S1 2 drive to 1 drive upgrade

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OK, I am getting hiccups and such on recorded shows on my 7 year old S1 Phillips. When I first got it 7 years ago I added a second 80 GB drive (huge at the time!). So I have a 2 drive setup. The original Quantum drive (20 GB?) and the married 80 GB drive. I'd like to save all my recordings, etc.

I have a new 160 GB drive. How can I take the 2 drives and combine them onto the new, bigger drive? Can winmfs do this? or mfstools?

Any pointers would be great! I have done a search, and will do some more now, but I wanted to throw this out there and see if anyone had suggestions.

THanks!
John

 

OK, I found Hindsdales help site here:
http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html

I am reading throught it now. It looks like I can accomplish what I want with this command
backup -qTao - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd | restore -s 128 -nzpi - /dev/hdb

Now...I need to figure out how to get by the 137 GB limit. I'll keep searching.

thanks,
John

 

OK, now I am confused. I booted with MFS live and used the command in my post above. It seems to be backing up and restoring. I used the interactive command generator from the site http://www.mfslive.org/cgen.php and told it I had 2 drives, upgrading to one, bigger drive and wanted to keep my recordings. That process is running now and will take another couple of hours to complete (then I can put the bigger drive in Tivo and see if it works).

But while that is running, I have been reading a lot more. It seems that some people say that you CANNOT do what I am trying to do (go from 2 drives to 1 drive and preserve recorings). See this post from the weaknees forums: http://www.********.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1277

What am I missing here?
John

 

sorry about the link in the post above. I didn't mean to violate forum rules, I just wanted to document what I have done in case someone in the future needs the info for a similiar predicament.

So, I used the above command with mfslive and it appears to have succeeded! It took about 3.5 hours. I put the 160 GB drive in Tivo and it booted right up. I was surprised. All my shows seem to be there. I 'll test further later, but I played a handful of shows and they seem fine.

A lot of the info I have read seemed to indicate that going from an upgraded 2 drive system to a new 1 drive system while retaining my shows was NOT possible, but it seems to have worked for me (so far).

Nobody replied to my posts, but there is a TON of info out there on this (and other) sites. The bad thing is that some of the info is conflicting and/or out of date.

Hope this helps someone.
John

 

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Last one, I promise

The one drive is working, but still only report 106 hours (from the old A + B setup). That is fine for now. I'm just happy to have kept my shows and get everything working.

What I wonder is if I pick up a 250 GB drive, can I upgrade to it? I think I'd have to use the LBA48 kernel, but can I expand my number of hours this way?

To summarize, this is what I have done to my Tivo:
It came with a 20 GB Quantum fireball drive (A) in 2000
I added an 80 GB Maxtor drive (B) in 2000
Started having problem in 2007 with skipping so I:
backup/restored A+B to a 160 GB drive (C) ...it only reads 106 hours, though

Now can I upgrade again from the C drive to a new 250 GB drive. Will it expand correctly?

Thanks, hope that makes sense.
John

 

OK, I lied. That wasn't the last post. But for future reference, here is a link to a discussion I had with Spike over at mfslive forums. He was very helpful.
http://mfslive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=407

It seems there is a limit to the number of partitions a tivo drive can have, and whenver you expand, upgrade, etc, it adds partitions. I don't know what the limitations are, but it seems that if I want to add more space, I'll need to "combine" my 2 drives and "expand" it at the same time onto a bigger drive.

Hope this helps someone.
John