Help need upgrading hard drives

[NickB]

I know this stuff is out there somewhere but I can't seem to get exactly what I'm after:

I upgraded my TiVo with two 120GB disks around 5/6 years ago and one or both drives have started playing up. So I've got hold of two Samsung HA250JC drives and am looking for a guide to installing them.

I'm aware that there is now a workaround for the 137MB limit but have no idea how to go about it and the Hinsdale guide doesn't seem to address that issue.

I want to preserve all my recordings and I'm guessing that I need to move everything to one of the 250GB drives first (I only have 4 IDE slots available) before adding the second one later.

The TiVo has a Cachecard and I've cleared out all the old deleted recordings so there's around 80GB of data to be moved over.

Can anyone help?

[blindlemon]

If you upgraded directly from a 40gb to 1 or 2 120gb drives then you should be OK. You will, however, have to do a piped backup->restore to the 2 new drives leaving at least 250mb of swap, and then manually rebuild the partition tables before expanding the MFS while booted from the LBA48 Boot CD (http://www,tivoheaven.com/download/ptv-mfstools2-large-disk.iso). Then run copykern to copy the LBA48 kernel and initialise the swap.

Otherwise you may already have 3 partitions on your A drive, in which case you can't expand that unless you use the -f option from the MFSLive beta CD at the same time as doing the restore. That's a problem as you can't boot from the MFSLive CD and have 4 drives in your system if you only have 4 IDE ports.

[NickB]

Thanks Blindlemon

I decided I wasn't THAT wedded to the recordings that I had so I decided to bin them.

I backed up the 2*120GB Maxtors and then restored to one new 250GB Samsung drive. I then ran copykern and shoved the new disk into the TiVo and fired it up.

All seemed well so I ran mfsadd to add-on the second disk and put it all back together. It's now reporting 160-odd hours of best quality :D

I already had a 300MB swapfile and left that as it was, is that sufficient?

Now I need to get the thing doing its nightly update via the network rather than the phone. I had no luck when I tried this a year or so back, but that may be due to being on Virgin/NTL which may have been resolved.

Can I change from phone to network without removing the disks again?

[Benedict]

Can I change from phone to network without removing the disks again?Providing you can Telnet into the TiVo you should be able to run nicconfig remotely to change your daily call preferences.

[blindlemon]

I already had a 300MB swapfile and left that as it was, is that sufficient?
Yes. That's enough for 600gb in theory so you should be fine with 500gb.
Providing you can Telnet into the TiVo you should be able to run nicconfig remotely to change your daily call preferences.Yes, run nic_config_tivo via telnet and choose option 4.

[NickB]

Thanks for the advice guys. I've just made my first daily call via the network.

That's another cable I can remove from the spaghetti behind the TV.

Now, can anyone point me in the direction of a guide to accessing the TiVo from a remote PC?