Series 3 Upgrade

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I don't think that MFS tools boot CD has the lba48 kernel that supports the large disks.

www.knoppix.org appears to have a decent boot CD loaded with utilities. I'm going to give it at try in a few hours when my 'OUT FOR DELIVERY' series 3 arrives in a few hours.

Mindstorm, how long did it take to copy the 250GB to disk, then how long to put it back on the new drive?

 

Looking at the picture, the connector is NOT WD's SecureConnect. SecureConnect has two additional guides/plugs on the two sides, so it would only work with WD SATA drives. TiVo's connector does not have those extra plugs, so it can be used with any standard SATA drive.

 

You are right MFS Tools don't work, but in my case it was because of no SATA support . The statically linked libs I downloaded from sourceforge worked just fine under opensuse 10.1 (obviously suse has SATA and lba48 support)

As for the time, the bzip method took around 3+ hours to create the image and about 2 (maybe a bit more) to restore it (I essentially imaged the entire drive).

Using mfstool backup and restore is much faster (I went away and came back less than 20 minutes later and it [the backup] was complete. The mfstool backup was also very quick (again <20 minutes). I had no recorded content or season passes to backup or restore.

FWIW, I was able to get the S3 to boot and function normally using both methods. Just waiting on a larger dirve to see how easy it is to increase capacity.

As for knoppix or any other live linux CD, I'm sure that they should work just fine, but since I already have a few linux boxes for me to play with, it wasn't necessary for me

 

I have the Universal Boot CD 11 (LB48) that contains MFSTools 2.0.

My TiVo 2 was ordered on 9/12 so naturally I have not received it yet. I ordered a 750Gig drive from ZipZoomFly today with 2 day shipping so it should get here before the TiVo.

So I guess I should try a single drive image save and restore with 127MB swap?

- Rich

 

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I noticed that as well when I compared it to the specs sheet at WD. I'm not complaining either I don't know where the S3 is using SecureConnect information originally came from, but either Tivo changed their minds or WD has a few different variants of SecureConnect (just speculation on my part). Anyway, this is the stuff that makes tivo fun for me.

BTW I just checked, the tivo SATA connector doesn't have any mention of WD on it. The top says "SATA" and on the bottom of the connect it says "COMAX". This may be the possible supplier (probably cheaper than WD) http://www.comaxtech.com/ At least we now have a potential OEM part supplier if you break your connector (they are rather sturdy, but just in case...)

 

FWIW, the current MFS Tools has a bug that does not preserve the size of the non-active root partition. It may not matter, but I prefer to use dd/zip and mfsadd instead of mfsbackup/mfsrestore.

 

Should work, I left my swap at 127 (I never explored what it really is set at on the original drive) and the drive/S3 is working just fine. Like I said, this was an image put onto the same size drive so keep that in mind.

Also I was extra anal in that I didn't want to screw up the original drive so I made a full image using bzip, put that image on my "test" drive and then experimented with mfstools on the test drive (mfstool back and restore). Based on those experiments I see no reason why you couldn't just perform a mfsbackup on the original drive as long as you are careful.

Update: See C3's post above about mfsbackup/restore bug....I'm not sure if this will be a problem or not (I haven't noticed contraindications yet).

C3, what combination of dd/zip do you use (example please?) I could give that a try and see how long it takes.

 

Thanks. I will give that a try when it comes in.

I also plan to put the original drive in the closet

- Rich

 

It's the very old TiVo backup method before MFS Tools came out, essentially the same as what you're doing with bzip.

If you look at the two root partition sizes, the ones created by mfsrestore are not the same. Probably not an issue until TiVo actually needs the additional disk space.

 

BZIP is not on my disk. Is there a place to get a LB48 boot disk with bzip?

- Rich

 

If you really want it: http://www.bzip.org/downloads.html

But you should get by with mfstools if you find it too hard to get this into your environment. If you are using the Boot CD, you could just copy this to a floppy and then mount the floppy drive and use it that way, or if you know how to modify the Boot CD image file, you could insert it into the image and reburn the image.

HTH

 

It came from me after I saw the great photos that MZ posted in the S3 FAQ. My post is here. After viewing this photo, I mistakenly thought it was the WD connector. If you check them out, it does appear to be a custom version of the WD connector.

I wasn't trying to start a panic , and if you read my post, you'll see that my intention was that people verify the connection before they got stuck with a new HD that couldn't be returned. I was also disappointed because I didn;t want to see a proprietary connection in the S3. I like neatness (read as: no adapters necessary)

This is the kind of news I like to hear

 

It wouldn't start a panic....extra plastic on a connector? That's what dremels are for

 

BTW, if you are planning on using the Boot CD, I don't think it will work since it doesn't contain SATA driver support (as far as I know) and the S3 uses SATA drives. I don't have the time to take a real close look at the free boot cd and see what would be required to update the included kernel images. Hopefully someone will do it soon for those people that don't have linux boxes (and what's the excuse for not having at least one linux box anyway )

 

Incorrect, they both have SATA support, the only difference is that the MFSTools 2.0 disc doesn't support LBA48, which is required for drives/partitions larger than 137GB. The PTVTools LBA48 Disc works fine for backing up and restoring the original S3 drive to different drives.

PS. Check the *other* forum for some S3 drive information.

 

I don't think you need the OEM for this one...

http://www.cooldrives.com/sa15poto4moa.html

I think that would work beautifully. SecureConnect port (15 pin power side) to that converter, then plugs right into the molex connector of the new hard drive. If your new drive doesn't have the older 4-pin molex connector, then you convert it back to sata using your standard molex - sata converter.

Something more elegant will come along, I'm sure... but still something to think about.

 

Thanks for the clarification. I take it the PTVTools LBA48 disc/image is the one you need to pay for and the MFSTools 2.0 is the free one (that's the one I tried)

Could you PM me about *other* information....

 

I used the free version available here: http://www.ptvupgrade.com/products/software/lba48/lba_4.04_license.html

PM Sent!

 

I'd be very appreciative of a PM regarding the *other* info as well.

-JB

 

The Weakness Instructions for the Series 3 are available. Unfortunately, they don't mention anything about what they did to prepare the hard drive for insertion into the TiVo.

Has this alternate root partition bug always existed, or are we just seeing it now with the Series 3 being a different layout? How much difference in partition space are we talking about? Is this something we can fix using MFS Tools, or are we back to the old school "dd" methods again? Given that the root is where TiVo puts its stuff, and that new functionality will require more space, its probably in our best interest to get these the two partitions sized properly.

Also, to get back to the swap issue for a quick second, another site has the console output from the S3. I noticed this part in the log:

Code:

Activating swap partitions
Adding Swap: 131064k swap-space (priority -1)

So it appears that TiVo is still using 127MB for swap space, even though the drive is much larger then previous TiVos. Perhaps we should just stick with that number? I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that the TiVo kernel would not initialize more then 127MB of swap anyway - is this still the case?