Drive Replacement...

[bluewomble]

My TiVo has recently been displaying signs that one or both of it's disks are failing (jumpy audio and skipped video frames, etc.).

I currently have 2 120Gb disks in it and would like to upgrade to a single disk (of at least 240Gb).

What is the current recommended disk to put in?

Is it possible to do the upgrade and keep all my recordings?

Also, can someone point me in the direction of the best current howto document -- I was looking at Hinsdale, but it seems a bit out of date because it doesn't mention things like the LBA48 hack, etc.

Thanks for your help,
Ash.

[blindlemon]

Hi Ash - welcome to the forum :)

Going from 2x120gb to 1x240gb and keeping your recordings should be possible as long as your current total MFS partitions are less than 4. If you upgraded from a single 40gb drive directly to 2x120gb then this should be the case as you will now have two partitions on your A drive and one on your B drive. Any other configuration will be problematic and it may be impossible to keep your recordings.

My recommended drive would most definitely be a Samsung HA250JC - this is by far the best drive for TiVo upgrades IMHO as it is 5400rpm so is very quiet, virtually vibration free and very cool running. It is also easily the most reliable drive I've ever sold for TiVos!

In the scenario I mentioned above, you would not normally be able to expand the MFS set, so you would be "wasting" 10gb - but this is hardly worth worrying about as it only equates to about 3 hours at standard "best" quality.

To copy everything to an HA250JC you will need to boot from the LBA48 CD (http://www.tivoheaven.com/download/ptv-mfstools2-large-disk.iso) and use a command line similar to the following:-

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdX /dev/hdY | mfsrestore -s 300 -r4 -zpi - /dev/hdZ

where hdX and hdY are your source drives and hdZ is your target. Then run copykern selecting hdZ and kernel option 1 to copy the LBA48 kernel and initialise the swap.

If you want more detailed instructions, the following howto is widely recommended for upgrades above 137gb these days:-
http://www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/upgrade3.html

[bluewomble]

That's great. Thanks!

What if I want bigger than 240Gb... is there an equivalent drive in 400Gb or 500Gb? Is it a good idea to increase capacity to this size?

Any ideas where I can get any of the Samsung 5400rpm drives? They don;t seem to be stocked in any of the places that I usually look online -- I guess they are quite old...

Thanks,
Ash.

[blindlemon]

If you want more space you could add a 2nd HA250JC for 500gb :)

Without a cachecard + RAM you will almost certainly start to see significant slowdowns in menu responses with 500gb though...

Samsung only ever made these drives in 200gb and 250gb AFAIK. Possible larger alternatives might be something like the WD Green Power drives, but these are SATA so you will need an IDE/SATA converter for use in the TiVo and a system that has a spare SATA port or will accept your converter to configure them.

Try www.ultratec.co.uk for bare drives. The HA250JCs are not cheap compared to other 250gb drives :eek: but are well worth the extra IMHO :up:

[bluewomble]

Cool... maybe I'll stick with 1 samsung drive then.

How do I find out how many mfs partitions I have? Can I do that by telnet'ing to my TiVo?

Thanks for your help,
Ash.

[blindlemon]

In your kernel log after a reboot look for a few lines like the following:-
Jan 1 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Partition check:
Jan 1 00:00:41 (none) kernel: hda:Started kswapd v 1.12
Jan 1 00:00:41 (none) kernel: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 hda10 hda11 hda12 hda13 hda14 If the last partition listed is hda14 (as here) then you have two MFS parittions in use and can expand the MFS set one more time with a single drive; if it's hda16 then you have 3 MFS partitions in use and the set cannot be expanded without dropping recordings, adding a second drive or using the -f option from the beta version of the MFSLive CD (which is not guaranteed to work).

[bluewomble]

Cool, thanks, I guess I must be ok then...

Jan 1 00:03:19 (none) kernel: Partition check:
Jan 1 00:03:19 (none) kernel: hda:Started kswapd v 1.12
Jan 1 00:03:19 (none) kernel: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 hda10 hda11 hda12 hda13 hda14
Jan 1 00:03:19 (none) kernel: hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3 hdb4 hdb5 hdb6
Jan 1 00:03:19 (none) kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.


Thanks for your help... I've ordered a drive from Ultratec, so hopefully that'll fix all my problems!

Thanks again,
Ash.

[Pete77]

The HA250JCs are now very pricey per Gb now but as blindlemon says they appear very reliable and are very quiet and cool.

I have had two of them for 33 months now and they are still going strong (says he touching wood and crossing fingers), whereas there seem to have been reports of quite a few more failure of the larger 400Gb Samsung HDLD disk in this forum.

At one stage I was thinking of upgrading to a WD Green Power 1TB so I could have 350 hours or so at Mode 0 but with the onward push of HD television I can see I am going to have consider getting an HD television and some recording device that works with that in the next year to 18 months or so.:(:o

[bluewomble]

Right, I've got my new drive and the old drives in my PC, but I'm having some problems...

All the drives are found by the PC, and I've managed to do a small divorced backup to my PC's drive.

But when I try to do the big piped backup/restore, I get an error saying that the target disk is not big enough.

I've currently got 2 x 120Gb disks, which are both recognized as 120034MB by the linux kernel boot process. The new drive is a Samsung, which is reported to have 250059MB.

I'm using the following command to do the backup/restore (to keep all my recordings)

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hde /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 300 -r4 -zpi - /dev/hdh

My old TiVo A drive is on hde, old TiVo B drive on hdb and new empty drive on hdh.

I get the following message:

Scanning source drive. Please wait a moment.
Source drive size is 39 hours
- upgraded to 127 hours
- upgraded to 175 hours
- upgraded to 270 hours
Uncompressed backup size: 218499 megabytes
Restore failed: Bckup target not large enough for entire backup by itself.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ash.

[bluewomble]

Arrrggg I'm having a bit of a nightmare here... I thought I would give on the upgrade for now (until I can fix the above problem) and put the 2 original drives back in, but they no longer seem to work -- I suspect I have some jumper settings wrong somewhere... currently I have:

B drive closest to the motherboard, A drive closest to the power supply.
A drive jumpered to master, B drive with no jumpers (which is slave).

When I power up, the cachecard starts it's process (writing, verifying, caching) and then it displays the "Almost there..." screen, then reboots and goes back to caching again.

Does anyone know what I've done wrong?

Thanks,
Ash.

[blindlemon]

You will not be able to transfer your recordings to one drive because you have two MFS partitions on the A drive and three on the B drive!

I suspect that tinkering with your drives to back them up may have exacerbated the corruption you already had.

As you managed to get a small divorced backup, you should be able to use that to configure your new drive, although you will lose your recordings.

[bluewomble]

I tried to restore the small backup image to the new drive, but I get exactly the same error message as when trying to do the full backup/restore.

[blindlemon]

Ah, then it's not a divorced backup.

[bluewomble]

Ah, ok... I thought that was the point of the small backup...

How do I make a divorced backup then?

[blindlemon]

Sorry - I was answering on the move last night. Here's a fuller explanation.

A divorced backup is always a small backup because it discards the extra MFS partittions. However, the "-l32" parameter required to retain the backgrounds for search by title etc. in a UK TiVo backup can also sometimes retain small recording streams less than 32mb in the additional MFS partitions. Any partition in which a stream is retained must be included in the backup - hence the problem of backups which won't 'divorce'.

To force backups to divorce in these circumstances I normally run my DeleteAll script (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=4658244#post4658244) via telnet to clear out all recordings, including those in the "deleted" bin. If your TiVo would boot OK then this would be the way to go.

However, it sounds as if your MFS is corrupt, forcing the reboot cycle, so I would suggest trying either mfsassert -please from the bash prompt (if you can get one for long enough before it reboots) or a kickstart 58 to force a GSOD and hopefully clean up the MFS enought to allow the TiVo to boot so that you can then run DeleteAll before redoing the backup.

The other possible cause of your reboots just at the end of a restart is that your PSU has aged to the point where it can no longer cope with the power demands of this stage of the startup cycle. This is rare, but it does happen, and usually manifests itself as a predictable reboot just about when you would expect to see the "man on a slide" video.

[bluewomble]

So does that mean that to restore the backup I have made I need to restore to 2 disks?

I might try to boot up into the cachecard install cd (which does the byteswapping thing) and see if I can mount the tivo partition and get anything useful from the logs.

Does mfsassert -please trigger a GSOD?

Thanks,
Ash.

[bluewomble]

Also, are my jumper settings correct? I forgot to look at them when I pulled the drives ;-)

I'm using A drive on the end of the cable, jumpered to master, B drive on the middle of the cable, jumpered to slave.

Thanks,
Ash.

[blindlemon]

So does that mean that to restore the backup I have made I need to restore to 2 disks?

Does mfsassert -please trigger a GSOD?

Also, are my jumper settings correct? I'm using A drive on the end of the cable, jumpered to master, B drive on the middle of the cable, jumpered to slave.Yes, yes and yes :)

[bluewomble]

Great, thanks.

In an effort to see if I could get something working, I did a dd copy of the old A drive (which I think is the older of the two) to the new 250Gb samsung.

I've now put the Samsung drive into TiVo with the old B drive and started it up. I've got the Green Screen Of Death (the first I've ever seen). What are the chances of it recovering from this stage? How long does it normally take to complete?

Assuming it recovers from here, if I get another Samsung disk, then I guess I can do a dd copy of the old B drive to get a working TiVo (with recordings) the same size as before. Would I be able to mfsadd again to make use of the extra space (again, keeping recordings?), or would I need to loose recordings to use all the extra space?

Thanks ever so much for all your help,
Ash.

Update: The GSOD has finished and TiVo has just rebooted... and come back to life! Hurrah!

[bluewomble]

I'm going to stick with a 2 drive setup, as that seems easier, so I've ordered another Samsung and I'll do a dd style copy of my old B drive to replace it.

Given how many partitions I have, will I be able to expand the new drives to take advantage of the extra 260Gb (keeping recordings), or will I just have to make do with 240Gb? What command would I use?

I'm assuming that if I'm happy to delete all my recordings, then I should pull the drives, use your DeleteAll script to remove all the recording streams, then do a backup (which should give a divorced backup) then restore the divorced backup to the 2 drives to make use of the space?

Thanks,
Ash.

[bluewomble]

Ok, so I've copied both my old 120Gb disks onto new 250Gb Samsungs using dd.

Have I got enough partitions left to expand again (to make use of the unused 260Gb of disk) using the same 2 disks and keeping recordings? The last partition on my A drive is hda14 and the last one on my B drive is hdb6 (which I guess means that I have 3 pairs of mfs partitions on each disk).

I was thinking of doing this:
1. Put both new drives in my PC and make a small backup again.
2. Run mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hdc /dev/hdb (assuming new A drive is hdc and new B drive is hdb)
3. Run copykern to get the lba48 kernel.

Is this likely to work? I don't want to try it and break my TiVo again (my wife would kill me!)

Thanks for your help,
Ash.