HR10-250 Upgrading an already upgraded expanded drive with MFSlive or WinMFS?

2660 Views 4 Replies 2 Participants Last post by markis, May 18, 2011

markis

Discussion Starter · May 14, 2011

Yes, my HR10-250 is still chugging along, but I think the drive needs to be replaced soon.

I think I originally used MFSLive to upgrade and expand the stock 250GB to 400GB, then hacked the 400GB.

I'd like to clone and expand the 400GB to a new 500 or 750GB drive with all the shows and hacks intact.

MFSLive Single to Single Drive Upgrade

Option 1.3 To copy everything from expanded Tivo drive to another bigger drive. If you get "Backup target not large enough" error, chances are, you need this option.

This option is built into WinMFS so give it a try.

There is no command line here for using MFSLive. Is WinMFS the only way to clone upgrade/expand and already upgraded drive? Or what is the MFSLive command for that?

WinMFS - MFSCopy (Disk to Disk copy)

Does WinMFS automatically account for a previously cloned and expanded drive? Or is there an extra step or setting I need to use beyond the steps listed at the link?

Thanks for your help.

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unitron

· #2 · May 15, 2011

Start off by reading the adapter thread

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=416883

and quit thinking in terms of an expensive >500GB IDE drive and about a cheaper per GB 1TB SATA drive instead.

Also, get the free version of Tivo Desktop and start offloading your recordings to a nice big NTFS partition on a computer hard drive.

You've probably got all of the partitions allowed on a single TiVo drive already, so you won't be able to just copy and expand, you'll need to do a truncated backup and restore that to a new big drive and test it in the TiVo, and then, when you know it works, take it back out and expand it.

Then you can copy back the shows from the computer.

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markis

Discussion Starter · #3 · May 16, 2011

unitron said:
Start off by reading the adapter thread

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=416883

Thanks for the link. I have used an adapter with my PCs before, but didn't think about trying one with the TiVo. One thing I'm not sure about is the maximum supported single drive capacity. I've seen some mention of the limit being 750GB on the HR10-250.

unitron said:
Also, get the free version of Tivo Desktop and start offloading your recordings to a nice big NTFS partition on a computer hard drive.

Is TiVo Desktop now compatible with the old HR10-250 DirectTiVo? Last time I checked, it wasn't, which is why my unit is hacked to offload shows.

unitron said:
You've probably got all of the partitions allowed on a single TiVo drive already, so you won't be able to just copy and expand, you'll need to do a truncated backup and restore that to a new big drive and test it in the TiVo, and then, when you know it works, take it back out and expand it.

Then you can copy back the shows from the computer.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I'll have to look into the partition limits. I'd prefer not to offload all shows and restore them, since I haven't had the best luck with that (and probably can't use TiVo Desktop).

Worst case, I may just pick up the closest match size (maybe 500GB) and just do a straight clone without further expansion. I'm mainly interested in getting a longer life out of a new drive, rather than expanding capacity.

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unitron

· #4 · May 16, 2011

markis said:
Thanks for the link. I have used an adapter with my PCs before, but didn't think about trying one with the TiVo. One thing I'm not sure about is the maximum supported single drive capacity. I've seen some mention of the limit being 750GB on the HR10-250.

Is TiVo Desktop now compatible with the old HR10-250 DirectTiVo? Last time I checked, it wasn't, which is why my unit is hacked to offload shows.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I'll have to look into the partition limits. I'd prefer not to offload all shows and restore them, since I haven't had the best luck with that (and probably can't use TiVo Desktop).

Worst case, I may just pick up the closest match size (maybe 500GB) and just do a straight clone without further expansion. I'm mainly interested in getting a longer life out of a new drive, rather than expanding capacity.

That 750GB limit you heard about was probably due to that being the largest PATA/IDE drive made. The adapter thread I linked for you shows two people running 1TB SATA drives in their HR10-250s.

First of all, make sure you aren't using a GigaByte brand motherboard unless you've got a sacrificial hard drive attached as Primary Master for it to create a Host Protected Area on so that it'll be satisfied and won't put any on any other drives.

Here's something I copied from "the site which may not be named"

pdisk -l /dev/hda

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/hda'
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1
2: Image Bootstrap 1 1 @ 268618469
3: Image Kernel 1 8192 @ 268618470 ( 4.0M)
4: Ext2 Root 1 524288 @ 268626662 (256.0M)
5: Image Bootstrap 2 1 @ 269150950
6: Image Kernel 2 8192 @ 269150951 ( 4.0M)
7: Ext2 Root 2 524288 @ 269159143 (256.0M)
8: Swap Linux swap 262144 @ 269683431 (128.0M)
9: Ext2 /var 262144 @ 269945575 (128.0M)
10: MFS MFS application region 1048576 @ 270207719 (512.0M)
11: MFS MFS media region 216092297 @ 272304871 (103.0G)
12: MFS MFS application region 2 1048576 @ 271256295 (512.0M)
13: MFS MFS media region 2 268618405 @ 64 (128.1G)

That's for the original 250GB drive.

When you went from the original 250Gb to the 400, you probably added 2 more MFS partitions, so if you want to keep everything on the 400 you'll have to settle for only using 400GB of a 500 or larger, at least using the MFS Live cd v1.4.

backup -Tao - /dev/hd'x' | restore -s 250 -pi - /dev/hd'y'

where 'x' is the 400 and 'y' is the new 400 or larger drive.

I haven't been playing with WinMFS long enough to know if it can enlarge existing MFS partitions or not. I've got to look into that.

Find the link on what's currently the last page of the adapter thread to the Avolusion adapter on Amazon and get a couple of those (cheap enough to have a spare) and find yourself a good deal on a 500GB or larger SATA drive.

Read through the drive upgrade thead

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784

to find out which drives to use or look out for, remembering that it's a "Series 3"-centric thread, but has info useful for other models as well.

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markis

Discussion Starter · #5 · May 18, 2011

Thanks very much for all your help and tips, unitron. I don't have a Gigabyte board. My older machine with PATA connections has an Asus board. I'll run pdisk on my 400GB drive and count the partitions, but I expect you're right, since I'm sure I must have followed one of the older guides.

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