# 6TB tivo Upgrade



## paulb7873 (Jan 14, 2015)

I am sure this has been asked before but if I were to buy the 6tb upgrade from weeknees can I make an image of a hard drive to share with everyone? or would it just be huge? sector by sector would be 6tb I am sure but a VHD image?


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

The VHD format doesn't support drives over 2040GB. If you have Windows 8.1 you could create and mount a dynamically expanding VHDX virtual drive that has exactly the same number of sectors as the source drive, then use a bye-for-byte copy tool to xerox it.

Assuming that the Weaknees drive is mostly zeros, the resulting VHDX file should only be a few gig. The copy will take about 40 hours even on an internal SATA bus and the only way to restore it would be to reverse the whole process.

It's not very practical (and probably illegal), but it's technically possible.


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

Also not very ethical.

On a practical sense for a Roamio image you would not need to do an image back up if there are no recordings. The process would not take long and would be similar to how the 4TB community image is installed.


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## paulb7873 (Jan 14, 2015)

Just thinking of ways to do it. Say I buy the 6tb from them and can get some type of VHDX file out of it so I can at least restore it when I want. or if that drive screws up I can copy the vhdx file to another drive. How would the VHDX file be small like that. it just doesn't include the zeros in the data?


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

The VHDX format works the same way as the VHD format. There is a 'block' size defined in the header that's usually 2MB (at least in the VHD world).

As long as it's a "dynamically expanding" VHD or VHDX, any 'block' that contains all zeros will be noted in the Block Allocation Table as empty, and it won't take up any additional space on the drive. One non-zero byte in the block means that the entire block will be recorded as is.


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## philhu (Apr 11, 2001)

The 4tb community image is pretty easy.

There isn't much data on a blank drive.

You copy the beginning, a piece of the middle and the end of the drive to the disk

The problem I see is alot of SATA controllers would barf at the 6tb disk, as most old ones (ie over 1 year old) only support up to 4tb, or was that all really just a software limitation?

I remember the days that 8.1 GIG was the limit for drives. I also remember 20 MFM format drives as the limit upgraded to RFM at 30MEG

And about ethics. i totally agree. Weaknees doesn't build a product so people can steal it, and not buy from them. I ended up paying weaknees $95 to setup my 4tb drive. Cheap price! Better pieve of mind. What happens when a software update comes down and cause loss of all 4tb of your shows with a 'free' setup?


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

A 6TB Premiere is possible at this time with our current tools.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

jmbach said:


> A 6TB Premiere is possible at this time with our current tools.


As Weaknees has done 6Tb it should be possible, but I don't know what tools Weaknees used to get the 6Tb working.


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

It's not straight forward. We would need to create a 4TB drive first (either on a 6TB drive first using hdparm or create one on a 4TB drive and copy it over to a 6TB drive) . Calculate the number of blocks from the end of the last partition to the end of the drive. Use hdparm on a 2TB or larger drive and adjust the block size to reflect our calculation. Using an undocumented feature of JMFS the add a secondary drive to the MFS. Copy about 2k from the secondary drive to the beginning of the new additional partition on the primary drive. Coalesce partitions 11 and 12 (this is assuming that the 4TB drive was made with rearranging the original partitions in the order of 1, 11, 12, 13, ....) then manually adding a 15th partition to the APM using a 64bit APM entry. After that, put in the TiVo and let divorce and boot.


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## garyschmidt78 (Feb 10, 2009)

JMBACH, I would be willing to pay $5 - $10 fee for a document that would provide specific details on how to get 6TB updates for my Premiere and Roamio units. Hopefully, the document would have examples with the calculations and screen shots of the tools used for each step of the upgrade. If you used examples of specific 6TB drives for your calculations, it would be most helpful.


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

At this point it would be for Premiere only. Roamio in the near future, if the gods smile upon us, will have a solution. Make a contribution to the writers of the tools that we will be using and we will call it a day. If you want to work on it, send me a PM.


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## x60hz (Jan 21, 2009)

@jmbach I would also be interested in this as well.


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

I will cobble up some instructions shortly.


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## joe90 (Jun 5, 2009)

@Jimback did you guys ever got it to work? That is the Premier update with a 6 TB HD. I will be willing to offer the same garyschmidt78 did

Please let me know


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

Actually started working on the program to do the 64bit APM conversation yesterday.


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## joe90 (Jun 5, 2009)

Thank you for the fast replay. Sounds good and let me know if I can be of any help


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