Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ

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HI, I tried google. NO luck...

I had a Seagate 750 on my Tivo HD with the eSata....used winmfs...but gave in after many glitches and freezes...took it off and got the Tivo approved expander...
Now I have this Seagate 750...I had a port on my PC so I just plugged it in...but Vista does not see it... How can I get Vista to see it so I can reformat it and use it as a spare drive on my computer? I bought 2 at the time and one works great...its in the other eSata port...
Thanks in advance... I didnt know where else to go.

 

Pretty sure if you type compmgnt.msc at the Run... prompt it will bring up the computer management utility that will allow windows to see the drive. Once it does, you can select it and format it. Windows doesn't recognize it right now because it is the wrong format.

Jason

 

That did it. THanks.

New problem...Connected MY tivo verified DVR Expander....keeps rebooting...says it sees the storage would you like to use it? I say yes..it reboots....I go to the info screen..hours are still the same low number...and it says External Storage is connected and gives the model number of the expander...and then the message comes up saying it sees a dvr expander ....do you want to use it....and of course...no luck...
I removed all wires...powered down...followed the directions exactly...no luck..any advice for this new problem?
Thanks again in advance.

Ken

 

Would like to report that the Samsung 1TB EcoGreen drive is working fine for me in my HD. Very quiet and a good deal at $99. Only problem I had was an initial gray screen at power on but I rebooted and everything has worked well since.

 

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Nice to hear. Thanks for reporting back. (Even though it may not sit well for some of us that paid $269 or more for our 1TB drives about a year ago )

 

Glad it worked for you.

I know that you said that you had a 750G in the TivoHD originally. I am assuming that you put the original 160G back in, or did you put another larger drive in? If you put a different drive in, you will need to marry the external drive with the internal drive using winMFS instead of just hooking it to the tivo.

I have heard others report issues with what esata cable was used to connect the external drive to the Tivo. The one that seems to be most well loved is a SIIG cable (see recommendations at the beginning of this thread).

Jason

 

Ah..Ok..I have a drive in mine that is larger than the original...So even though I have the approved drive..>I must once again marry it to the Tivo HD drive using win mfs...like I did the first one that caused all the reboots...

Originally I had...Upgraded drive inside with a mfs married seagate 750 on the outside....took that off...but left the upgraded drive inside....then tried to add the my dvr expander because its "approved" with hopes of no reboots...

So once again I have to crack the case open and connect it all to my PC..its been so long..will have to read up on it again. LOL Thanks for your time and information.....
Ken

 

Ok, I'm making my second attempt at upgrading my internal S3 hard drive right now. Using a laptop this time (eMachines desktop tried & failed with last time), with a dual "eSATA CardBus" installed/slid into one of the available (express?) side slots of the laptop. I've got the two hard drives (a new Samsung EcoGreen 1TB and the original 250GB) plugged in to this eSATA CardBus via a pair of eSATA cables.

I was going to try and run diagnostics on the new drive before I got started with the MFScopy procedure, but I got sidetracked and forgot about it.. hopefully I can do that after the mfscopy procedure, if that's still a good idea.

On to the upgrade - I'm probably an idiot since nobody else seemed confused by them, but the instructions specific to doing the internal drive upgrade with saving existing recordings on page one of this thread left me confused in a few spots. So I bailed, googling to find these mfscopy upgrade instructions from Engadgethd instead, which have been easier for me to follow.

So I'm about half way through the upgrade. 13 hours of existing programming being transferred over to the new drive as I type. By my estimation, it will take an hour and 45 minutes to complete the transfer. In other words, still plenty of time for things to go terribly wrong!

 

Hi everybody. I am new to this forum I found it a couple of weeks ago after I looked at the back of my TiVo and saw that external storage port. Well I just hooked up a 1TB Fantom GForce drive. The TiVo recognized it right away. I ordered if from newegg for $130, model GF1000EU. So far so good. I'll report back if I have any problems.

 

Just had to do a hard reboot of my Samsung EcoGreen HD system and sorry to say I got a bad case of the gray screen hang as well as one power on hang. After about five or six hard reboots, I got past the problem and the system is running fine again. Soft reboots don't seem to cause any problems. But with the problem I'm now seeing along with similar problems from several other users, this drive appears to be too much of a crapshoot and I don't think anyone should use it as an internal HD drive unless someone figures out how to get around the hard power on problem. Sorry to have to report this.

Note: It's now 2/22/09 and I've been running with a UPS system for the past four months or so. I've had no problems with the drive at all and have done three hard reboots without a problem. My UPS indicates that my wall voltage is 123V and the UPS clips that back to 120V as well as reshaping the power signal. That apparently was enough to let my HD work with the Samsung drive without problems, since before I was failing maybe 40% of the time when rebooting.

 

I'm sure you already know this Rich, but in computers there's one thing pretty well guaranteed. Whatever you buy today will be available in a few months for less, and/or something bigger and faster will be available for no more.

I've come to the conclusion there really isn't a right or wrong time to buy. Just know in advance that if you wait 6 or 12 months, you'll always be able to buy the same thing cheaper - but you've been able to enjoy it for the last year, take satisfaction in that.

The first hard drive I ever bought was to upgrade a dual-floppy CP/M system - too many years ago. It was a 5 MB drive (no, that's not a typo!) If I remember right, I found a killer deal and only paid $300 or so for it. That was great considering I had gotten a killer deal about a year before that on a pair of double density, double sided Shugart 8" floppy drives - 512K of storage on a single floppy, for only $250/drive!

 

Ah...The good ol days ... $4600 for 386 25Mhz system w/dot matrix printer.

 

Well...we lived in a shoebox and could only dream about a dot matrix printer.

 

Don't leave out the 40 MB drive!

 

DallasFlier wins the I remember when contest.

 

Thanks for that datapoint. That is how we determine what works best. You mention that others have reported the same problem. Were those problems reported here or at some other site?

 

You are fortunate you have the original TiVo S3 which has eSATA plug'n'play capability with most external drives without having to buy the official but limited 500GB one as with the TiVo HD model. Yes, definitely keep us posted on reliability. And welcome to TCF!

 

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=408190

 

Thanks for the link...I missed that thread.

Reports of problems crop at this post and afterward. I only count two others that had the "grey screen" issue. If it had only happened once I'd call it a singular event (faulty drive, cable, etc.) but three separate incidents with the same symptoms is cause for alarm.

Your "too slow to come up to speed" boot theory is as good as any I can think of. It sounds like once they are running things are good. Since a soft reboot works the only time this may be a problem would be during a power failure. If TiVo is connected to a UPS things s/b okay (as long as the power outage isn't longer than the UPS can handle).

However I agree that until this is sorted out I think bkdtv might need to add the Samsung Spinpoint "Green" 1TB hard drive to those that are not recommended.

 

My personal experience is that I have to do a "hard boot" more often to recover from a variety of software and other unknown problems than occur for power failures. So I don't think that a UPS system would really fix the problem for most. There have not been any examples of the problem with S3 systems so that for the time being it appears it's only the HD where the Samsung EcoGreen 1TB drive is questionable.

If it's really true that a slow power up of the drive is the problem, TiVo could probably make a small timing change to their boot software to fix the problem. Wish they would; the Samsung drive is very quiet, low power consuming and cost effective and would could possibly be a better option for them in the XL system than the current drive they're using (I'm assuming they use a WD drive now).