Advanced format drive for a S2 DirecTiVo?

sbourgeo · 07-07-2012, 09:47 AM

Has anyone successfully used one of the Western Digital AV-GP advanced format drives in a Series 2 DirecTiVo? I'm going to attempt to revive a Hughes HDRV2, and I can get a WD10EURX to use with my Rosewill RC-A-SATA-IDE SATA/IDE adapter for about $100. Is this an exercise in futility, and if so, what currently available drive is among the recommended for a Series 2 with LB48-aware 6.4a software?

sbourgeo · 07-08-2012, 12:36 PM

I also have a pair of Hitachi hdt721050sla360 500 GB SATA drives in my spare parts pile. They are not advanced format, but they do run at 7200 RPM with similar power draw numbers to the 2 TB Western Digital WD20EURS I just put in my TiVo HD. I'll probably experiment with those first since I already have them on hand.

lillevig · 07-08-2012, 01:21 PM

If the 500GB drive works I'd just stick with that. It's a lot of hours of SD recording.

sbourgeo · 07-08-2012, 07:57 PM

Yeah, they're the easiest thing to try anyway. I've been going through my supply of disks lately and I've had a bunch of dead soldiers on hand.

CrashHD · 07-08-2012, 10:30 PM

I'm currently testing a WD20EURS drive on a S2 DTivo. I've paid special attention to the number of hoops to jump through to get a full 2TB working on a Series2, and also to keeping the partitions aligned. I have seen some partition tables where the bootstrap partitions are a single sector (512bytes) in size. If that occurs, it looks as though that will cause the rest of the partitions to be misaligned.

Normally, bootstrap partitions are 4kB in size, which results in proper partition alignment.

sbourgeo · 07-09-2012, 07:07 AM

Thanks CrashHD, I have been watching your progress at ddb.

BobCamp1 · 07-09-2012, 01:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CrashHD

I'm currently testing a WD20EURS drive on a S2 DTivo. I've paid special attention to the number of hoops to jump through to get a full 2TB working on a Series2, and also to keeping the partitions aligned. I have seen some partition tables where the bootstrap partitions are a single sector (512bytes) in size. If that occurs, it looks as though that will cause the rest of the partitions to be misaligned.

Normally, bootstrap partitions are 4kB in size, which results in proper partition alignment.

Apple's were typically 800 kB in size, which is 1600 sectors, which still keeps the drive aligned.

CrashHD · 07-09-2012, 04:19 PM

Is that why the bootstrap partitions are there? It's an Apple partition manager thing?

BobCamp1 · 07-10-2012, 09:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CrashHD

Is that why the bootstrap partitions are there? It's an Apple partition manager thing?

I presume the bootstrap partition contains the Linux bootloader. In the old Macs (PowerPC), this is the only partition type that the "BIOS" could load and execute. (The Mac OS would not mount this partition). This bootstrap partition would have some simple program that loaded the kernel from a different partition (or if it had yaboot, allow you to choose which partition to boot from, if you had multiple OSs on one machine).

There was usually only one bootstrap partition, yet Tivo has two. Apparently Tivo designed the box so that even the bootstrap code was upgradeable and counted as part of the image (kind of defeats its purpose, but very flexible).

Since the bootstrap partition contained a very small program, you wanted it as small as possible as unused sectors in that partition would lead to precious wasted space on a 40 MB hard drive. But now we have 2 TB drives, so who cares?

If Tivo balks at increasing the bootstraps' partition sizes, just align the next partition so it starts on an LBA that's a multiple of 8. There will be a tiny amount of unpartitioned (and unused) space, but who cares?