Premiere Drive Upgrade Instructions - with all-in-one jmfs Live CD

[unitron]

Originally Posted by Guy Kuo

Yes, do as Unitron instructs.

320GB ---> intermediate 1TB drive via winMFS with swap carefully adjusted to avoid creating an extraneous AppleFree partition. Let winMFS expand to fill the 1TB drive.

You should end up with a 1TB that uses its entire capacity but does not have an AppleFree partition. If you do see an AppleFree partition on the 1TB, redo the 320GB ---> 1TB via winMFS but adjust the swap size to "use up" what would become the extraneous AppleFree partition.

Take the 1TB drive and copy / expand via JMFS to the 2 TB drive.


Unitron's 2 step process ensures that you keep all the created partitions below the 1TB limit in the TiVo disk drivers. This differs from the process in the first post of this thread which goes from 320 straight to 2GB. That creates a whopping 1.7 TB partition that may initially appear to work, but likely will become unstable once the system writes beyond 1TB in the big partition. Crashes, reboots, or possibly just overwriting of older shows despite them appearing to remain in My Shows listing.

Unitron's 2 step method might save a lot of grief. I think it is worth doing it his way unless you somehow have specific knowledge that TiVo has rewritten its disk drivers to properly address partitions greater than 1TB. Nobody on the web seems to be reporting such an updated was made by TiVo.

Thank you for the vote of confidence, but just for the record the big swap size is to get a big swap size.

(don't know for sure if it's necessary, but better to have it and not need it than the other way around. Like I say, cheap insurance)

I think that, unlike MFS Live, WinMFS will make sure not to leave any extra space when expanding, and it will do so even if you don't specify a swap size different from the one on the source drive.

I tried MFS Live with swap sizes in a number of different sizes slightly above or slightly below 1,000 MB and it stubbornly insisted on leaving a little-bitty Apple Free partion no matter what.

[Guy Kuo]

Thanks for clarifying that point.

BTW, my S3 --> 2TB via your method has now successfully filled its entire capacity AND the oldest recordings do not appear to be corrupted by the newest ones. That suggests the file system is happy.

I don't understand why we are not hearing reports of problems after more than 1TB is written on the non-XL Premieres. Those who went direct from 320GB to 2TB ended up with a 1.7 TB partition via JMFS.

It just takes a long time to actually fill a 2TB drive with recordings and then go back and verify the oldest ones are actually intact.

[Wiked]

Ok well when I get time after all these shows transfer (will take days) then I will do the process.

This partition map was from the straight copy from a 320GB>>2TB and since it only has 14 partitions would it be ok?

If I have to do the process you outlined above with all 3 TiVo's then I will have to use the same 1TB HDD as the intermediary drive in the sequence which isn't a drama.

Thanks

Partition Maps
#: type name length base ( size )
1 Apple_partition_map Apple 63@1 ( 31.5K)
2 Image Bootstrap 1 1@171920054 ( 512.0 )
3 Image Kernel 1 8192@171920055 ( 4.0M)
4 Ext2 Root 1 524288@171928247 ( 256.0M)
5 Image Bootstrap 2 1@172452535 ( 512.0 )
6 Image Kernel 2 8192@172452536 ( 4.0M)
7 Ext2 Root 2 524288@172460728 ( 256.0M)
8 Swap Linux swap 262144@172985016 ( 128.0M)
9 Ext2 /var 524288@173247160 ( 256.0M)
10 MFS MFS application region 589824@173771448 ( 288.0M)
11 MFS MFS media region 137630712@174951096 ( 65.6G)
12 MFS MFS application region 2 589824@174361272 ( 288.0M)
13 MFS MFS media region 2 171919990@64 ( 82.0G)
14 MFS MFS media region 3 3594447360@312581808 ( 1.7T)

[unitron]

Originally Posted by Wiked

Ok well when I get time after all these shows transfer (will take days) then I will do the process.

This partition map was from the straight copy from a 320GB>>2TB and since it only has 14 partitions would it be ok?

If I have to do the process you outlined above with all 3 TiVo's then I will have to use the same 1TB HDD as the intermediary drive in the sequence which isn't a drama.

Thanks

There's a thread in the S3 forum on using jmfs on the S3 HD (and S3 HD XL), and since you've got Series 3 platform machines and not Series 4, you should probably be over there seeing if anyone has reported long term success with a partition larger than 1TB (or 1.2TB, depending on how you measure).

[Tivoitis]

I started the thread for Tivo HD's and haven't had any issues with a 1.7TB partition:

Partition Maps
 #:                  type name                            length base      ( size  )
  1   Apple_partition_map Apple                               63@1         (  31.5K)
  2                 Image Bootstrap 1                          1@171920054 ( 512.0 )
  3                 Image Kernel 1                          8192@171920055 (   4.0M)
  4                  Ext2 Root 1                          524288@171928247 ( 256.0M)
  5                 Image Bootstrap 2                          1@172452535 ( 512.0 )
  6                 Image Kernel 2                          8192@172452536 (   4.0M)
  7                  Ext2 Root 2                          524288@172460728 ( 256.0M)
  8                  Swap Linux swap                      262144@172985016 ( 128.0M)
  9                  Ext2 /var                            524288@173247160 ( 256.0M)
 10                   MFS MFS application region          589824@173771448 ( 288.0M)
 11                   MFS MFS media region             137630712@174951096 (  65.6G)
 12                   MFS MFS application region 2        589824@174361272 ( 288.0M)
 13                   MFS MFS media region 2           171919990@64        (  82.0G)
 14                   MFS MFS media region 3          3594447360@312581808 (   1.7T)

I made sure to fill up the drive during my first week, taping shows all day long, until I was convinced that there was no issue with any of my existing shows and that the deletes fell off properly. I've been running with 2TB drives in my Tivo HD's since 12/2010.

[Guy Kuo]

Interesting.... maybe TiVo silently updated their disk software drivers to handle the big partitions. Not a bad thing if they did.

[Wiked]

Tivoitis,
I am recording all the time on the first one I did to see how it goes. I will be nearly full within 24hrs as I transferred over many movies to it so I will see how it goes too and let you all know the outcome.

[Wiked]

Unitron,

Ok I did the TiVo your way yesterday so I will see how it goes.
The first TiVo I did was straight from 320GB>>2TB and I have filled it up with recordings and it's going great also.

If I have any issues with either way I will report them here for you guys.

[unitron]

Originally Posted by Wiked

Unitron,

Ok I did the TiVo your way yesterday so I will see how it goes.
The first TiVo I did was straight from 320GB>>2TB and I have filled it up with recordings and it's going great also.

If I have any issues with either way I will report them here for you guys.

Thanks for the data points.

[Cap'n Preshoot]

Originally Posted by kturcotte

Any SATA hard drive will work. Western Digital seems to be the preferred brand though, especially those in the A/V DVR line.

Though a fairly old post, I think this maybe needs to be reiterated from time to time. For TIVO drive upgrades your best drive will be one rated for AV (video) usage. True that any drive will work, but the advantage of one designed for A/V is it will continue writing in spite of any errors encountered. I'd much rather have a momentary blip than a huge 30~45 second gap while a non-AV drive tries to perform error recovery.

Just my 2¢ worth.

[BobCamp1]

Originally Posted by Cap'n Preshoot

Though a fairly old post, I think this maybe needs to be reiterated from time to time. For TIVO drive upgrades your best drive will be one rated for AV (video) usage. True that any drive will work, but the advantage of one designed for A/V is it will continue writing in spite of any errors encountered. I'd much rather have a momentary blip than a huge 30~45 second gap while a non-AV drive tries to perform error recovery.

Just my 2¢ worth.

Then why doesn't Tivo use such a drive in their DVR?

You aren't going to have such a blip very often. If you're having one more than once every three months, your hard drive is circling the drain. Honestly though, you should never see such a blip in a healthy hard drive.

Besides, what if that sector was where the OS was? Wouldn't you want the hard drive to try really hard to boot so you can watch or transfer the shows?

The other tweaks in the A/V hard drive firmware are very minor in nature, and don't yield any benefits except looking good on a datasheet. All hard drives are rated for 24/7 use. You're just paying for the longer warranty for the A/V drive.

[dwalke85]

New to upgrade

I was able to boot up jmfs and did the whole copy thing but at about 39 gb the program stops and tells me that it did not copy.

I tried to get the log.log but I did not have permission.

I am going from original HD to 2 Tb wd ears

I did try on another computer with the same results.

Any ideas.

Thanks

[lessd]

Originally Posted by dwalke85

New to upgrade

I was able to boot up jmfs and did the whole copy thing but at about 39 gb the program stops and tells me that it did not copy.

I tried to get the log.log but I did not have permission.

I am going from original HD to 2 Tb wd ears

I did try on another computer with the same results.

Any ideas.

Thanks

I had a similar problem once, solves it by a program that did what was called a full low level format on the drive (I think the program is Max Blast ISO)

[unitron]

Originally Posted by lessd

I had a similar problem once, solves it by a program that did what was called a full low level format on the drive (I think the program is Max Blast ISO)

Just be sure to do that to the target drive, and not to the source drive, since it writes zeros to the entire drive and you don't want to erase your source.

Also, since the stock drive in a Premiere is, if I'm not mistaken, a Western Digital, and the EARS is also WD, Maxtor software is probably not the thing to use on either.

You can download an image for a bootable cd from the WD site that has their diagnostic software on it, and run the long test on both drives, and run the "write zeros to the drive" utility only on the EARS.

Check the documentation on the jumper settings for the EARS, and see if there's one for turning on or off advanced format and if there's one to set whether the drive is 1.5Gb/s or 3 or 6 and see what the original drive is and match it.

Remember, do not boot into Windows with the original Premiere drive attached to the computer!!!

[CoxInPHX]

Originally Posted by BobCamp1

Then why doesn't Tivo use such a drive in their DVR?

Every Premiere I have seen DOES have a WD AV/GP HDD installed as stock equipment.
TCD746320 Premiere - WD3200AVVS

TCD746500 Premiere - WD5000AVDS

TCD748000 Premiere XL - WD10EVDS or WD10EURS

TCD758250 Premiere Elite/XL4 - WD20EURS

[lessd]

Originally Posted by unitron

Just be sure to do that to the target drive, and not to the source drive, since it writes zeros to the entire drive and you don't want to erase your source.

Also, since the stock drive in a Premiere is, if I'm not mistaken, a Western Digital, and the EARS is also WD, Maxtor software is probably not the thing to use on either.

You can download an image for a bootable cd from the WD site that has their diagnostic software on it, and run the long test on both drives, and run the "write zeros to the drive" utility only on the EARS.

Check the documentation on the jumper settings for the EARS, and see if there's one for turning on or off advanced format and if there's one to set whether the drive is 1.5Gb/s or 3 or 6 and see what the original drive is and match it.

Remember, do not boot into Windows with the original Premiere drive attached to the computer!!!

The Max Blast works on any drive, but you sure don't want to zero out the original drive.
You can boot any TiVo drive into Windows XP or newer as long as you don't use the windows drive service, Windows just will not see the drive. WinMFT requires you to boot into Windows to run the software.

[unitron]

Originally Posted by lessd

The Max Blast works on any drive, but you sure don't want to zero out the original drive.
You can boot any TiVo drive into Windows XP or newer as long as you don't use the windows drive service, Windows just will not see the drive. WinMFT requires you to boot into Windows to run the software.

People have reported here that they booted into Windows to take a look at their Premiere drive with WinMFS, and when they put the drive back in the TiVo, it wouldn't TiVo no mo'.

Better safe than sorry.

[lroscoe19]

Originally Posted by L David Matheny

I've heard of situations where you must use a CD and not a DVD. I can't remember whether that was only when burning firmware to be read by a DVD player (or whatever), or whether it could also apply to an .ISO image that is to be booted by a computer. If you can get your hands on a CD-R, try that.

I've tried using the CD-R & get the same results as with the DVD-R. Was wondering if someone could help with I'm having with trying to upgrade my Premiere to a 2TB drive. Using a JMFS Live DVD, I'm getting a "loading/boot/vmilinuz"...then a "loading/boot/initrd.gz" message...before the computer reboots. This happens over & over again. Any ideas on what I can do? Thanks.

[lessd]

Originally Posted by unitron

People have reported here that they booted into Windows to take a look at their Premiere drive with WinMFS, and when they put the drive back in the TiVo, it wouldn't TiVo no mo'.

Better safe than sorry.

Some of the older Windows installation would come up with a window asking you if you want to ready a new drive, answering yes to that question kill the drive for TiVo. Newer versions of windows (Vista and Win 7) will not have such a window, so you can't bonk the drive by just booting into Windows.

[unitron]

Originally Posted by lessd

Some of the older Windows installation would come up with a window asking you if you want to ready a new drive, answering yes to that question kill the drive for TiVo. Newer versions of windows (Vista and Win 7) will not have such a window, so you can't bonk the drive by just booting into Windows.

I'm talking about looking at it with WinMFS, probably mfsinfo specifically.

Why this would cause problems I don't know, as you'd think it would be a read-only operation, but people have reported it happening to them right here on this website.

Spike isn't going to guarantee that WinMFS won't bork a Premiere drive.

TiVo isn't going to guarantee it.

Microsoft isn't going to guarantee it.

Considering that the only way currently known to fix the problem is get hold of another Premiere drive and overwrite it, my advice is better safe than sorry.


Apparently you can boot into Linux with the MFS Live cd, v1.4, and use

pdisk -l

to look at the Premiere's partition map safely, but since

mfsinfo

on that cd is going to return an error message on a Premiere drive, there's no point in risking even that.

[BobCamp1]

Originally Posted by CoxInPHX

Every Premiere I have seen DOES have a WD AV/GP HDD installed as stock equipment.
TCD746320 Premiere - WD3200AVVS

TCD746500 Premiere - WD5000AVDS

TCD748000 Premiere XL - WD10EVDS or WD10EURS

TCD758250 Premiere Elite/XL4 - WD20EURS

I stand corrected for the Premieres! But their previous models did not utilize A/V drives.

Actually, looking through the data sheets for WD, it looks like all new low RPM drives are now also being marketed as "A/V" drives or have an A/V counterpart. The data sheets for the green drive vs. their A/V brothers look identical but the A/V drives are $5 - $10 more expensive. The warranties are also the same -- 3 years.

Interestingly, there are 3 TB A/V drives even though no DVR can actually use them. So I guess they're trying to sell them to people who edit movies at home.

Since A/V drives aren't as big a rip-off as they were before, I don't consider anyone who buys one a complete idiot. Not like those people who use synthetic motor oil.

[lessd]

Originally Posted by unitron

I'm talking about looking at it with WinMFS, probably mfsinfo specifically.

Why this would cause problems I don't know, as you'd think it would be a read-only operation, but people have reported it happening to them right here on this website.

Spike isn't going to guarantee that WinMFS won't bork a Premiere drive.

TiVo isn't going to guarantee it.

Microsoft isn't going to guarantee it.

Considering that the only way currently known to fix the problem is get hold of another Premiere drive and overwrite it, my advice is better safe than sorry.


Apparently you can boot into Linux with the MFS Live cd, v1.4, and use

pdisk -l

to look at the Premiere's partition map safely, but since

mfsinfo

on that cd is going to return an error message on a Premiere drive, there's no point in risking even that.

WinMFS is not totally compatible with the TP, but just looking at the drive with WinMFS will not bork the drive, people that have reported WinMFS borking the TP drive may have done something they should not have done, or did not realize they should not have done like super size a standard TP drive, that just a guess on my part.
You are correct that if you not sure what your doing with any TiVo drive not connecting it to any computer is safe from borking the drive, I know that some computer motherboards (at least one that has been reported) can bork a TiVo drive in the boot process.

[unitron]

Originally Posted by lessd

WinMFS is not totally compatible with the TP, but just looking at the drive with WinMFS will not bork the drive, people that have reported WinMFS borking the TP drive may have done something they should not have done, or did not realize they should not have done like super size a standard TP drive, that just a guess on my part.
You are correct that if you not sure what your doing with any TiVo drive not connecting it to any computer is safe from borking the drive, I know that some computer motherboards (at least one that has been reported) can bork a TiVo drive in the boot process.

At least one brand of motherboard, GigaByte

[dwalke85]

Originally Posted by lessd

I had a similar problem once, solves it by a program that did what was called a full low level format on the drive (I think the program is Max Blast ISO)

Thanks for the help.

I used the WD tools to check the drive and after a few hours the drive came up with Bad sectors. So I will have to return.

[dameongreen]

simple and flawless tut.
Thanks!

[True Colors]

Is there any way to use a 3TB drive into any HD Tivo?

Thanks,

TC

[lessd]

Originally Posted by True Colors

Is there any way to use a 3TB drive into any HD Tivo?

Thanks,

TC

No, they will not boot on any TiVo even with just a direct copy no expansion as the format of any drive above 2.2Tb is different and TiVo does not recognize it.

[alyssa]

No one except Weaknees & DVR_Dude has figured out how to marry and external to a Elite (XL4) yet?

as a data point, DVR_Dude charges $50 plus $10 shipping to do the pairing. You supply the hdd's & the external case.

[irepoder]

Thanks Comer,

I was able to recover a corrupted premiere hdd by using your software to copy a friends hdd, then after using it for a week, upgraded to a 1tb WD10EADS. All functions working flawlessly. Excellent program!

[guammm17]

Can you use this method to downgrade drive size (if you delete all the material off the original premiere drive)? I would like to try to put an SSD in mine but cant afford anything above 256 GB, and I don't really care that much about space, as I have it networked to a computer with over 2TB in the other room. Just trying to cut down on noise in the bedroom, it drives my lady nuts. I assume this wont work, but figured I'd ask since I couldn't seem to find any info on it elsewhere.