Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ

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InstantCake. Hitachi drive

 

OK, that's good. Hmm, I don't know of any issues with using a Hitachi drive other than the noise...

Anyone else out there seen this?

Randy

 

How long did you wait on the "Almost there" screen?
I would give about 10 mins before giving up.

This has happened to me with a 2TB Hitachi drive in my XL. Usually another hard power cycle would bring it up. Once it is working, I don't seem to have any issues including soft reboots.

 

I gave it nearly 30 minutes.

 

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Sorry for asking a dumb question, but is this the latest DD to use? http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html Is this still the command to copy the entire drive from one drive to another? dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k Thanks - Rich

 

WD1501FASS appears to not work. Stuck on "powering up" with all LEDs for >10 min.
Trying to replace a Seagate...
Not the same as too big (no reboot, reboot, reboot).
Any ideas?

 

I have three third-generation Tivo's (one S3 and two THD's) which had their internal drives upgraded to 1Tb Western Digital drives several years ago. Unfortunately, at that time, I wasn't aware of the MfsSuperSize option, so I never ran them. More precisely, here are my three Tivo units, the drives they were upgraded with, the current reported amount of HD and SD hours, and the approximate date I performed the hard drive upgrade:

THD #1 - WD10EACS, 142 HD hours and 1241 SD hours, Nov/07
S3 - WD10EVCS, 143 HD hours and 1244 SD hours, July/08
THD #2 - WD10EVCS, 142 HD hours and 1241 SD hours, Dec/08

From reading some of the earlier posts in this thread, it seems like if I just run MFSSuperSize on my drives now, I will magically just get about 15Gb more recording space on each drive. However, before trying this out, I've got a couple of minor concerns that I'm hoping someone can address.

1) It seems MFSSuperSize performs its magic by truncating reserved space. I know the FAQ and some other posts in this thread say that it should be fine to run MFSSuperSize any time, but does that really apply when it's been running for two years after upgrading? I can understand where doing it a day or two later won't matter because the reserved space likely never filled up, but since it's been running with its current reserved space for over 2 years, it may have completely filled up. As such, is it really safe to simply truncate the size of that reserved space by 15Gb? What happens to files that may currently be residing in that space? If it only affects the Tivo ads that were recorded/downloaded there, then I could care less. But is there any chance it could potentially lead to systemic instability or some other cascading set of failures, such as widespread corruption of other files and/or directories on the disk?

2) I don't recall the version(s) of WinMFS I used to upgrade my various Tivo's. Is there any risk with simply using the latest version of WinMFS to perform MFSSuperSize on drives that were previously expanded using earlier versions of WinMFS?

Apologies if these questions have already been answered. I tried to find relevant posts in this thread regarding MFSSuperSize, but it's such a large thread that I may have missed the particular posts (if any) that address these issues.

 

If your TiVo is stuck on the "Welcome! Powering up..." screen it means that the motherboard cannot communicate with the hard drive. Is the drive plugged in properly? Do you hear it spin up when you plug TiVo in?

Besides being overkill for a TiVo (no need for 7200RPM or 64MB cache) I don't know if anyone has tried to install one of those or if it's incompatible for some reason. If it does end up working it will also run fairly hot and be pretty noisy. Was there a particular reason you chose this drive?

What model TiVo do you have and how did you go about upgrading?

 

MFS Supersize frees up extra space reserved for storing tivoclips; the advertising videos that are downloaded. You can indeed Supersize at any time w/o having an impact on your current settings or recordings.

I cannot answer your question #2 but I don't see any reason that it should affect anything as MFS Supersize has done the same thing throughout all of the winMFS upgrade versions.

You would end up with 157 HD and 1367 SD hours or recording space. If you feel it's worth doing but might be risky you could PM the author of winMFS, Spike, on his website, http://mfslive.org/forums/ and see what he has to say.

 

Sure, but as I mentioned, my concern was that the reserved space was already fully in use (which I would think might be possible, since I've been running with it at its current size for 2 years). So by shrinking the reserved space by 15Gb, if that space is currently fully occuped by tivoclips and other Tivo ads, then you've essentially got to delete 15Gb worth of files occupying the reserved space. Does MFSSuperSize delete those files gracefully, or does it somehow just "chop off" 15Gb, regardless of whether or not that might entail straddling the boundary of an existing file? If the latter, then is there risk of corrupting more than just the truncated file? If it's just one tivoclip that's corrupt, I could care less. But if the corruption leads to systemic instability or somehow corrupts other files and/or directories, well, that would be an entirely different and far more troubling story...

 

I think you might be over thinking this but I get what you mean. There have been plenty of people that have Supersized post upgrade, but I don't know if their drives were completely full or not. The time you've had them wouldn't matter, it would be a matter of space, swap files, etc. I wouldn't hesitate to do it but again, if you're worried, get in touch with Spike and see what he recommends.

 

I wanted to replace a Seagate ST31500341AS that I suspect is causing video glitches and is kinda noisy.
What 1.5TB would work better as a replacement in a Series 3 for being a little quieter and more reliable?

The WD will probably end up in my video 'server' project.

 

Any of the recommended drives listed on the first post of the FAQ should do just fine. Also, understand that you will end up using less than the full 1.5TB of space. More about that in Section V, #17 of the FAQ. FWIW I would stay away from Seagate's 1.5TB drives since they have a very poor track record.

Happy upgrading!

 

Just wanted to add the anecdote of another issue with a Samsung F1 - I upgraded to a 500GB a couple of years ago shortly after I bought my first Tivo HD. It recently showed signs of failing (pixelation on recordings, shortened recordings, the occasional problem with live channel changes). Kickstarted into 54 and Tivo SMART check failed on extended scan. Put it into my Win PC and HDScan SMART check said it had excessive uncorrectable sector errors.

Bought a Hitachi HD31000 1TB from amazon and used winmfs w/supersize to copy the Sammy over and get a nice 157 HD hours of goodness that will hopefully last more than a couple of years. Had no problem setting AAM to 128 w/HDScan, drive was manufactured in Jan 2010.

Will probably Spinrite the Sammy and reuse it until it dies on some machine I don't care about (and have backups for). The drive doesn't make noise and performs fine other than the bad sector count, but it's just a matter of time.

 

I use 4 of these HD103UJ drives in a NAS with raid5. The NAS has been pretty much continuously powered on for the last 2 years (Power On hour 16343, Power Cycle Count 5)
One astonishing stats is the Hardware ECC Recovered: 18977608. NAS is working great though.

 

I gave up on trying to fix it and called TiVo yesterday for an out-of-warranty exchange.

It's still $149.

 

Thanks, Rich, but there are no 1.5TB drives listed in the FAQ. I'll try a WD EARS here in a couple of days and see how that works. I know about the limit, but as I said, I want to replace a 1.5TB drive already in the S3.

I'll post a follow-up once I try the new drive early next week.

(Edit: You know Rich, if I would've scrolled down two lines in the FAQ I would have seen them. Thanks. Again, if the EARS works, I will post and we can add it to the list for everyone else.)

 

Okay, you have me worried...not only did you miss it in my post, but you didn't see it in the FAQ either. As mentioned in my post, the 1.5TB drives are listed in Section V, #17 of the FAQ. Be SURE you read ALL of the upgrade instructions as well. Missing even one step will guarantee failure. Luckily you can start over again, but avoiding the disappointment of having your "new" TiVo not fire up the first time is a nice thing. The WD EARS series should work just fine.

 

How broad is your definition of "communicate", Rich? If sitting together in stony silence is also a form of communication, I'll agree with you. The WD10EVDS did exactly that when I installed it several weeks ago. With images of both 9.2a and 11.0g software, it wouldn't advance past "Welcome! powering up..." Applying wdidle3.exe resolved this immediately. It's quick and easy for those who haven't used it.

BTW I pulled the plug on my one week + experiment with warranty exchange "certified repaired" Seagate 750GB as external drive. It was a strange one. The drive checked out fine with all diagnostics. I accumulated about 500GB of HD recordings with it in place. No glitches. Then in quick succession I encountered every error I've seen in 2.5 years with the S3 except for pixelation. From one night to the next morning, the errors were:
With full intact recordings, access to them denied with message "No Signal. Recordings not made" (paraphrasing). As in the past, rebooting restored access to all recordings. Irritating, not fatal.
Spontaneous reboot with extended GSOD
Reboot when HDMI connected TV was powered up
Reboot when component connected TV was powered up
Random screen freeze and reboot

Pretty impressive collection of errors in just an 8 hour period, don't you think? So I followed the advice of the most experienced on this thread and simplified things with just the WD10EVDS internal. No glitches since ending the experiment early this week. I did finally upgrade the Sony DHG HDD250s to enable guide acquisition digitally. Out of use for over 2 years. I had forgotten how s l o w any sort of command input with them is. I hope they're never needed as backups.

 

Hi - I put in a 1TB WD (listed) drive back in December. One night 2 weeks ago we turn on the TV and it's pixelating/distorting so bad it lost 5 min of a 1 hour program. I did system restart and after it completed, it spontaneously rebooted about 20 seconds later. So I powercycled, and all was fine with no recurrence.

last night, we noticed intermittent noticeable, but not severe, pixelating/distorting on a program.

so I'm thinking of pulling the drive and running the WD diagnostics. Any harm? Any suggestions?

thanks!
/j