S]

Of course, you could just put a FAT partition on your new drive for the backup before you go on to make it a TiVo disk.

[6speedlt1]

Originally posted by azitnay
Here's to hoping we get that extra $60 rebate... I know they'll go through hell and back with me before I give up on it.

Drew

I walked in and got an instant rebate when the $60 links dissappeared. So I'm golden.

MarkW

[Les_D]

Is it possable to use a disk thas has been used in a WinXP box?

I've got a 120gig drive that I haven't really used in a while.

Can I use a tool like FS_Wipe2 that wipes the entire disk partitions and all???

[Robert S]

No need to do anything special. MFS Tools or dd will overwrite everything on the disk. The problems come when you allow Windows XP to run while there's an active TiVo disk attached to the computer.

[spudly]

After reading the "how-to", can someone confirm that I can upgrade an upgraded Series I DTiVo? About a year and a half ago I upgraded my standard 35 hr DSR6000 40 hour ("A" drive) with an additional 80GB ("B")drive for a total of ~110 hours.

Now, I would like to *replace* my 40 GB drive (A) with a 120GB drive but and keep all my recordings which currently reside on my A+B drive. Thus it will retain my recodings and preferences but net me 120 + 80 GBS or ~ 185 hours.


This is doable as per Steps 7, Option #3 & Step 10 - Config #4, no?

TIA,
Glenn

[weaknees]

I don't know about the specific numbers in the guide, but essentially, you need to do a 'dd' of the A drive to the new A drive, then an mfsadd of both drives.

The only issue here is the swap space - have you increased that?

Michael

[spudly]

Hi Weakness,

I haven't done this "upgrade to an upgrade" yet as I was waiting for some verification that I can in fact do this.

Good point about the swap space - I hadn't considered that.

-Glenn



Edit to correct typo

[weaknees]

Yeah - for that reason it might be a good idea to just scrap the programming, make a backup, and restore with more swap.

Michael

[Robert S]

See the third post in the Fixes thread for a method to increase your swap without losing your recordings. It is much trickier than starting from scratch, though.

[spudly]

Thanks Robert S!

After reading through the beginnings of the "fixes" thread I am vascillating as to whether I am even going bother undertaking this or not. Perhaps it may end up being more trouble than it's worth. There is the old addage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" that I can stand by! Maybe I'll just be content with my ~110 hours.

I am quite PC literate but some of the linux commands are a little intimidating as if I make a mistake I'm up a creak. Definately mull this over for a while.

Appreciate the input.
Glenn

[Abiding Dude]

I did my upgrade last night successfully. I think I ran into every sort of problem I could possibly run into, but I persevered and now I have my 105 hour Tivo. I had set the jumpers wrong on both the old and new Tivo drives and had unintentionally limited the drives to 30Gb.

I ran thru the backup 4 times trying to figure out why it kept failing half way thru before I discovered my error. I was so happy when the backup finally worked :)

Then my restore failed. I had mistakenly named the good back up Tivo.back, but had tried to restore from a previous Tivo.bak backup.

I tested out the newly restored drive and it wouldn't work! Then I remembered I hadn't set the drive as master again. After I did that, the test worked. When I was putting the case back on I totally yanked the cable-o-death out and freaked out :) But it went back into its slot without any problems.

I put the whole thing back together again and plugged all the cables in and started up the unit and it didn't work again :) Then I remembered I hadn't plugged in either the IDE nor the power cable on the drive. So I had to disconnect everything and take the unit apart again. When I put it all back together everything worked without a hitch :)

So my story has a happy ending and I want to thank all the knowledgable peeps on this board for their magnifiicent minds.

[jangell2]

Ok, I've gone thru the instructions with a fine tooth comb and think I understand the process. Since I am an XP user, I want to verify a couple of things.

That note at the end of the instructions says I have to create a fat32 partition to put the backup file in. But a message above seems to say its only important not to allow the computer to boot up in XP with the Tivo drives attached.

My questions are:
1) Do I really need that partition?
2) Can I create both the cd rom boot drive and the floppy boot disck (with qunlock if needed) while running XP?
3) If I screw up and run XP with the Tivo drives attached, can I fix them by simple restoring the backup file on them?

I think I've got another question here. I am a Series 1 DTV Phillips 6000 owner with a dual drive (30gb & 15gb) drives. If I've read the instructions correctly, the original Tivo drive I keep does not get a backup file restored to it. The only thing that gets done to it is the expand command (this is done at the same time as the new drive). Is this correct?

Thank you very much.

johnny

[weaknees]

You only need the partition if you want to make a backup - mfstool can't store the backup on an NTFS partition.

You can create what you need under XP.

You can restore a backup file to fix the overwrite problem that XP causes, but, of course, you need a backup file first. If the system boots into XP while you are booting to make the backup, you're toast.

I don't really understand your last question - are you upgrading only one drive?

Michael

[jangell2]

You only need the partition if you want to make a backup - mfstool can't store the backup on an NTFS partition.

I thought a backup was necessary. Isn't the restore of the backup what sets up my new larger drive? If not, what part of the process is actually preparing the new drive to be a tivo drive?

I don't really understand your last question - are you upgrading only one drive?

Yes. I have a dual drive dtv tivo with a 30gb & 15gb original drives. I have a 100gb maxtor drive that will replace the 15gb drive. Following the instructions, the new drive will be the tivo A drive and the original 30gb drive will become the B drive.

[Robert S]

A backup is a good idea, but you can transfer the system directly from the original drive(s) to the new one with dd or an MFS Tools pipe.

Just put a FAT partition (1Gb will be plenty - don't fill the whole disk!) on your upgrade drive and backup to that. You shouldn't ever have to boot with both a TiVo drive and your Windows drive connected at the same time.

NT just corrupts the boot block, so restoring a backup does fix the drive.

You sound like you're not planning to copy your recordings across. If so, I would recommend that you don't add your old A drive as a B drive, just stick with the 100Gb single drive.

[jangell2]

A backup is a good idea, but you can transfer the system directly from the original drive(s) to the new one with dd or an MFS Tools pipe.

Just put a FAT partition (1Gb will be plenty - don't fill the whole disk!) on your upgrade drive and backup to that. You shouldn't ever have to boot with both a TiVo drive and your Windows drive connected at the same time.QUOTE]

I don't know linux or msftools so I don't know how to do this. Can you refer me to doc about this?

[QUOTE]You sound like you're not planning to copy your recordings across. If so, I would recommend that you don't add your old A drive as a B drive, just stick with the 100Gb single drive.

Why should I do this? I'll be losing 35 hours if I don't use the original drive? Does there tend to be more failures if I use an original drive?

Thanx for all your help.

[Robert S]

Yes, worrying about drive failures. Your original drives will be getting on in years and brand new drives often fail in their first few days of service.

If you get a problem with a single-drive TiVo, it's obvious which drive needs replacing. This isn't the case with a twin.

I would definitely let your new drive fill up before you add the B drive.

If you want the extra space that badly, why didn't you get a 120 or 160Gb drive?

[i9elcaro]

I am following these instructions:
http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html
to upgrade from a single A drive to a larger A drive. I am at the step of performing the mfsadd command, but this command does not exist on the boot CD. There exist two directories, called /mad31 and /mad32. Each of these contain files called mfsadd_a and mfsadd_ab. Am I losing my mind, or are the instructions incorrect? Please help...

TIA

[Robert S]

mfsadd is an alias for MFS Tools 2.0. I think you've got a TiVoMad CD there...

[savy]

Hinsdale,

Just wanted to let you and others know. I purchased a 120GB u/g from you for my Sony 30 hour TIVO. Your service was outstanding, received the drive ready to drop into my unit within 3-4 days from order. Installation instructions were clear and concise.

I opted to replace my loud A drive with the single upgraded drive, which has taken me from 30 hours to something just shy of 150 hours. I have run setup today and everything is back up and running like a charm.

Oh yeah I can't even tell my TIVO is on anymore with the new hard drive in it...... Since I moved the TIVO to my bedroom it has been annoying me, but that is solved now as well.....

Thanks again for the excellent support you have provided for guys like me that want to take a drive and just drop it in. For the extra money for the service and piece of mind that you provide it is WELL worth the money and by the way it was not allot extra (so thanks for keeping your mark up reasonable)

For now my 80 hour series two unit is good space wise but when I want more out of it I will be calling on you again....

Savy

[xoff]

Thanks to Hinsdale and this forum, I upgraded a single 160gb Maxtor with zero problems.

Total time, including futzing with the pain-in-the-butt screw on the SAT-T60 was *30* minutes.

I now have the original 40gb drive as a spare and the image on CD as well.

Thanks for all your efforts!

Within 10 minutes of the upgrade, the wife had changed all her season passes to "save until I delete". :)

Thanks again, Hinsdale and company!

[Kenwood]

Originally posted by Robert S
Yes, worrying about drive failures. Your original drives will be getting on in years and brand new drives often fail in their first few days of service.

They sure do. I added a 120 gig HD to my T-60 from a Tivo Upgrade company on Sunday. Everything went smooth on the install. It took me longer to do the wires from my entertainment system, than actual install the extra drive.

Well, last night while watching a Tivo'd program. Everything started studdering and freezing...then the kiss of death. Reboot after reboot. It worked fine for two days after the upgrade, then crash. Now I can't get past "Powering Up" gray screen. I called the company I bought the upgrade drive from and the are overnighting me a two new drives from their "Get Well" package deal. Odds are the add-on drive failed and not my original Tivo drive. They were really cool on the phone and all I really have to pay for is the overnight shipping charges. I'll have it up and running tommorrow. Great customer service. :up:

It just sucks, cause I was still watching "24" and was only on episode 4. :eek: I don't see Fox showing reruns of 24, so I'll have to buy the 2nd season on DVD. Plus I had over 50 season passess worked out in harmony (east & west coast feeds). That's going suck reprogramming everything :( Plus my 2 1/2 year old daughter is going to wig-out when she finds out she can't watch Elmo's World or the Wiggles when she gets home from daycare today.

[AnthonyJS]

Just do it!

I agonized over it until my wife called asking why she could no longer find Max and Ruby on our TiVo. It started deleting my son's shows as space was needed. We also never got any suggestions.


I ordered a preformatted B drive from Hinsdale for my Series 2 60 hour unit. The 120Gb Maxtor drive came right on schedule and slid right in.

It took longer to disconnect the unit from the entertainment center than it did to do the upgrade. The upgrade did require both Torx 10 and 15 size bits.

Perhaps I am too literal, but when you install the power supply wire, install it right onto the existing wire. I started to remove the existing wire before I realized that was not necessary!

To Hinsdale: :up: :up: :up:

[clherv]

Desire: Converting my SAT-T60 from single 40G to 40G + 120G.

I know the instructions say it is for a 98, 95, or Me. I have an old 95 machine (OS is b), and a 98 machine with no memory that I can make work by borrowing the memory from my XP, but none of those machines have much HD space at all.

I read a poster saying I could do it without any drive at all, except for the new (as of yet unpurchased--I like apstech.com).

But, I also have a friend who knows a whole lot about PCs, and has a couple of machines running Linux.

I am thinking that he could use the instructions to make the backup drive, and format for the new Tivo drive.

Don't you think so?

?????

Comments???

[weaknees]

You can actually really only do this with Linux (although you could use the MacTiVo Blesser in this circumstance) but the key is to never boot in to XP with your TiVo drive attached to your PC. Otherwise, just use the instructions at the top of this thread and you'll be in Linux.

Michael

[clherv]

Weaknees, Thanks for the helpful reply.

In reading my post this morning I realized that I was not clear in my sentence: I am thinking that he could use the instructions to make the backup drive, and format for the new Tivo drive.

I meant that the friend could do the work in Linux on one of his machines already running Linux.

I think Weaknees figured this out, but I wanted to clarify for other responders.

Thanks again.

Kent

[Robert S]

MFS Tools runs quite happily under an ordinary Linux install. The only thing you need to worry about is drive locking so you'll need a DOS boot disk with qunlock on it or a TiVo boot CD.

You can do the upgrade on the XP machine if you wish. Put a small FAT partition on the new drive and backup to that. Then use XP to copy the backup off that drive before proceeding with the upgrade. You should not ever need to have the XP drive and a TiVo drive connected simultaneously.

However, I refer you to a couple of posts back in this thread. This upgrade is not a good idea. It would be much better to make the new drive the A drive. You can copy the recordings to the new disk if you want, although this will take a few hour

[weaknees]

Another important point about running MFS Tools under a normal Linux install - be careful about using a kernel that's too new. If you do, and you are using 160 GB or larger drives, you'll create lot's of problems.

There's a lot more info on these boards about this, but for now, if you are using 120s or smaller, you would be fine with most installations of Linux.

Michael

[Robert S]

Good point, Michael. Of course, as he's got a Series 1, all he need to do is use the Turbonet installer to reflash his PROM (to break the DTiVo lock-down) and dd Todd's kernel (http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=83342) on to the disk and he could use a large drive. (If he uses a 120Gb drive then none of this is relevent).

Series 2 users do need to be very careful, though.

This only applies to LBA-48 installations - Linux 2.4.19 or later.

If you don't want to go down the large drive path, check that your large drive is being recognised as 137Gb. You might end up having to do your backup/restore in an LBA-48 environment (so you can get at your Ext3/ReiserFS/whatever partitions) and then booting the MFS Tools 2.0 CD for the expand step

[clherv]

Q1: I went back and read the old posts (again), but can't figure why swapping A is better than adding B.

I figured that adding was good for nervous type. I mean, isn't it harder to mess up when adding something versus trying to copy and paste all the data? Not challenging you on that. I just want to understand what you mean so I can make the best decision. Also, I thought there was a thing about having to worry about Tivo upgrades not liking something in the future, and so I need to be able to appear to have the same drive as the one with which I started.

Q2: I tried to read all the pages in this post before I posted. It seemed like virtually nobody with an SAT-T60 had upgraded to a drive bigger than 120G, and those that had on this model or others could not really get much more actual usable space. Is that wrong? That is why I decided to just go to 120G. In general when I buy RAM or HD upgrades, I go as big as the can up until the price point break because I don't want to be tossing the older drive later. I am asking because you seemed to indicate a larger drive might work.

Thanks.

Kent

[Robert S]

I regard adding as more risky because your making a change to your working A drive. If you copy your working A drive on to a new drive then if there's a problem you can go back to your original drive and try to figure out what's wrong. If you get a problem with your added drive you'll probably have to restore a backup to your (formerly) working A drive to get working again.

New drives are an unknown quantity. Sometimes they fail in the first few days of operation (my last two drives have done this!) again, it's better if that happens to a single drive than a married pair.

Doing this also lets you increase swap, which is a good thing. If you go beyond 180Gb the TiVo will not be able to recover from a 'green screen' filesystem corruption error (but see the Fixes thread for a rescue procedure) without extra swap. When you copy the A drive with MFS Tools it'll automatically increase swap (because of the -s 127 parameter). Although 40+120 is OK, if you wanted to go to 2x120 later, that would be more difficult.


About a week ago Todd announced that he has fixed the problem with his LBA-48 kernel. Anyone can now fit a large drive to their Series 1 TiVo. It's not particularly difficult. All you do is make the TiVo drive with MFS Tools 2.0 under an LBA-48 version of Linux (Red Hat 8.0 or later, for example) and then use a TiVo boot disk to dd the new kernel on to partition 3 & 6. For a DTiVo you also have to reflash the boot PROM as per the Turbonet installation to break the lock-down.

In terms of swap, if you use -s 127 you have enough swap to go to at least 280Gb (you need 1/2Mb of memory for each Gb of disk space and you have about 6Mb of spare RAM (22Mb spare on DTiVoes and Series 2's) plus 127Mb of swap).

If you wanted to go to 2x250Gb or use a 320Gb drive then you'll need more even more swap. The Linux 2.1 kernel the Series 1 TiVo uses is limited to 128Mb per swap partition. Creating extra swap partitions isn't a problem, but activating them means editing /etc/fstab, which is a bit fiddly.

With one spare entry in the A drive's partition table plus the inactive kernel partition it shouldn't be a problem to get enough swap to repair 2x320Gb and it's also possible to put swap partitions on the B drive, so it should always be possible to get enough swap for mfsfix to complete, but if you're putting in a 250Gb drive you might want to think about doing -s 256. This would mean MFS Tools would give you no swap at all (you have to initialise it yourself as described in the first post of the Fixes thread), but it would make a 256Mb hole in the disk layout into which additional swap could be fitted later if necessary (ie, you added a second large drive).

Anyway, to get back to the actual question: large drives are now possible. The upgrade isn't well tested or properly documented yet, but there's no reason to think it won't work

[John Wilson]

I am going to add a 120GB drive to my 60 hour Series 2 TiVo. Would someone who has done this before please look over the following and point out any mistakes/alternatives? This is my 1st experience with MFS Tools 2.0, a Western Digital 7200 rpm 120GB drive and a Series 2. I've done two Series 1 TiVos before however:p

1. I've formatted a 6GB Hd as Fat32 under XP and I will use this as my Windows drive and it will connect to the Primary Master IDE channel. To Linux, it will be called out as hda.

2. I will connect my original TiVo 60 GB drive to the PC's Secondary Master channel as designate it as hdc

3. Connect my NEW WD 120GB drive to the Primary Slave channel and designate it as hdb

4. connect my CD-ROM to the Secondary Slave channel and designate it as hdd
Note: I plan to jumper all of the above drives so that they match the Master/Slave requirement.

5. Using Hinsdale's How-To, I will back up the image to the 120GB using step 7, option #1. After booting off the CD-ROM using the bootable MFS Tools CD, I will confirm that the correct sizes are being recognized.
Question: Do WD drives ever get locked and if so, is there something like qunlock to unlock them?

At the linux prompt #, I will type:

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos

and then to backup, I will type:

mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

6. 25 minutes later, I am now ready to restore this image to the 120GB drive for testing in the TiVo. I will type the following to restore the image to the NEW drive:

mfsrestore -s 127 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb

HERE IS WHERE I AM CONFUSED, should the above command have a "b" in front of the "zpi" because it is a Series 2 or not? The guide is alittle confusing here. :confused:

Also, does the -s 127 part expand the swap space in the backup image and do I really need to for a 60GB + 120GB setup?

7. When the restore is done, I will type:

umount -f -a -r

and then power down the PC, remove the 120Gb drive, jumper it to Master, and place it in the TiVo to test the image. I realize that even though they are listed, my recordings are not there. I DO want to keep these recordings so does that limit me to only option #1 in the Capacity upgrade Step 10?

8. Here is wher I could use some advice. I want to preserve my recordings AND I am concerned about the larger swap space issue. If I use UG Configuration #1, it just uses mfsadd to increase the capacity to include the new drive but doesn't change the swap space as there is no "-s 127" parameter and I'm not changing the image on the original drive. So, should I use #1 with mfsadd and take my chances with the GSOD or should I use Option #3 (which really doesn't match my configuration as I want to use the original A drive plus the new 120GB as the B drive.

What command(s) should I use here to both increase the swap space AND preserve my settings and recordings in my particular configuration?

Sorry this is so long but just typing it out has helped me understand alittle better what is going to happen, hopefully :D

Thanks for you help.

[Robert S]

60+120 is OK on a Series 2 without extra swap.

You seem rather nervous. Wouldn't it be safer to copy your recordings to the new drive and leave your A drive alone for now?

Use an MFS Tools pipe to copy recordings:

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

Once you're happy the new drive is OK (I'd at least want to see it full of recordings) then use mfsadd to add the old A drive as a B drive.

-s is an option for mfsrestore (-s with mfsbackup does something completely different). The swap partition is not included in the backup. -s tell mfsrestore what size partition to make.

-b does set the byte-ordering correctly for a Series 2, but MFS Tools can usually figure it out for itself

[comakid]

I have an original 30 hour standalone phillips hdr312xx that I upgraded
last year to a 135 hour by adding an 80 gig hd following your instaructions.
The upgrade went fine. I decided to do another capacity upgrade this year
I removed the original 30 gig quantom drive and the "new" 80 gig hard
drive and replaced both of them with 120 gig wedtern digital drives. Again
this upgrade worked fine and was easy to follow. Thanks for the how to
instructions

[quoc]

Hinsdale's howto - http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/
Tyger's howto - http://www.tyger.org/MFS/2.0/howto.html

After doing 4 upgrades, I now discover that Hinsdale's howto and Tyger's howto are different. I've been using Tyger's since I thought they were the same, and MS Word doc prints out nicer.

I didn't catch this until I read a post about a Tivo Series 2 missing its background after an upgrade. I had the same problem when testing the small backup image. It went away when I did a full backup|restore, so I thought it was a fluke. Now I know that I needed the "-f 4138" option for mfsbackup. Not a problem since I still have the original drive and have now made a new backup image.

Now I find out that my 64MB swap (didn't use the "-s" option with mfsrestore) may be too small, and there's a possibility of a GSOD boot loop (I've printed the rescue procedure.) All upgrades were single-40GB to dual-160GB. There's not much I can do now if I want to preserve my recordings.

Just wanted to let you know that the howtos are different. Use Hinsdale's!

Quoc

[m00nshiner]

First off, I want to say thanks for all the great information posted here on upgrading. I purchased a 120g to upgrade my T60. I went to backup my tivo, and the hard drive went out. So I am now pleading that someone will send me a backup image. Thanks in advance!

[MikeekiM]

Clarification question: Are both of these relevant to the HDVR2? Or only #1? I used alternative #2 on my Sony... I'd like to try and keep my upgrade process as stable as I can (anything new and I may make mistakes!)...

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

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


Thanks!

[weaknees]

You MUST use #2 or similar instructions for an HDVR2 - the 'originals' don't work for the HDVR2.

Michael

[ellingsj]

I had a problem upgrading my TiVo because my two computers won't boot with a 120Gig HD attached. It just hangs. Even if I disable detection of the drives (boot off CD) or manually enter a fake size that it should like. Regardless, if the large drive is attached, it wouldn't boot. This makes it pretty hard to upgrade <GRIN>. So I installed a Promise Ultra133 card into the system and attached the drives to it. Well, the system would now boot off the CD, but it wouldn't detect the drives on the Promise controller.

I found the answer here: http://www.geocities.com/ender7007/

I booted with "nodma ide2=0xd400,0xd002 ide3=0xb800,0xb402" and all went well. The above URL will show you how to figure out the I/O addresses for any promise controller... and perhaps others as well.

Additionally, I had previously expanded my TiVo from 20GB to 120GB back in the mfstools/bless days (had a computer that was OK with large drives then). Making the backup image worked fine, but if I made the backup with the "-s" option to revert the image back to a 20Gig image, it would not restore onto my new 120Gig drive (old drive was getting noisey and I feared it'd die). I'd get the endless reboot on power-up unless I restored with the "-x" option... in other words, I don't think I could ever go back to a 20Gig drive... and perhaps not anything smaller than the 120Gig I had just imaged.

Needless to say... now I'm happily running on dual 120Gig with 306 hours 24 minutes of video recording love...

Thanks to Hinsdale and Tyger!

[kman007]

OK, not exactly a Tivo upgrade question, but definitely related...

I have a 120GB HD I want to add to my 14 hour unit, but I'd rather not open up my computer and fiddle with the HD's that are already in there and mess them up. I have an external USB enclosure that I have a backup 80GB HD in right now. If I open the external enclosure up and replace my backup drive with the 120 for all the prep work, can I just pop the 80 gigger back in when I am done? Will I have to modify bios for either switch? Will I lose data as a result of this? Thanks for any advice.

[Robert S]

I very much doubt it. You could try booting a really current Linux (eg Knoppix if you don't want to install Red Hat 9) and see if that can see the drive through the USB ports. If the drive can be seen as a single device node, the I don't see why MFS Tools couldn't use it. No idea what the device node for that would be called, though.

Unplugging IDE drives is not a big deal. If you're really worried about the current drives, just leave them unplugged while you work on the TiVo drives.

[Cedric]

A question for Robert S regarding upgrade "safety" ( and reversibility)

I'd like to copy my A drive (Series 2 DTiVo, Hughes HDVR2) to a spare 40 Gb drive and put the original A on the shelf as a backup.

Assuming that I then use the cloned A drive and marry a new B drive to it, shouldn't I be able remove both drives and reinstall the original A drive in the event of a major problem? (Understanding that recordings, SPs, and any software upgrades will be lost, of course).

[Robert S]

Yes, that's something I recommend, at least initially. Copying the A drive shouldn't alter it (considerations about XP signatures, jumper settings etc notwithstanding), so you can go back to it. You can even swap between the two sets if you want.

When my first upgrade died I was very pleased I had copied my A drive rather than adding to it.

After a month or so you can be pretty confident your new drive(s) are OK and reuse the original A drive.

[zac29349]

Hi,

I have a dual drive Philips 6000 in which I want to replace the original drives with dual 120 drives.

I followed the Hinsdale instructions, very nice, but I've hit a snag.

My computer's bios doesn't automatically recognize my new 120 GB drives as 120 drives. Rather, the best I can do is type in the cylinders, heads, and sectors info (527 megabytes after using the hard drive manufacturer's instructions). A friend has indicated my computer doesn't support 48 bit LBA? Does that ring a bell?

So I trudged on, hoping for the best. After getting the hard-coded drive info into the bios I ran the mfstools suite and everything seemed to work fine, but the mfsbackup .... | mfsrestore ... commands' results indicated an "additional 63 hours" only. It didn't sound right to me.

I haven't dropped the new drives into my TIVO yet, am I missing something, and if I'm not, what's my best bet to get the TIVO to recognize the full potential of those new drives?

Would the mfsadd command add the space? Do I need to borrow a PC that can adequately recognize the drives?

Am I done and don't realize it?

I hope this isn't a duplicate question, I've sat here for a couple of hours trying to find a similar case on the forum and I cannot seem to find a match.

Thank you....

[Robert S]

You really do need to get the drives recognised correctly by Linux. It's nice if the BIOS sees them, but it's the sizes printed when Linux boots that's important.

Try setting the BIOS to 'None' on the channels that the big drives are on.

You may well have to use a different PC.

[Dilbertic]

Hi,

I have a Sony SVR-2000 30 gig drive I am trying to backup and then replace with a 80gig drive.

I have the drive unlocked and it reports as 30 gigs Q-Fireball Drive and I tried the MFStools 1.0 and 2.0 boot from CD

Config:
HDA - win98 drive
HDB - Empty
HDC - Tivo 30 gig drive
HDD - CDROM

everything works to the point that I type in the command to back the unit up:
mfsbackup_ -6so_ /mnt/dos/tivo.bak_ /dev/hdc

then I end up getting this error:

mfsbackup_ -6so_ /mnt/dos/tivo.bak_ /dev/hdc10: Seccess
MFS_load_volume_header: mfsvol_read_data: input/output error
mfsbackup: Backup failed to startup. Make sure you specified the right devices, and that the drives are not locked.

HELP HELP HELP
I have tried moving the tivo drive to Pri-slave and same thing

Thanks,

Dilbertic

:confused:

[malloy]

I'm just at the spot where I'm going to mount the DOS disk and try to back up my TiVo disk to my DOS/Windows disk. I have an active primary partition (DOS C: Drive), an inactive primary partition (C: backup) and an extended partition with an active logical drive (D: for data) and a number of inactive logical drives (various backups). As it happens, the active primary partition is first on the drive, but this wouldn't have to be true (at least not for Windows 98 to boot just fine). Is the location of the active primary partition important? Is there a different mount command I could use to back up to the active logical (D: data) drive?

The MFS Tools documentation I could find and the Hinsdale How to, don't seem to address any of this explicitly. A search of the forum didn't turn up anything either. Am I the only one still partitioning my hard drives? I'm just a little nervous telling something to scribble on my Windows hard drive without understanding exactly what will happen.

Thanks for any enlightenment.

[Robert S]

The 'active' flage is only used by the BIOS to decide which partition to look for a boot loader on. Once the OS is running, it's irrelevent.

Unlike DOS/Windows with its automatic assignment of drive letters, Unix can selectively mount and unmount partitions while it's running. This means you need to know the partition number of the partition you want to mount.

C: is hda1, the other C: is hda2 and D: is hda5. Probably.

You'll see the list of partition on the hard drive printed when in the boot log, so it should be obvious which partitions are valid.

You're not telling anything to 'scribble on the Windows' drive. Unix will mount the filing system exactly as DOS does, it's just that it does it in a way that you control. If you try to mount a non-existent partition then you'll just get an error (probably 'must specify file-system type').

Do make sure you unmount the partition with umount before you reboot/power off.

[malloy]

Thanks for the explanation--that helps a lot. I've been in software development for 30 years, even managing development of some Unix products. But, this is my first hands-on exposure to Unix. I appreciate the time y'all have put into this TiVo hacking thing.

I've noted the warning in your reply and elsewhere to be sure to unmount with umount. What happens if you don't? This must happen now and again due to honest errors, carelessness, Acts of God, etc. How badly can things go?

[Robert S]

It's equivalent to rebooting Windows without doing Shutdown. Not necessarily disasterous, but to be avoided if possible.

[TorontoSVR]

ok got a Samsung 120GB today and was working through the upgrade process but for some reason my tivo only shows me as having a 32 GB hd even though my bios shows it as being 120 GB I did a mfsinfo on the drive and it shows this

the MFS volume set contains 4 partitions
/dev/hdc10
MFS partition Size: 512MiB
/dev/hdc11
MFS Partition Size: 27661MiB
/dev/hdc12
MFS Partition Size: 0MiB
/dev/hdc13
MFS partition Size: 3560Mib
Total MFS volume size: 31734MiB
Estimated hours in a standalone Tivo: 33
This MFS volume may be expanded 4 more times



Which I know this is wrong what can I do to fix it the drive is reading correctly in the bios so I must just be typing something wrong
Which is wrong

[jwixted]

TorontoSVR said:
ok got a Samsung 120GB today and was working through the upgrade process but for some reason my tivo only shows me as having a 32 GB hd even though my bios shows it as being 120 GB...


I had this problem, and it turned out to be the jumper settings. Make sure you have the drive set to the first picture on the top row of the "installation Guide" - AB+FH. I think it's irrelevant if the BIOS reports the drive correct, you only care if Linux is reporting it correctly. Once Linux boots, scroll backward (<SHIFT>-<PG UP>), what does it report the drive size to be?

[weaknees]

That's right - this is the jumper settings. And just in case it's the next question, no, you can't just switch the jumpers and have the TiVo recognize the extra space. Whatever you did the first time to put the image on the drive, you'll need to do again. If you made a backup, and then restored that, just restore again. If you did a pipe backup|restore, then you need to do all of that again.

Michael

[PeteyBoy23]

Wow, what extensive instructions. Excellent job!

What I'm going to do is upgrade a TiVo 60hr S2 on Friday. I took these steps, and removed what I didn't need (as it didn't apply). I was hoping someone can just peruse these steps quickly, and let me know if I'm missing anything.

The bottom line is that I think my drive is crapping out (yeah, after only 6 months), and I want to transfer all data onto a new(er) 80 or 120gb drive. I don't need to reuse the old drive, and will attempt to get it replaced *crosses fingers*, so I can add it back in, in the future.

I would appreciate your feedback on these specific steps. Thanks a ton!

Here's my steps! (http://www.walkerproconsulting.com/TiVo.doc)

[Still]

I accidently booted my computer into windows XP with both the original TiVo drive and upgrade drive connected. I did this before completing my backup. I then performed a backup correctly, followed the rest of the directions, but after connecting the drives I cannot get by the powering up screen. Is my backup corrupted? If yes what steps can I take to rectify this?

[Robert S]

You need MakeTiVoBootable (http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=117404). The corrupted boot sector will be in your backup too, so you'll either need to make a fresh backup or remember how to use MTB the next time you restore a backup.

[Still]

Can we use MTB even though we have already run the restore expand process in the new and old TiVo (we continued on a diff machine with a different new drive after the mistake was recognized)? Can we still use our original TiVo drive to make a backup with MTB?

[Robert S]

It looks like MTB creates a boot block from scratch rather than copying from somewhere, so it doesn't matter what state your drives are in.

The backup file will be the same which ever disk you make it from.

[Still]

Is it possible to do the backup from a friend's TiVo (it's the same model) and use it on my TiVo? I'm not concerned with my setting or anything.

[Robert S]

As long as it's the same brand, series and type (standalone/dtivo).

[ricl]

Thanks to Hinsdale's how-to and MFS tools.
I had added a 100G hard drive to a sony version 1 with software rev 3 a couple years ago.

When thunderstorms took my modem to bit heaven, it looked like an opportune time to get the 9th tee network card and do the tivo hacks.

Fortunately I MADE a BACKUP(!!!) using MFS tools 2.0. I then installed the network card. In the Sony box, the rubber feet poke thru and keep the network card from sliding on easily. I undid one of the mounting tangs which allowed me to get it on. I then started on the tivo hacks. For some reason, I had problems when initially using the Steve Jenkins Tivohack directions and could not mount the partitions properly. I then found out about the /tivonet directory on MFS tools and tried to use those directions. After a couple of attempts, the script seemed to work and I put the drive into the tivo. I have been bouncing them back and forth for a while and got careless with setting the drive on the mounting bracket. I plugged in and POOF...the drive was toast b/c the pc board in the bottom of the drive had shorted up against the mounting bracket grommet.

After getting my bearings, I decided to use the restore function on the 100G hard drive I had. It worked! Thank the Lord!

I then went back to the Steve Jenkins directions b/c the /tivonet script will not run on a newly restored drive. This time it all worked like clockwork; I have the tivoweb running. After the update, I will make ANOTHER backup to baseline my configuration.

The hacks are GREAT! It is the kind of media network capability convergence I was looking for. It is not without risk, and I share my story to remind everyone to make a BACKUP and be careful with your drives.

ric

[Still]

I have a TiVo model TCD130040 in which I corrupted my backup file by booting while connected to XP. I have a backup file on my computer for a TCD230040 model. I am wondering if I can expand my 40HR original TiVo drive and a new 120GB drive using the TCD230040 settings and then place these in my TCD130040.

[Robert S]

How about using MakeTiVoBootable (http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=117404) to fix the boot block on the drive?

[clherv]

As some might remember, I posted about my upgrade plans for my SAT-T60 about a month ago. I finally found a 120G WD for a good price.

We took the Tivo drive out last night, but could not get the CD to boot. Turns out the CD drive has a bad power connector. It is toast now. I have three other IDE drives that I can borrow from other machines (I wanted to use the burnt drive to justify buying a new one, but...)

I re-read the Hindsdale instructions today, and edited them down to just what I will need.

A nervous question: Which commands have risk that I will damage the original A drive.??? Maybe by putting a 2 where I needed a 1 or something???

Depending on how risky it is, I might have two other family members check each command before I press the enter key.

As a reference, here are the commands I plan to use:

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k
dd conv=noerror,sync if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k
umount -f -a -r (umount not unmount)
mfsrestore -s 127 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb
mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
<<deleted due to redundancey--sorry>>
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda

Thank you.

Kent

[weaknees]

You've got a lot of duplicative commands there - are you sure you'll need them all?

The only problem you'll have about hosing the A drive is if you mis-specify a drive letter in the process.

But first I'd check that list - you could ugprade three different TiVos with what you have there.

Michael

[clherv]

Weaknees,

Thanks for responding.

To answer your question: No, I am not sure that I will need them all. I am not sure what they all do. I do know there is one duplicate: He tells of two ways to do the full backup of the drive. He tells of an MFStools way, and straight Linux OS way. I put them both becuase I can't yet decide which one. I guess you might consider another one a duplicate--the backup that only does only the small backup by compressing all but the show contents. If anyone would not mind explaining them, I would sooo appreciate it. Also, if anyone wants to just tell me the duplicates, that would be welcome too.

I don't know the diference between Hinsdale's instruction's and Tiger's. Should I read his in detail too?

I would really like to understand the commands, but that will require me to learn Linux.
For example, I know what "copy C:\File.txt A:\" means in DOS, but have no idea what the Linux equivalent is. Because I understand the DOS, then I can literally double check the actual meaning of each character before I hit the return key.

Also, I would like a listing of the MFStools commands and their function/structure/parameters. I posted that question on Tiger's thread because I thought that was the appropriate place.

By the way, the plan is to do the compact backup to keep on CD, then do the full backup to the 120G, then keep the CD and the old 40G on the shelf until I desperately need the 40G for some PC thing, in which case I will re-format.

Kent

[Robert S]

You might want to look at Installing Linux and Getting Started (http://www.tldp.org/LDP/gs/node5.html). The installing bit is obsolete now, but the getting started stuff is still good. The MFS Tools boot disk will give you enough Linux to try the examples. (Download Knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) if you want to see what the current version of Linux looks like. Like MFS Tools, Knoppix runs from a boot CD.)

There is a README file on the MFS Tools CD that lists all the MFS Tools commands. There are mistakes in this file (everything it says about swap is wrong, some newer TiVoes need different backup options), so plan your upgrade from Hinsdale rather than any of Tiger's documentation.

I recommand using the MFS Tools pipe (mfsbackup ... | mfsrestore ...) instead of dd to clone the disk as this increases your swap size, which is important if you want to add more disk space later (as this is a Series 1 TiVo you can add a HUGE disk if you want, see page 6 of the 160Gb thread in the Underground).

[clherv]

Thanks.

I will look at that.

[weaknees]

To expand on Robert S's comments, I'll list what you should do to achieve what you want with comments:

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc (assumes the TiVo drive is secondary master - this makes the backup file for your CD)
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdd (I changed the second drive spec to "hdd", so install your new drive at secondary slave - this will copy over everything with your recordings and increase your swap)
umount -f -a -r

That should do it.

Michael

[clherv]

Weaknees,

Thanks,

I just got back to the house, so I will start looking at it all.

Kent

[clherv]

I am reading the Linux tutorial from the link you sent. I am learning and practicing. Thanks.

My goal is to learn enough and practice enough so that I can be sure of which is the "from", and which is the "to"

The below is an extract from Hinsdale's document:

hda - Primary Master

hdb - Primary Slave

hdc - Secondary Master

hdd - Secondary Slave

Question: Is it true that the above is always the Case. This is the reference that Linux always uses??? Means: whatever drive I connect to Sec/Mast will always be referenced on Linux (the copy I have from the MFS Tools CD/floppy) as hdc???

Kent

[Robert S]

Yes, that's a Linux standard. You could change it with mknod or mv, but that would be an unusual thing to do.

Unlike DOS/Windows that designates C:, D:, etc at boot, /dev/hda is a pseudo file called a 'device node' that tells the kernel to access a particular device driver with a particular device code. Therefore /dev/hda points to primary master even if there's no drive connected. (In contrast C: points to the first FAT partition the BIOS can find).

Of course, normally one would never use /dev/hda - it's only used by the plumbing in the OS - and there is no Unix equivalent of C:, there's a single filing system tree that starts at / and other filing systems are mounting into that tree with mount.

[RickHan]

Will these utilities work with a DIshNetworkPVR/DVR 501?
I have a 501 with a 40gb Seagate drive. I have an 80gb Seagate drive.
It didn't recognize the new drive, so I figure I need to format it somehow.
NOTE: THe PVR508 is a 501 with an 80gb drive.....
Any help appreciated..Rick

[Robert S]

This Forum describes upgrading TiVoes. This is not a TiVo.