Collapse Drives onto One New Drive?

1154 Views 10 Replies 4 Participants Last post by HomeUser, Sep 21, 2007

Ghanziang

Discussion Starter · Sep 20, 2007

Hello all,

I have an 80 hours tivo with an additional 120GB drive. I am starting to get some stuttering, and reboot cycles every once in a while. I think it may be a drive going bad. So I purchased a 250gb drive (Hitachi). I would like to move both current drives to the one new drive saving the content. I checked out lots of the faqs and couldn't see a way to move from 2 drives to the new 250gb single drive. I have read that when you expand your tivo, you are adding partitions to the partition table and that it maxes out at 15 or 16 partitions. Is it possible to update that partition table to have a single drive instead of the dual drives?

I have just about given up on this, but thought I would ask the forum before I go by another drive and try to copy both over.

Thanks for your help.

G.

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BTUx9

· #2 · Sep 20, 2007

possible: probably
easy: unlikely

there is a method to coalesce 2 adjacent pairs of tivo partitions under the right circumstances, but it isn't at all automated, and getting the current partitions onto the new drive could be quite tricky if you don't know what you're doing

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Ghanziang

Discussion Starter · #3 · Sep 20, 2007

Well, I am not afraid of linux, but I don't know the structure of the drives for a tivo setup very well. So I guess that counts as not knowing all that much about what I am doing.

Any alternatives?

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BTUx9

· #4 · Sep 20, 2007

other than extraction/reinsertion (which can't be discussed here), I can't think of any

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HomeUser

· #5 · Sep 21, 2007

Ghanziang said:
Hello all,

I have an 80 hours tivo with an additional 120GB drive. I am starting to get some stuttering, and reboot cycles every once in a while. I think it may be a drive going bad. So I purchased a 250gb drive (Hitachi). I would like to move both current drives to the one new drive saving the content. I checked out lots of the faqs and couldn't see a way to move from 2 drives to the new 250gb single drive. I have read that when you expand your tivo, you are adding partitions to the partition table and that it maxes out at 15 or 16 partitions. Is it possible to update that partition table to have a single drive instead of the dual drives?

I have just about given up on this, but thought I would ask the forum before I go by another drive and try to copy both over.

Thanks for your help.

G.

If the 80G is the original TiVo drive you should be able to do it with MFSLive.
If you do not need to keep recordings MFSTools or MFSLive can do it with the -f9999 -s options in the backup

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Ghanziang

Discussion Starter · #6 · Sep 21, 2007

The 80gb is the original tivo drive and the 120gb was added using mfstools way long time ago. I would like to keep the content. What would the command be for that?

Thanks!

G.

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Da Goon

· #7 · Sep 21, 2007

Ghanziang said:
The 80gb is the original tivo drive and the 120gb was added using mfstools way long time ago. I would like to keep the content. What would the command be for that?

Thanks!

G.

There's a command line generator at www.mfslive.org

edit - more specifically, here : http://www.mfslive.org/cgen.php

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BTUx9

· #8 · Sep 21, 2007

Sorry... I assumed you'd already determined you had too many partitions.
Depending on your machine and a couple other factors, you may or may not be able to expand the new drive to use the full 250gb (it may just use the 200gb combined from the original drives)

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Ghanziang

Discussion Starter · #9 · Sep 21, 2007

I may be out of partitions. Is there any way to modify the details of a partition so that I can use the extra 50gb of available disk space? I had read on a different forum about modifying the partition table by hand. Is that feasible? I checked the MFSLive command generator and I don't see that it will expand the capacity to the new drive, which I can live with, but if I can get an additional 50gb...

G.

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HomeUser

· #10 · Sep 21, 2007

Ghanziang said:
The 80gb is the original tivo drive and the 120gb was added using mfstools way long time ago. I would like to keep the content. What would the command be for that?

Thanks!

G.

Depends on how you set up the drives in the PC. Use the interactive command line generator Da Goon pointed to

your command will look something like this
backup -qTao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | restore -s 128 -zpi - /dev/hdc

Note: I am assuming you have a Series2 Tivo. A Series1 may need a kernel mod.

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HomeUser

· #11 · Sep 21, 2007

Ghanziang said:
I may be out of partitions. Is there any way to modify the details of a partition so that I can use the extra 50gb of available disk space? I had read on a different forum about modifying the partition table by hand. Is that feasible? I checked the MFSLive command generator and I don't see that it will expand the capacity to the new drive, which I can live with, but if I can get an additional 50gb...

G.

I think Spike2k5 was doing this in a Beta you need to register at MFSLive .com and contact Spike

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