[JamieP]

MFStools runs fine on a hard disk installed linux distribution. I'm not sure why you had trouble. Did you use the statically linked executable here?

In generally, you'll probably run out of partitions if you try to move from a dual drive to a single drive while preserving recordings. There are only 16 partitions available on a tivo drive, and you probably have more than that on your dual drive setup. Unfortunately, mfstools 2.0 can't merge partitions as it copies from the old pair to the new drive. There is an ugly manual workaround [reference], but it's only recommended for the curious/adventuresome/foolhardy/informed tivo hackers.

 

[JamieP]

Well, even though MFSTOOLS2 LBA can "see" all my drives, I am getting an error. I'm sure it doesn't like me trying to copy all those recordings and/or I ran out of partitions, but even when doing an "mfsinfo" on each drive or pair of drives, I also get a similar error, so my guess is it can only see IDE drives, not any connected to an Ultra/ATA controller. Attached are pictures of the drives being recognized, then the error I get when doing the copy. Any help at this point is much appreciated. Thanks!

You need to populate /dev with all the devices. I believe the standard mfstools isos only have /dev/hd[a-d], so you need to mknod the additional device files. See this post for details. Either that, or use only /dev/hd[a-d].

It might be easier to just boot FC2 and use mfstools there, if you already have it installed. Note that with the static mfstools, it's all linked together into a single multic-call app called "mfstool", Instead of "mfsrestore ..." you run "mfstool restore ..." etc.

 

[JamieP]

The only problem I did notice is the recording capacity only shows 497 hours? I have another DirecTivo using 2 - 300GB drives and it's capacity is 527 hours. My new upgrade is a 400GB + 300GB combo so I would expect it to be well over 600 hours.

I'll bet it expanded on one disk but not the other. It has to expand twice to fill both disks, and it might not have had enough partition pairs free to allow that. If you examine the partition tables on the two new disks with pdisk, I'll bet you'll see a large "Apple_Free Extra" partition on one disk or the other. Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do about this unless you want to do the dirty "partition merge" trick I linked to earlier. Either that, or give up on preserving your recordings and start over with a "shrunk" image.