Can you expand just one of two drives?

[Bryan Crow]

Following the Hinsdale guide, I cloned one of my two drives to a larger drive—from a 40GB Maxtor to a 500GB Seagate. The dd copy works. But I think it’s working despite doing things wrong.

I’m not even sure which HDD is the TiVo A Drive and which is the B. The Seagate is on the right (as you face the TiVo from the front), and a 120GB Maxtor is on the left. This larger Maxtor and the 40GB Maxtor were both installed in a DVR40 by Weaknees (about whom I can’t say enough nice things). After trying almost all other combinations, I got the TiVo working by jumpering the Seagate as Master and the Maxtor as slave (no jumper). Yet it’s the Maxtor that’s cabled as Master with the slave IDE cable position at the Seagate.

Why didn’t I note the way the drives were attached and jumpered before I started? I did, and they were already set up this same way, but here’s the catch: After serving me beautifully since 2003, the Weaknees-modified TiVo quit working. My wife said, “Fix it. Hurry up and fix it.” It proved to be a bad HDD. We had a couple of Series 2 TiVos in the closet that DirecTV declined to have me ship back after sending replacements—TiVos at first but then R15s. I snatched a 40GB Maxtor out of one of these single-drive TiVos and used it to replace the 40GB drive in the Weaknees dual set. It didn’t occur to me that I might be replacing the Weaknees B drive with an A drive. I was in a hurry. And it worked.

OK, it ain’t broke, but I want to get full use from the new 500-gig Seagate. Mfs Tools showed only 137GB for the new drive, even though BIOS showed 500, but an expert I spoke with told me to ignore that discrepancy, go ahead and clone with dd copy, and—once I’d tested the drive in the TiVo—then expand it with Mfsadd.

But as I read Hinsdale about Mfsadd for dual-drive setups, I’m scratching my head. The 500GB clone is already married to the 120GB Maxtor, since the original 40GB HDD was. Doesn’t Mfsadd tell one drive to discover the extra capacity in the other drive? Must you put both working TiVo drives in the computer and expand both? You’d need to be sure which one is the A drive, wouldn’t I? Or could you expand the 500GB Seagate without also expanding the 120GB Maxtor?


Thanks.

Bryan

[BTUx9]

2-drive setups generate more heat, use more power, and are harder to work with (backup/restore/fix).

If it were MY system, I'd try to xfer the 2 drives worth of data to the single 500gb drive. I believe the modified mfstools that's available through mfslive.org may allow you to do this, but never having done so, I don't know how well it works/what the potential problems are (it involves coalescing adjacent mfs partitions).

[robomeister]

The Hinsdale guide is outdated. You need to check out www.mfslive.org. This site has two different tools, a Linux boot CD and a Windows program. Both will upgrade TiVos.

There may be an option to upgrade one of two drives. But as stated before, a two drive system is problematic. It would be easier if you "upgraded" from 2 drives to a single big drive, say a 750GB drive.

Anyway, good luck with mfslive.org

robomeister

[Bryan Crow]

Thanks, BTUx9 and robomeister.

I didn’t make my question clear, but I bet I can just take the cover off another TiVo and figure out the cable and jumper scheme. Since I stuck that 40GB drive from another TiVo into the Weaknees-modified dual-drive job, I was flabbergasted that it worked. I didn’t have to marry it to the B drive or do any mods to either drive, not even to jumpers or cables. But reading Hinsdale and others has confused me. I’m pretty sure the smaller drive was on the right—in front of the power supply. I’m talking about the 40GB drive I replaced with the one from a single-drive TiVo. I assumed it was the A drive, since I figured Weaknees used the one that came with the TiVo they acquired and then upgraded for me.

But did they use the 120GB drive as A and install the original 40-gig drive as B? The gray slave connector was attached to the 40, and the 120 got the black master connector. That lead me to think the little drive was the B, but it was jumpered to serve as master. Master jumper settings and slave IDE cable position. And that’s the way I have it now. Won’t work if the combination of jumpers and cable positions are changed.

Now throw in another clue: That 40 I’d liberated from the junk-pile single-drive TiVo would work by itself before I connected it to the 120. Of course. It worked alone in the junk TiVo. I think it was attached to the motherboard with a short 80-conductor cable with just one connector at the MB and the other at the drive. I’m still amazed I was able to salvage most of my wife’s programs by substituting the borrowed drive for the original. How did the 120 know it was supposed to communicate with the borrowed one? I thought the two drives in a dual-drive setup had to be programmed to work together.

And don’t forget that the current setup is essentially the same—with a 500GB HDD clone of the borrowed 40-gig drivein place of the borrowed drive. Why worry about which is the A and which is the B? I worry that I may have to put both drives in a computer and designate each properly in order to expand the bigger drive. Or can I expand the 500 without regard to the 120—just run Mfsadd on it as if it were the only drive in this TiVo? But I get the impression that at least one function of Mfsadd is to let the other drive in a dual-drive TiVo know there’s extra recording capacity available.

I often feel dumb and often am dumb, but I’m embarrassed to think this shouldn’t be a quandary. I can hear you saying, “What’s this guy asking? It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Not to me.

Bryan

P.S. I’m with you, BTUx9, on the deleterious effects of heat. A closet we built into our new house for electronics gear contains five DVRs, two DVD recorders, VCR, two AM-FM receivers, an Élan house-wide distribution amplifier-PBX-intercom, an MD player, a CD changer, a remote-controlled tape deck, a jukebox computer, lighting and phone ringer controls, and three APC-UPS backups—all controlled by IR via receivers in every room and 13 universal remotes—plus a huge, slow fan to evacuate heat. Whew! What a sentence. Sorry.

My desktop computer has four mechanical hard drives, including two 15,000 rpm SCSI HDDs that run pretty hot, but more heat comes from three Gigabyte iRAM dynamic-memory solid-state hard drive based on 12 1GB sticks of RAM (not counting 4GB of system RAM) and two cooler flash-memory HDDs. I built this system back when AMD’s FX62 was the fastest CPU on the planet, and it’s not so cool itself. This machine started life with lots of noisy fans, but it ran too hot, so I water-cooled four of its components—only to have to tear it down still again and install Koolance cooling blocks for everything. Now it runs between 37° and 41° Celsius. This monster doesn’t reside in World Central (my wife’s epithet for the electronics closet). I mention it only to illustrate how conscious I’ve become of heat in electronic devices.

But about the TiVo, the big ventilation fan keeps World Central at about 72 degrees. I’ve taken further measures for some individual components. The hotter ones rest on steel grids with wide spacing. Since it’s mounted six and a half feet up, I felt safe in removing the cover from the TiVo with the 500GB HDD I also elevated the big hard drive 2” above its other components and placed a quiet squirrel-cage blower beside it, focused the flow onto the HDDs and chassis. I haven’t taken temperatures, because the HDDs feel cool enough, barely warm.

Robomeister, thank you for the link. I just downloaded WinMFS Beta Build 8. With relief, I plan to use the Windows interface to expand the clone. Wish I’d had it at the outset. Did manage to get by on the dd clone, but I wasn’t at all familiar with Linux.

[BTUx9]

If you throw an unmarried drive A in, the tivo will just ignore drive B. Sounds like what you did.

re: drive locations, it's VERY unlikely they would have put the add-on drive in as the primary and moved the 40gb to secondary... the cable colors/locations only matter if cable select is being used (which I also find somewhat unlikely). The jumpers are the only way to truly know.

Heat was only 1 of the reasons I listed for going to back to a single drive system, but, as always, it's really up to you.

[Bryan Crow]

Thanks, BTUx9. You've cleared up the matter.

I was fairly sure the HDDs in the original dual-drive configuration were not jumpered Cable Select. But who knows? Who cares? To me, the most valuable comment you make is that I’d been getting by with just that 40GB A Drive, the one I liberated from another TiVo. I guess the 120-gig drive has been languishing and still is. I’ll marry it to the 500GB A Drive now. The clone of the borrowed I’ll give up and make DVDs of the stuff my wife wants and start all over

I'm not surprised that heat can make trouble in dual-drive TiVos. What’s more, the 500-gig drive really runs hot—especially mounted in the usual A Drive location without the separate B Drive fan. But this bigger drive is mounted outside the case, up in the stream of a cheap, quiet squirrel-cage blower. It sits well above the level of the case cover—if the cover were on. It’s not.