MFS Reformatter (mfsr)

OK...I just snagged one of the 3TB from Macsales. It looks like the bang for your buck what I need. I've been living with a Series 3 with a 155 hours of HD for many years so I'll basically have that amount per tuner on my 4 tuner bolt Vox.
Question for the MFS. Should I put the 3TB drive in the bolt, let it format etc and then take it out and run it through MFS for alignment? Does it work for the Bolt?

 

Hi,

I just wanted to ask - the last drive upgrade I did was on a Series 3 OLED but have a Roamio. I had to upgrade to the Roamio at exactly the same time I was moving my wife and 4 kids into a 90% completed house and Verizon changed many channels to MP4 (which the OLEDs don't decode) and I was just so overwhelmed I didn't have time to do anything myself so just got a 6TB Roamio straight from Weaknees. So I just ordered a Bolt VOX and it's sitting on my table. I want to upgrade the drive and started looking into this. It's not perfectly clear what the process is - though it seems to have changed quite a bit from Series 1-3 days and certainly isn't like winmfs anymore. I just wanted to ask a couple of clarifying questions - sorry if this is all covered in 3+ years of previous discussion.

It looks like, at least as far as the Bolts go, simply putting a new compatible drive into the system is all you have to do. It will get setup by the TiVo but there is no need (and apparently no available way?) to clone the old drive to a new drive and seemlessly reboot. Is that correct?

And if I gather correctly what the point of MFSR is, that you take that new drive prepared by the TiVo and MFSR realigns the drive structure to efficiently handle 4K content.

Do I have that mostly correct?

Otherwise, can you point me to a reasonably concise description of the steps in the drive replacement, can you point me to discussion on maximum drive sizes and drive choices for the Bolt VOX?

Thanks!
Merrick

 

Under TE3/v20, up to 3TB, you can just swap the drives and not need to hook up to a PC, MSFR is only for alignment. Over 3TB, you would need to use MSFR to expand to full capacity.

WinMFS will not work on anything newer than Series 3.

Bolt uses laptop drives (2.5inch) so its hard to find a reliable one. Some have used 3.5inch drives bypassing the eSATA connection and connecting into the MB's SATA port, and use an external housing.

 

TE4 as well, right?

The Toshiba 2.5" 3TB drive seems to have worked relatively well for people (among 2.5" drives), and still can be found (although no longer being manufactured). E.g. currently at macsales.com.

 

Hello, I am having a problem with my tivo I was hoping someone could help please.

So, I have a tivo roamio ota. I reformatted MFS as according to the instructions on this thread. I upgraded with a WD 8tb RED NAS. Everything worked great and synced and gave me crazy storage! That worked fine for a few months so then I decided to get a Tivo Mini Vox which said it would work with my Roamio. Again, everything worked perfectly (once I figured out the whole moca mess) for a few months. But then after a few months it began to screw things up and constantly restart/reboot. Now my tivo works and records but I have noticed that I have been getting a lot of partial recordings. At first I thought it was the mini. But then I caught my Tivo Roamio OTA restarting and finally realized that it will just randomly restart and reboot for seemingly no reason then go back to working fine. Sometimes it reboots a lot sometimes not for a long time. I dont even have like a crazy amount of shows stored up. I even deleted a bunch of things to see if that was clogging it up (sorry not computer smart lol) . Could someone please tell me how to fix this. Do I need to reformat or downgrade/upgrade something with MFS? Would going back to the original hard drive simply fix this (dont want to really do this) I really want to fix this . Any help would be greatly appreciated thank you!

 

Its rather buggy in that department.

 

Disconnect the mini from the network for a week and see if you still have the issue. I read on the forum somewhere that an aberrant mini was causing the host TiVo to reboot.

 

Is there somewhere where you state why the MFS IS helpful for the Toshiba 3TB. I understand you can just pop it in the Bolt and the Bolt does the rest but again don't understand than why it helps to use MFS (thought you note something about 4K usage). Any advise and reasoning here would be greatly appreciated as I get the Bolt Thursday

 

Thanks so much. I only have a laptop so it sounds like, while MFS would be helpful, it would not be worth my time to try to figure out an external storage option to use MFS

 

Many thanks for the explanation and recommendations! Helpful, as is the software.

 

Im stuck. I bought a Seagate 4TB ST4000LM024. When pulling it out of the houseing, destroyed the usb plug stuff in back. I installed and ran the hd, fully installed Tivo, and ran it for a day. With only Tivo format I have 285 Hours HD or 1957 SD of recording capcity. Pulled it out to redo and run MFSR, but Win7 did not reconize it. My version of Win7 only had diskpart verions from 2009. Downloaded a freeware disk partition prog, and re-fromatted all 4TB to NTFS. Installed in Tivo Bolt TCD84950. Plugged in Tivo, ran startup until it asked for Country. Unplugged, hooked up into desktop, but Windows does not reconize my 4TB HD. What did I do wrong?

 

I panicked. Rebooted, and reconnected the Seagate Drive. Win7 still did not see it, but SeaTools did. Ran MFSR. Success. Put Bolt back together. Ran Tivo install. Now I have up to 639 HD or 4401 SD hours to fill up in my OTA Installation.
Running Series6
Hydra-Mira-4-6

A donation is on it’s way.

How stable is install on Seagate, should I worry about Tivo booting the drive out?

 

Awesome work. Thanks. Went from 2TB to 4TB available. Had to turn off Google Drive during format. Donated!

 

I'm considering buying a Bolt Vox 1TB and adding an external 3.5" 4TB drive connected to the Bolt's internal SATA port. If I have to downgrade to TE3 in order to get this drive to work, can I then upgrade again to TE4?

 

Yep.

 

I bought Bolt Vox 1TB in July. Bought this Seagate Ext Drive and pulled drive out -
Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB External Hard Drive HDD (STDR4000900)
Installed and booted up tivo
Used mfs on the drive
Windows 10 gave me some error.
It think I reran with As Administrator option to make it happy
Reinstalled the drive and full 4TB available.
Awesome work by the community!

Note: I gave myself a bit of extra work by screwing together the drive assembly etc and then had to pull it all apart again after booting up tivo the first time.
Just connect the cables and leave the drive sitting on top of Bolt board for the 2 minutes it takes to boot up.

Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB External Hard Drive HDD (STDR4000900)
by Amazon.com
Learn more: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0196J43TE/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_-87DDbAY45XKT