Can you expand an HR10-250 twice or thrice ?

[dwynne]

I have several HR10-250 DirecTV Tivos working. All have upgraded hard drives - the original drive to something larger or a BAK file (of an OEM drive) to something larger. I will be doing a full copy of everything including shows.

I want to upgrade some of them to even larger drives. Seems like I remember there being a bug or issues with expanding more than one time.

Is that correct? Most of these were done with spike's updated MFSTools in the last year or two, but maybe not all.

If there is an issue with trying to expand and already expanded drive, how to tell before I buy the new drive(s) and try it?

Thanks,
Dennis

[classicsat]

"Naturally", there is only one chance for expansion, as there is only enough partition entries for one more pair. There are ways/tools to coalesce partitions so you can expand again.

To see if you have available partition entries you sie pdisk -l /dec/hdx where x is the unix drive letter, on the MFStools CD. partitions 13/14/15 should be free, the last one labeled apple free.

[dwynne]

Thanks for the reply. I am pretty sure my expanded drives are going to have 13-15 in use - otherwise they could not have been expanded - right?

In the FAQ over on MFSLive:

To save recordings and expand Single drive setup:

Series 1 Standalone (2x)
Series 1 Standalone UK (2x)
Series 1 DTV (1x)
Series 2 & Series 3 standalone & Dtv (1x)

Using mfslive beta w/ restore -f option
more than 10x depending on how big your drive is and what r value you use.

That shows the 1x expansion limitation using the standard tools. The -f option was added to the beta tools from MFSLive to handle the re-sizing and copying of the shows to the new (and larger) partitions. Too bad the beta is not available nor is the -f option available in the released version of the tools. However, it IS supposed to be in the Windoze version of the software - WinMFS. I would prefer to use LINUX as normal, but I have Windoze machines so I can use the newer tool.

I ordered a new drive for one of my upgraded HR10s, I will see how it goes once I get it in and have a chance to try the copy.

Dennis