Two drives to one?

[gcimmino]

Howdy folks. It's been a year since I was last here and not sure how long since I last did an upgrade..

Anyway, been hearing some noises out of one of our S2 boxes and while I haven't checked to see if its a drive or fan, I have a question to ask about possible recovery:

The S2 box had the original drive replaced by two larger drives. I used mfstools back in the day.

Now I'd like to replace the two existing drives with a single large drive *and* preserve the content on the drives.

Has the state of the tools progressed to the point where that's possible now? Some posts from about a year and a half ago suggest not, but things change.

Of course, if this is possible, any pointers to tools and docs would be appreciated.

Thanks

[SamRoza]

The Hinsdale FAQ indicates that this is possible, and I was planning on going from 2 drives (original 40 + 80), to one big one (320).

Are there problems with using MFStools to do this?

Please let me know.

[SamRoza]

Actually, it amy not work. That puts a crimp in my plan.

I had planned on going away from the dual disk setup and getting it onto one single disk. I figured it would help with heat and power, and it's almost 3 times as much space.

I used mfstools last time, and had planned on doing the same this time. Is there any way around this "not enough partitions" issue?

[wscannell]

Visit mfslive.org. You should be able to do this, but you may need the beta version of mfslive. Look for the -f option. There is help available on the site.

[SamRoza]

I had looked at the site and the guide and it seems pretty wishy-washy. It appeared to be doable, but then it looked like Spike said the best option was to copy only settings, and that confused the matter.

I've opened up a thread with the question on his forum and have not yet received an answer.

Thanks.

Sam

[rhfritz]

Sam, I'm here because this evening I'm doing this 2->1 upgrade via the Hidsdale guide. And I'm having problems.

Like you, years ago I did the 1->2 on my S2. Now I'd like to go back. I did the simple backup step per the instructions, but when I restored the backup and booted, the Tivo got to "Almost There" and then gave me this message about a "Serious Problem" requiring 3 hrs to fix. I ignored it figuring it was because the old 2nd disk was present. Anyway, I then followed it with the long copy procedure designed to preserve shows. My original S2 was a 40gb to which I added a 60gb. I'm attempting to replace with a single 120gb and mfsrestore tells me the destination isn't large enough.

I tried using the simple/short mfsrestore again (no shows) and put the disk into a different S2 I picked up for test purposes. I got the Serious Problem message again and let it do the repair. The test disk now spends time in Almost There before rebooting.