Hinsdale 2 drives to 1 - help

[RedMan8]

A few years ago, I added a hard drive to my TiVo (Series 2 54xxx40), giving
it a total of about 250 gigs.

Yesterday, the picture froze and one of the drives started making a strange
noise. It wasn't quite as bad as the grinding noise I have heard in the
past inside a PC, but it was definitely a bad sound. I unplugged the TiVo,
waited a few seconds and plugged it back in. It booted up fine and there is
no more noise, but I decided to get a new hard drive anyway.

So I just ordered a 750 gig blank drive. It's big enough to fit everything
and it will be nice to have just one drive to worry about.

After reading the instructions on the Hinsdale How-To site:
http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html

I noticed a small gotcha. It says you can't copy the whole drive with
recordings from a dual-drive to a single drive because it won't allow any
more partitions to be created. Essentially, the new single drive would only
be recognized as the original 250 gigs and there is no way to expand that
any further.

What about the MFSLive method... does that do what I need?

heeeeeelp!
:)

[classicsat]

The regular MFSLive uses standard MFS tools, so will be of no real help.

You might want a special beta version of MFS Live, which has the capability to merge partitions.

[rbtravis]

Go to www.MFSlive.org download and run winMFS beta. It must be run on Windows XP version 2.0 or greater. It may do what you want. Good Luck :)

[RedMan8]

Wonderful, thanks!
I'll read up on it, but I thought windows xp writes something to the TiVo drives that was very bad?

More learning to do!
Woo Hoo!

[RedMan8]

I started a thread over there:
http://www.mfslive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=864&p=4372#p4372

And here is what I think I decided... let me know if you see anything that doesn't make sense...

Make simple backup file, just in case:

hda - Windows C drive - Primary Master
hdb - Existing B - Primary Slave
hdc - Existing A - Secondary Master
hdd - CD-ROM - Secondary Slave

- Boot from CD (CD is always the mfslive linux cd)
- Verify drive attachments (shift-page up)
- Mount the windows drive:
mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
- Backup to a file on the windows drive:
mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb
- unMount the windows drive:
umount -f -a -r
- Shut down (ctrl-alt-del)


Make real copy to new drive:

hda - Existing A - Primary Master
hdb - Existing B - Primary Slave
hdc - New A - Secondary Master
hdd - CDRom - Secondary Slave

- Boot from CD
- Verify drive attachments (shift-page up)
- Backup and Restore to new drive:
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -zi - /dev/hdc
- Shut down (ctrl-alt-del)

Expand new drive to fill capacity:
hda - Windows C drive - Primary Master
hdb - New A - Primary Slave
hdc - empty - Secondary Master
hdd - CD-ROM - Secondary Slave

- Boot into windows
- Open WinMFS
- Click "Tools --> Mfsadd"
- Shut Down
- Put new HD in TiVo and enjoy!