# Should've been a simple upgrade, but I'm stumped...



## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

Thanks to all of you fine folks over the years, I thought I'd have no problem with this simple upgrade, but I'm at my wit's end.

I have a standalone S2 with a WD 320G drive that's been working like a dog for years. I started to get some pixelation and freezing and I figured it was the drive going bad, so I picked up a WD 500G Caviar Blue to pop in there when I had time.

Long story short, it turns out it was the power supply that was the culprit so I ended up replacing that to solve the freezing issue. But I figured, hey, I have the drive and the box is open so why not put the new drive in and spare myself some later grief?

But I'm having no joy.

I want to preserve my recordings obviously, which should be easy since the box boots on the old (320GB) drive. But I used both MFSLive and WinMFS to copy the old drive to the new (500GB) drive, but either way it hung at "Welcome" like it didn't like the drive (no chance for kickstart either). I also tried using the bootpage utility but that had no effect.

I thought the new drive could be bad or something like the head parking feature could be causing a problem, so first I used the WD utility to disable that. Then to prove the hardware I decided to start from scratch, so I used Instantcake to image the new drive. It booted fine, so I knew there was no compatibility problem or failure.

SO I went back to WinMFS, again did a back up and restore (and MFSAdd since the drive is bigger) and it still hung. Figuring the only difference between the images was that one was expanded, I did yet another back up and restore, this time without expanding. It still hangs. I put the old drive back in - boots right up.

Any ideas? I'm sure there's a kludgy workaround (boot the old drive, copy recordings to PC, Instantcake the new, copy them back) but I'm just bothered by the fact that this seems to make no sense. Please shed some light on this!


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

ddonohue said:


> Thanks to all of you fine folks over the years, I thought I'd have no problem with this simple upgrade, but I'm at my wit's end.
> 
> I have a standalone S2 with a WD 320G drive that's been working like a dog for years. I started to get some pixelation and freezing and I figured it was the drive going bad, so I picked up a WD 500G Caviar Blue to pop in there when I had time.
> 
> ...


Have you tried using the MFSLive tools bootable disk? There is a tool called dd_rescue that may be what you need. Not sure why WinMFS is not making a usable drive, but you should know that the backup image from WinMFS will not save your recordings. It's what is called a truncated backup. If you were to do a Clear and Delete Everything on your old drive, make a WinMFS backup, and then restore to the new drive, it would likely have a better chance of booting. Of course your recordings would be gone....


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

Yes, I tried both MFSLive and WInMFS and both gave the same result. And actually, I was NOT aware that the process I was using did not save recordings, I was under the impression that a truncated backup was only an option, not the default. If it had worked, I guess I would have discovered that pretty quick.

Good idea to try dd_rescue, I've used that in the past on a failing drive. I just thought the backup/restore process was the same, minus the skipping bad sectors part. I'll give it a try.


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

How many partitions are on the original drive? You may be out of partitions if this was previously upgraded.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Is the 320 still not written to by anything other than the TiVo?

Did you upgrade straight to the 320 from the original drive?


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

Soapm said:


> How many partitions are on the original drive? You may be out of partitions if this was previously upgraded.


I don't recall off the top of my head, and it's not currently connected, but I recall the MSFInfo command ending with something like "can be expanded 4 more times." Does that answer your question?


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

unitron said:


> Is the 320 still not written to by anything other than the TiVo?
> 
> Did you upgrade straight to the 320 from the original drive?


Mmmmm.... I can't imagine anything else other than TiVo wrote to the drive. But I can't recall exactly how I created the 320 originally; I seem to remember there might have been an interim step there, like the original to a 160, then that one to a 320. In fact, I think that must have been the case because I recall the usable size being below 127 for a while prior to the LBA48 fix coming into widespread use. But as I mentioned above, MFSInfo says it can still be expanded, if that's why you were asking.


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

lillevig said:


> Have you tried using the MFSLive tools bootable disk? There is a tool called dd_rescue that may be what you need. Not sure why WinMFS is not making a usable drive, but you should know that the backup image from WinMFS will not save your recordings. It's what is called a truncated backup. If you were to do a Clear and Delete Everything on your old drive, make a WinMFS backup, and then restore to the new drive, it would likely have a better chance of booting. Of course your recordings would be gone....


Okay, that was weird. Based on your excellent suggestion, I tried using dd_rescue instead of backup/restore to go from the 320 to the 500. It ran for a few hours and ended with no errors. I plopped the 500 into TiVo and fired it up. It now got past the grey "Welcome" screen - yay! - but this time it hung on the "Almost there" screen. Argh! After about 45 minutes I gave up on it.

However, since I was now at least getting to that point, I realized I could now get to kickstart, so I restarted it and did a kickstart 57. Green screen, chugged a while, then voila! Now Playing List. Damnedest thing I ever did see.

Pulled it out, used WinMFS to do an MFSAdd, and record time went from 402 hrs to 638 hrs at basic quality. I'll keep the 320 on hand in case the new one starts to act flaky, but it looks like everything's okay.

Thanks much!


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

ddonohue said:


> I don't recall off the top of my head, and it's not currently connected, but I recall the MSFInfo command ending with something like "can be expanded 4 more times." Does that answer your question?


But that includes the 3 times you can add an MFS pair on a second drive.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

ddonohue said:


> Mmmmm.... I can't imagine anything else other than TiVo wrote to the drive. But I can't recall exactly how I created the 320 originally; I seem to remember there might have been an interim step there, like the original to a 160, then that one to a 320. In fact, I think that must have been the case because I recall the usable size being below 127 for a while prior to the LBA48 fix coming into widespread use. But as I mentioned above, MFSInfo says it can still be expanded, if that's why you were asking.


Glad to see in your post following this one that you've been successful.

What's the exact model number of your S2?

I'm pretty sure that it was only the Series 1s that needed an aftermarket LBA kernal patch (copykern).


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

unitron said:


> Glad to see in your post following this one that you've been successful.
> 
> What's the exact model number of your S2?
> 
> I'm pretty sure that it was only the Series 1s that needed an aftermarket LBA kernal patch (copykern).


It's early, a TCD140060. Also have a Premiere, but the S2 is still chugging along. I'm pretty sure the LBA patch was an issue way back in the day before TiVo added native support for >137 GB drives, but I guess that's all water under the bridge now.


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

unitron said:


> But that includes the 3 times you can add an MFS pair on a second drive.


Good point, I knew there was a caveat to that statement. I've not had a single drive that could update 4 times. Now that makes sense...


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

ddonohue said:


> Pulled it out, used WinMFS to do an MFSAdd, and record time went from 402 hrs to 638 hrs at basic quality. I'll keep the 320 on hand in case the new one starts to act flaky, but it looks like everything's okay.
> 
> Thanks much!


so it wasn't you had too many partitions, you didn't have enough partitions


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