# Premiere Drive Upgrade Instructions - with all-in-one jmfs Live CD



## comer

*revision 104 - Nov-06-2010 - with Supersize!*

***WARNING***

 *Software is provided with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. Please read the licence terms (GPL v3).*
 *Opening your Tivo cover will void manufacturer's warranty.*
 *Although program is not designed to do (and actually attempts to prevent) data loss and distruction, it certainly has a potential to do so. It is ultimately YOUR responsibility to backup, stow away and otherwise protect your data.*

 If you like my work, buy me a beer... or milk... or a harddrive 

*OVERVIEW*
This is a bootable Linux CD based on Slax distribution. It includes all software tools known to make a harddrive larger than the standard work in Tivo Premiere with expanded capacity.
Basic usage, suitable for most users who only want to expand their Tivo disk capacity, is fully *guided*, based on simple prompt-choice automated *script*.

*Once again, for clarity's sake, if youd don't want to tinker, experiment and/or dig in the code or Tivo, the "USAGE BASIC" and some hardware is enough to set you up with larger Tivo Premiere drive!
*
*It was ONLY TESTED ON PREMIERE DISK. Also, it was not tested and probably will not work on multi-disk configurations.*

The full procedure of making a larger Tivo Premiere disk contains the following:

 Taking the original disk out of the Tivo
 Copying the original disk onto a new larger one
 Doing modifications of structures on the new disk to make extra space available for Tivo
 Installing the new disk back into Tivo.
 This CD helps in doing steps #2 and #3 of this procedure.​
*DOWNLOAD*
Current: *Download link* (*Mirror* thanks *coold8*! :up
MD5 checksum:


Code:


a5ef24d6841f75c5c5cfd5fd703f6069 *./jmfs-rev104.iso.zip

Previous: *Download link* (*Mirror* courtesy of *coold8* as well)
MD5 checksum:


Code:


c6241f5838cf5d1f4b451229b184f031 *./jmfs-rev68.iso.zip


*REQUIREMENTS and PREREQUISITES*
You will need:
 Your original Tivo disk
 New disk larger than Tivo's
 Computer that you can boot from CD or USB
 Jmfs Live CD
It implies that you also need an ability and willingness to:
 Open/close your Tivo box
 Take harddrive out of the Tivo and put harddrive back into it
 Connect/disconnect the original and the new harddrive to a computer using SATA or USB
 Burn ISO image on a CD or set up a bootable USB stick
 Boot up/shutdown a computer using the prepared bootable media
 Follow the guided prompt
 Wait for 2-4 hours for process to finish

*USAGE BASIC*

 Download CD disk image (ISO). For basic usage you only need the "jmfs-*.iso.zip" file. Sources (jmfs-src*.zip) are also in the folder for those who want to build themselves. (download link above)
 Unzip the ISO and burn it on CD
 Connect a Tivo disk and a new large disk to a computer. SATA or USB - does not matter, it will work either way, but SATA is faster.
 Boot that computer from the CD burned in step #2.
 The guide will be started automatically, follow the prompts.
 If you are upgrading from stock drive, you will need to do: _Copy_, _Expand_, _Supersize_ - in that order.
 If you are supersizing an already expanded drive, just do _Supersize_.

 If you ever find yourself in a shell (command prompt) you can:

 Restart the guide by
"/root/guide.sh" command

 Shutdown the system by any of:
pressing Ctrl-D
 "exit" command,
 "logout" command
 "poweroff" command

 Reboot the system by any of:
pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del
 "reboot" command

 During the guided process there is a log file created "/root/log.log". If you experience any problems or errors please check that file for any extended error information. It would like to ask for assistance, please copy the log file somewhere, where you can access it later (e.g. mount an external USB drive or existing partitions and copy it there).​
*USAGE ADVANCED*You are in the root shell, no need to "sudo" anything.
You need to know your disk names. The source Tivo disk and the targer where you want to copy or the one you want to expand. To find harddrive names in the system:

 run "fdisk -l" and make note of the device names and capacities (for ex. "Disk /dev/sda: 2000.3 GB").
 run "hdparm -i <device>" (for ex. "hdparm -i /dev/sda") which will output the disk model (e.g. "/dev/sda: Model=WDC WD20EVDS-63T3B0")
All disks are made read-only on boot, so if you are planning to copy and/or expand, make your target drive writable by "chmod u+w <target drive path>" (e.g. "chmod u+w /dev/sda").

There are scripts included to run tools separately, outside of the guided prompt:


 mfsadd.sh
Expects 1 parameter - target drive for expansion (e.g. "/dev/sda").
Drive must already contain copy of the original Tivo disk.
 diskCopy.sh
A "shortcut" for "ddrescue", expects two parameters: source disk and target disk or file name
(e.g. "/dev/sda /dev/sdb" or "/dev/sda /mnt/sdb1/tivo.img").
 mfslayout.sh
Prints the layout of a Tivo disk. Usefull for testing/making sure the disk is OK.
Expects 1 parameter - Tivo drive name (e.g. "/dev/sda").
 jmfs.sh
Base script to run a class from jmfs package. All arguments are passed to executed class.

*BUILDING*
You need Apache ANT 1.7.1 or above and JDK 1.6 or above.
The ANT build script is included with sources. The targets are:

 build (default)
only compiles the sources. 
 clean
deletes all built files, so all sources will be recompiled
 package
compiles and creates packages - jar, bin.zip and src.zip for distribution.


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## orangeboy

This thread should be stickied.


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## wp746911

thanks comer. Very impresssed. Got a new premier on the way so I'll try it your new way soon! (did last one the 'old comer' way using linux and lots of command prompts)


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## cr33p

Awesome work, thanks Comer


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## Derek42141

Thank you so much. I have a new premiere that i have never set up. I'm getting a cable card next week. (I live in a fairly small town with only one cable provider. Cable cards are a new fangled invention around here. They don't even advertise them. I guess they think we are all stupid ******** anyway.) I really wanted to upgrade to 2tb before i started using.


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## kturcotte

Will this transfer/copy everything over from the original drive as well?


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## comer

kturcotte said:


> Will this transfer/copy everything over from the original drive as well?


Yes


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## txporter

Is it possible to use this image on a flash drive rather than a burned CD?


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## comer

txporter said:


> Is it possible to use this image on a flash drive rather than a burned CD?


Yes, although it's a bit uglier - video modes are much more limited. I didn't want to hold on the release to investigate that 
To make bootable USB, dowanload "Universal USB installer", start it and follow the instructions. When asked what type of Linux, uncheck "download ISO", choose either "Other" or "Slax 6" and navigate to ISO file.


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## txporter

comer said:


> Yes, although it's a bit uglier - video modes are much more limited. I didn't want to hold on the release to investigate that
> To make bootable USB, dowanload "Universal USB installer", start it and follow the instructions. When asked what type of Linux, uncheck "download ISO", choose either "Other" or "Slax 6" and navigate to ISO file.


Thanks, comer! I guess it was more a curiosity than anything. I still have some blank disks lying around.  I am thinking about taking the plunge into Premiere ownership and this is the first thing on my list (bigger drive). Thanks for all your hard work on this!


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## wp746911

I did the 'old comer' linux method using ubuntu run directly from a USB drive- I used the universal usb installer and did it that way- it was pretty easy to run it that way. Not surea bout the new fangled method.


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## bmgoodman

Derek42141 said:


> Thank you so much. I have a new premiere that i have never set up. I'm getting a cable card next week. (I live in a fairly small town with only one cable provider. Cable cards are a new fangled invention around here. They don't even advertise them. I guess they think we are all stupid ******** anyway.) I really wanted to upgrade to 2tb before i started using.


I would recommend you upgrade AFTER if your cable company (A) pairs the cable card to the device and (B) insists on sending someone to your home and (C) charges for the installation.

In this case, if you ever need to re-image from your original disk, your cable card will still be paired. Otherwise, you're looking at another truck roll. Just my $.02.


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## jbell73

Does this method allow access to tools to adjust the intellipark (WD Drives) or the AAM acoustic settings?


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## comer

jbell73 said:


> Does this method allow access to tools to adjust the intellipark (WD Drives) or the AAM acoustic settings?


If you mean if the original manufacturer's tools are included - then no. As far as I know they are for DOS/Windows only? If you know what parameter to change, you can use included "hdparm".


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## jbell73

First off -- GREAT WORK!!! This has been missing in the Premiere world for a while now.

As for the DOS only tools, that makes sense. I think hdparm -M will set the AAM settings. If wdilde3 is only available for dos then another quick boot solution would fix that (I used Hiran's Boot CD via USB to run the wdidle3 /S:0 setting to disable the intellipark). Without a floppy drive now a days, boot disks are harder and harder to come by.

BTW - I have not yet used your tool (plan to shortly on a 2TB upgrade). Do you have HD/SD recording capacities for different drive sizes using this method (1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB etc..)? Is there a maximum drive size supported by the Premiere or this process?


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## comer

jbell73 said:


> Do you have HD/SD recording capacities for different drive sizes using this method (1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB etc..)?


The statistic is very limited - I didn't think of gathering it and people didn't think of sharing the information  After all, what's important is how much *you* get out of your drive, not what *someone esle* got out of his, be it less or more, isn't it? 
From all I know, 1T gives 145, 1.5T - 218, 2T - >250 hours of HD.



> Is there a maximum drive size supported by the Premiere or this process?


Yes, right now with this tools max is +2T of space. So if you go from 320G, the total max will be 2.3T


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## True Colors

bmgoodman said:


> I would recommend you upgrade AFTER if your cable company (A) pairs the cable card to the device and (B) insists on sending someone to your home and (C) charges for the installation.
> 
> In this case, if you ever need to re-image from your original disk, your cable card will still be paired. Otherwise, you're looking at another truck roll. Just my $.02.


I am not saying that you are wrong at all, but I am a bit lost with this......

What exactly is the advantage of waiting until after the cable card is installed to upgrade the hard drive?

Does the installation of the cable card alter the image on the original hard drive in some way?

I am about to buy a premiere myself with the small hard drive and then replace it with a larger one. I would like to understand things as best possible so I can go about this the best way possible.

Thanks,

TC


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## HazelW

True Colors said:


> I am not saying that you are wrong at all, but I am a bit lost with this......
> 
> What exactly is the advantage of waiting until after the cable card is installed to upgrade the hard drive?
> 
> Does the installation of the cable card alter the image on the original hard drive in some way?
> 
> I am about to buy a premiere myself with the small hard drive and then replace it with a larger one. I would like to understand things as best possible so I can go about this the best way possible.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> TC


The cable card pairing information is stored on the hard drive. If you ever need to replace the upgraded drive and you don't have a copy with the pairing information, you will probably need a truck roll from your cable company.


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## akaussie

Super newbie question here - please forgive.
My Premiere (first Tivo I've owner - I'm excited about it!) is arriving on Monday and I am wanting to upgrade the hard drive.
I have an iMac which I would use for the process.
Steps I'm assuming I need to take:
1) Download the jmfs Live file and burn to a CD
2) Connect original tivo drive and new hd to iMac (and suggestions on doing this easily?)
3) Boot up computer using boot cd.
4) Follow instructions

So I am hoping the only thing I am missing is the best way to connect the original tivo drive and the new hard drive to the iMac.

Thanks for much for the information - sorry for the newbie questions!


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## comer

akaussie said:


> Super newbie question here - please forgive.
> My Premiere (first Tivo I've owner - I'm excited about it!) is arriving on Monday and I am wanting to upgrade the hard drive.
> I have an iMac which I would use for the process.
> Steps I'm assuming I need to take:
> 1) Download the jmfs Live file and burn to a CD
> 2) Connect original tivo drive and new hd to iMac (and suggestions on doing this easily?)
> 3) Boot up computer using boot cd.
> 4) Follow instructions
> 
> So I am hoping the only thing I am missing is the best way to connect the original tivo drive and the new hard drive to the iMac.
> 
> Thanks for much for the information - sorry for the newbie questions!


Wow, I am excited to test this on iMac! 
I don't know how much access you have to the insides of your iMac. If it's easy as pop the door and SATA is right there - then I suggest using SATA. It's faster and drive model is recognized easily by the tool.
If not, then use USB-to-SATA.


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## akaussie

comer said:


> Wow, I am excited to test this on iMac!
> I don't know how much access you have to the insides of your iMac. If it's easy as pop the door and SATA is right there - then I suggest using SATA. It's faster and drive model is recognized easily by the tool.
> If not, then use USB-to-SATA.


Comer - thanks for the quickly reply. I haven't actually looked - and I think my wife my kill me if I open up her precious iMac, so I think USB-to-SATA will be the way to go.
Monoprice has a SATA to USB adapter for under $10 so I'll pick up two of those (I'm assuming I'll need one for each hard drive).

Another quick question - will anything bad happen if I try the boot cd before I get and hookup the hard drives - just to make sure it boots properly on my iMac?


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## comer

akaussie said:


> Comer - thanks for the quickly reply. I haven't actually looked - and I think my wife my kill me if I open up her precious iMac, so I think USB-to-SATA will be the way to go.
> Monoprice has a SATA to USB adapter for under $10 so I'll pick up two of those (I'm assuming I'll need one for each hard drive).
> 
> Another quick question - will anything bad happen if I try the boot cd before I get and hookup the hard drives - just to make sure it boots properly on my iMac?


Yes, it's perfectly fine


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## Torgo

Another satisfied customer 

Ordered a WD20EVDS from Newegg, downloaded and burned the ISO image.

Pulled the 320GB drive out of my almost new premiere, hooked both up to my desktop, boot of CD, follow prompts (I didn't have a laptop in the same room to pull up Comer's instructions, so I just booted off the CD).

So easy to use, took 3 hours or so to copy over, done, plug into tivo, boot up, 2TB of storage goodness.

Compared to the "good ole days" of upgrading Directivos to 120GB harddrives using MFS and command lines tools, this was a piece of cake.

I upgraded my HD last year with a DVRDUDE drive, that was obviously easier from a "don't have to mess w/ a PC" perspective, but you lose all your settings etc.

This was perfect, quick, easy, and all is still there.

Thanks very much Comer!


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## richsadams

comer said:


> Wow, I am excited to test this on iMac!
> I don't know how much access you have to the insides of your iMac. If it's easy as pop the door and SATA is right there - then I suggest using SATA. It's faster and drive model is recognized easily by the tool.
> If not, then use USB-to-SATA.


Just as an FYI, Apple computers do not have SATA or eSATA ports&#8230;at all. (There's a third party upgrade to the new 27" iMac that will add an eSATA connection but you have to send it in, yadda, yadda). Apple has chosen to use Firewire 800/1394b instead of eSATA. iMac's are fully self contained. (See here) There are no "doors" on an iMac and zero access to anything inside by the normal user&#8230;or even the advanced user for that matter. The Mac Pro line is the only computer that allows internal access of any sort, at least of the nature that PC owners are used to. I love my iMac and our other Macs and would never ever return to using PC's (for anything but upgrading TiVo's  ), but when it comes to upgrades such as Linux/Windows boxes are capable of they are limited.



akaussie said:


> Comer - thanks for the quickly reply. I haven't actually looked - and I think my wife my kill me if I open up her precious iMac, so I think USB-to-SATA will be the way to go.
> Monoprice has a SATA to USB adapter for under $10 so I'll pick up two of those (I'm assuming I'll need one for each hard drive).
> 
> Another quick question - will anything bad happen if I try the boot cd before I get and hookup the hard drives - just to make sure it boots properly on my iMac?


Rather than buying those adapters I'd highly recommend buying a USB/SATA dock instead. Here's one that I have connected to my iMac:

http://amzn.to/9VPPQQ

You can even buy one that will allow you to mount two drives (ostensibly the TiVo drive and the new drive) at the same time. They are great for swapping out hard drives down the road where the little adapters are a bit cumbersome.

http://amzn.to/8Zp09s

If you want something lightning fast this quad interface NewerTech FireWire 800 dock is a little more spendy but works perfectly:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/

It works great with all of our Mac's.

Although I have a PC I built and use for TiVo upgrades and planned on using it to upgrade our Premiere XL, I'd also be interested in seeing how things go with a Mac. I burned a copy of Comer's program so I'll pop it in my iMac after I post this and report back if it'll boot up or if it blew up&#8230;ha! 

Happy upgrading!

*EDIT/UPDATE:* The good news is that the iMac will start up using the jmfs Live CD. The possibly bad news is that although I had my TiVo Series3 OEM hard drive in my USB/SATA dock connected to my iMac, the program did not recognize it. So I'm not sure if it's a case of it being a Series3 drive Vs a Premiere that's an issue or if it's a Mac/USB port recognition issue. In any case, the program will run on a mac (use the Option key to boot up - oddly enough the disk shows up as "Windows"). If it is a port issue it might be that you'd have to use Boot Camp or VMWare Fusion or Parallels with a Linux OS (Ubuntu, Centos, etc.) to make this work with a Mac. I haven't cracked my Premiere XL open yet. (I haven't purchased a 2TB HDD for an upgrade yet either). So if I find time I may pull the Premiere's drive and give it a try to see how it goes.

*UPDATE II:* Success (thus far)! I pulled our TiVo Premiere XL's hard drive and inserted in the USB/SATA dock connected to my iMac. I booted up the iMac with the jmfs Live CD. Everything went normally and the program recognized the Premiere's hard drive asking if I would like to copy or expand it. I don't have a 2TB drive yet so I shut the program down and will have to wait until I, akaussie or some other brave soul tries to upgrade using a Mac. However it would appear at this point that it will work.


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## comer

richsadams said:


> Just as an FYI, Apple computers do not have SATA or eSATA portsat all.


Good to know! :up: I wonder if they have specially built firewire HD inside, probably not, eh? 



> The good news is that the iMac will start up using the jmfs Live CD.


Perfect! :up: I was worried that some drivers were missing as the CD is based on a small linux distro.



> The possibly bad news is that although I had my TiVo Series3 OEM hard drive in my USB/SATA dock connected to my iMac, the program did not recognize it. So I'm not sure if it's a case of it being a Series3 drive Vs a Premiere that's an issue or if it's a Mac/USB port recognition issue.


I wonder exactly the same thing. Would you be able to get "log.log" out?


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## True Colors

Does it matter which brand of hard drive you use for this?

The electronics store by my house has the 2 TB seagate barracuda in stock. Here is the link to the product page. Is this okay for me to use?

www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?name...b2561210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&locale=en-US

Thanks,

TC


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## comer

True Colors said:


> Does it matter which brand of hard drive you use for this?
> 
> The electronics store by my house has the 2 TB seagate barracuda in stock. Here is the link to the product page. Is this okay for me to use?
> 
> www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?name...b2561210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&locale=en-US
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> TC


Brand does not matter as long as you are comfortable with its reliability. Seagate has dropped the ball lately.


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## kturcotte

True Colors said:


> Does it matter which brand of hard drive you use for this?
> 
> The electronics store by my house has the 2 TB seagate barracuda in stock. Here is the link to the product page. Is this okay for me to use?
> 
> www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?name...b2561210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&locale=en-US
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> TC


Any SATA hard drive will work. Western Digital seems to be the preferred brand though, especially those in the A/V DVR line.


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## richsadams

True Colors said:


> Does it matter which brand of hard drive you use for this?
> 
> The electronics store by my house has the 2 TB seagate barracuda in stock. Here is the link to the product page. Is this okay for me to use?
> 
> www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?name...b2561210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&locale=en-US
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> TC


Yikes! That's a terrible price.  (Or is that just an example and the store nearby is giving them away? ) You can generally find 2TB drives for ~ $100 to ~$125 on sale now.

Yes, in a sense it does matter what drive you use. Unless you just can't wait I'd order one of the WD or Hitatchi drives discussed earlier. AFAIK no one is using Seagate drives for these upgrades to date, so no known data exists. It's generally better to stick with what's been proven successful. YMMV of course.

I'm sure others will chime in but you can see this post on the cousin to this thread for more thoughts

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8146832#post8146832


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## kturcotte

Also (This SHOULD go without saying) plug the Tivo into a UPS!! Even a small one to deal with momentary power blips will go a long way to keeping the hard drive healthy! Hard drives don't like to even really be shut down, let alone just lose power completely.


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## richsadams

kturcotte said:


> Also (This SHOULD go without saying) plug the Tivo into a UPS!! Even a small one to deal with momentary power blips will go a long way to keeping the hard drive healthy! Hard drives don't like to even really be shut down, let alone just lose power completely.


Absolutely! :up::up::up:


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## True Colors

The high price you saw for the Seagate drive that I linked above is the list price. The store where I shop sells this thing for a discount. My discounted price will be about $125 or so.

I have used Seagate drives in the past and they were fine. Are they really bad now?

TC


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## akaussie

Rich - Thanks for the information on iMac's. I just had a chance to boot up using the bootdisk and it booted fine. 
I don't yet have my Tivo (or a new hard drive) so I can't test anything additional yet.
I'm hoping that is was a glitch because of your drive being from an S3.


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## richsadams

True Colors said:


> The high price you saw for the Seagate drive that I linked above is the list price. The store where I shop sells this thing for a discount. My discounted price will be about $125 or so.
> 
> I have used Seagate drives in the past and they were fine. Are they really bad now?
> 
> TC


I wouldn't say Seagate drives are "bad" by any means. Lots of folks are using them including yours truly and lots of folks are happy with them. However they used to be at the very top of the QC totem once but based on posts found almost anywhere now, that came to an end a couple of years ago. Perhaps they've just had a run of pretty bad luck here and there but it appears things have changed.

Also as mentioned, they haven't been used for upgrades for any of the TiVo's for quite a while now and AFAIK, none with the Premieres. I don't have any reason to believe that particular drive wouldn't work, but there are some that have been problematic and have never been on the recommended list. The other thing to consider is noise. Since the one you're looking at is a 5900 RPM drive I suspect that it's reasonably quiet, but they didn't publish the acoustic specs so it's hard to say. Unfortunately due to a lawsuit Seagate lost long ago the drive acoustics (AAM) cannot be adjusted on Seagate hard drive so you're saddled with whatever you get. I have one of their DB35 line of dedicated A/V drives and it's been stellar for years and is almost silent (seek noise rated at 23db idle). I also have one of their Barracuda 7200RPM drives and it sounds like a thrashing machine (rated at 33dB).

In any case, for that price I'd opt for one of the WD GP AV drives like this one:

http://bit.ly/9RkNWS

Or even though these are very quiet out of the box, if you don't mind adjusting the acoustics to make it quieter one of these&#8230;

http://dell.to/cGOnGs

Again, more info about adjusting the AAM can be found here (Section IV, #32):

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160

Whatever you decide, best of luck and let us know how things go!


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## richsadams

Comer, akaussie and friends&#8230;curiosity got the better of me so I pulled our Premiere's hard drive, connected it to my iMac and ran the jfms Live CD and the program recognized the Premier's hard drive! So the issue was with the Series3 drive I tried before, not with anything else. I updated my earlier post if you'd like more details.

So the good news, thus far anyway, is that it appears that the program will work on a Mac. :up: Once I break down and buy a 2TB drive I will try it for myself, but akaussie might beat me to it.


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## comer

richsadams said:


> Comer, akaussie and friendscuriosity got the better of me so I pulled our Premiere's hard drive, connected it to my iMac and ran the jfms Live CD and the program recognized the Premier's hard drive! So the issue was with the Series3 drive I tried before, not with anything else. I updated my earlier post if you'd like more details.
> 
> So the good news, thus far anyway, is that it appears that the program will work on a Mac. :up: Once I break down and buy a 2TB drive I will try it for myself, but akaussie might beat me to it.


Cool! Thanks for update


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## akaussie

richsadams said:


> Comer, akaussie and friendscuriosity got the better of me so I pulled our Premiere's hard drive, connected it to my iMac and ran the jfms Live CD and the program recognized the Premier's hard drive! So the issue was with the Series3 drive I tried before, not with anything else. I updated my earlier post if you'd like more details.
> 
> So the good news, thus far anyway, is that it appears that the program will work on a Mac. :up: Once I break down and buy a 2TB drive I will try it for myself, but akaussie might beat me to it.


It'll prolly be the second week of October before I can upgrade. UPS isn't delivering my unit until Monday and Comcast isn't coming out until Saturday the 2nd to install the cablecard. I want to give it a few days to run before I pull the hard drive just in case any issues crop up.
Very encouraging news though! I'll post once I try it out.


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## shaggy2002

So it looks like lots of people are having success upgrading to 2 TB. I am curious. Are most of the people only using the Wizard from the CD they burn? How many people have had to use command line as well as the wizard? I am trying to decide if I should buy the regular premiere and upgrade to a 2 TB drive or just buy a XL. Please advise.


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## comer

shaggy2002 said:


> So it looks like lots of people are having success upgrading to 2 TB. I am curious. Are most of the people only using the Wizard from the CD they burn? How many people have had to use command line as well as the wizard? I am trying to decide if I should buy the regular premiere and upgrade to a 2 TB drive or just buy a XL. Please advise.


I am not sure I understand how those 2 things are related 
You can buy regular Premiere and use either guide or command line. Or you can buy XL and won't have to use CD at all.


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## shaggy2002

Comer, i guess i am looking for instructions. because in the first post I see download the file. But I am just trying do determine what all is needed to be done to see if I can make it work. If I cannot, then buying the XL would be the option so I can have at least a TB. From your post it appears you upgrade the regular premiere all you need to do is go through the guide.

If you get a XL, can you not upgrade that to a 2 TB drive? Or are you saying you just pull the drive and copy over existing drive to new drive and it can already see all of the space on the new drive?


----------



## comer

shaggy2002 said:


> Comer, i guess i am looking for instructions. because in the first post I see download the file. But I am just trying do determine what all is needed to be done to see if I can make it work.


You need:
 your original Tivo disk
 new disk larger than Tivo's
 computer that you can boot from CD or USB
 jmfs Live CD

It implies that you also need an ability and willingness to:
 open/close your Tivo box
 take harddrive out of the Tivo and put harddrive back into it
 connect/disconnect the original and the new harddrives to a computer using SATA or USB
 burn ISO image on CD or set up a bootable USB stick
 boot up/shutdown a computer using the prepared bootable media
 follow the guided prompt
 wait for 2-4 hours for process to finish



> From your post it appears you upgrade the regular premiere all you need to do is go through the guide.


Pretty much 



> If you get a XL, can you not upgrade that to a 2 TB drive?


Yes. Though upgrading non-XL Premiere gives you about the same value (depending on how much you value THX logo) for half the price.



> Or are you saying you just pull the drive and copy over existing drive to new drive and it can already see all of the space on the new drive?


No. In addition to that, the disk structure requires some modifications in order to expose all its capacity to Tivo (a la "format" in Windows). That's why we needed a tool.

Adding the requirement above to the instructions is a good idea :up:


----------



## shaggy2002

you rock comer...sounds good. I will get the reg premiere when I get some time and money and upgraded to the 2 TB. Thanks for your help.


----------



## Crochunters

Wow Comer... you ARE the man. I just upgraded my 320 gb stock premiere drive with a WD 2 terabyte drive. It works perfectly. Thank you so much for the time and energies you spent perfecting this software cd. You saved me boocoo bucks. :up:


----------



## zordude

Successful upgrade to 2TB Thanks Comer!

Z


----------



## jdoscher

comer said:


> Yes, although it's a bit uglier - video modes are much more limited. I didn't want to hold on the release to investigate that
> To make bootable USB, dowanload "Universal USB installer", start it and follow the instructions. When asked what type of Linux, uncheck "download ISO", choose either "Other" or "Slax 6" and navigate to ISO file.


I used the 'Slax 6' option and successfully upgraded a brand new Tivo Premiere to a 2TB 'Green' drive. I followed the on-screen prompts and had no issues. I used a barebones Atom D510 box to do the imaging, and it took about 5 or 6 hours to run.

Thanks Comer!


----------



## retiredqwest

I was curious as to whether this software would work on my THD.

Computer used is an old P4 Asus MB running XP SP3. Source is the original 160 gigger.

The first drive I tried was a Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB. JMFS booted and recognized both drives. Activated the copy and after several hours it finished and expanded the 1.5TB. THD booted up and it now showed 215 HD hrs. 

Next tried a Samsung 2TB, that I pulled from my server. JMFS did its thing again. It took 5:35 to cold boot to the intro animation.... seemed like an eternity.

Now it shows 287 HD hrs. Here's a couple of photos...


----------



## comer

retiredqwest said:


> I was curious as to whether this software would work on my THD.
> 
> Computer used is an old P4 Asus MB running XP SP3. Source is the original 160 gigger.
> 
> The first drive I tried was a Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB. JMFS booted and recognized both drives. Activated the copy and after several hours it finished and expanded the 1.5TB. THD booted up and it now showed 215 HD hrs.
> 
> Next tried a Samsung 2TB, that I pulled from my server. JMFS did its thing again. It took 5:35 to cold boot to the intro animation.... seemed like an eternity.
> 
> Now it shows 287 HD hrs. Here's a couple of photos...


Cool! Thanks for being a Pioneer (as *richsadams* put it)! :up: I suspected it could do that, but had no way of testing


----------



## retiredqwest

comer said:


> Cool! Thanks for being a Pioneer (as *richsadams* put it)! :up: I suspected it could do that, but had no way of testing


I'm running it right now to a 1TB just to see how many hours it will show.

I ran Winmfs to a 2TB AV-GP WD20EVDS and it got 180 hrs because of the 1TB limitation.

I ordered a Premier, against my better judgment, and will use the AV-GP WD20EVDS for it.

I need to get the Sammy back in the server....

Scotty


----------



## comer

retiredqwest said:


> I ordered a Premier, against my better judgment...


Why is that - what is your better judgment?


----------



## retiredqwest

My conclusions for my THD:

Using a 1TB WD10EADS It shows 142 hours. 
1.5TB = 215 hrs.
2TB = 287 hrs.

And I would like to think this would work for an S3, I don't have one.

Standard Disclaimer: You try this and blow up your original drive don't come crying to me.

Scotty


----------



## retiredqwest

comer said:


> Why is that - what is your better judgment?


I've been reading a LOT lately.....

I reserve any more comment until I get mine and see how it goes....


----------



## comer

retiredqwest said:


> I've been reading a LOT lately.....
> 
> I reserve any more comment until I get mine and see how it goes....


Well, good luck with your Premiere  I am quite happy with mine :up: HD i-face is a bit sticky-slow, but that's OK - when I am on a couch I have nowhere to hurry anyway 



retiredqwest said:


> Next tried a Samsung 2TB, that I pulled from my server. JMFS did its thing again. It took 5:35 to cold boot to the intro animation.... seemed like an eternity.


I checked the code once more and I think I know what could be the reason. Some things in Premiere disk structure are different than in THD. I made appropriate adjustements in jmfs in comparison to MFS Tools (for technically inclined: FS pointer offsets I think is most important). So strictly speaking they are not correct in THD. However, Tivo has quite a tolerance for errors and an ability for self-healing. I think that process is what took time.


----------



## kturcotte

Is there a preferred website to purchase hard drives from (Best packing/safety)? Unfortunately, the ONLY thing we have around here is a Best Buy, and they don't carry it. Also, is there anyway to run a torture test on the hard drive before I do anything, to make sure it's going to last?


----------



## tcfcameron

retiredqwest said:


> My conclusions for my THD:
> 
> Using a 1TB WD10EADS It shows 142 hours.
> 1.5TB = 215 hrs.
> 2TB = 287 hrs.
> 
> And I would like to think this would work for an S3, I don't have one.
> 
> Standard Disclaimer: You try this and blow up your original drive don't come crying to me.
> 
> Scotty


Something stands out here. A 2TB drive in a THD should give you 318 (or, in some cases 319) hours of HD content. This is when using the "Broflovski" image, which doesn't allow for use of the MFS SuperSize feature.


----------



## comer

tcfcameron said:


> Something stands out here. A 2TB drive in a THD should give you 318 (or, in some cases 319) hours of HD content. This is when using the "Broflovski" image, which doesn't allow for use of the MFS SuperSize feature.


Probably because it's already "supersized", hence the difference.


----------



## jbell73

comer said:


> Probably because it's already "supersized", hence the difference.


I think that is the next and final step in this process -- figuring out how to enable the MFSSupersize feature with this process. Other than that, it's a very simple and successful upgrade process.

-JBell73


----------



## retiredqwest

comer said:


> Probably because it's already "supersized", hence the difference.


I ran Winmfs supersize on the 1.5TB and it went from 215 to 237 hrs.
I ran Winmfs supersize on the 1TB and it went from 142 to 157 hrs
I would assume the 2TB would goto the 318 hr or so mark.

So much for my scientific evaluation....

Scotty


----------



## Bai Shen

kturcotte said:


> Is there a preferred website to purchase hard drives from (Best packing/safety)? Unfortunately, the ONLY thing we have around here is a Best Buy, and they don't carry it. Also, is there anyway to run a torture test on the hard drive before I do anything, to make sure it's going to last?


I picked up a 2TB Green drive from BB. The only issue is that they have EADS and EARS mixed together, with no way to tell them apart without opening the box.


----------



## kturcotte

My drive's on the way, should be here Monday. Question-I have a regular, 320 GB Premiere. Say it's full, about how long should everything take?


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> My drive's on the way, should be here Monday. Question-I have a regular, 320 GB Premiere. Say it's full, about how long should everything take?


Full/not full - does not matter. 2-4 hours.


----------



## kturcotte

comer said:


> Full/not full - does not matter. 2-4 hours.


It's still going to transfer everything over though right? Recordings, Settings, cable card association, Thumbs rating?


----------



## richsadams

kturcotte said:


> Is there a preferred website to purchase hard drives from (Best packing/safety)? Unfortunately, the ONLY thing we have around here is a Best Buy, and they don't carry it. Also, is there anyway to run a torture test on the hard drive before I do anything, to make sure it's going to last?


Noted that you already have a drive on the way&#8230;but for others, most of the major online retailers are doing a fairly good job shipping drives now. Newegg used to be abysmal, sending drives in clamshells bouncing around in boxes with no packing, etc. I've purchased a number of drives from them&#8230;all but two worked, one being DOA and the other had the click of death&#8230;but both were Seagate 1.5TB drives and they were very problematic at the time anyway. More recent reports say that Newegg have finally gotten their act together though and are packing them much better. All the drives I've gotten from Amazon, Dell and Buy.com have been well packed and had no problems.



kturcotte said:


> It's still going to transfer everything over though right? Recordings, Settings, cable card association, Thumbs rating?


That's my understanding.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## tgrim1

jbell73 said:


> First off -- GREAT WORK!!! This has been missing in the Premiere world for a while now.
> 
> As for the DOS only tools, that makes sense. I think hdparm -M will set the AAM settings. If wdilde3 is only available for dos then another quick boot solution would fix that (I used Hiran's Boot CD via USB to run the wdidle3 /S:0 setting to disable the intellipark). Without a floppy drive now a days, boot disks are harder and harder to come by.
> 
> BTW - I have not yet used your tool (plan to shortly on a 2TB upgrade). Do you have HD/SD recording capacities for different drive sizes using this method (1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB etc..)? Is there a maximum drive size supported by the Premiere or this process?


Which Hirens Boot CD version and which program did you use?


----------



## hotoru

Comer, thanks for the great tool. Worked great to easily clone my 320GB stock tivo drive to the new WD 2TB drive. Least I could do was donate some for your help.

I posted my step by step how I upgraded my TiVo Internal hard drive to a 2TB western digital (WD20EARS) drive here for any who are interested.


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> It's still going to transfer everything over though right? Recordings, Settings, cable card association, Thumbs rating?


Yes, it will copy everything.


----------



## richsadams

Dell has the 2TB WD20EARS hard drive on sale for $94.99 w/free shipping again.

http://dell.to/bmW3pA


----------



## nukleuz

richsadams said:


> Dell has the 2TB WD20EARS hard drive on sale for $94.99 w/free shipping again.
> 
> Bought 2
> 
> Thanks


----------



## joesebastian

Bought 1. Thanks Rich!


----------



## chrispitude

Happy 2TB Premiere owner here now. Thanks Comer! A small token of my appreciation is coming your way.


----------



## nukleuz

chrispitude said:


> Happy 2TB Premiere owner here now. Thanks Comer! A small token of my appreciation is coming your way.


Yeah me too,coming your way soon


----------



## KtotheM

Comer,

Thank you for this upgrade path! My old Series 2 finally died in August and I had been waiting to get a Premiere until there was some way to upgrade it. I ended up getting an XL for the added space. 

What is funny is that I *just* purchased a Samsung LED HD TV last Thursday and turned the HD menus on. The disk usage meter was already pegged out at 100%. I have my Tivo record every episode of Cops (and a wishlist for anything with taser in it  )and don't delete them until it absolutely has to. lol 

I will be ordering a 2TB drive tonight.

I do have two questions:

1. Can you still use the 1TB (or perhaps a larger one) expander? Reading the FAQ, on the older models, it says that "Plug and Play" expantion will not work.

2. (Anyone can answer) Does the Premiere only have room for 1 disk internally? I've been searching for internal pics and have come up empty handed.

Thanks again!


----------



## richsadams

KtotheM said:


> I do have two questions:
> 
> 1. Can you still use the 1TB (or perhaps a larger one) expander? Reading the FAQ, on the older models, it says that "Plug and Play" expantion will not work.
> 
> 2. (Anyone can answer) Does the Premiere only have room for 1 disk internally? I've been searching for internal pics and have come up empty handed.
> 
> Thanks again!


Welcome to the forum. With respect to your questions, I'm not sure on #1 but my guess is no based on TiVo Series3, TiVo HD and HDXL upgrades (expansion issues).

Here's a photo of the interior of a TiVo Premiere:

http://i51.tinypic.com/2le77df.jpg

My WAG on #2 is also no, at least not without incurring HDD and CPU heat issues.

BTW, our new Sammy Plasma is sah-weet too! :up:

Happy upgrading and enjoy!


----------



## kturcotte

I manged to get it to boot into DOS easy enough, but then it wants a floppy drive. I don't have a floppy drive, nor does my motherboard have a floppy drive connector. What do I do now?


----------



## KtotheM

Rich,

Thanks for the welcome and reply! I have been a long time lurker. I figured it was time to register. 

Thanks for the pic. I scoured Google for a good while looking for one. The physical box looks like it would be easy enough to have multi drives, but it sure doesn't have enough space inside.

Even if I cannot use the expander, I think 2TB will do for now. I have not set any of my Season Passes to record on the HD channels yet. I think I will just reserve that for shows that I really want to watch in HD. I have tons of movies recorded and set to not delete. I like having something to watch even when there is nothing on TV. I have a buddy that keeps his Tivo clean. I want something to fall back on.

This Samsung TV is leaps above my poor Sony tube. lol Even SD TV and SD movies have a new "feel" and realism to them. I'm waiting on my points for the TV purchase to post on my Best Buy Rewards and then I will go and get a Blu-Ray player. lol

I just remembered one other thing I was wondering. I have read on the board not to tuse the Green Western Digital hard disks, and have seen some people that are using the AV Green WD disks. Are these ok to use now, just the AV Green line, or stay away from them at all costs? I run the RE3 and RE4 models in my PCs at home and thought about using them. I don't mind the extra noise as my Tivo is behind glass and silent and the extra reliability would be nice. Although, the lower price of the Green disks is also attractive as well as any power savings.

Thanks again!

Kelly


----------



## richsadams

KtotheM said:


> I just remembered one other thing I was wondering. I have read on the board not to tuse the Green Western Digital hard disks, and have seen some people that are using the AV Green WD disks. Are these ok to use now, just the AV Green line, or stay away from them at all costs? I run the RE3 and RE4 models in my PCs at home and thought about using them. I don't mind the extra noise as my Tivo is behind glass and silent and the extra reliability would be nice. Although, the lower price of the Green disks is also attractive as well as any power savings.


Hey Kelly, glad to help. TiVo Premier's actually come stock with WD AV/GP "green" drives (the TiVo Premiere: WD320AVVS and the TiVo Premiere XL the WD10EVVS) so when it comes to TiVo there's no reason not to use one. TiVo can't take advantage of anything more than 5400RPM or 8MB of cache, so both the WD GP and AV/GP drive line work fine in TiVo. The WD AV/GP drives are quieter than the standard line (such as the WDxxEARS) however even those are very quiet out of the box. However the Auto Acoustic Management or "AAM" on the GP drives can easily be adjusted to match the AV/GP drive's seek setting (128) using a basic tool called hddscan while you have the drive attached to a computer. Using a higher performance drive is overkill and doesn't net any sort of performance enhancement.

BR DVD's look awesome on the Sammy too!

*EDIT*: I happened across the specs for WD's RE3 and RE4 hard drives and they list the seek acoustics at 34dBA . By comparison the WD GP's are 24dBA to 27dBA and the AV/GP drives are 23dBA to 25dBA, so unless your TiVo is encased in a sound proof room I'm guessing the noise for the RE drives would be far too loud to handle&#8230;and again offer no advantage when it comes to a TiVo application.


----------



## comer

KtotheM said:


> 1. Can you still use the 1TB (or perhaps a larger one) expander? Reading the FAQ, on the older models, it says that "Plug and Play" expantion will not work.


Plug-n-Play is supported for WD DVR expander only. For generic ESATA tool is coming soon 



> 2. (Anyone can answer) Does the Premiere only have room for 1 disk internally? I've been searching for internal pics and have come up empty handed.


It would be extremely difficult to fit another HDD inside. Beside potential heat problems, there are no brackets of any kind that could be used to attach another HDD. The existing one is on the sleds that are mounted on stand-offs going through motherboard.


----------



## richsadams

comer said:


> It would be extremely difficult to fit another HDD inside. Beside potential heat problems, there are no brackets of any kind that could be used to attach another HDD. The existing one is on the sleds that are mounted on stand-offs going through motherboard.


Brackets? We don't need to stinking brackets!  In the old (S1 and S2) days we used to strap a second drive to the first w/zip ties (or worse, duct tape). I still have a "dual drive" S1 in the garagejust can't part with it. (BTW, I used the more sophisticated zip tie method!) Some industrious folks added a second internal hard drive to their Series3's and TiVo HD's as well. However the Premiere boxes are considerably smaller so there's no way that I can see to do that any more.  (At least until they start making 2TB 2.5" drives or SSD's.  )


----------



## comer

richsadams said:


> Brackets? We don't need to stinking brackets! ... However the Premiere boxes are considerably smaller so there's no way that I can see to do that any more.  (At least until they start making 2TB 2.5" drives or SSD's.  )


My point exactly  The only space I see that would fit another drive is beside the existing one - and to mount there one would need some kind of support. Plus we forget one important point! There's only one SATA connector on MB anyway  I suppose one can route a SATA-to-ESATA cable to the outside of the box and connect to ESATA port there though


----------



## richsadams

comer said:


> I suppose one can route a SATA-to-ESATA cable to the outside of the box and connect to ESATA port there though


That was how folks added a second internal drive to the S3's and THD's&#8230;not difficult, but again, not really physically practical with the Premiere.


----------



## txporter

Just started my Tivo Premiere upgrade. I got a WD20EARS from Amazon that had a May 14th (I think), 2010 build date. Setting the seek acoustics to 128 was easy with the HDD-scan utility linked in the Series3 drive upgrade thread. I had a lot of trouble with the wdidle3. I read in the thread that many folks needed to change their BIOS settings from RAID to IDE in order to recognize their drives, so I went ahead and updated that from the get-go. After about an hour of tinkering, I determined that my computer will not boot off of CD when set to IDE??!! I went back into my BIOS and changed the setting back to RAID, just intending to boot back to Windows and try later. I had forgotten to pull the boot disk out and it booted to FreeDOS without issue. It had no issue recognizing the drive. wdidle3 /d just caused the system to hang and then come up with a Fail, Abort, Retry prompt after a couple of minute from which I couldn't exit so I had to reboot again. wdidle3 /s300 worked fine. Hope to make it back this evening to actually use comer's utility to copy my virgin Premiere drive to the 2TB.


----------



## jbell73

tgrim1 said:


> Which Hirens Boot CD version and which program did you use?


I think it was 9.8, or maybe 9.6. It doesn't matter, since you need to add the WDIDLE program to the /Programs folder and then access it via command prompt. I only used it for the boot feature to get me to a non-Windows command prompt.

-JBell73


----------



## True Colors

I think that I am ready to take a swing at this. I have a Tivo premiere which has been paired with a cable card from Fios. I have also received my new 2TB drive from new egg that was recommended here by rich. 

One question..... do I have to adjust the jumpers on the SATA drives for this process? Is the original source drive that I am pulling out of the Premiere considerd the "master" drive and then the new 2TB the "slave"?

Thanks,

TC


----------



## comer

True Colors said:


> One question..... do I have to adjust the jumpers on the SATA drives for this process? Is the original source drive that I am pulling out of the Premiere considerd the "master" drive and then the new 2TB the "slave"?


SATA does not have a master/slave notion, so no jumper adjustment is necessary.
Good luck with your upgrade! :up:


----------



## kturcotte

After I boot up with the DOS cd it wants a floppy disk, but I want to give it the cd with the Western Digital tool on it. What do I do?


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> After I boot up with the DOS cd it wants a floppy disk, but I want to give it the cd with the Western Digital tool on it. What do I do?


I can't try myself right now, but can you take out your boot cd and put in the cd with the wdidle?


----------



## kturcotte

comer said:


> I can't try myself right now, but can you take out your boot cd and put in the cd with the wdidle?


I did, but it didn't do anything. This is EXACTLY what I get once MS DOS starts:

CD ROM Device Driver for IDE (Four Channel Supported)
Copyright Oak Technology INC. 1993-1996
Device Version V340
Device Name: BANANA
No drivers found, aborting installation

Device driver not found: 'BANANA'.
No valid CDROM device drivers selected
A:\>


----------



## richsadams

kturcotte said:


> I did, but it didn't do anything. This is EXACTLY what I get once MS DOS starts:
> 
> CD ROM Device Driver for IDE (Four Channel Supported)
> Copyright Oak Technology INC. 1993-1996
> Device Version V340
> Device Name: BANANA
> No drivers found, aborting installation
> 
> Device driver not found: 'BANANA'.
> No valid CDROM device drivers selected
> A:\>


BANANA is the most common driver for CD/DVD drives. It's possible that your CD/DVD drive is not compatible. Try changing directories to R: or S: (A:\ cd R: ). See if you can get to wdidle3.exe that way. If not you may need to get The Ultimate Boot CD to create a new bootable CD with wdidle3 (downloaded separately).

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Or is it WD's Lifeguard you're trying to useor something else? Forgive meposts become a blur after a while so you may have to spell out exactly what it is you're trying to do to refresh our memories (at least mine anyway  ).

That's my WAG, but I may be off base a bit since I haven't gone down that path in quite a while. Comer or others may have better advice.


----------



## True Colors

Okay, I am trying to do this but I seem to have hit a roadblock.

Here is everything that I did, step by step.

I successfully burned the ISO image to a bootable CD

I removed the hard drive from my Tivo Premiere.

I connected my original TIVO premier hard drive to my PC by using an adapter cable

I connected my new 2 TB blank hard drive(Western Digital model WD20EVDS) to my PC by using another adapter cable

I turned off my computer.

I loaded the bootable CD into my PC and turned the power on. As expected, it now boots up in a Linux environment. It seemed to be working fine at that point.

It asked me if I want to:
[C] copy
[E] expand
[X] exit
 shutdown

I picked "copy."

Then it tells me it only recognizes one Tivo drive connected to my system. It asks me if I would like to use it as a source for copy

I click "yes"

THEN I HIT MY PROBLEM........

It tells me that it only detects the Tivo original drive and one other drive on my system----the hard drive on my PC. It asks me if I want to use it as a target for copy.

At this point I am stuck. I do not know what to do. I was hoping to copy the image from my original Tivo hard drive onto the new blank 2TB drive. But since this application does not even recognize that the 2TB is there, it will not let me write to it.

What do I do? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

TC


----------



## txporter

True Colors said:


> Okay, I am trying to do this but I seem to have hit a roadblock.
> 
> Here is everything that I did, step by step.
> 
> I successfully burned the ISO image to a bootable CD
> 
> I removed the hard drive from my Tivo Premiere.
> 
> I connected my original TIVO premier hard drive to my PC by using an adapter cable
> 
> I connected my new 2 TB blank hard drive(Western Digital model WD20EVDS) to my PC by using another adapter cable
> 
> I turned off my computer.
> 
> I loaded the bootable CD into my PC and turned the power on. As expected, it now boots up in a Linux environment. It seemed to be working fine at that point.
> 
> It asked me if I want to:
> [C] copy
> [E] expand
> [X] exit
> shutdown
> 
> I picked "copy."
> 
> Then it tells me it only recognizes one Tivo drive connected to my system. It asks me if I would like to use it as a source for copy
> 
> I click "yes"
> 
> THEN I HIT MY PROBLEM........
> 
> It tells me that it only detects the Tivo original drive and one other drive on my system----the hard drive on my PC. It asks me if I want to use it as a target for copy.
> 
> At this point I am stuck. I do not know what to do. I was hoping to copy the image from my original Tivo hard drive onto the new blank 2TB drive. But since this application does not even recognize that the 2TB is there, it will not let me write to it.
> 
> What do I do? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> TC




Could it be the adapter or usb port? Have you tried connecting the drive with the adapter under windows? That drive should be recognized fine as others have used it successfully. I just started the copy procedure on a WD20EARS tonight and it was recognized on an adapter.


----------



## richsadams

True Colors said:


> Okay, I am trying to do this but I seem to have hit a roadblock.<snip>


It's probably a BIOS issue. I trust your PC's hard drive is SATA? If so try disconnecting your PC's hard drive SATA and power cable and connect the SATA and power cable to your new hard drive. Your OEM TiVo drive will be connected by the USB adapter which you know is recognized and you know also that your MB recognizes your PC's hard drive so the program should see both now. FWIW you don't need your PC's hard drive connected at all since you're booting up in a DOS program from your optical drive.


----------



## joesebastian

retiredqwest said:


> My conclusions for my THD:
> 
> Using a 1TB WD10EADS It shows 142 hours.
> 1.5TB = 215 hrs.
> 2TB = 287 hrs.
> 
> And I would like to think this would work for an S3, I don't have one.


I have a S3 that I upgraded to 1TB about a year ago. I still have the stock 250GB that ships with the S3. I am concerned that there has been software updates from Tivo.
My question is:
I would like to upgrade to 1.5TB using jmfs. I have WD15EARS.
Do I use the stock S3 disk as the source (to copy) from a year ago or the 1TB that is currently running the S3?
Did you use Spike supersize after the copy or did you just use the jmfs expand or both?

Thanks
Joe


----------



## True Colors

richsadams said:


> It's probably a BIOS issue. *I trust your PC's hard drive is SATA? * If so try disconnecting your PC's hard drive SATA and power cable and connect the SATA and power cable to your new hard drive. Your OEM TiVo drive will be connected by the USB adapter which you know is recognized and you know also that your MB recognizes your PC's hard drive so the program should see both now. FWIW you don't need your PC's hard drive connected at all since you're booting up in a DOS program from your optical drive.


Yes. The internal hard drive on my PC IS a SATA drive. It is a western digital 80 gig(WD800 model).

I will try your suggestion later this evening when I get home.

Thanks Rich!

TC


----------



## kturcotte

richsadams said:


> BANANA is the most common driver for CD/DVD drives. It's possible that your CD/DVD drive is not compatible. Try changing directories to R: or S: (A:\ cd R: ). See if you can get to wdidle3.exe that way. If not you may need to get The Ultimate Boot CD to create a new bootable CD with wdidle3 (downloaded separately).
> 
> http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
> 
> Or is it WD's Lifeguard you're trying to useor something else? Forgive meposts become a blur after a while so you may have to spell out exactly what it is you're trying to do to refresh our memories (at least mine anyway  ).
> 
> That's my WAG, but I may be off base a bit since I haven't gone down that path in quite a while. Comer or others may have better advice.


I understand about the posts becoming a blur lol It's the wdidle3.exe that I'm trying to use.
Also, does it matter WHEN that's done (Before/after "Tivoing" the new drive)?


----------



## richsadams

kturcotte said:


> I understand about the posts becoming a blur lol It's the wdidle3.exe that I'm trying to use.
> Also, does it matter WHEN that's done (Before/after "Tivoing" the new drive)?


Doesn't matter when it's done. Might not even need to be doneas mentioned earlier it depends on the drive, manufacture date, etc.


----------



## kturcotte

richsadams said:


> Doesn't matter when it's done. Might not even need to be doneas mentioned earlier it depends on the drive, manufacture date, etc.


It's a Western Digital WD20EVDS-63T3BO with a manufacturer's date of 08Setp2010. If it helps any, the serial # is WCAVY5511393


----------



## richsadams

joesebastian said:


> I have a S3 that I upgraded to 1TB about a year ago. I still have the stock 250GB that ships with the S3. I am concerned that there has been software updates from Tivo.
> My question is:
> I would like to upgrade to 1.5TB using jmfs. I have WD15EARS.
> Do I use the stock S3 disk as the source (to copy) from a year ago or the 1TB that is currently running the S3?
> Did you use Spike supersize after the copy or did you just use the jmfs expand or both?
> 
> Thanks
> Joe


FWIW tried running Comer's JMFS program with a Series3 OEM drive and the program did not recognize the drive due to the file structure (which is different from a Premiere and a TiVo HD/HDXL). So I don't think it will work. If not, you can get 1.26GB of a 1.5TB drive by using the standard winMFS upgrade method that you used to upgrade to 1TB. Not sure if it's worth it or not. I will PM you with more info.

With regard to the current software version and using the OEM drive for upgrades, it really doesn't matter unless you've switched cableco providers in which case you'd lose your cable card pairing by using the OEM drive. You could slip the OEM drive back in and it will automatically update to the latest software or you could upgrade using the OEM drive and the new drive will get updated.

FWIW if you want to use your OEM drive and want to save your _current_ Season Passes and Wish Lists, sign up for TiVo Guru Guides or KidZone before upgrading. When you upgrade the SP's and WLs will be repopulated after TiVo contacts the "mother ship".


----------



## richsadams

kturcotte said:


> It's a Western Digital WD20EVDS-63T3BO with a manufacturer's date of 08Setp2010. If it helps any, the serial # is WCAVY5511393


Sept. 8th is right on the line&#8230;although IIRC there someone had an EVDS that was dated in July and didn't need Intellipark to be tweaked. About the only way to find out is to upgrade and see if, one, it boots up and if it boots up if it will reboot from a menu restart. If it does all of that, then you wouldn't need to mess with wdidle3.exe. Kind of trial and error right now.


----------



## kturcotte

richsadams said:


> Sept. 8th is right on the linealthough IIRC there someone had an EVDS that was dated in July and didn't need Intellipark to be tweaked. About the only way to find out is to upgrade and see if, one, it boots up and if it boots up if it will reboot from a menu restart. If it does all of that, then you wouldn't need to mess with wdidle3.exe. Kind of trial and error right now.


So just run Comer's program, put it in the Tivo, and IF it boots, reboot it using the menu. If that works-everything's fine. If it doesn't work, I can then go ahead and do the wdidle3.exe tweak and not have to use Comer's program again?


----------



## kturcotte

Also, what's the MOST this should take? I have a program ending at 4 pm and the next one is scheduled for 9 pm. Should I be able to complete EVERYTHING and have it up and running by 9?


----------



## akaussie

kturcotte said:


> Also, what's the MOST this should take? I have a program ending at 4 pm and the next one is scheduled for 9 pm. Should I be able to complete EVERYTHING and have it up and running by 9?


When I upgraded to a 2 TB drive the process took 5+ hours (not sure exactly how long, as I went to bed before it finished up).
On my iMac I was working with a USB to SATA connections for both the original Tivo drive and the new hard drive..


----------



## willv28

I used my existing WD10EAVS from my TiVo HD and used it for my Premiere. Everything went smoothly as could be.

One funny thing is it seems to be function slightly slower at times, not sure though as I almost did it immediately upon buying the premiere.


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> So just run Comer's program, put it in the Tivo, and IF it boots, reboot it using the menu. If that works-everything's fine. If it doesn't work, I can then go ahead and do the wdidle3.exe tweak and not have to use Comer's program again?


It should boot after the upgrade regardless - it's a cold boot. Then reboot from menu - it's a warm boot - there it may hang if your drive has an issue with IntelliPark. If it hangs - turn the power off, apply the wdidle tweak and install the drive back into Tivo. No additional upgrade procedure necessary.


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> Also, what's the MOST this should take? I have a program ending at 4 pm and the next one is scheduled for 9 pm. Should I be able to complete EVERYTHING and have it up and running by 9?


Depending on your drive connections. If it's SATA, then about 3 hours (320G at 33 M/s - conservative). If USB then about twice slower in my experience - 5 hours.


----------



## nukleuz

I don't know if the software would boot on a macbook pro intel,anyone tried that yet?


----------



## comer

nukleuz said:


> I don't know if the software would boot on a macbook pro intel,anyone tried that yet?


You'll be the first!  jmfs does not change anything on any disk without explicit permission. What do you get to lose?


----------



## kturcotte

All right, I must have screwed something up. Everything's hooked up to the computer correctly. Both hard drives spin up, and the BIOS sees them. With the disc in, it does boot, and I do get the top row of Penguins. But then I get this message:

Fatal Error occurred-JAVAMFS Data not found. You are maybe using an unsupported boot device (eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA). Workaround: Copy the directory JAVAMFS from your boot device to an IDE/SATA disk, eg. to /mnt/hda1/javamfs or c:\javamfs. Then try to boot again.

Everything is SATA. Nothing is SCSI. No RAID or anything. What am I doing wrong?


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> All right, I must have screwed something up. Everything's hooked up to the computer correctly. Both hard drives spin up, and the BIOS sees them. With the disc in, it does boot, and I do get the top row of Penguins. But then I get this message:
> 
> Fatal Error occurred-JAVAMFS Data not found. You are maybe using an unsupported boot device (eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA). Workaround: Copy the directory JAVAMFS from your boot device to an IDE/SATA disk, eg. to /mnt/hda1/javamfs or c:\javamfs. Then try to boot again.
> 
> Everything is SATA. Nothing is SCSI. No RAID or anything. What am I doing wrong?


Looks like a CD-burn problem. Can you see what's on CD under your regular OS (windows/mac)? You should see a couple of dirs: boot - 7Mb, JavaMFS - 78Mb. Inside JavaMFS there must be a file "livecd.sgn". Is it there?


----------



## True Colors

I got it to work!! I now have 2 TB of storage goodness on my Tivo premiere thanks to comer's solution!!!!

If anyone read my earlier posts, I mentioned a roadblock. It turned out that I actually had 2 roadblocks. I will post the resolutions here just in case anyone else encouters similar problems. 

I was using two USB to external hard drive adapters. Both of my problems were related to that.

My first problem was very, very simple. The electrical plug to power up one of the hard drives was bad. That was an irritating problem but an easy one to fix.

My second problem was slightly more complex. My PC did not recognize one of the hard drives. Rich suggested that I might have a BIOS issue, and that I could possibly overcome that by connecting one of my drives directly to my motherboard. I tried his idea and it worked like a charm.

Thanks Rich! Thanks comer!!!

TC


----------



## comer

True Colors said:


> I got it to work!! I now have 2 TB of storage goodness on my Tivo premiere thanks to comer's solution!!!!
> 
> If anyone read my earlier posts, I mentioned a roadblock. It turned out that I actually had 2 roadblocks. I will post the resolutions here just in case anyone else encouters similar problems.
> 
> I was using two USB to external hard drive adapters. Both of my problems were related to that.
> 
> My first problem was very, very simple. The electrical plug to power up one of the hard drives was bad. That was an irritating problem but an easy one to fix.
> 
> My second problem was slightly more complex. My PC did not recognize one of the hard drives. Rich suggested that I might have a BIOS issue, and that I could possibly overcome that by connecting one of my drives directly to my motherboard. I tried his idea and it worked like a charm.
> 
> Thanks Rich! Thanks comer!!!
> 
> TC


No problem, enjoy! :up:


----------



## True Colors

Obviously I am thrilled with the solution that comer designed.

I do have one question, though...... After I imaged my 2TB drive I ran the "expand" command. When I booted up the new drive it told me that I have approximately 290 hours of space for HD recordings(or something close to that amount).

I looked at the weaknees page and they claim that their 2TB drive has 317 hours of HD recording space. Just out of curiousity, how did they squeeze that extra capacity in there?

TC


----------



## richsadams

True Colors said:


> I got it to work!! I now have 2 TB of storage goodness on my Tivo premiere thanks to comer's solution!!!!
> 
> If anyone read my earlier posts, I mentioned a roadblock. It turned out that I actually had 2 roadblocks. I will post the resolutions here just in case anyone else encouters similar problems.
> 
> I was using two USB to external hard drive adapters. Both of my problems were related to that.
> 
> My first problem was very, very simple. The electrical plug to power up one of the hard drives was bad. That was an irritating problem but an easy one to fix.
> 
> My second problem was slightly more complex. My PC did not recognize one of the hard drives. Rich suggested that I might have a BIOS issue, and that I could possibly overcome that by connecting one of my drives directly to my motherboard. I tried his idea and it worked like a charm.
> 
> Thanks Rich! Thanks comer!!!
> 
> TC


Sahweeet! Enjoy!


----------



## comer

True Colors said:


> I looked at the weaknees page and they claim that their 2TB drive has 317 hours of HD recording space. Just out of curiousity, how did they squeeze that extra capacity in there?


It's called "supersize". You can read what I think about it here.


----------



## bluraven

Thanks comer! Your upgrade CD/script worked flawlessly for me. It was by far the easiest TiVo hard drive upgrade I have ever done. Upgraded to 2TB WD20EVDS. The only other thing that could possibly make it better is to add the supersize option, but it's not all that important really. I don't think I'll even come anywhere near the 290 HD hour limit for my family's needs. Well done and so very thankful for all your efforts. Many Thanks!


----------



## comer

bluraven said:


> Thanks comer! Your upgrade CD/script worked flawlessly for me. It was by far the easiest TiVo hard drive upgrade I have ever done. Upgraded to 2TB WD20EVDS. The only other thing that could possibly make it better is to add the supersize option, but it's not all that important really. I don't think I'll even come anywhere near the 290 HD hour limit for my family's needs. Well done and so very thankful for all your efforts. Many Thanks!


Enjoy! :up:


----------



## kturcotte

comer said:


> Looks like a CD-burn problem. Can you see what's on CD under your regular OS (windows/mac)? You should see a couple of dirs: boot - 7Mb, JavaMFS - 78Mb. Inside JavaMFS there must be a file "livecd.sgn". Is it there?


I looked, and there's NOTHING labeled CD or DVD (It's mainly a DVD burner) in my Windows Folder. Could this be maybe because I never install the drivers, and just let Windows handle it (Which works)? If it helps any, I have an ASUS DRW-241ST DVD Burner. I did download the latest firmware 1.03 and updated it, even though I already had it, and that didn't change anything.
The only other thing I can think of is that I'm burning it to a DVD because I don't have any blank CDs. That shouldn't matter should it?


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> I looked, and there's NOTHING labeled CD or DVD (It's mainly a DVD burner) in my Windows Folder.


I didn't mean label "CD"  Could you open your CD/DVD drive with jmfs CD inside in Windows explorer?



> The only other thing I can think of is that I'm burning it to a DVD because I don't have any blank CDs. That shouldn't matter should it?


Interesting, I never though of this... I _believe_ there shouldn't be a problem, but I have to try...


----------



## kturcotte

comer said:


> I didn't mean label "CD"  Could you open your CD/DVD drive with jmfs CD inside in Windows explorer?
> 
> Interesting, I never though of this... I _believe_ there shouldn't be a problem, but I have to try...


lol Okay. 2 folders, Boot and JAVAMFS. Boot is 6.74 MB and contains isolinux, syslinux, initrd (Which is compressed), usb_inst and vmlinux. JAVAMFS contains livecd.cgn and the folder Modules which contains 1-001-core.lzm, 3134-jre1.6.0-18.lzm and jmfs-rec68.lzm


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> lol Okay. 2 folders, Boot and JAVAMFS. Boot is 6.74 MB and contains isolinux, syslinux, initrd (Which is compressed), usb_inst and vmlinux. JAVAMFS contains livecd.cgn and the folder Modules which contains 1-001-core.lzm, 3134-jre1.6.0-18.lzm and jmfs-rec68.lzm


Seems alright. May be DVD is an issue after all. Can you boot from USB? First you will need FAT formatted USB stick. Then either do steps here, or copy everything from CD to USB and use "\boot\usb_inst.cmd X:" on USB (where "X:" is your USB drive name under Windows).


----------



## kturcotte

comer said:


> Seems alright. May be DVD is an issue after all. Can you boot from USB? First you will need FAT formatted USB stick. Then either do steps here, or copy everything from CD to USB and use "\boot\usb_inst.cmd X:" on USB (where "X:" is your USB drive name under Windows).


FAT or FAT32?


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> FAT or FAT32?


FAT32


----------



## kturcotte

comer said:


> Seems alright. May be DVD is an issue after all. Can you boot from USB? First you will need FAT formatted USB stick. Then either do steps here, or copy everything from CD to USB and use "\boot\usb_inst.cmd X:" on USB (where "X:" is your USB drive name under Windows).


That it seems to like. I haven't actually connected the drives since there's stuff recording until 4 PM, but I didn't get that error message, and it was looking for Tivo drives!! I'll update later (Hopefully around 8PM or so). Question-I would *ASSUME* the transfer would be quicker if there were less stuff recorded on the original drive (Especially suggestions which is about 30 HD hours full lol)?


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> That it seems to like. I haven't actually connected the drives since there's stuff recording until 4 PM, but I didn't get that error message, and it was looking for Tivo drives!! I'll update later (Hopefully around 8PM or so). Question-I would *ASSUME* the transfer would be quicker if there were less stuff recorded on the original drive (Especially suggestions which is about 30 HD hours full lol)?


There you go! :up: Nope, it won't be faster - it does the exact clone of the original drive, so always full 320G (or 1T for XL) to copy. The only way to speed it up - is to attach drives using direct SATA connections.


----------



## kturcotte

comer said:


> There you go! :up: Nope, it won't be faster - it does the exact clone of the original drive, so always full 320G (or 1T for XL) to copy. The only way to speed it up - is to attach drives using direct SATA connections.


I'm connecting them direct to the motherboard via SATA. I'm not afraid to open my computer lol


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> I'm connecting them direct to the motherboard via SATA. I'm not afraid to open my computer lol


So that's as fast as it gets. You are looking at about 3 hours of cloning.


----------



## kturcotte

It worked!! Everything booted up fine (Seemed a little quicker than usual even), and I have 290 hours of space. Thanks!!!!


----------



## comer

kturcotte said:


> It worked!! Everything booted up fine (Seemed a little quicker than usual even), and I have 290 hours of space. Thanks!!!!


Finally!  No problem, enjoy! :up:


----------



## Anthony GT

nukleuz said:


> I don't know if the software would boot on a macbook pro intel,anyone tried that yet?


I just tried today and have been unable to get it to boot. I just get the flashing folder image with the "?" as it looks for system info to boot off of.

I made the boot DVD with Disk Utility. I think I will try again tomorrow using Toast and see if that makes a difference.

Tony


----------



## comer

Anthony GT said:


> I just tried today and have been unable to get it to boot. I just get the flashing folder image with the "?" as it looks for system info to boot off of.
> 
> I made the boot DVD with Disk Utility. I think I will try again tomorrow using Toast and see if that makes a difference.
> 
> Tony


*kturcotte* has just recently reported that he had problem with bootable DVD as well here. Try bootable USB.


----------



## tcfcameron

comer said:


> Probably because it's already "supersized", hence the difference.


Ah, yes, that would make sense.


----------



## rcobourn

comer said:


> Looks like a CD-burn problem. Can you see what's on CD under your regular OS (windows/mac)? You should see a couple of dirs: boot - 7Mb, JavaMFS - 78Mb. Inside JavaMFS there must be a file "livecd.sgn". Is it there?


My upgrade went well after a couple minor problems.

I got the same error when the cd-rom drive was attached to a SATA port that was apparently different from the others. My motherboard has 6 ports on one controller and 2 on other. The ports on the secondary controller cause this problem.

BTW, discCopy is actually copyDisc, or vice versa.

Thanks for the great tools!


----------



## Anthony GT

comer said:


> *kturcotte* has just recently reported that he had problem with bootable DVD as well here. Try bootable USB.


Well, it took a while before I could get back to this. I was able to make a bootable DVD on my Macbook Pro using Toast. Next up is the actual drive expansion! I'm going to try it on my Mac-mini. I'll report back with results.

Tony


----------



## AbMagFab

Couple of questions:

1) Can I backup my stock Tivo drive to an ISO somewhere? If so, what would you recommend?

2) Will your tool work with an ISO as a source? Mounted with VCD or something similar?

3) Can I use the drive/ISO from one Premiere to upgrade another Premiere? Knowing I'd have to do a C&DE after the install.

Thanks!


----------



## comer

AbMagFab said:


> 1) Can I backup my stock Tivo drive to an ISO somewhere? If so, what would you recommend?


Yes. It will be a 1-to-1 image as opposed to WinMFS/MFStools-style backup. Meaning that it will be the size of the original drive - 320G for regular and 1T for XL. The virgin images are compressed pretty well though - to a few G from 320. See the "old" guide in my signature, especially #6 under Usage -> LInux. All the tools are on CD.



> 2) Will your tool work with an ISO as a source? Mounted with VCD or something similar?


Yes. Same as above.



> 3) Can I use the drive/ISO from one Premiere to upgrade another Premiere? Knowing I'd have to do a C&DE after the install.


Yes. I didn't try it myself, but I know a few who did.



> Thanks!


No problem, happy upgrading!


----------



## dmk1974

comer said:


> ***WARNING***
> 
> *Opening your Tivo cover will void manufacturer's warranty.*
> 
> [/INDENT]


How would TiVo know that you opened your cover? There used to be stickers on the back years ago, but mine doesn't have any.


----------



## comer

dmk1974 said:


> How would TiVo know that you opened your cover? There used to be stickers on the back years ago, but mine doesn't have any.


If something happens (you spill your coffee inside) and they ask, you would have to tell them honestly, right?


----------



## richsadams

dmk1974 said:


> How would TiVo know that you opened your cover? There used to be stickers on the back years ago, but mine doesn't have any.


We even had a "method" of removing those little silver jewels so they wouldn't be damaged and could be replaced once upon a time. They haven't used them for years though. So as Comer mentions, unless you spill something inside or break something there's plausible deniability.

The fact of the matter is TiVo knows about our little mod adventures almost from the moment TiVo is fired up. As soon as TiVo communicates with the Mother Ship they're aware of the change by viewing their logs. However there have only been a couple of cases of TiVo denying warranty service. As long as you don't confesses to a CSR that you performed an upgrade (end of story) and re-install the original drive before returning it, life s/b good.


----------



## Leon WIlkinson

comer said:


> If something happens (you spill your coffee inside) and they ask, you would have to tell them honestly, right?


Good thing most TiVos don't have a built in cup holder, like a desktop.


----------



## richsadams

Leon WIlkinson said:


> Good thing most TiVos don't have a built in cup holder, like a desktop.


Except for the older Series3's.


----------



## comer

richsadams said:


> Except for the older Series3's.


Btw, I loooove this front display. Why did they abandoned it in THD/Premiere?


----------



## richsadams

comer said:


> Btw, I loooove this front display. Why did they abandoned it in THD/Premiere?


$$$


----------



## MikeAndrews

richsadams said:


> Except for the older Series3's.


WTF is that icon on the right of the display? I never see that! Was there a later generation?


----------



## lessd

netringer said:


> WTF is that icon on the right of the display? I never see that! Was there a later generation?


Press the format button and that icon will come on, that button is under the clock a little to your right.


----------



## Anthony GT

Anthony GT said:


> Well, it took a while before I could get back to this. I was able to make a bootable DVD on my Macbook Pro using Toast. Next up is the actual drive expansion! I'm going to try it on my Mac-mini. I'll report back with results.
> 
> Tony


Success! It took about 6 hours to make the copy since I was using 2 SATA --> USB adapters plugged into my Mac-Mini. Super easy process from start to finish. Awesome work, comer! Contribution coming your way soon.


----------



## comer

Anthony GT said:


> Success! It took about 6 hours to make the copy since I was using 2 SATA --> USB adapters plugged into my Mac-Mini. Super easy process from start to finish. Awesome work, comer! Contribution coming your way soon.


Enjoy! :up:


----------



## Leon WIlkinson

Comer is about to make me break my warranty, dang you!! 

Thank you for your hard work!!!


----------



## comer

Leon WIlkinson said:


> Comer is about to make me break my warranty, dang you!!
> 
> Thank you for your hard work!!!


I never condone such an action


----------



## rcobourn

Got a service update yesterday (was at 14.5). Restarted the TiVo last night to apply it, and it stuck at applying the service update all night. I power cycled this morning and after the initial startup message it goes to blank screen and stays there. Going to have to revert to my stock drive.

I suggest you pull off any recordings you want before the TiVo reboots!


----------



## comer

rcobourn said:


> Got a service update yesterday (was at 14.5). Restarted the TiVo last night to apply it, and it stuck at applying the service update all night. I power cycled this morning and after the initial startup message it goes to blank screen and stays there. Going to have to revert to my stock drive.
> 
> I suggest you pull off any recordings you want before the TiVo reboots!


So you had an expanded drive at 14.5 and it stuck on 14.6 update?


----------



## rcobourn

comer said:


> So you had an expanded drive at 14.5 and it stuck on 14.6 update?


Exactly. Has anyone using this method survived the 14.5 to 14.6 update?


----------



## txporter

rcobourn said:


> Exactly. Has anyone using this method survived the 14.5 to 14.6 update?


Using comer's method? I did. Just got the update the other day. Installed and rebooted without a hitch.


----------



## comer

rcobourn said:


> Exactly. Has anyone using this method survived the 14.5 to 14.6 update?





txporter said:


> Using comer's method? I did. Just got the update the other day. Installed and rebooted without a hitch.


What drives (1 or 2T for ex.) and systems (TP or TPXL) do you have guys?


----------



## akaussie

comer said:


> What drives (1 or 2T for ex.) and systems (TP or TPXL) do you have guys?


I came home to my 2 TB TP showing 15.6, so no problems here.


----------



## SullyND

akaussie said:


> I came home to my 2 TB TP showing 15.6, so no problems here.


i15.6!


----------



## akaussie

comer said:


> What drives (1 or 2T for ex.) and systems (TP or TPXL) do you have guys?





SullyND said:


> i15.6!


Oops.. slight typo.. 14.6..
Hopefully we will be talking about 15.x within the next year...


----------



## txporter

comer said:


> What drives (1 or 2T for ex.) and systems (TP or TPXL) do you have guys?


WD20EARS. Standard Premiere


----------



## rcobourn

comer said:


> What drives (1 or 2T for ex.) and systems (TP or TPXL) do you have guys?


Seagate 2TB, TP

Going to copy the stock drive to the 2TB and retry the upgrade this weekend, maybe it was a fluke.


----------



## Hannover Fist

Guys:

Followed the instructions in the first post: Booted from usb, original tivo drive is sda, new 2T Hitachi is sdb. [C]opied the drive, then [E]xpanded it, no worries, errors, etc.

Put the drive back in the new premier, booted it, got the typical "just a few more minutes please" screen, then... colorful confetti static on my screen with the hard drive grinding away.

This is not the expected outcome.

Previous to attempting the copy, I had done initial setup, paired the cable card, and downloaded the latest update of Tivo software available ( sorry, in my haste to upgrade I neglected to get the version number ). After the software update applied, there were two subsequent reboots for partition switching, etc, and then a happy working updated Premier.

I did a quick review of the partitions with mfslayout.sh and they seemed appropriate. I'm running the copy again, and I'll try and boot it without expanding it to see if that makes a difference.

But, the question here is: Have any of you seen anything like this before or do you have any idea what might have borked up here? Did I not wait long enough on initial boot with the newly expanded drive?

HannoverFist


----------



## comer

Hannover Fist said:


> But, the question here is: Have any of you seen anything like this before or do you have any idea what might have borked up here? Did I not wait long enough on initial boot with the newly expanded drive?


I have. No apparent reason. Just waited a bit and it went away with Tivo clip. So I if you see it again - wait a bit longer  The only definite manifestation of the problem I have seen so far - is boot loop. When Tivo reboots, wait a minute, then reboots again and so on. Everything else recovers by itself in my experience.


----------



## Hannover Fist

Went back, re-copied the original, and booted from it. Brief color confetti screen, then the new Tivo intro clip played. Ok, good step 1.

Removed the drive, expanded it, replaced it, rebooted - no color confetti but about 20 seconds of black screen before the intro clip.

So, turns out I wasn't patient enough originally and got worried. My apologies - but, hopefully the next soul will learn from my experiences.

Thanks for the excellent utility, Comer. I'll be sending something your way.

HannoverFist


----------



## richsadams

Hannover Fist said:


> So, turns out I wasn't patient enough originally and got worried.


----------



## comer

Hannover Fist said:


> Went back, re-copied the original, and booted from it. Brief color confetti screen, then the new Tivo intro clip played. Ok, good step 1.
> 
> Removed the drive, expanded it, replaced it, rebooted - no color confetti but about 20 seconds of black screen before the intro clip.
> 
> So, turns out I wasn't patient enough originally and got worried. My apologies - but, hopefully the next soul will learn from my experiences.
> 
> Thanks for the excellent utility, Comer. I'll be sending something your way.
> 
> HannoverFist


No problem, glad it turned out alright for you  Enjoy! :up:


----------



## Berryman1979

retiredqwest said:


> I was curious as to whether this software would work on my THD.
> 
> Computer used is an old P4 Asus MB running XP SP3. Source is the original 160 gigger.
> 
> The first drive I tried was a Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB. JMFS booted and recognized both drives. Activated the copy and after several hours it finished and expanded the 1.5TB. THD booted up and it now showed 215 HD hrs.
> 
> Next tried a Samsung 2TB, that I pulled from my server. JMFS did its thing again. It took 5:35 to cold boot to the intro animation.... seemed like an eternity.
> 
> Now it shows 287 HD hrs. Here's a couple of photos...


My internal hd is dying on my TiVoHD. I would like to get the biggest replacement I can. My question is this. Does this post say that I can make A 2TB drive work? Because that would be awesome. Thanks in advance to any who respond.


----------



## retiredqwest

Berryman1979 said:


> My internal hd is dying on my TiVoHD. I would like to get the biggest replacement I can. My question is this. Does this post say that I can make A 2TB drive work? Because that would be awesome. Thanks in advance to any who respond.


YES

NO wait... I left those messages as a tease......

I ran this program against 4 drives and I'm still using the 1.5TB in the THD for the last month since I'm saving the WD 2TB EVDS for my new Premiere.

If you do this it will give you 287 hrs HD. And if you use WINMfs and turn on 'supersize' it will show 318 hrs HD.


----------



## NYHeel

Quick question. I'm running out of space on my previously upgraded TivoHD 1TB drive that I used WinMFS for. Can I use JMFS to upgrade (and copy recordings) from my 1TB drive to a new 2 TB drive? Also, assuming I can and everything works, would I need to run supersize in WinMFS or would the fact that the 1TB drive in the TivoHD already has supersize set carry over to the 2TB drive? Thanks for the help.


----------



## retiredqwest

NYHeel said:


> Quick question. I'm running out of space on my previously upgraded TivoHD 1TB drive that I used WinMFS for. Can I use JMFS to upgrade (and copy recordings) from my 1TB drive to a new 2 TB drive? Also, assuming I can and everything works, would I need to run supersize in WinMFS or would the fact that the 1TB drive in the TivoHD already has supersize set carry over to the 2TB drive? Thanks for the help.


In my experimenting.... Supersize must be a bit that is written to the hard drive. So, if the old drive was supersized, JMFS would copy that setting over to a new drive.

And I did try copying a 1TB to a 2TB drive... took over 7 hours maybe even 8....


----------



## comer

NYHeel said:


> Quick question. I'm running out of space on my previously upgraded TivoHD 1TB drive that I used WinMFS for. Can I use JMFS to upgrade (and copy recordings) from my 1TB drive to a new 2 TB drive? Also, assuming I can and everything works, would I need to run supersize in WinMFS or would the fact that the 1TB drive in the TivoHD already has supersize set carry over to the 2TB drive? Thanks for the help.


The answer for the 1st question - most likely it will *not* work. Just like WinMFS, jmfs will create a new partition. I know for sure that Premiere does not like that and would not work. I can't say if THD won't with the same certainty.
The answer to the 2nd question - most likely it *will* work. I.e. "supersize" will be carried over, but the point is moot because of the 1st issue.


----------



## retiredqwest

comer said:


> The answer for the 1st question - most likely it will *not* work. Just like WinMFS, jmfs will create a new partition. I know for sure that Premiere does not like that and would not work. I can't say if THD won't with the same certainty.
> The answer to the 2nd question - most likely it *will* work. I.e. "supersize" will be carried over, but the point is moot because of the 1st issue.


No longer a most likely..... I just tried it and JMFS does not detect the expanded drive created by WINmfs. And that was using a 750G drive......


----------



## comer

retiredqwest said:


> No longer a most likely..... I just tried it and JMFS does not detect the expanded drive created by WINmfs. And that was using a 750G drive......


A drive from THD? That's strange... 
You wouldn't have the 'log.log', would you?


----------



## retiredqwest

comer said:


> A drive from THD? That's strange...
> You wouldn't have the 'log.log', would you?


I guess my Unix/Dos/Linux skills are lacking on this.

After JMFS is loaded, I eXit out to the root prompt. I can dir the root and see those files, I can ls and see everything. I can use less log.log | more and scroll thru the file and fdisk -l shows the drives mounted......

but when I try cp log.log /dev/sda it doesn't copy the file..... I did cp --help and that doesn't seem to help me....

so go ahead and tell me what to do...... musta killed too many brain cells when I was younger....


----------



## Thos19

So this upgrade will work with the Tivo HD? Will it work with the Series 3, or are we still bound by the 1.25TB limit. I love my Series 3 and it would be great to upgrade to 2TB. 

Thos.


----------



## comer

Thos19 said:


> So this upgrade will work with the Tivo HD? Will it work with the Series 3, or are we still bound by the 1.25TB limit. I love my Series 3 and it would be great to upgrade to 2TB.
> 
> Thos.


No, it doesn't.


----------



## tcfcameron

comer said:


> No, it doesn't.


Look at it as an opportunity, Comer. Build the tools and they will come...

...and donate to the Comer "All things TiVo expansion" R&D fund.

...that is, if they know what's good for 'em! 

I wonder if that "Paragon Drive Copy" program, that somebody had claimed success with, in an earlier post, works for all models.

Any luck replicating the MFS Supersize toggle yet?

Or, replicating the WinMFS truncated backup process?

No pressure (OK, just a little). 

Is there anything I can do on my end that may be of help? I still have that 2TB "spare" drive installed in my computer for testing purposes, as well as drive images at the ready (all except for the Premiere, wouldn't ya' know).

Just let me know.

As far as the OP's question, there's some confusion as to which model they are asking about. It's not clear if they are asking about the "Series 3", or the "TiVo HD". If the TiVo HD, there's always the Broflovski image and WinMFS to get 2TB w/supersize and 318 glorious hours of HD capacity.

I just wish I there were a means to make occasional backups of a 2TB TiVo HD, once the Broflovski image is installed (either truncated, or full). Currently there isn't (that I am aware of). Maybe that Paragon software would do the full backup...


----------



## lessd

tcfcameron said:


> Look at it as an opportunity, Comer. Build the tools and they will come...
> 
> ...and donate to the Comer "All things TiVo expansion" R&D fund.
> 
> ...that is, if they know what's good for 'em!
> 
> I wonder if that "Paragon Drive Copy" program, that somebody had claimed success with, in an earlier post, works for all models.
> 
> Any luck replicating the MFS Supersize toggle yet?
> 
> Or, replicating the WinMFS truncated backup process?
> 
> No pressure (OK, just a little).
> 
> Is there anything I can do on my end that may be of help? I still have that 2TB "spare" drive installed in my computer for testing purposes, as well as drive images at the ready (all except for the Premiere, wouldn't ya' know).
> 
> Just let me know.
> 
> As far as the OP's question, there's some confusion as to which model they are asking about. It's not clear if they are asking about the "Series 3", or the "TiVo HD". If the TiVo HD, there's always the Broflovski image and WinMFS to get 2TB w/supersize and 318 glorious hours of HD capacity.
> 
> I just wish I there were a means to make occasional backups of a 2TB TiVo HD, once the Broflovski image is installed (either truncated, or full). Currently there isn't (that I am aware of). Maybe that Paragon software would do the full backup...


You can do a full backup onto another 2Tb drive but that a pain in time and cost of your 2TB backup drive.


----------



## coold8

Hey Guys,

The download link is down unless you are a mediafire subscriber, so here you go:

http://www.thesocialworldwide.com/jmfs-rev68.iso.zip

Thanks.


----------



## comer

coold8 said:


> Hey Guys,
> 
> The download link is down unless you are a mediafire subscriber, so here you go:
> 
> http://www.thesocialworldwide.com/jmfs-rev68.iso.zip
> 
> Thanks.


Added your link as a mirror to the guide. Thanks a lot! :up:
Though mediafire works for me... Could someone try the original link, please?


----------



## richsadams

comer said:


> Added your link as a mirror to the guide. Thanks a lot! :up:
> Though mediafire works for me... Could someone try the original link, please?


The file "jmfs-rev68.iso.zip" from the original link downloads fine...the other, "jmfs-src-rev68.zip", didn't though...just received a bunch of pop-up ads. (Reminded me to turn my pop-up blocker back on!)


----------



## comer

richsadams said:


> The file "jmfs-rev68.iso.zip" from the original link downloads fine...the other, "jmfs-src-rev68.zip", didn't though...just received a bunch of pop-up ads. (Reminded me to turn my pop-up blocker back on!)


Just tried it - works for me too. There _is_ a popup, but I closed it and the download link behind worked.


----------



## richsadams

comer said:


> Just tried it - works for me too. There _is_ a popup, but I closed it and the download link behind worked.


Ah, I must have missed it. I got about four pop-ups so I probably closed it in my haste to get rid of them all.


----------



## NYHeel

tcfcameron said:


> Look at it as an opportunity, Comer. Build the tools and they will come...
> 
> ...and donate to the Comer "All things TiVo expansion" R&D fund.
> 
> ...that is, if they know what's good for 'em!
> 
> I wonder if that "Paragon Drive Copy" program, that somebody had claimed success with, in an earlier post, works for all models.
> 
> Any luck replicating the MFS Supersize toggle yet?
> 
> Or, replicating the WinMFS truncated backup process?
> 
> No pressure (OK, just a little).
> 
> Is there anything I can do on my end that may be of help? I still have that 2TB "spare" drive installed in my computer for testing purposes, as well as drive images at the ready (all except for the Premiere, wouldn't ya' know).
> 
> Just let me know.
> 
> As far as the OP's question, there's some confusion as to which model they are asking about. It's not clear if they are asking about the "Series 3", or the "TiVo HD". If the TiVo HD, there's always the Broflovski image and WinMFS to get 2TB w/supersize and 318 glorious hours of HD capacity.
> 
> I just wish I there were a means to make occasional backups of a 2TB TiVo HD, once the Broflovski image is installed (either truncated, or full). Currently there isn't (that I am aware of). Maybe that Paragon software would do the full backup...


I think there is some confusion here. I'm fairly certain that retiredqwest said that he tried JMFS on a TivoHD and it worked (although it took the Tivo a really long time to boot up since itr had to fix a lot of stuff in the drive). My question that I asked earlier was if I could go from a 1TB already upgraded TivoHD drive to a 2TB drive using JMFS. THat one is apparently a no.

By the way, I would use the Broflovski image if I could get my hands on it. But I haven't seen anyone still sharing that image so JMFS seems like the only way to get a 2TB drive in my Tivo HD with DIY methods. I of course understand that JMFS was not created for use in a TivoHD.


----------



## retiredqwest

NYHeel said:


> I think there is some confusion here. I'm fairly certain that retiredqwest said that he tried JMFS on a TivoHD and it worked (although it took the Tivo a really long time to boot up since itr had to fix a lot of stuff in the drive). My question that I asked earlier was if I could go from a 1TB already upgraded TivoHD drive to a 2TB drive using JMFS. THat one is apparently a no.
> 
> By the way, I would use the Broflovski image if I could get my hands on it. But I haven't seen anyone still sharing that image so JMFS seems like the only way to get a 2TB drive in my Tivo HD with DIY methods. I of course understand that JMFS was not created for use in a TivoHD.


Yes, JMFS does detect the stock THD and I was able to copy and then expand to a a 2TB drive, Samsung is all I had then. That gave me 287 hrs. Then I used Winmfs and turned on supersize to max out at the 318 hr mark. I also tried this on a 1TB and 1.5TB drives. I have left the Seagate 1.5TB in the THD, 237 hrs is good enough for it. I then tried copying the 1TB to a 2TB... took almost 8 hrs. Thank goodness I had a spare computer....

Yesterday, I used Winmfs and copied the THD to a 750G and expanded it. JMFS did not detect it. Then I tried a 200G and did not expand it.

Conclusion: JMFS will not detect a THD drive created by Winmfs.

It would be nice if someone else tried this out and see if they get the same results.


----------



## richsadams

retiredqwest said:


> Yes, JMFS does detect the stock THD <snip>


FWIW I can confirm that jmfs does _not_ detect a stock Series3 HDD.


----------



## metronomadic

I just got a TiVo premiere, and was planning on upgrading it with a Western Digital 2.0TB WD20EADS. I haven't really seen this drive mentioned much, is there a known problem with these that I'm missing, or is it just that they are slightly older drives or something?


----------



## richsadams

metronomadic said:


> I just got a TiVo premiere, and was planning on upgrading it with a Western Digital 2.0TB WD20EADS. I haven't really seen this drive mentioned much, is there a known problem with these that I'm missing, or is it just that they are slightly older drives or something?


Several here are using that drive...no problem...just an older model is all.


----------



## metronomadic

richsadams said:


> Several here are using that drive...no problem...just an older model is all.


Thanks! You've put my mind at ease.

And a big thanks to Comer, too! This tool was such a breeze. I ran it the other day at home using USB SATA enclosures, took the drives in to work to change the Intellipark and AAM settings, and now I am all set to power up my Premiere later today.


----------



## tcfcameron

richsadams said:


> Several here are using that drive...no problem...just an older model is all.


Older? It sure didn't take long for a 2TB drive to get that designation...

I would have went with "In WD's ongoing commitment to render older generations of Windows even harder to continue to use, they have begun implementing "advanced format technology" on drive capacities that don't even require it, as opposed to just using it on the drive capacities that had hit the newest size barrier, which actually made its implementation a requirement".

I really wish they had kept producing parallel drive lines (as opposed to a phase-out transition) in the 2TB and lower capacity drives.

As a side note, Fry's electronics has been in the habit of advertising EARS drives, but actually selling you EADS ones (Bulk Pack, bare OEM ones, anyway). That's how I got my WD20EADS drives.

Tongue-in-cheek, check. Grumpy mode: active.


----------



## richsadams

tcfcameron said:


> Older? It sure didn't take long for a 2TB drive to get that designation...
> 
> I would have went with "In WD's ongoing commitment to render older generations of Windows even harder to continue to use, they have begun implementing "advanced format technology" on drive capacities that don't even require it, as opposed to just using it on the drive capacities that had hit the newest size barrier, which actually made its implementation a requirement".
> 
> I really wish they had kept producing parallel drive lines (as opposed to a phase-out transition) in the 2TB and lower capacity drives.
> 
> As a side note, Fry's electronics has been in the habit of advertising EARS drives, but actually selling you EADS ones (Bulk Pack, bare OEM ones, anyway). That's how I got my WD20EADS drives.
> 
> Tongue-in-cheek, check. Grumpy mode: active.


Perhaps the word "earlier" would have been more apropos.


----------



## efrsysop

I couldn't resist any longer. I finally pulled the trigger on a Premiere XL, Slide Remote, and a WD20EVDS. I'll be running the disk check on the new drive tonight and doing the copy and expand tomorrow. A big thanks to Comer and I'll donate just as soon as you give us Supersize  J/k, donation coming your way!


----------



## comer

efrsysop said:


> I couldn't resist any longer. I finally pulled the trigger on a Premiere XL, Slide Remote, and a WD20EVDS. I'll be running the disk check on the new drive tonight and doing the copy and expand tomorrow. A big thanks to Comer and I'll donate just as soon as you give us Supersize  J/k, donation coming your way!


Hold on a few more days guys, it's done, just need to put it in a nice package for ya


----------



## efrsysop

comer said:


> Hold on a few more days guys, it's done, just need to put it in a nice package for ya


Woot! Woot! Best Halloween "candy" ever. ~30 more hours of HD!

I know I speak for everyone here when I say thank you so much for all of your time. Please know that it is greatly appreciated.

-Spencer


----------



## efrsysop

comer said:


> Hold on a few more days guys, it's done, just need to put it in a nice package for ya


Btw- Let me know if I can help out at all with my Premiere XL whether its making an image, or testing something I'm happy to help. 

-Spence


----------



## EricM

Just upped my two Tivo HDs to 237H (1.5TB drives). I didn't go as smoothly as I expected. Here is what happened:
-Took original 160GB drive with firmware 9.3 and copied to previously in-use 1.5TB (180 Hrs at that point) with jmfs
-Expanded with jmfs
-Booted THD with 1.5TB drive
-THD got stuck in a loop of powering up for 2 min, "almost there" screen for a few seconds then GSOD for a few seconds and reboot. I let it run like that for 35 minutes, after which I pulled the plug, plugged back in and it did it again for 20 minutes. After that I turned off and decided to try something else. Was the swap too small for 1.5TB with GSOD? Maybe, but I couldn't find how to adjust it using jmfs.
-Used Winmfs to fix swap, fix kernel, both options 1 and 2 did not solve the GSOD loop. Used Winmfs to "erase format" on 1.5TB drive.
-Took original 160GB drive with firmware 9.3 and copied to previously in-use-but-now-erased 1.5TB with jmfs
-Expanded with jmfs
-Booted THD, same GSOD loop.
I noted that trying to set supersize bit on the 1.5TB drive in that state caused WinMFS to crash.

Here is what worked (this was close to 24Hrs after first using jmfs  )
-Took original 160GB drive with firmware 9.3 and copied to previously in-use 1.5TB with jmfs
-Did NOT expand with JMFS
-Booted THD on 1.5TB drive. Boot OK, 20 Hours available which was expected.
-Let it download and install firmware 11j
-Set Supersize bit on 1.5TB with WinMFS
-Expand 1.5TB with JMFS
-Boot THD on 1.5TB. Boot OK, 237 Hours available. Yay! :up:
-Clear&Erase everything, to make sure the THD is still happy afterwards
-Tivo booted in guided setup and has been happy ever since.

I repeated the process on my second THD, whose original drive had an even earlier firmware (8.x , I think it was 8.1) without any issue. 237 Hours as well.

I am mentionning this purely to bring more data to this thread. My solution is probably heavy handed but worked for me and might help others in the same situation. Another thing I realized later is that the first TiVo original drive (9.3) had been pulled in "standby" state. This might have caused/contributed to the GSOD problem.

I'd like to finish by thanking Comer for this tool, overall I'm very happy though I need to catch up on some sleep tonight


----------



## richsadams

Thanks very much for that...and your perseverance! I know how heart-sinking a bad boot-up can feel! 

I may have read through all of your trials and tribulations a little too quickly, but it sounds as if the key was upgrading to the latest version of TiVo's software? If so, would it make sense to slip the OEM drive back in, force a connection get the update and _then_ perform the upgrade? That would be a pretty simple bit of advice to add to the instructions. Or am I missing something? (Not unusual BTW  )

Thanks again and TIA for confirming or some clarification. :up:


----------



## EricM

Well, I'm not 100% sure if it's the firmware, the standby state or something else (for instance combination situation where a newer firmware handles too small a swap size more gracefully?). Yes, it could be the firmware. To get more pointers, it would help to know which FW *retiredqwest* had on his original drive.
If it is indeed the firmware, yes, updating the original drive first would be a quicker solution, but I started the whole thing with the self-assigned requirement that I would not modify my original drive 
And as far as the bad bootup, I wasn't too worried because I had the original drive and the shows were backed up on the other TiVo. My attitude was more like "cool, looks like I'm gonna learn something new today"


----------



## vurbano

I am currently copying the stock Premiere drive to a 1TB WD10EVDS AV-GP drive. I will then expand it and put it back in the premeire. What are my odds of success?


----------



## aparikh

Hello,

Just joined this site and I am impressed with the amount of information... Sorry if this has been answered but I will ask just to make sure I am correct with this what I think I am reading...

I have 2 TiVO HDs that came with the 160GB drives which I upgraded to 750GB awhile back with WinMFS.

Am I correct in that it seems that I can now drop in a 2TB using Comer's methods? I also see that DVR_Dude is also selling the 2TB for the THD160 at a fair price...

Also, does it matter if I get the WD 2TB that isn't specifically listed as AV?

Thanks all,


----------



## comer

vurbano said:


> I am currently copying the stock Premiere drive to a 1TB WD10EVDS AV-GP drive. I will then expand it and put it back in the premeire. What are my odds of success?


If you are already copying your drive, then you have everything setup and recognized correctly. 100% :up:


----------



## comer

aparikh said:


> Hello,
> 
> Just joined this site and I am impressed with the amount of information... Sorry if this has been answered but I will ask just to make sure I am correct with this what I think I am reading...
> 
> I have 2 TiVO HDs that came with the 160GB drives which I upgraded to 750GB awhile back with WinMFS.
> 
> Am I correct in that it seems that I can now drop in a 2TB using Comer's methods? I also see that DVR_Dude is also selling the 2TB for the THD160 at a fair price...
> 
> Also, does it matter if I get the WD 2TB that isn't specifically listed as AV?
> 
> Thanks all,


*retiredqwest* answered the first question just a few posts above
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8205708#post8205708. As for the second - check the sister thread here. Especially posts by *richsadams* toward the end of the thread are most relevant.


----------



## vurbano

comer said:


> If you are already copying your drive, then you have everything setup and recognized correctly. 100% :up:


installed in tivo and booting up. Please work........


----------



## vurbano

yeah baby!!!!!!!!!

Comer you da man!
I bought a $399 dollar 32" HDTV from BB for my sons room with a $99 dollar brand new Premiere promotion + $75 dollar 1TB AV-GP + comer software = a $500 dollar XL unit for $175 bucks


----------



## retiredqwest

EricM said:


> Well, I'm not 100% sure if it's the firmware, the standby state or something else (for instance combination situation where a newer firmware handles too small a swap size more gracefully?). Yes, it could be the firmware. To get more pointers, it would help to know which FW *retiredqwest* had on his original drive.
> If it is indeed the firmware, yes, updating the original drive first would be a quicker solution, but I started the whole thing with the self-assigned requirement that I would not modify my original drive
> And as far as the bad bootup, I wasn't too worried because I had the original drive and the shows were backed up on the other TiVo. My attitude was more like "cool, looks like I'm gonna learn something new today"


I have 11.j on the stock THD. I think it had just been downloaded. As for your tribulations...... I have my doubts it had anything to do with the firmware. That being said, I would have made sure the stock drive was up to date before copying it. As that would tell me the stock drive was in working order.

AND I also use a spare computer so the drives are directly connected to SATA ports. It took about an hour and a half to copy the stock drive.

I did this 4 times to various drive sizes without one glitch. Either I'm an exceptionally talented computerist.... or just plain a$$ lucky..... probably the latter.

And if you notice my sig..... I upgraded my stock premiere yesterday first try.

Scotty


----------



## EricM

retiredqwest said:


> AND I also use a spare computer so the drives are directly connected to SATA ports. It took about an hour and a half to copy the stock drive.
> Scotty


Me too. Based on previous experiences, I absolutely do not trust USB to copy the entire contents of a hard drive. The (SATA) copy onto a 5400 rpm Samsung achieved 25MB/s average, while the copy onto a WD "green" achived 35MB/s average. Both are 1.5TB.

I'm willing to run further tests next week on the unit that was problematic since I have a spare 1.5TB (Seagate 7200.11) here at work. Just have to coordinate this with my season passes  First I have to reproduce the problem. Then boot off the original drive and take it out of standby mode. If that doesn't work, to be thorough I'd have to clear&erase everything still on FW 9.3. Only if that doesn't work either will I connect to the network and upgrade the original drive to 11j.


----------



## retiredqwest

I dropped the Stock THD back in and put it in Standby. Copied and expanded using JMFS and it booted just like normal and then went into Standby...... and I brought it of Standby.

I was just curious.


----------



## aparikh

comer said:


> *retiredqwest* answered the first question just a few posts above
> Especially posts by *richsadams* toward the end of the thread are most relevant.


Thanks...

My current 1TB and the 750GB drives were made through WinMFS. Can I still use your tool or am I out of luck for the moment?


----------



## Brent W

Thank you very much. I just updated one of my premiere's to 2TB. Thank you for all your work, and sharing it with everyone.


----------



## mrthornhill

Newegg has a sale on the Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB drive today for $89.
Looking through this thread I've seen that at least one person has successfully used this drive to upgrade their Premiere.
I'm curious what you guys think though, comparing that drive to the AV-GP WD20EVDS 2TB drive. At the moment it'd be $40 more expensive. Worth it for the supposed additional AV device features?


----------



## Befazzled

mrthornhill said:


> Newegg has a sale on the Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB drive today for $89.
> Looking through this thread I've seen that at least one person has successfully used this drive to upgrade their Premiere.
> I'm curious what you guys think though, comparing that drive to the AV-GP WD20EVDS 2TB drive. At the moment it'd be $40 more expensive. Worth it for the supposed additional AV device features?


Apply coupon code EMCZZYR25 and get another 10% off of that price.

Great deal I couldn't pass it up.


----------



## richsadams

mrthornhill said:


> I'm curious what you guys think though, comparing that drive to the AV-GP WD20EVDS 2TB drive. At the moment it'd be $40 more expensive. Worth it for the supposed additional AV device features?


The WD20EVDS is a good choice, however TiVo doesn't or cannot take advantage of the various A/V drive's proprietary features. The only plus is that the AAM is already set to the lowest seek level (128) making it very quiet. However you can use hddscan to adjust the AAM on the EARS model even though it is pretty quiet out of the box.


----------



## naggeneen

What great information here! Thanks!

I have run into one problem using the BlacXDuet Dual Drive USB/eSATA dock. Drives are recognized when in the HDD1 slot, but not in the HDD2 slot.

The company who makes the dock has a note in the box that, when using the eSATA connection, the operating system must have a port multiplier driver installed... but that it's not an issue when running connected via USB as most operating systems have port multiplying over USB installed... but maybe not? I've switched around the new drive and the original TiVo drive, but the application only recognizes the drive in the HDD1 slot and the internal hard drive of the laptop.

Any input or advice would be appreciated!

Thanks again!
Naggeneen


----------



## richsadams

naggeneen said:


> What great information here! Thanks!
> 
> I have run into one problem using the BlacXDuet Dual Drive USB/eSATA dock. Drives are recognized when in the HDD1 slot, but not in the HDD2 slot.
> 
> The company who makes the dock has a note in the box that, when using the eSATA connection, the operating system must have a port multiplier driver installed... but that it's not an issue when running connected via USB as most operating systems have port multiplying over USB installed... but maybe not? I've switched around the new drive and the original TiVo drive, but the application only recognizes the drive in the HDD1 slot and the internal hard drive of the laptop.
> 
> Any input or advice would be appreciated!
> 
> Thanks again!
> Naggeneen


That same issue was reported a page or two ago (or it might have been on the companion thread). The OP ended up using two separate connections...I think two SATA/USB adapters but it might have been two single SATA docks, or it might have been one of each. That's probably what you'll need to do as well. You can still use your dock but you'll need to get a SATA/USB adapter or another dock...unless of course you can connect your hard drives directly to SATA ports on your motherboard (which is the ideal way to upgrade).


----------



## retiredqwest

naggeneen said:


> What great information here! Thanks!
> 
> I have run into one problem using the BlacXDuet Dual Drive USB/eSATA dock. Drives are recognized when in the HDD1 slot, but not in the HDD2 slot.
> 
> The company who makes the dock has a note in the box that, when using the eSATA connection, the operating system must have a port multiplier driver installed... but that it's not an issue when running connected via USB as most operating systems have port multiplying over USB installed... but maybe not? I've switched around the new drive and the original TiVo drive, but the application only recognizes the drive in the HDD1 slot and the internal hard drive of the laptop.
> 
> Any input or advice would be appreciated!
> 
> Thanks again!
> Naggeneen


Since I have a Duet.... thought I'd give this a try....

And no it only recognizes 1 drive.... probably because the underlying Linux OS it uses does not support USB port multiplying.

Scotty


----------



## richsadams

retiredqwest said:


> Since I have a Duet.... thought I'd give this a try....
> 
> And no it only recognizes 1 drive.... probably because the underlying Linux OS it uses does not support USB port multiplying.
> 
> Scotty


:up:


----------



## comer

_Supersize_ has been released. You will get 317 HD hours from 2TB drive. Enjoy!


----------



## efrsysop

comer said:


> _Supersize_ has been released. You will get 317 HD hours from 2TB drive. Enjoy!


317 HD hours indeed!

This is working perfectly for me, thanks so much Comer once again, for all of you hard work.

Of course people are going to want to know how truncated backup is coming along with external storage....

Still reading in the -%?


----------



## comer

efrsysop said:


> 317 HD hours indeed!
> 
> This is working perfectly for me, thanks so much Comer once again, for all of you hard work.
> 
> Of course people are going to want to know how truncated backup is coming along with external storage....
> 
> Still reading in the -%?


Yep, still negative. Shame on you, Tivo, using _int_ in 21st century 
Backup will come eventually


----------



## jmill

317 hours here as well! Thanks comer, everything worked perfectly!


----------



## 11274

I'm trying to expand a TivoHD from 1TB internal to 2TB internal. This unit has already been expanded once from the original stock internal to the 1TB using mfslive.

I did the copy and expand which seemed to work. At least it told me I had something like 1.8TB total. 

Then I plugged it in to the Tivo, which complained that I had an external drive which was not plugged in. I have never had any external drive. I did the only thing I could which was to agree to have it clear the external drive. That results in my getting back to just the 1TB space on the 2TB drive.

I also tried a copy/expand/supersize. That gives the same external error, and clearing the "external" gets it into a powerup/almost done loop.

I presume the problem is the previous mfslive expansion. Is there any way around this?


----------



## comer

km said:


> I'm trying to expand a TivoHD from 1TB internal to 2TB internal. This unit has already been expanded once from the original stock internal to the 1TB using mfslive.
> 
> I did the copy and expand which seemed to work. At least it told me I had something like 1.8TB total.
> 
> Then I plugged it in to the Tivo, which complained that I had an external drive which was not plugged in. I have never had any external drive. I did the only thing I could which was to agree to have it clear the external drive. That results in my getting back to just the 1TB space on the 2TB drive.
> 
> I also tried a copy/expand/supersize. That gives the same external error, and clearing the "external" gets it into a powerup/almost done loop.
> 
> I presume the problem is the previous mfslive expansion. Is there any way around this?


Unfortunately - no, unless you want to lose all your recordings. When restoring with expansion MFSTools/WinMFS does (almost) the same thing as JMFS - adds extra partitions. And there are only so many partitions Tivo can take. So when you do expand again, the new partition is one too many for Tivo.

You can expand THD drive with JMFS either going from stock or from a drive restored by WinMFS without expansion (I don't know if WinMFS has such option, but I believe MFSTools do).


----------



## retiredqwest

km said:


> I'm trying to expand a TivoHD from 1TB internal to 2TB internal. This unit has already been expanded once from the original stock internal to the 1TB using mfslive.
> 
> I did the copy and expand which seemed to work. At least it told me I had something like 1.8TB total.
> 
> Then I plugged it in to the Tivo, which complained that I had an external drive which was not plugged in. I have never had any external drive. I did the only thing I could which was to agree to have it clear the external drive. That results in my getting back to just the 1TB space on the 2TB drive.
> 
> I also tried a copy/expand/supersize. That gives the same external error, and clearing the "external" gets it into a powerup/almost done loop.
> 
> I presume the problem is the previous mfslive expansion. Is there any way around this?


I guess I can comment on this now....

I spent this weekend trying to expand a stock THD to winmfs and then use JMFS to expand to a larger drive and have it work in the THD. It doesn't, in my case the THD would boot and report 21 hrs HD. I tried this twice....

After several emails back and forth, Comer came to the conclusion on how many partitions the TIVO can read.

So, yes you can use JMFS to expand a THD to a larger drive, you just have to use the stock drive as the source.


----------



## lessd

comer said:


> Unfortunately - no, unless you want to lose all your recordings. When restoring with expansion MFSTools/WinMFS does (almost) the same thing as JMFS - adds extra partitions. And there are only so many partitions Tivo can take. So when you do expand again, the new partition is one too many for Tivo.
> 
> You can expand THD drive with JMFS either going from stock or from a drive restored by WinMFS without expansion (I don't know if WinMFS has such option, but I believe MFSTools do).


WinMFS does have have the ability to just use the stock space, after you restore the image the program will ask you if you want to use the extra space, just answer no and your large drive will only have the original image on it and use only only the space that the original drive had.


----------



## coold8

Hi guys,

Posted new revision on server in case mediafire stops working or whatever, as a backup. Thanks for the new Version!

New link:

http://www.thesocialworldwide.com/jmfs-rev104.iso.zip

Old Version will still be kept on the server if someone needs it.

-Dave


----------



## comer

coold8 said:


> Hi guys,
> 
> Posted new revision on server in case mediafire stops working or whatever, as a backup. Thanks for the new Version!
> 
> New link:
> 
> http://www.thesocialworldwide.com/jmfs-rev104.iso.zip
> 
> Old Version will still be kept on the server if someone needs it.
> 
> -Dave


Thanks a lot! :up: I added link to your mirror to the guide


----------



## jkwaterman

With the premiere, if you have an upgraded internal drive, do you still need a software hack to add an external expansion drive? Is there a thread discussing how this is done with the premiere, or is it the same procedure as the Tivi HD? I have seen comments that this has been done, but they did not elaborate.


----------



## comer

jkwaterman said:


> With the premiere, if you have an upgraded internal drive, do you still need a software hack to add an external expansion drive? Is there a thread discussing how this is done with the premiere, or is it the same procedure as the Tivi HD? I have seen comments that this has been done, but they did not elaborate.


You can do it with the current set of tools. However, if your total storage will be greater than 2Tb then you will experience a glitch of unknown consequences. So you better off just using 2tb drive.


----------



## aaronwt

I think I'm ready to try this upgrade. I'm going to sell one of my XL boxes and put a 1TB drive in a regular Premiere. I have a new two platter hitachi drive that has been sitting around for almost a year that I willl use for it.


----------



## chalooch101

i upgraded my tivo premiere to a 1tb now i want to upgrate the 1tb to a 2tb. if i follow the same steps will i be able to copy the 1tb to the 2 tb


----------



## JFalc

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I have ran the upgrade on two Premiers and the "version 68" cd worked great.

If I want to 'supersize' my undersized 2tb drive, is there such a feature in the new 1.04 version ? I am asking if this can be done without 'copying' or starting over. In essence, I want to 'expand' and already copied and expanded drive (pre Nov version).?

Will this work with v. 1.04?


----------



## comer

chalooch101 said:


> i upgraded my tivo premiere to a 1tb now i want to upgrate the 1tb to a 2tb. if i follow the same steps will i be able to copy the 1tb to the 2 tb


No, sorry  You can expand only once from stock drive. You can not expand an already expanded drive.


----------



## comer

JFalc said:


> Thank you, thank you, thank you.
> 
> I have ran the upgrade on two Premiers and the "version 68" cd worked great.
> 
> If I want to 'supersize' my undersized 2tb drive, is there such a feature in the new 1.04 version ? I am asking if this can be done without 'copying' or starting over. In essence, I want to 'expand' and already copied and expanded drive (pre Nov version).?
> 
> Will this work with v. 1.04?


You can "supersize" at any time without copying or starting over. You can not expand the same drive more than once.


----------



## davidahn

comer said:


> Plug-n-Play is supported for WD DVR expander only. For generic ESATA tool is coming soon
> 
> What's the word on generic eSATA external drive support (non-WD My DVR Expander)? I bought two 2TB drives, and I'm itching to have a 4 TB monster TiVo. I haven't even upgraded the internal HD yet, thought I'd do it all at once.
> 
> I initially got very excited about Hulu Plus, thinking I didn't need to clutter my hard drive with shows I've watched, but they're pulling stuff off like crazy. So it turns out I really do need a HUGE capacity TiVo.
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> David


----------



## comer

davidahn said:


> What's the word on generic eSATA external drive support (non-WD My DVR Expander)? I bought two 2TB drives, and I'm itching to have a 4 TB monster TiVo. I haven't even upgraded the internal HD yet, thought I'd do it all at once.
> 
> I initially got very excited about Hulu Plus, thinking I didn't need to clutter my hard drive with shows I've watched, but they're pulling stuff off like crazy. So it turns out I really do need a HUGE capacity TiVo.


In short - bug-limited by Tivo. But you _can_ do it if you are adventurous enough  Read about it here and here.


----------



## Tivoitis

I've got a couple of Tivo HD's and I'm going to try to upgrade using the Western Digital WD20EURS, a 2TB drive. Do I need to worry about the Advanced Format? I still have my original drive available as a source, but I sure it's a pretty ancient software version on there. I had upgraded to a 750GB drive right after I bought them originally, so it's probably a 3yr old version of the THD software.

Will I have problems using such an old version? Should I clone the drive, install and let the software update, then pull it out after the software is up-to-date and then expand and supersize it? Or can I just clone, expand, and supersize it from the the get go?


----------



## Anthony GT

comer said:


> You can "supersize" at any time without copying or starting over. You can not expand the same drive more than once.


Just tried to Supersize on my 2TB drive and it resulted in no change in recording capacity. The drive was expanded using the previous version of the expander. It seems like a pretty simple process so I'm not sure what I am missing. The only think I can think of is that I used a USB --> SATA converter. Do I need a direct SATA connection?


----------



## comer

Anthony GT said:


> Just tried to Supersize on my 2TB drive and it resulted in no change in recording capacity. The drive was expanded using the previous version of the expander. It seems like a pretty simple process so I'm not sure what I am missing. The only think I can think of is that I used a USB --> SATA converter. Do I need a direct SATA connection?


By recording capacity , do you mean space bar or system info?


----------



## Anthony GT

comer said:


> By recording capacity , do you mean space bar or system info?


System info. It stayed at 317 HD hours.

Wait a sec. Tha's what it's supposed to be isn't it? I need to stop doing these things early in the morning.


----------



## comer

Anthony GT said:


> System info. It stayed at 317 HD hours.


Well, that's what it supposed to be after Supersize  Without it, system would show 287 HD hours. So you are supersized!


----------



## Anthony GT

comer said:


> Well, that's what it supposed to be after Supersize  Without it, system would show 287 HD hours. So you are supersized!


Thanks Comer. I realized it right after I posted it. I vow to do no more hacks until after 10:00am!

What should a 1 TB drive end up with?


----------



## comer

Anthony GT said:


> Thanks Comer. I realized it right after I posted it. I vow to do no more hacks until after 10:00am!
> 
> What should a 1 TB drive end up with?


I don't remember clearly. I think without it - 156, with 180-ish.


----------



## Anthony GT

comer said:


> I don't remember clearly. I think without it - 156, with 180-ish.


Hmmm, my Premiere with 1 TB drive is showing 145 HD hours after Supersize. Will it mess anything up if I try to Supersize it again?


----------



## richsadams

Tivoitis said:


> I've got a couple of Tivo HD's and I'm going to try to upgrade using the Western Digital WD20EURS, a 2TB drive. Do I need to worry about the Advanced Format? I still have my original drive available as a source, but I sure it's a pretty ancient software version on there. I had upgraded to a 750GB drive right after I bought them originally, so it's probably a 3yr old version of the THD software.
> 
> Will I have problems using such an old version? Should I clone the drive, install and let the software update, then pull it out after the software is up-to-date and then expand and supersize it? Or can I just clone, expand, and supersize it from the the get go?


Well...AFAIK no one has tried upgrading with the new WD20EURS AV/GP drive so you'll be a bit of a TiVo Pioneer!

TiVo, Linux, Apple, etc. are unaffected by the 400K sector "advanced format"...it's only a Windows issue.

Based on some other reports, it would probably be best to slip the original TiVo drive back in, force a connection and update before upgrading. (FWIW updates are not incremental so it will go from whatever's on there to the latest.)

If you want to receive the latest update ASAP you can try forcing a connection to TiVo to see if it will download. (It may take several connections before the update will appear.)

1. TiVo Central
2. Messages and settings
3. Settings
4. Phone and network
5. Connect to the TiVo service now

Once the download has finished and loaded look at the "Last Status" line on that screen or in System Information and if it says "Pending restart" instead of a date your new software will automatically install at 2 a.m. your time. Or you can reboot TiVo and it will install the update immediately. You will see these two screens during the reboot process when it does.

You can reboot TiVo via the menu screens:

1. TiVo Central
2. Messages & Setup
3. Restart or reset system
4. Restart the TiVo DVR

Or you can simply unplug it, wait about 10 seconds for the hard drive to spin down and plug it back in.

If you have the patience it would be helpful if you could perform the upgrade, install the drive, see if it will boot up and if so if it will boot up from a menu restart. That would be valuable information to determine if this particular drive has the soft reboot issue (hangs at the "Welcome" screen after a menu restart). If it does hang, either at the initial boot or a menu restart you will probably need to run the wdidle3.exe program to extend the Intellipark timeout to five minutes. (See the Drive Expansion FAQ, Section IV, #29 for details: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160.) I suspect that it won't be an issue since this is a new model and other models manufactured after September 15th or so no longer have to have the firmware updated.

If you could also give us the drive's manufacture date that would be valuable too. TIA for that.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## richsadams

Anthony GT said:


> Hmmm, my Premiere with 1 TB drive is showing 145 HD hours after Supersize. Will it mess anything up if I try to Supersize it again?


you can Supersize at any time w/o affecting any of your recordings, etc. The result s/b 156 hours.


----------



## comer

Anthony GT said:


> Hmmm, my Premiere with 1 TB drive is showing 145 HD hours after Supersize. Will it mess anything up if I try to Supersize it again?


Like I said - I don't remember clearly  So w/o Supersize it is 145h. With Supersize - 156


----------



## comer

richsadams said:


> TiVo, Linux, Apple, etc. are unaffected by the 400K sector "advanced format"...it's only a Windows issue.


I don't think it's even a Windows issue or issue at all. If your *partition* block is not the same as *harddrive* block - you *will* experience performance degradation no matter what OS is used, particularly if harddrive's block is *larger* than partition's. It's easy to understand - if a partition has 512 byte block it writes/reads in these chunks. HDD in turn uses it's own blocks and only reads/writes in those chunks. If disk has 4K block, then every read/write of 512 bytes by OS will cause the whole 4K read/write. So essentially, OS will *always* cause 8 times the I/O it really needs. And, of course, the drive will be used 8 times "harder" if you will, in terms of service life. However, it's much more difficult to quantify due to cache an alike.

With all that said, one can specify an appropriate block size when creating a partiton, in *any* system. Except Tivo  The partition block in it is fixed to 512 byte. :down:


----------



## Anthony GT

richsadams said:


> you can Supersize at any time w/o affecting any of your recordings, etc. The result s/b 156 hours.


I reran Supersize on it and it worked this time. I wonder what I messed up the first time? Oh well, thanks!


----------



## richsadams

Anthony GT said:


> I reran Supersize on it and it worked this time. I wonder what I messed up the first time? Oh well, thanks!


Nice work. Enjoy!


----------



## Tivoitis

Thanks for the reply ... I planned poorly though and am still pulling old shows off my current drive (750GB) using Tivo Desktop (there isn't any faster method, is there?), so it'll be a while before I can actually do my first swap.

My WD20EURS has a manufacture date of 10/13/2010, and was factory set to "quiet" mode (code 128 when read with hdparm) and was factory set to an idle timeout of 8 seconds. I already disabled the idle timeout though - what's the reasoning behind using a timeout of 5 minutes versus just disabling it? I also just went ahead and copied the old drive, expanded and supersized it from the start, so I guess I'll be testing that configuration first.


----------



## richsadams

Tivoitis said:


> Thanks for the reply ... I planned poorly though and am still pulling old shows off my current drive (750GB) using Tivo Desktop (there isn't any faster method, is there?), so it'll be a while before I can actually do my first swap.
> 
> My WD20EURS has a manufacture date of 10/13/2010, and was factory set to "quiet" mode (code 128 when read with hdparm) and was factory set to an idle timeout of 8 seconds. I already disabled the idle timeout though - what's the reasoning behind using a timeout of 5 minutes versus just disabling it? I also just went ahead and copied the old drive, expanded and supersized it from the start, so I guess I'll be testing that configuration first.


That should all work fine. The AAM is set to 128 on all WD AV drives. You probably didn't have to disable or even tweak the Intellipark feature based on the manufacture date but no harm done. Setting it to 5 minutes was recommended in case folks decided to repurpose the drive later on and still wanted the feature.

There are other programs like KMTTG that are a little more robust compared to TiVo Desktop but the limitation is due to how TiVo is built, not so much the program used to transfer recordings.

Enjoy!


----------



## Tivoitis

I like KMTTG too, but it seems like Tivo Desktop does a better job of recovering and continuing with transfers. I had transfers using pyTivo and KMTTG that just stopped and I couldn't figure out a way to continue/restart the transfers without deleting and starting the transfers. Are there any other download tools that can manage the restart/continue like Tivo Desktop (or is it available in pyTivo or KMTTG and I just didn't find it?)?


----------



## richsadams

Tivoitis said:


> I like KMTTG too, but it seems like Tivo Desktop does a better job of recovering and continuing with transfers. I had transfers using pyTivo and KMTTG that just stopped and I couldn't figure out a way to continue/restart the transfers without deleting and starting the transfers. Are there any other download tools that can manage the restart/continue like Tivo Desktop (or is it available in pyTivo or KMTTG and I just didn't find it?)?


Outside of a few corrupted recordings I haven't had to deal with interrupted transfers...although I know folks post about them now and then. Hopefully someone has some suggestions.


----------



## Tivoitis

Okay, so I've had a bit of fun trying to get this to work on my THD.


I tried copy, expand, and supersize from my original drive (which was at version 8.1.7c2). That went into a reboot loop.
I used WinMFS to make a truncated copy of my current drive (which is at v11.0j) and restored that to my new drive. When I tried to expand the new drive with JMFS, it failed. I put the new drive into my THD to see if it would be recognized. It went into recovery mode and fixed itself after 3 hrs. I removed it and tried to use JMFS to expand it again, but it again failed to complete the expansion.
I finally popped the original drive back into my THD and let it update to 11.0j. Once that was done, I used JMFS to copy, expand, and supersize the drive. JMFS said it completed successfully, and the new drive worked in my THD, but it only showed the original 28 HD hours. When I tried JMFS again to expand the drive, it failed to do the expansion.
I used JMFS again to copy from the original drive and then only expanded the new drive. This worked in my THD and showed 288 hours. I removed the new drive and tried to supersize it with JMFS, but when I put it back into my THD, it froze for a while and when it became responsive again, it was back to showing only 28 hours (and oddly enough, it was responsive only to remote code 2).
I'm re-copying the original drive and will only expand it and will live with it at "only" 288 hours in my THD. 
Anyone have other ideas for me to try? Comer, if there's any log information I can provide or any diagnostics I can run, let me know and I'll do it. If not, I'm still happy and thankful to be able to use a 2TB drive!


----------



## comer

Tivoitis said:


> Okay, so I've had a bit of fun trying to get this to work on my THD.
> 
> 
> I tried copy, expand, and supersize from my original drive (which was at version 8.1.7c2). That went into a reboot loop.
> I used WinMFS to make a truncated copy of my current drive (which is at v11.0j) and restored that to my new drive. When I tried to expand the new drive with JMFS, it failed. I put the new drive into my THD to see if it would be recognized. It went into recovery mode and fixed itself after 3 hrs. I removed it and tried to use JMFS to expand it again, but it again failed to complete the expansion.
> I finally popped the original drive back into my THD and let it update to 11.0j. Once that was done, I used JMFS to copy, expand, and supersize the drive. JMFS said it completed successfully, and the new drive worked in my THD, but it only showed the original 28 HD hours. When I tried JMFS again to expand the drive, it failed to do the expansion.
> I used JMFS again to copy from the original drive and then only expanded the new drive. This worked in my THD and showed 288 hours. I removed the new drive and tried to supersize it with JMFS, but when I put it back into my THD, it froze for a while and when it became responsive again, it was back to showing only 28 hours (and oddly enough, it was responsive only to remote code 2).
> I'm re-copying the original drive and will only expand it and will live with it at "only" 288 hours in my THD.
> Anyone have other ideas for me to try? Comer, if there's any log information I can provide or any diagnostics I can run, let me know and I'll do it. If not, I'm still happy and thankful to be able to use a 2TB drive!


Thank you for the detailed account of your upgrade! :up:
I think THD may have a problem with maximum disk size being set to 2T - that's what Supersize does. I don't recall - has it worked for anyone on THD?


----------



## wombat94

Thanks Comer!

What a great two weeks for Tivo in my world.

First, I looked into and finally got going with Streambaby - great software.
Second, the 6ave.com deal - 2 Premieres on their way - the better to stream and transfer at high speeds.
Then, reading up on Premiere upgrades here. Purchased 2 WD 2 TB caviar green drives in anticipation of receiving the Premieres.
Finally, last night I received the Tivos, activated 1 year prepaid service on each, pulled the drives and upgraded to the 2TB drives, supersized.

Now I have replaced my two old Tivo HDs with two shiny new Premieres with a year's worth of service and a total of over 600 HD hours of storage for a grand total of just over $600.

Now I've got my eye on two slider remotes and I'll be all set.


----------



## comer

wombat94 said:


> Thanks Comer!
> 
> What a great two weeks for Tivo in my world.
> 
> First, I looked into and finally got going with Streambaby - great software.
> Second, the 6ave.com deal - 2 Premieres on their way - the better to stream and transfer at high speeds.
> Then, reading up on Premiere upgrades here. Purchased 2 WD 2 TB caviar green drives in anticipation of receiving the Premieres.
> Finally, last night I received the Tivos, activated 1 year prepaid service on each, pulled the drives and upgraded to the 2TB drives, supersized.
> 
> Now I have replaced my two old Tivo HDs with two shiny new Premieres with a year's worth of service and a total of over 600 HD hours of storage for a grand total of just over $600.
> 
> Now I've got my eye on two slider remotes and I'll be all set.


Congrats! :up: Slightly out of subject, but... I switched to Harmony remote (550) to control 6 devices including Premiere and can not imagine using anything else now


----------



## wombat94

comer said:


> Congrats! :up: Slightly out of subject, but... I switched to Harmony remote (550) to control 6 devices including Premiere and can not imagine using anything else now


I'm a big harmony person myself. I have a Harmony 880 in the bedroom and a Harmony One in the home theater/living room.

But I have to say, I like the bluetooth/no line of sight aspect of the Slider remote and the keyboard seems great.

I'm probably going to buy one slider first for the bedroom, where line of sight to the Tivo is more of a challenge, and the harmony is really overkill (just Tivo, TV and DVD player at the moment) - slider + DVD remote will be better most of the time vs. the Harmony 880.

In the home theater, line of sight is fine, and I do love the Harmony One.

The biggest issue there is the keyboard for search text entry. I may keep the HOne and try out my Lenovo HTPC remote for text entry - I've heard that USB keyboards now work with the Premiere.


----------



## retiredqwest

comer said:


> Thank you for the detailed account of your upgrade! :up:
> I think THD may have a problem with maximum disk size being set to 2T - that's what Supersize does. I don't recall - has it worked for anyone on THD?


I thought I had tried this and left a comment in a previous message in this thread.



> Yes, JMFS does detect the stock THD and I was able to copy and then expand to a a 2TB drive, Samsung is all I had then. That gave me 287 hrs. Then I used Winmfs and turned on supersize to max out at the 318 hr mark.


I don't have a spare 2TB drive to try this again.....

Scotty


----------



## MikeAndrews

davidahn said:


> comer said:
> 
> 
> 
> Plug-n-Play is supported for WD DVR expander only. For generic ESATA tool is coming soon
> 
> 
> 
> What's the word on generic eSATA external drive support (non-WD My DVR Expander)? I bought two 2TB drives, and I'm itching to have a 4 TB monster TiVo. I haven't even upgraded the internal HD yet, thought I'd do it all at once.
Click to expand...




jkwaterman said:


> With the premiere, if you have an upgraded internal drive, do you still need a software hack to add an external expansion drive? Is there a thread discussing how this is done with the premiere, or is it the same procedure as the Tivi HD? I have seen comments that this has been done, but they did not elaborate.





comer said:


> In short - bug-limited by Tivo. But you _can_ do it if you are adventurous enough  Read about it here and here.


Thanks, Comer, but those point right back to this thread. We know you worked really hard but no good deed goes unpunished.

There was a mention here that at least one here got 2TB + 2TB working with only the negative space bug. You're going to have to spill what worked and how to do that.

I'm thinking that for once I want to max out disk space at first bluish with my new Premiere unless the eSATA external disk add can be done later without losing recordings.

Sooo, buddy.... is it looking like the doing a single 2TB disk now with JMFS (with the minimum number of partitions?) will still allow adding an external later?

Personally I can grok calculating the sizes and start blocks and running the utilities manually if you want me to try writing some docs. Just point me at what the winning setup turned out to look like.


----------



## Ladd Morse

I had hoped to report an easy success in upgrading my TiVo HD to a 2TB drive, as has been done by others, but unfortunately despite multiple attempts on my part , I can't get it to work.

Original TiVo HD 160 GB drive that has the cablecard pairings on it. 
A new 2 TB WD20EARS drive purchased last week.
Latest JMFS iso image.

Copying from the old 160 GB drive to the new 2 TB took about 5 hours via eSATA. I then expanded and supersized the drive.
Installation of the 2 TB drive into the TiVo HD results in the "powering up" screen for a couple of minutes, then the "almost there" screen for about 25 seconds, then the "powering up" screen returns. Letting the TiVo sit for several hours changes nothing; still stuck on the "powering up" screen.

Pulling the power cord and waiting for 15 seconds and plugging the cord back in gives me the "powering up" screen for a couple of minutes, then the "almost there" screen for 25 seconds THEN I get a green screen with text saying "tivo has detected serious hard disk issues and will attempt to fix them. Please wait three hours". After about 10 seconds the "powering up screen re-appears. Letting the TiVo sit as long as overnight changes nothing. 

I have re-imaged the 2 TB drive twice, the second time only expanding the drive, not performing the supersized function. Identical results.

Given that other people appear to have successfully created a 2 TB drive for their TiVo HDs using the JMFS iso, I'm baffled as to what I'm doing wrong.

clues, tips, advice, etc. requested


----------



## comer

Ladd Morse said:


> Given that other people appear to have successfully created a 2 TB drive for their TiVo HDs using the JMFS iso, I'm baffled as to what I'm doing wrong.
> 
> clues, tips, advice, etc. requested


Not with Supersize they didn't. Looks like Premiere Supersize is not compatible with THD. Do not do it. *Retiredqwest* has just said that his success was with expanding with JMFS and Supersizing with WinMFS.


----------



## comer

netringer said:


> There was a mention here that at least one here got 2TB + 2TB working with only the negative space bug.


You see, that's exactly why I am pointing back to the thread - it's all explained there. The word "only" here is wrong. Nobody knows or has proven that this is the "*only*" bug related to >2TB storage. For example, I have no idea what's going to happen when total amount of recordings go beyond 2T mark.



> You're going to have to spill what worked and how to do that.


No, I am not. I do what I do because I _want_ to.



> is it looking like the doing a single 2TB disk now with JMFS (with the minimum number of partitions?) will still allow adding an external later?


Yes, expanding with JMFS still allows adding an external storage. However, JMFS or not, total storage is larger than 2T *will* result in "negative space bug". Again, it was all said in this thread already 



> Personally I can grok calculating the sizes and start blocks and running the utilities manually if you want me to try writing some docs. Just point me at what the winning setup turned out to look like.


You don't need to. What you do need - is to understand that you can lose all your recordings unexpectedly due to unknown nature and extent of this bug. It's quite like drug trials - they pay you money for taking some seemingly harmless substance, but noone knows if that substance will cause cancer in 10 years. So, if you still want to experiment - PM me for instructions. I have no intentions to put that in the guide, unless I can not handle the amount of PMs


----------



## Ladd Morse

comer said:


> Not with Supersize they didn't.


Thanks for the reply, but my second attempt was without the JMFS supersize (expansion only) and it still didn't work. And it didn't work the exact same way it didn't work when I did try the supersize option).

I'll be trying the "Retiredqwest" method tonight.


----------



## comer

Ladd Morse said:


> Thanks for the reply, but my second attempt was without the JMFS supersize (expansion only) and it still didn't work. And it didn't work the exact same way it didn't work when I did try the supersize option).
> 
> I'll be trying the "Retiredqwest" method tonight.


Hm... that's strange. Was the old drive altered with WinMFS by any chance?


----------



## Ladd Morse

comer said:


> Hm... that's strange. Was the old drive altered with WinMFS by any chance?


I don't think so. If memory serves correctly, about a week after purchase the cable guy did the cable card installation. I then pulled the drive the next day, backed it up to a computer via WinMFS, then copied that backup to a new 1 GB drive, expanded and supersized and put that in the TiVo.

I'm pretty sure the original 160 GB drive had no exposure to WinMFS other than performing the backup.


----------



## retiredqwest

Something to consider here.....

I used rev.68 iso for all of my testing and resultant drive that I used in my THD. And the Premiere for that matter. I used rev104 on the Premiere to supersize the 2TB to the 317 hrs HD.

Don't know if that makes a difference.


----------



## Tivoitis

Ladd Morse said:


> I had hoped to report an easy success in upgrading my TiVo HD to a 2TB drive, as has been done by others, but unfortunately despite multiple attempts on my part , I can't get it to work.
> 
> Original TiVo HD 160 GB drive that has the cablecard pairings on it.
> A new 2 TB WD20EARS drive purchased last week.
> Latest JMFS iso image.
> 
> Copying from the old 160 GB drive to the new 2 TB took about 5 hours via eSATA. I then expanded and supersized the drive.
> Installation of the 2 TB drive into the TiVo HD results in the "powering up" screen for a couple of minutes, then the "almost there" screen for about 25 seconds, then the "powering up" screen returns. Letting the TiVo sit for several hours changes nothing; still stuck on the "powering up" screen.
> 
> Pulling the power cord and waiting for 15 seconds and plugging the cord back in gives me the "powering up" screen for a couple of minutes, then the "almost there" screen for 25 seconds THEN I get a green screen with text saying "tivo has detected serious hard disk issues and will attempt to fix them. Please wait three hours". After about 10 seconds the "powering up screen re-appears. Letting the TiVo sit as long as overnight changes nothing.
> 
> I have re-imaged the 2 TB drive twice, the second time only expanding the drive, not performing the supersized function. Identical results.
> 
> Given that other people appear to have successfully created a 2 TB drive for their TiVo HDs using the JMFS iso, I'm baffled as to what I'm doing wrong.
> 
> clues, tips, advice, etc. requested


I had to re-install the original 160GB drive and let it upgrade the software to v11.0j first, then I was able to use JMFS to copy and expand it. When I copied the original and let that update, I wasn't able to expand it. I'm still working with comer to figure out how to supersize it properly.


----------



## Ladd Morse

retiredqwest said:


> Something to consider here.....
> 
> I used rev.68 iso for all of my testing and resultant drive that I used in my THD. And the Premiere for that matter. I used rev104 on the Premiere to supersize the 2TB to the 317 hrs HD.
> 
> Don't know if that makes a difference.


Good point to consider. I'm 1/3 done with another JMFS copy from the 160GB to the 2TB. I am going to follow your steps to see if that makes a difference -- first step is putting the un-expanded and un-supersized drive into the TiVo to see if it works.

If it doesn't, I'll put the original drive back in the TiVo, force an update to the 11j, then re-image again and test. If THAT doesn't work, I'll step back to JMFS version .68 to see if that works.

I'll be reporting back tomorrow morning, but at 5 hours per re-image, it will take me all day if I have to go through all the steps. Not a problem at my end other than just wanting things to go faster.


----------



## Tivoitis

For what it's worth, I'm using JMFS 1.04 for all my processing (and it's off a flash drive boot). Luckily, I've got a newer CPU to use for imaging - it takes about 2hrs to do the copy from the 160GB to the 2TB. I do notice that I have to keep it from falling asleep or it freezes up. Is there anyway to turn off power management?


----------



## davidahn

Success! Followed the TiVo + Comer procedure:

1. TiVo Premiere 320GB service activated
2. M-Card installed by Verizon FiOS tech
3. Installed original S4 320GB and Samsung 2TB in bays 2 & 3 of Mac Pro via SATA2
4. Booted from Comer's JMFS Live CD using option key to select boot volume
5. Used easy script to clone original 320GB drive (about 3.5 hrs over SATA2)
6. Expanded, then Supersized drive (super fast!)

And vo&#237;l&#224;! We now have a 2 TB, 317 HD hour, lifetime service TiVo Premiere for $398 (TiVo Premiere: $0; 2 TB HD: $99; PLS: $299). Thanks, Comer! You are da man!

David

P.S. My greed knows no bounds; I'm still looking forward to adding an external eSATA 2 TB drive. Will keep checking back.


----------



## tcfcameron

davidahn said:


> And voílà! We now have a 2 TB, 317 HD hour, lifetime service TiVo Premiere for $398 (TiVo Premiere: $0; 2 TB HD: $99; PLS: $299).


So, you must have the $0 Promo Premiere + $19.95/month with 2 year commitment plan?

Are you aware that after 2 years, you'll still have to pay $19.95/month, because the promo units never lose their promo designation?

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but your cost calculations don't factor in the promo *service* rate, which drives up the TCO considerably.


----------



## rcobourn

tcfcameron said:


> So, you must have the $0 Promo Premiere + $19.95/month with 2 year commitment plan?
> 
> Are you aware that after 2 years, you'll still have to pay $19.95/month, because the promo units never lose their promo designation?
> 
> I don't mean to rain on your parade, but your cost calculations don't factor in the promo *service* rate, which drives up the TCO considerably.


Why would he be paying a promo service rate when he has PLS?


----------



## tcfcameron

rcobourn said:


> Why would he be paying a promo service rate when he has PLS?


It doesn't add up. How do you obtain a "$0" Premiere that is eligible for PLS?

I'd sure like to know!

The only $0 Premieres, that I am aware of, are promotional units bought directly from TiVo, which come with the service plan I described.

Admittedly, I was up too late when I posted my query... Thus, the lack of a sentence or two that would have made it make sense...


----------



## lessd

tcfcameron said:


> It doesn't add up. How do you obtain a "$0" Premiere that is eligible for PLS?
> 
> I'd sure like to know!
> 
> The only $0 Premieres, that I am aware of, are promotional units bought directly from TiVo, which come with the service plan I described.
> 
> Admittedly, I was up too late when I posted my query... Thus, the lack of a sentence or two that would have made it make sense...


That is a good one, what place has a TiVos for $0 beside TiVo itself, unless he had a $100 Best Buy (or another store) gift certificate.


----------



## tinkererguy

This Monday, I will have a new WD20EVDS 2TB drive and a new TiVo Premiere, already activated and tied to my account (supposedly, as told by tivo.com sales).

I've worked with Series 3 upgrades in the past, and am familiar with using old school dd copy techniques to keep programs, and cablecard config stays intact.

This time, I'm getting a m-card visit on Tuesday (Cox still doesn't do self-install), but I'd like to have Premiere ready by Monday night.

I plan to replace the Premiere drive with the new 2TB drive, using JMFS 1.04 for the copy using boot CD, with 2 sata ports on a PC.

Am I better off:
a) copy/expand prior to using the Premiere (removing the Premiere drive before even plugging it in for the first time)
b) turn on the Premiere first (skipping cablecard set up), then let it finish doing updates (forcing if needed), then remove drive and copy/expand?

Then on Tuesday I'll configure the m-card with Cox. And when the 2TB dies someday, I'll have the original to copy the original image from again to a new drive, although I will have re-activate the m-card, of course.

Any thoughts/suggestions appreciated!
Does somebody have screenshots of how JMFS actually looks doing a copy/expand?


----------



## tcfcameron

tinkererguy said:


> Am I better off:
> a) copy/expand prior to using the Premiere (removing the Premiere drive before even plugging it in for the first time)
> b) turn on the Premiere first (skipping cablecard set up), then let it finish doing updates (forcing if needed), then remove drive and copy/expand?
> 
> Any thoughts/suggestions appreciated!


I'm actually doing option "A", right now. I'm trying it on two different Premiere units. The first finished all the jmfs procedures just fine (according to the program). But I still have to verify/adjust the AAM & Idle Timer settings before I can fire it up and see what happens. The second unit is still in the copy process.

I've noticed that you may have to reboot a few times to get the "drive model" listed properly in the drive selection screens (all the drive parameters were correct, but the model was listed as "*unknown*").

I'm getting about 40MB/sec data transfer rate with SATA. At that speed, it's only taking a few hours per drive. I went with the WD20EADS drives, that I got for $79/each w/free shipping from NewEgg a while back (A big "Thank You" to the person who posted that deal and the required discount code).

Since disabling AAM and disabling the Idle Timer, with the WD20EADS drives, worked so well with my THDs, I'm probably going to do the same with the Premieres. But, I thought it may also make sense to query the factory drives and see what TiVo has them set to (and perhaps just use those parameters).

I'll report back when I am all done (or if it turns out that something goes wrong).


----------



## tcfcameron

tcfcameron said:


> I'm actually doing option "A", right now. I'm trying it on two different Premiere units. The first finished all the jmfs procedures just fine (according to the program). But I still have to verify/adjust the AAM & Idle Timer settings before I can fire it up and see what happens. The second unit is still in the copy process.
> 
> I've noticed that you may have to reboot a few times to get the "drive model" listed properly in the drive selection screens (all the drive parameters were correct, but the model was listed as "*unknown*").
> 
> I'm getting about 40MB/sec data transfer rate with SATA. At that speed, it's only taking a few hours per drive. I went with the WD20EADS drives, that I got for $79/each w/free shipping from NewEgg a while back (A big "Thank You" to the person who posted that deal and the required discount code).
> 
> Since disabling AAM and disabling the Idle Timer, with the WD20EADS drives, worked so well with my THDs, I'm probably going to do the same with the Premieres. But, I thought it may also make sense to query the factory drives and see what TiVo has them set to (and perhaps just use those parameters).
> 
> I'll report back when I am all done (or if it turns out that something goes wrong).


Everything worked flawlessly. 317 HD hours.

It could be easy to forget to supersize, as it requires you to back up one menu level after you expand the drive. (Just something to watch for).

I went with AAM & Idle Timer both disabled (done via boot floppy with Hitachi Feature Tool v2.12 & WDIDLE3 v1.05).

Thank You, Comer! :up:


----------



## comer

tinkererguy said:


> This Monday, I will have a new WD20EVDS 2TB drive and a new TiVo Premiere, already activated and tied to my account (supposedly, as told by tivo.com sales).
> 
> I've worked with Series 3 upgrades in the past, and am familiar with using old school dd copy techniques to keep programs, and cablecard config stays intact.
> 
> This time, I'm getting a m-card visit on Tuesday (Cox still doesn't do self-install), but I'd like to have Premiere ready by Monday night.
> 
> I plan to replace the Premiere drive with the new 2TB drive, using JMFS 1.04 for the copy using boot CD, with 2 sata ports on a PC.
> 
> Am I better off:
> a) copy/expand prior to using the Premiere (removing the Premiere drive before even plugging it in for the first time)
> b) turn on the Premiere first (skipping cablecard set up), then let it finish doing updates (forcing if needed), then remove drive and copy/expand?
> 
> Then on Tuesday I'll configure the m-card with Cox. And when the 2TB dies someday, I'll have the original to copy the original image from again to a new drive, although I will have re-activate the m-card, of course.
> 
> Any thoughts/suggestions appreciated!
> Does somebody have screenshots of how JMFS actually looks doing a copy/expand?


Technically it does no matter - it will work either way. From cable-card setup point of view, I would do it *after* card is configured, as I understand the procedure to do it takes time, tech visit and otherwise quite involved. This way all the settings will be kept backed up on the original drive.


----------



## chrisbac

This sounds like great work, but I am looking to upgrade an old Series 2. Will the new jmfs tool work for that, or do I need to revert to the older tools. I gave my old series 2 to a friend who is interested in expanding the drive until they make the move the HD.

Thanks.
Chris


----------



## lessd

chrisbac said:


> This sounds like great work, but I am looking to upgrade an old Series 2. Will the new jmfs tool work for that, or do I need to revert to the older tools. I gave my old series 2 to a friend who is interested in expanding the drive until they make the move the HD.
> 
> Thanks.
> Chris


With a Series 2 why would you not just use WinMFS, there is no advantage to this new tool (for a Series 2) and no risk using WinMFS.


----------



## vectorcatch

I thought I'd post some information about a short experiment performed with JMFS and a TiVo HD. (I decided to experiment with a drive that was not being used, 320GB WD Scorpio Blue).

I started with the stock TiVo HD drive (160GB) with 11.0j installed.


Performed a copy with JMFS to the 320GB drive. (~2 hrs using ESATA docks)
Performed an expand and then a supersize using JMFS.
Placed the drive back in the TiVo HD. It booted fine, but only displayed the standard 21 hrs. 
Tried an expand again with JMFS, expand failed since it had already been done.
Tried Supersize again with JMFS, tool reported success, but again had no effect when placed back in the TiVo.
Used WinMFS to turn SuperSize on (no other modifications using WinMFS)
Placed back in TiVo and rebooted. TiVo reported 47 HD hrs. 
Trying to fill up to test extra space now to verify space actually works.

Now this was more of an experiment with JMFS than anything else, but now makes me wonder why the final WinMFS supersize made everything work. Are the 2 performing supersize in a different way?


----------



## richsadams

vectorcatch said:


> I thought I'd post some information about a short experiment performed with JMFS and a TiVo HD. <snip>


Interesting stuff and some good data points. Thanks for taking the time to share. :up:


----------



## richsadams

chrisbac said:


> This sounds like great work, but I am looking to upgrade an old Series 2. Will the new jmfs tool work for that, or do I need to revert to the older tools. I gave my old series 2 to a friend who is interested in expanding the drive until they make the move the HD.
> 
> Thanks.
> Chris


Hi Chris. As Les suggests...all you need to do is use winMFS to replace/upgrade the drive in your Series2. All you need to know can be found here:

http://www.mfslive.org/winmfs/


----------



## tinkererguy

comer said:


> Technically it does no matter - it will work either way. From cable-card setup point of view, I would do it *after* card is configured, as I understand the procedure to do it takes time, tech visit and otherwise quite involved. This way all the settings will be kept backed up on the original drive.


Getting ready by preparing my new 2TB WD20EVDS that arrived today. Verified the acoustic settings was at 128 (factory defaults), indeed it was. Then I made sure to idle timeout disabled using "WDIDLE /D" (factory defaults was 8 seconds).

As far as the before/after cablecard question, I'll probably do a WinMFS backup of the drive before it's ever even booted, just as a sort of a just-in-case. I'll then be able to safely/easily try many scenarios for the jmfs copy/expand procedures, should I wind up having any issues with booting.


----------



## tcfcameron

tinkererguy said:


> I'll probably do a WinMFS backup of the drive before it's ever even booted, just as a sort of a just-in-case. I'll then be able to safely/easily try many scenarios for the jmfs copy/expand procedures, should I wind up having any issues with booting.


WinMFS isn't capable of backing up, and/or restoring, Premiere drives.

To the best of my knowledge, no such tools exist for the Premiere (yet).

The only backup option that you have, with the Premiere, is to use Comer's software to make a full backup to another drive of the same size, and then shelve that drive as your "backup".


----------



## tcfcameron

The EASY way to set AAM & Idle Timer on WD drives:

I have accidentally stumbled upon an easy way to get your new WD GP or AV-GP drive(s) set up with your desired AAM & Idle Timer settings, WITHOUT HAVING TO MESS AROUND WITH YOUR BIOS SETTINGS!

1. Download the IBM/Hitachi Feature Tool v2.12 - It must be the floppy disk version, that includes an installer that creates the bootable disk. IT MUST BE VERSION 2.12.

2. Download "WDIDLE3.EXE" v1.05 (earlier versions don't work with the newest drives).

3. After creating the Feature Tool bootable disk, simply copy WDIDLE3.EXE to the same disk.

4. Forget about changing your BIOS settings (the SATA/IDE mode settings), as it won't be necessary.

5. With your WD hard drive(s) hooked up, and the floppy disk inserted, power-on your computer. Let the floppy boot up into the Feature Tool software.

6. Use the Feature Tool software to set your desired AAM setting.

7. Exit the Feature Tool software, turn on CAPS LOCK, run WDIDLE3.EXE /? from the command prompt to get the list of options. Set your desired timeout (which should be /D for "Disabled" when the drive is going to be used in a TiVo).

8. Power down, or reboot, depending on what you want to do next. These settings can be changed at ANY TIME, without affecting the data on the drive.

Why does this work? It's because the Feature Tool software loads the appropriate drivers and sets the communication mode in a way that allows changes to be made to the drive's settings.

It's very likely that this can be done with a CD/DVD or flash drive. But, I have not verified that yet.


----------



## tinkererguy

tcfcameron said:


> WinMFS isn't capable of backing up, and/or restoring, Premiere drives.
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, no such tools exist for the Premiere (yet).
> 
> The only backup option that you have, with the Premiere, is to use Comer's software to make a full backup to another drive of the same size, and then shelve that drive as your "backup".


Ah yes, I missed that rather important fact, thank you for setting me straight.
I have found I have a spare 320GB drive (WD3200KS) to use Comer's software to copy to as a backup.

As usual, glad I posted here!


----------



## tinkererguy

tcfcameron said:


> The EASY way to set AAM & Idle Timer on WD drives...


Ah yes, it had struck me how silly it was to be using 2 different boot media to do these simple tasks, simply hadn't bothered to meld the two together.

Thank you!


----------



## comer

tcfcameron said:


> WinMFS isn't capable of backing up, and/or restoring, Premiere drives.
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, no such tools exist for the Premiere (yet).
> 
> The only backup option that you have, with the Premiere, is to use Comer's software to make a full backup to another drive of the same size, and then shelve that drive as your "backup".


For technically inclined and adventurous: 
you can make a truncated backup manually. All recordings will be gone, but their names will be stuck in the list - so you must do C&DE after you restore such backup. Here's how to do it:
*The parts where you identify drives/fdisk and such can be taken from JMFS instructions from post #1, Advanced usage. But think twice if you don't know what it is - you will have hard time to succeed.*

 Run ./mfslayout.sh for your Tivo drive.
 Make a note of start blocks of 'MEDIA data' regions in 'Zones Physical' layout part. We will strip those - they take the larges space and contain only video data.
 Now the task is to 'dd' or 'ddrescue' everything before, after and between these regions. To give you an example: stock drive has two of those. So there will be 2 parts - one 64 blocks from 0, another from the end of 1st until start of 2nd: size (355788706-343818304=11970402) blocks from 343818304. For JMFS-expanded drives you will have 3 regions, so there will be 3 parts. Compressed on highest setting all together it should take ~800M - will fit on CD 
 Write down the offsets you used and keep together with the backup - use them to restore - just 'dd' those parts on their places on the disk.


----------



## richsadams

comer said:


> For technically inclined and adventurous:
> You can make a truncated backup manually. All recordings will be gone, but their names will be stuck in the list - so you must do C&DE after you restore such backup. <snip>


Good stuff. :up: The caveat being that unlike an MFSTools or winMFS truncated backup, having to run a C&DE will wipe out cable card pairing, SP's, WL's, etc. But there will be a servicable image which in an emergency is very good to have.

Although it's a bit more expensive I like Cameron's idea of creating a full backup hard drive and putting it on the shelf. That way if something happens there's very little down time with simply swapping out the drives...plus you can use it to create a new drive and keep all of your settings.


----------



## scottb4u

So, when will this method be made "windows compatible"?


----------



## MikeAndrews

scottb4u said:


> So, when will this method be made "windows compatible"?


It is "Windows compatible." You just reboot your Windows machine with the CD you were free to burn in Windows.


----------



## plazman30

Do I really need to use an AV drive? I have 2 TB drives sitting around not being used right now. I don't want to spend money if I don't have to.


----------



## comer

richsadams said:


> Good stuff. :up: The caveat being that unlike an MFSTools or winMFS truncated backup, having to run a C&DE will wipe out cable card pairing, SP's, WL's, etc. But there will be a servicable image which in an emergency is very good to have.
> 
> Although it's a bit more expensive I like Cameron's idea of creating a full backup hard drive and putting it on the shelf. That way if something happens there's very little down time with simply swapping out the drives...plus you can use it to create a new drive and keep all of your settings.


Actually, I may have misnamed it. Only recordings need to be cleared. Season passes, cable card and the rest of the settings are not in Media areas, so they would be preserved by such backup.


----------



## comer

plazman30 said:


> Do I really need to use an AV drive? I have 2 TB drives sitting around not being used right now. I don't want to spend money if I don't have to.


Though opinions differ, the prevalent is - no, you don't have to use an A/V drive.


----------



## tinkererguy

Well, first the good news:

a) copy 320GB original (never booted) Premiere drive
It took about 5 hours to copy (chosen from jmfs menu) the original 320GB to spare 2007-vintage WD3200KS 320GB drive (22kB/s avg), using jmfs boot CD from internal SATA ports on a desktop. I said "No" to the expansion question at the end, the copy failed to boot in Premiere (said almost done for >10 minutes), powered off for 15 sec, then 2nd try it booted right up

b) copy 320GB original (never booted) Premiere drive to new 2TB drive
It took about 4 hours (faster target drive)
In menu, chose yes to expansion, then ran supersize, uneventful, no errors noted.
It too failed to boot on the first attempt I believe, but on the 2nd try no problem, great, shows 317 HD hours! I then hooked it up to the TV and internet for 3rd boot, did the guided setup, then let it sit for an hour, it then rebooted with new code level, seems to behave OK, but most channels blank, of course.

c) m-card install by cable company
11:00am
Cox showed about half hour late, but he had m-card, and activated it by phone conversation with his support people, and was done in 30 minutes

d) Season Passes
4:00pm, it became clear from tivo.com/spm (Season Pass Manager) that I messed up something when trying to transfer passes from old S3 TiVo (which now has antenna-only connection) to new TiVo (which had unavailable/encrypted cable channels and antenna). So I redid the guided set up, this time it's on latest Software Version. Now things worked nicely, Season Pass Manager online seems to like latest code, makes sense. Was just trying to have something working by the time family got home

Now, the bad news:
e) 7:15pm
Power (Green) TiVo Premiere Green Light ON
Transfer (Blue) TiVo doing a transfer from TiVo Desktop PC
Recording (Red) TiVo doing a recording of single show on a single tuner
We had live TV on, and suddenly, without anybody pressing an bluetooth slider remote keys, Premiere suddenly putting out plain Green screen, with lights on Premiere staying on (as explained below), but unresponsive to IR or bluetooth commands. So unplugged for 10 seconds, not long enough, back to green screen. Unplugged for 20 seconds, this time no picture at all. Unplugged for 5 minutes, this time normal TiVo starting menu for 2 minutes, then black video output, nothing.

Seems I might be destined to head back to the original Premiere hard drive to see if I can stay up on that drive.

Anybody have ideas on what I may have done wrong?
Or something else I can try in jmfs before I resort to going to the original drive?
Is there any point in waiting 3 hours on a black screen?
-whereas on green screen, I'm supposed to wait 3 hours I read here:
http://support.tivo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/511

Thanks all, and yes, this all takes a lot of time (copies whole drive apparently). And while I don't have a backup of a 320GB original drive with cablecard configured (ran out of hours before cable guy was due to arrive), I may be able to talk Cox support into pairing the new m-card remotely should I wind up on the original drive.


----------



## tinkererguy

Clarification to previous post:
The first, sudden green screen was showing identical output of plain green fullscreen to both the HDMI and composite (remote TV) outputs. The other boot, which started first as a normal TiVo boot for 2 minutes roughly, followed by green over HDMI turns out to still be green on HDMI, but it is outputting black on composite.

I suppose I'll just wait 2 more hours and see what happens (after 3.5 hrs total)...


----------



## tinkererguy

After 3.5 hrs of solid green screen, I gave up and unplugged (hard to tell if pattern of disk seeks was random or had patterns, as other noise nearby and AMM at 128 keeps things pretty quiet).

So I did a kickstart 54 SMART test (a lot easier to do than on S3!) and did the
"Run S.M.A.R.T. tests" option, which after about 5 minutes and a bunch of "Pass" messages, got this error message:

Confirm /dev/hdb
Cannot access /dev/hdb
Drive not present or not responding!

seconds later, this message came up:
Read, random locations on /dev/hda
TEST FAILED

Should I pull the drive at this point (and again run Western Digital boot CD diagnostics that it passed 2 days ago), and revert to the (already backed up) factory drive? I feel that is unlikely to fail the WD SMART test, as the messages above appear to be complaining out the filesystem, although since this is a Premiere maybe it just acts differently, I dunno, which is why I'm posting here for advice.

Should I instead try other kickstart options?


----------



## tinkererguy

Powered off once again (after the SMART tests) and this time, took out Bluetooth dongle and waited 5 minutes.

Then tada, I powered it back on and it booted just fine (HDMI almost there screen blanked briefly 3-4 times though). It's working now, as if nothing ever happened (and recording and file transfers restarted right away).

Time to call it a night, that's a relief, now it can index and process Seasons Passes and other housekeeping all night long. But this incident didn't exactly inspire family confidence.

I fully realize this whole problem may have been a bluetooth thing, or a Premiere 14.6-01-3-746 software thing, and not necessarily a jmfs-rev104 thing. I wouldn't know really, as I haven't run on the stock drive at all, at least I still have 2 320GB drives (original and jmfs created copy) on standby, just in case...


----------



## mattack

Anthony GT said:


> I just tried today and have been unable to get it to boot. I just get the flashing folder image with the "?" as it looks for system info to boot off of.
> 
> I made the boot DVD with Disk Utility. I think I will try again tomorrow using Toast and see if that makes a difference.


I successfully just made a boot disc with Disk Utility on my MacBook Pro on 10.5.8. I booted into it.. haven't yet hooked up my Tivo drives (my one fear is how is it going to not see the computer's INTERNAL drive and me accidentally obliterate that.. but I am still going to boot into it with the drives connected).


----------



## comer

mattack said:


> I successfully just made a boot disc with Disk Utility on my MacBook Pro on 10.5.8. I booted into it.. haven't yet hooked up my Tivo drives (my one fear is how is it going to not see the computer's INTERNAL drive and me accidentally obliterate that.. but I am still going to boot into it with the drives connected).


I believe the issue was that it was DVD and not CD 
And don't worry about obliterating disks - the only thing that can do that is "copy" (expand and supersize won't even start if a disk does not have a valid Tivo file system on it) and before doing "copy" jmfs asks 2 times if you are sure.


----------



## rcobourn

tinkererguy said:


> Powered off once again (after the SMART tests) and this time, took out Bluetooth dongle and waited 5 minutes.
> 
> Then tada, I powered it back on and it booted just fine (HDMI almost there screen blanked briefly 3-4 times though). It's working now, as if nothing ever happened (and recording and file transfers restarted right away).
> 
> Time to call it a night, that's a relief, now it can index and process Seasons Passes and other housekeeping all night long. But this incident didn't exactly inspire family confidence.
> 
> I fully realize this whole problem may have been a bluetooth thing, or a Premiere 14.6-01-3-746 software thing, and not necessarily a jmfs-rev104 thing. I wouldn't know really, as I haven't run on the stock drive at all, at least I still have 2 320GB drives (original and jmfs created copy) on standby, just in case...


Tinkerguy, I have had similar problem, and also found removing the slide remote receiver allows for a normal bootup. I can then reinsert it. In fact, I also thought my upgrade had failed, until I disconnected everything and it fired right up.

The question I have is, does this happen regardless of the upgraded drive, or not.

It wasn't until after I got the software upgrade that the issue developed (first boot with new software). Either there is an issue with the new software and the slide remote or an issue with slide remote/new software/upgraded hard drive.

One thing I would recommend for anyone doing an upgrade: get your cablecard installed before the upgrade. That way the pairing won't need to be redone if you revert to the stock hard drive.


----------



## tinkererguy

Fantastic, thank you rcobourn!

It has stayed up for 12 hours now, I'm tempted to plug bluetooth module back in (it's nice not having to aim the remote) and just watch out for the next code upgrade release date estimate, and see if I can pull the module out before that upgrade (to avoid family being greeted with a green screen the next morning).

Then again, my machine did spontaneously turn to green screen many hours after boot (with module inserted all the while), so perhaps I'm better off waiting until next software release. Are you saying you are stable for many days or weeks as long as the bluetooth module is not inserted at boot time?

As usual, it's good to know somebody is in the same boat as you, and I too wonder if bluetooth module acts like this in stock (non-upgraded) Premieres running 14.6-01-3-746


----------



## scottb4u

I am about to expand my Premiere to 2 tb internal.

Can this method be used for a 2 tb internal in an S3?


----------



## tinkererguy

tinkererguy said:


> Fantastic, thank you rcobourn!
> wonder if bluetooth module acts like this in stock (non-upgraded) Premieres running 14.6-01-3-746


My guess is probably yes, that 14.6 has issues with bluetooth dongle at boot time, that trigger a green screen immediately or within hours. Just a hunch, little data to back up this "thinking out loud"...


----------



## mattack

scottb4u said:


> I am about to expand my Premiere to 2 tb internal.
> 
> Can this method be used for a 2 tb internal in an S3?


Read the other replies.. Hint, it doesn't work with s3 at all...


----------



## mattack

On my MacBook Pro, with both my orig TivoHD drive (160 GB?) and new 1 TB drive connected to a DockMaster II USB drive dock, jmfs doesn't see the 1 TB drive..

I see them right now, booted into OS X, in Disk Utility.

Is there any hope of jmfs being updated? If not, I'll probably figure out the old upgrade methods again within the next few days at most.

I'm using rev 104.

Oh, I guess this is a similar problem as mentioned on a previous page. I had thought previously that they were only seeing a problem with eSATA.. but they were seeing a problem with USB too.

So there's no solution? Darn, this was the major reason I bought this dual dock in the first place.


----------



## scottb4u

How about expanding to a 2tb internal, then adding a 1tb WD AV Expander "approved" drive? Will that work?


----------



## retiredqwest

mattack said:


> On my MacBook Pro, with both my orig TivoHD drive (160 GB?) and new 1 TB drive connected to a DockMaster II USB drive dock, jmfs doesn't see the 1 TB drive..
> 
> I see them right now, booted into OS X, in Disk Utility.
> 
> Is there any hope of jmfs being updated? If not, I'll probably figure out the old upgrade methods again within the next few days at most.
> 
> I'm using rev 104.
> 
> Oh, I guess this is a similar problem as mentioned on a previous page. I had thought previously that they were only seeing a problem with eSATA.. but they were seeing a problem with USB too.
> 
> So there's no solution? Darn, this was the major reason I bought this dual dock in the first place.


JMFS only recognizes 1 drive in a dual bay dock. Because the underlying Linux OS it uses does not support USB port multiplying. Same thing happens with a Blacx Duet on a USB port.


----------



## richsadams

rcobourn said:


> One thing I would recommend for anyone doing an upgrade: get your cablecard installed before the upgrade. That way the pairing won't need to be redone if you revert to the stock hard drive.


Good advice. :up: For years it has always been recommended that new TiVo's s/b fully set up and kept running for a good 30 days prior to upgrading to help ensure that everything is in good working order. Otherwise there are just too many variables to determine what may have gone wrong. Problems often have nothing to do with the upgrade.


----------



## richsadams

scottb4u said:


> How about expanding to a 2tb internal, then adding a 1tb WD AV Expander "approved" drive? Will that work?


Unfortunately no, not at this time.


----------



## mattack

retiredqwest said:


> JMFS only recognizes 1 drive in a dual bay dock. Because the underlying Linux OS it uses does not support USB port multiplying. Same thing happens with a Blacx Duet on a USB port.


So NO Linux distribution supports this? Will it ever be supported?

It's surprising that such a basic thing wouldn't be supported.


----------



## comer

mattack said:


> So NO Linux distribution supports this? Will it ever be supported?
> 
> It's surprising that such a basic thing wouldn't be supported.


They do, of course. That particular driver is missing from the distrib I used to put JMFS together.


----------



## mattack

comer said:


> They do, of course. That particular driver is missing from the distrib I used to put JMFS together.


So googling, I found this:
http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq-pmsupport_desktop.asp

I'm not even sure if this is related. I understand there is SATA port multiplying AND USB port multiplying.. but since the adapter hooks to SATA drives and gives a USB port, I'm not sure which one is relevant.

So how much of a donation would you want to add the driver in? and/or is there an easy way I could add the driver in myself? I'd be willing to test versions you make if you put it in.


----------



## tcfcameron

mattack said:


> So googling, I found this:
> http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq-pmsupport_desktop.asp
> 
> I'm not even sure if this is related. I understand there is SATA port multiplying AND USB port multiplying.. but since the adapter hooks to SATA drives and gives a USB port, I'm not sure which one is relevant.
> 
> So how much of a donation would you want to add the driver in? and/or is there an easy way I could add the driver in myself? I'd be willing to test versions you make if you put it in.


My recommendation would be a way to allow the end-user to add their own drivers, if needed (in a way like how you can install 3rd party storage drivers during the beginning of a Windows XP installation).

I had to try four different motherboards before I could find one that would work with jmfs. I had to revert to an old P4 system with an Intel chipset.

I'm only bringing it up, since you brought up the 3rd-party driver matter.


----------



## rcobourn

tinkererguy said:


> Fantastic, thank you rcobourn!
> 
> It has stayed up for 12 hours now, I'm tempted to plug bluetooth module back in (it's nice not having to aim the remote) and just watch out for the next code upgrade release date estimate, and see if I can pull the module out before that upgrade (to avoid family being greeted with a green screen the next morning).
> 
> Then again, my machine did spontaneously turn to green screen many hours after boot (with module inserted all the while), so perhaps I'm better off waiting until next software release. Are you saying you are stable for many days or weeks as long as the bluetooth module is not inserted at boot time?
> 
> As usual, it's good to know somebody is in the same boat as you, and I too wonder if bluetooth module acts like this in stock (non-upgraded) Premieres running 14.6-01-3-746


Yes my Premier runs fairly well with the dongle in and using the Slide remote, unless I reboot it or it reboots itself. Then I usually have to pull the dongle to get booted.


----------



## tinkererguy

rcobourn said:


> Yes my Premier runs fairly well with the dongle in and using the Slide remote, unless I reboot it or it reboots itself. Then I usually have to pull the dongle to get booted.


Thank you rcobourn.

Likely not at all relevant, but, well, just in case: do you use the dongle extension cable or just have it plugged straight into the USB port? top or bottom port?


----------



## scottb4u

Thank you Comer! A flawless program that does exactly what it is supposed to do.

Added a 2tb WD20EARS drive "remidied" with wdidle3. Saved about $100 from the drive resellers on ebay. 

Now have 318 hours. That is 13.25 days of 24/7 HD recording!

What would happen if I added a WD AV 1tb Expander now? Would it be recognized or ignored? Would it mess things up? I've got one here but I'm unwilling to experiment...


----------



## comer

scottb4u said:


> Thank you Comer! A flawless program that does exactly what it is supposed to do.
> 
> Added a 2tb WD20EARS drive "remidied" with wdidle3. Saved about $100 from the drive resellers on ebay.
> 
> Now have 318 hours. That is 13.25 days of 24/7 HD recording!
> 
> What would happen if I added a WD AV 1tb Expander now? Would it be recognized or ignored? Would it mess things up? I've got one here but I'm unwilling to experiment...


Congrats and happy Tivoing 
I think this post will answer your question: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8245591#post8245591


----------



## tinkererguy

I thank you too Comer, here via words for my successful use of your fine work, and, voluntarily, via PayPal as well!


----------



## mattack

tcfcameron said:


> My recommendation would be a way to allow the end-user to add their own drivers, if needed (in a way like how you can install 3rd party storage drivers during the beginning of a Windows XP installation).
> 
> I had to try four different motherboards before I could find one that would work with jmfs. I had to revert to an old P4 system with an Intel chipset.
> 
> I'm only bringing it up, since you brought up the 3rd-party driver matter.


Well, it booted just fine on my MacBook Pro!


----------



## rcobourn

tinkererguy said:


> Thank you rcobourn.
> 
> Likely not at all relevant, but, well, just in case: do you use the dongle extension cable or just have it plugged straight into the USB port? top or bottom port?


No extension. I think I've had it plugged in to either usb port at one time or another, with the tuning adapter in the other.

If I can find time, and a window without too many recordings scheduled, I want to put the stock drive back in, and test with the slide remote, then allow the software to update, and retest, just to see if there is any sign of the problem with the stock drive. I'm really having a hard time coming up with any logical reason the slide remote should not get along with an upgraded hard drive.


----------



## speed_phreak

Awesome disc Comer! Now I feel compelled to donate. Easiest Tivo upgrade method I have ever used. I don't mind the command line, but your scripts definitely saved me time!

Thanks!


----------



## bgtees

Apologies if this has been asked, but I searched and could not find it. I have a Premiere with what appears to be a bad drive (the unit was dropped while recording and the drive is clicking). A friend of mine also has a Premiere. Can I use the drive from my friend's Premiere as the source drive to prepare a new drive that will work in my Premiere? If so, anything I need to know about that is different than the standard instructions?

Thanks!


----------



## richsadams

bgtees said:


> Apologies if this has been asked, but I searched and could not find it. I have a Premiere with what appears to be a bad drive (the unit was dropped while recording and the drive is clicking). A friend of mine also has a Premiere. Can I use the drive from my friend's Premiere as the source drive to prepare a new drive that will work in my Premiere? If so, anything I need to know about that is different than the standard instructions?
> 
> Thanks!


If they are the same model (Premiere or Premiere XL) you can do that under "normal" circumstances (using MFSTools, etc). However I don't know that it's been tried with Comer's upgrade method so you're in uncharted waters. I don't know of any reason it wouldn't work though. However when you boot up you will almost certainly receive an error message (as the OEM drives are matched to the unit). You will then have to run Clear and Delete Everything. That will restore the default image. Since you'll basically have a "new" TiVo you'll need to get your cable cards re-paried, etc.


----------



## bgtees

richsadams said:


> If they are the same model (Premiere or Premiere XL) you can do that under "normal" circumstances (using MFSTools, etc). However I don't know that it's been tried with Comer's upgrade method so you're in uncharted waters. I don't know of any reason it wouldn't work though. However when you boot up you will almost certainly receive an error message (as the OEM drives are matched to the unit). You will then have to run Clear and Delete Everything. That will restore the default image. Since you'll basically have a "new" TiVo you'll need to get your cable cards re-paried, etc.


Thanks Rich - I appreciate the information. I'll give it a shot this weekend and report back either way.


----------



## LSpera

Upgrade worked perfectly with a Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB 5900RPM SATA 3 GB/s 32 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive ST32000542AS.. got the drive for $69.99 shipped from Amazon. 317 hours of HD. I'm a happy guy!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!


----------



## bhfr

I don't understand why but using a different computer worked for me. I' copying to my 2tb now. Thanks


----------



## 172pilot

Haven't finished yet, but the copy is progressing, and as someone who's owned 7 Tivos now (2x S1, 2x S2, 1x Humax-DVDr, 1x HD, and now 1x Premier), I have to say, this was the QUICKEST and EASIEST upgrade I've ever done...

Thanks!!!!
-Steve


----------



## SUOrangeman

What's the verdict, if any, on advanced format drives? I've been looking at the models folks have successfully used for upgrades, but I don't think any of them are advanced format.

-SUO


----------



## cds618

Can someone help please,

I tried to copy my original 320 drive to a new WD AV-GP 2TB drive. I connected both drives, went through the guided setup, it found the Tivo drive, It found the 2tb destination drive, I selected Copy, it started to copy then after a while my computer screen went black & there was no hard drive activity. waited about an hour than I hit the escape button & it seemed to have stopped at around 31GB of copying - no errors. I restarted the computer & tried again. Same thing happened except it got to about 48gb of copying - no errors I waited 2 hours this time. Tried a 3rd time it got to 42gb with 1 error this time after 4 hours.

Any suggestions on what could be wrong?


----------



## stanlam

What is the best 1 TB and 2 TB drive to buy for the Tivo Premiere if price was not a factor. I figure I'm already saving so much money by doing the internal hard drive upgrade myself. I don't mind spending a few extra bucks on buying the most compatible 1 TB or 2 TB drive for the Premiere. I really don't want a headache with compatibility issues. Please give me the model # so I can buy it soon.


----------



## richsadams

SUOrangeman said:


> What's the verdict, if any, on advanced format drives? I've been looking at the models folks have successfully used for upgrades, but I don't think any of them are advanced format.
> 
> -SUO


If you're referring to the newer drives with 400K sectors, there's no impact when it comes to upgrading TiVo.


----------



## richsadams

cds618 said:


> Can someone help please,
> 
> I tried to copy my original 320 drive to a new WD AV-GP 2TB drive. I connected both drives, went through the guided setup, it found the Tivo drive, It found the 2tb destination drive, I selected Copy, it started to copy then after a while my computer screen went black & there was no hard drive activity. waited about an hour than I hit the escape button & it seemed to have stopped at around 31GB of copying - no errors. I restarted the computer & tried again. Same thing happened except it got to about 48gb of copying - no errors I waited 2 hours this time. Tried a 3rd time it got to 42gb with 1 error this time after 4 hours.
> 
> Any suggestions on what could be wrong?


It sounds like a hard drive problem. If your original TiVo hard drive was working fine there's likely an issue with your new drive.

I've gotten into the habit of testing all new hard drives. Most are fine but now and then one isn't. Your best bet is to run Western Digital's Lifeguard diagnostic program:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

You can run the quick test to see if it passes. If it doesn't, time for an RMA. If it does you should run the extended read/write/read test. That will take quite a while on a 2TB drive so I'd leave it run overnight.

You could run the quick test on your original TiVo drive, but do NOT run the extended diagnostic as it of course wipes everything on the hard drive.

Hope that helps and let us know how things go.


----------



## cds618

Thanks for the quick reply, I tried the quick test & it passed. Just started the extended, This is going to take 5 1/2 hrs.

Thanks again


----------



## richsadams

stanlam said:


> What is the best 1 TB and 2 TB drive to buy for the Tivo Premiere if price was not a factor. I figure I'm already saving so much money by doing the internal hard drive upgrade myself. I don't mind spending a few extra bucks on buying the most compatible 1 TB or 2 TB drive for the Premiere. I really don't want a headache with compatibility issues. Please give me the model # so I can buy it soon.


Welcome to the forum. You have several options. If it were me I would opt for one of these at this time:

WD10EVDS - http://www.amazon.com/5400RPM-Buffe...KO74/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291451556&sr=8-1

WD20EVDS - http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1291452565&sr=1-1

Those are both A/V dedicated drives and do not need any AAM adjustments. If you buy them from Amazon or Newegg.com they s/b new enough that they won't need the Intellipark feature tweaked.

Probably the most popular drives being used here are these:

WD10EARS - http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1291451854&sr=1-1

WD20EARS - http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1291451834&sr=1-1

Both of those drives are quiet out of the box but most folks adjust the AAM to 128 (matching the A/V dedicated drives) with a program called hddscan (http://www.hddscan.com) to make them quieter.

You can find more information about adjusting the AAM and Intellipark settings (for WD drives manufactured prior to 09/15/10) on the Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ (specifically Section IV, #32 and Section V, #14 respectively):

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160

Hope that helps and happy upgrading!


----------



## comer

cds618 said:


> Can someone help please,
> 
> I tried to copy my original 320 drive to a new WD AV-GP 2TB drive. I connected both drives, went through the guided setup, it found the Tivo drive, It found the 2tb destination drive, I selected Copy, it started to copy then after a while my computer screen went black & there was no hard drive activity. waited about an hour than I hit the escape button & it seemed to have stopped at around 31GB of copying - no errors. I restarted the computer & tried again. Same thing happened except it got to about 48gb of copying - no errors I waited 2 hours this time. Tried a 3rd time it got to 42gb with 1 error this time after 4 hours.
> 
> Any suggestions on what could be wrong?


I'd say it's not the drive, but hardaware problem. Try a different PC/Laptop if you can. If not - see what you can do to make it more stable - remove overclock, reset BIOS to safe defaults and so on.


----------



## richsadams

comer said:


> I'd say it's not the drive, but hardaware problem. Try a different PC/Laptop if you can. If not - see what you can do to make it more stable - remove overclock, reset BIOS to safe defaults and so on.


I thought that at first as well, but if it were hardware related (other than the hard drive that is) I'm confused as to why the upgrade would fail near the same point every time. Wouldn't it be problematic from the start?


----------



## cds618

comer said:


> I'd say it's not the drive, but hardaware problem. Try a different PC/Laptop if you can. If not - see what you can do to make it more stable - remove overclock, reset BIOS to safe defaults and so on.


I want to thank both Richsadams & Comer for your help. I ran both quick & extended tests and the both passed. I than read Comer's reply & did as he suggested. I reset my bios to the fail safe defaults (It wasn't overclocked), I disconnected my DVDr/CDr drive & used that SATA cable for the 2tb drive, I ran the software from a USB drive, I also disconnected all other cables from my computer (USB hub & network cable). ran the software again & it worked no problems, took about 2:40 to copy, I expanded than super sized. Put it back in my Tivo, fired that mother up & Woo Hoo 317 HD hours.

Thank again guys.
I will send you a donation Comer

Chris :up::up::up:


----------



## richsadams

cds618 said:


> I want to thank both Richsadams & Comer for your help. I ran both quick & extended tests and the both passed. I than read Comer's reply & did as he suggested. I reset my bios to the fail safe defaults (It wasn't overclocked), I disconnected my DVDr/CDr drive & used that SATA cable for the 2tb drive, I ran the software from a USB drive, I also disconnected all other cables from my computer (USB hub & network cable). ran the software again & it worked no problems, took about 2:40 to copy, I expanded than super sized. Put it back in my Tivo, fired that mother up & Woo Hoo 317 HD hours.
> 
> Thank again guys.
> I will send you a donation Comer
> 
> Chris :up::up::up:


Excellent and good to know that info. Comer was correct and I'm glad I wasn't.  Enjoy your "new" TiVo!


----------



## hisjerry

Comer,

Another success story with the WD20EARS (manufactured 10-30-2010) that was pulled from an external WD Elements external drive. All I did was: Hooked up tivo drive (via SATA), hook up new drive (via USB enclosure), set AAM to 128 (using HDDScan), popped in Comer's CD & followed directions. After a few hours, popped the new drive back in Tivo and confirmed 317 HD hours.

Donation already sent! Thanks! :up:

-hisjerry


----------



## stanlam

richsadams said:


> Welcome to the forum. You have several options. If it were me I would opt for one of these at this time:
> 
> WD10EVDS
> 
> WD20EVDS
> 
> Those are both A/V dedicated drives and do not need any AAM adjustments. If you buy them from Amazon or Newegg.com they s/b new enough that they won't need the Intellipark feature tweaked.
> 
> Probably the most popular drives being used here are these:
> 
> WD10EARS
> 
> WD20EARS
> Both of those drives are quiet out of the box but most folks adjust the AAM to 128 (matching the A/V dedicated drives) with a program called hddscan ] to make them quieter.
> 
> You can find more information about adjusting the AAM and Intellipark settings (for WD drives manufactured prior to 09/15/10) on the Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ (specifically Section IV, #32 and Section V, #14 respectively):
> 
> Hope that helps and happy upgrading!


Hi Rich,

thanks a million. I spent 2 hours last night trying to read through different thread and could not find an answer. I also sent several email to people on ebay selling these drives, but they won't tell me the model #. Thanks again.


----------



## Tivoitis

richsadams said:


> Welcome to the forum. You have several options. If it were me I would opt for one of these at this time:
> 
> WD10EVDS - http://www.amazon.com/5400RPM-Buffe...KO74/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291451556&sr=8-1
> 
> WD20EVDS - http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1291452565&sr=1-1
> 
> Those are both A/V dedicated drives and do not need any AAM adjustments. If you buy them from Amazon or Newegg.com they s/b new enough that they won't need the Intellipark feature tweaked.
> 
> Probably the most popular drives being used here are these:
> 
> WD10EARS - http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1291451854&sr=1-1
> 
> WD20EARS - http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1291451834&sr=1-1
> 
> Both of those drives are quiet out of the box but most folks adjust the AAM to 128 (matching the A/V dedicated drives) with a program called hddscan (http://www.hddscan.com) to make them quieter.
> 
> You can find more information about adjusting the AAM and Intellipark settings (for WD drives manufactured prior to 09/15/10) on the Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ (specifically Section IV, #32 and Section V, #14 respectively):
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160
> 
> Hope that helps and happy upgrading!





stanlam said:


> Hi Rich,
> 
> thanks a million. I spent 2 hours last night trying to read through different thread and could not find an answer. I also sent several email to people on ebay selling these drives, but they won't tell me the model #. Thanks again.


I recently did an upgrade to my Tivo HD and used the WD20EURS - this is the newest model in the Western Digital AV-GP line and it's a touch more energy-efficient.


----------



## cds618

stanlam said:


> Hi Rich,
> 
> thanks a million. I spent 2 hours last night trying to read through different thread and could not find an answer. I also sent several email to people on ebay selling these drives, but they won't tell me the model #. Thanks again.


Stan,

I bought the WD20EVDS on Ebay last week. search for WD20EVDS & look in the list for the one priced at $99 or best offer with free priority shipping, the guy is in PA. I offered to buy it for $85 & he counter offered for $92 said that's the cheapest he could sell it for. I couldn't find that drive for less anywhere else. It arrived 5 days later with a manufacture date of 11/4/2010


----------



## scottb4u

At $104, they are a great buy. BUT they need WDIDLE3. 

Super quiet and except for the need to adjust the head parking, they are perfect...


----------



## richsadams

scottb4u said:


> At $104, they are a great buy. BUT they need WDIDLE3.
> 
> Super quiet and except for the need to adjust the head parking, they are perfect...


Nice find. The drive may or may not require the Intellipark feature's timeout to be adjusted. WD drives manufactured after 09/15/10 no longer exhibit the soft reboot (or reboot hang) problem. So if the drives they're shipping were manufactured after that date the only thing they may need is to have the AAM adjusted to 128 for quieter operation (although they're very quiet out of the box).


----------



## scottb4u

I just bought two, both made in October and firmaware both set to 8 seconds. I disabled both. Neither worked before WDIDLE3.


----------



## richsadams

scottb4u said:


> I just bought two, both made in October and firmaware both set to 8 seconds. I disabled both. Neither worked before WDIDLE3.


That's a new bit of info. I don't know if you have it available without opening your TiVo's, but if so, can you please post the exact model numbers and manufacture dates? TIA.


----------



## scottb4u

Everything is closed up tight. But I believe the date is either Sept. 17 or Oct. 17.


----------



## stanlam

cds618 said:


> Stan,
> 
> I bought the WD20EVDS on Ebay last week. search for WD20EVDS & look in the list for the one priced at $99 or best offer with free priority shipping, the guy is in PA. I offered to buy it for $85 & he counter offered for $92 said that's the cheapest he could sell it for. I couldn't find that drive for less anywhere else. It arrived 5 days later with a manufacture date of 11/4/2010


I think he is sold out. I couldn't find the listing.


----------



## gardavis

Thanks, Comer! I did the upgrade yesterday without any major issues. It took 3 hours for the copy using SATA connections and an additional hour to remove and replace the drives and reboot. I used a WD20EARS drive and ran the Feature Tool and WDiddle3 tools.

I recorded my procedure and uploaded it to YouTube. I also wrote up a webpage with details and links at my DIYClinic site.

Of course, I made a donation to your beer fund

Gary Davis
Webguild


----------



## richsadams

scottb4u said:


> Everything is closed up tight. But I believe the date is either Sept. 17 or Oct. 17.


Understood. Do you know the model number?


----------



## mellenfan

I Upgraded Premiere with 2TB Drive using Comer's method. It downloaded a service update (14.6) - I don't have high def menus...I have the same menus as a TiVo HD. Any ideas?

Thanks!


----------



## lessd

mellenfan said:


> I Upgraded Premiere with 2TB Drive using Comer's method. It downloaded a service update (14.6) - I don't have high def menus...I have the same menus as a TiVo HD. Any ideas?
> 
> Thanks!


To get the HDUI
1) you may have to turn it on under settings and display
2) You must have an Internet connection to start the HDUI (phone will not work)
3) your output must be at least 720P to your HDTV
4) The TiVo must have activation (without activation no HDUI)
5) if the above does not get you the HDUI check the SI screen as it will tell you if the HDUI is available for your current setup or not.


----------



## tcfcameron

mellenfan said:


> I Upgraded Premiere with 2TB Drive using Comer's method. It downloaded a service update (14.6) - I don't have high def menus...I have the same menus as a TiVo HD. Any ideas?
> 
> Thanks!


I had the same, EXACT, thing happen when I upgraded two Premieres.

The original drives had never been booted, So, I wasn't sure whether or not it had anything to do with that (or the upgrade, in any context). I just went through the SD menus and found the setting to turn the HDUI on, and that did the trick, on both units.

I have had some other "weirdness" going on, such as netflix movies not wanting to play, unless I hit instant replay after the buffering period, as well as the "watch now from netflix" option randomly disappearing from places it is supposed to be. As for these problems, I have tried the :down:, :up:, play, play HDUI reboot procedure with no luck, rebooting the entire box with no luck, and have had to resort to using KS 52 to get everything back to "normal". I've had to do it twice now (on both units).

Why would I go straight to a KS 52, as opposed to the other KS options? It's the KS option with the least possibility of turning a TiVo into a brick. I had also done a KS 57, 58, & 52, on each unit after they had finished downloading all the available software updates. I now reserve KS 57 & 58 for last resorts (which I admit, is based on my personal experiences with both stock, and upgraded TiVo HDs).

KS 52 launches the same processes that happen when TiVo software updates are installed, after being downloaded (minus the download part). It also does some "spring cleaning" of the VAR partition, which doesn't cause you to lose anything (that needs to be there). As long as there is nothing wrong with the drive, and the last update that was downloaded isn't somehow corrupt, it's a very safe option to try.

Anybody who is reading this and going "huh, what?", just do a little searching around on KS 57 GSOD loop.

Again, I have no idea if KS 57/58 could "brick" a Premiere. I'd rather just not find out, unless I was out of options.


----------



## tommersyip

stanlam said:


> I think he is sold out. I couldn't find the listing.


His posting expired on Sunday. I was able to score one for $88 using your method a few minutes before it ended - I guess he needed to move them. Thanks for the info tho, saved me a ton. It's usually like $125 at the stores.


----------



## richsadams

tcfcameron said:


> Again, I have no idea if KS 57/58 could "brick" a Premiere. I'd rather just not find out, unless I was out of options.


There isn't any chance of TiVo's diagnostic and repair programs, AKA Kickstarts "bricking" a TiVo. The only risk is that there are enough issues with a drive that fsfix could push it over the edge...but that would have happened at some point anyway. More here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2


----------



## tcfcameron

richsadams said:


> There isn't any chance of TiVo's diagnostic and repair programs, AKA Kickstarts "bricking" a TiVo. The only risk is that there are enough issues with a drive that fsfix could push it over the edge...but that would have happened at some point anyway. More here:
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2


I have 4 TiVo HDs that disagree with that. Two had it happen with factory drives, then repeated, after fully testing them and re-imaging them, then the same with replacement drives and fresh images x2. The other two never ran on the factory drives, but bricked on upgrade drives, which were swapped out with drives from another supplier, imaged, and bricked again x2.

When not using factory/stock drives, the drives in use are the WD20EADS drives. With those drives, I had to use the "Broflovski" image. I can't pin anything on that image, since I can repeat the results with factory drives and factory images.

On another note, I have always been aware of the post/sticky that you provided, as I share it with others (with an added warning about the possibility of turning a working TiVo, or "mostly working" TiVo, into a brick).

I'm going to have to move this into a PM, and choose my words carefully on how I know what I know. You and I get our information regarding these diagnostic KS commands from the same source. (hint, hint)

I have a binding NDA that prohibits me from freely discussing a lot of what I know.

Hopefully, via PM, we can come to some sort of agreement on whether or not you should update your KS post with a cautionary note at the end. Hopefully I can word things in a way that doesn't violate the terms of my NDA.

It will take me some time to draft the PM, in a way that shares the most information, without linking the information to things that aren't supposed to be shared. I may also just asked our shared source of information how to best share what I know with you.

What I'm saying about the KS 57/58 bricking TiVos, isn't something that "should" happen (unless under the circumstances you already described), but it can, and does, happen, outside of that criteria.

I'd like to spare people the loss of everything on their TiVo, if it can be avoided, by not making KS commands seem so completely benign and safe to play with. I understand that you'll need data, data points, etc., backing this up. I intend to provide that.


----------



## richsadams

tcfcameron said:


> I have 4 TiVo HDs that disagree with that.


I and hundreds if not thousands have been employing the various Kickstarts diagnostic and/or repair programs on stock and upgraded TiVo's for about a decade now and AFAIK no one's TiVo ever stopped working from simply running the programs...granted that yours may be a first. However if there were problems we'd have known about it long ago.

If someone is resorting to running a KS there generally has been something wrong with their TiVo prior and in almost all cases it was a hard drive problem which was resolved by replacing the hard drive.

That said, the two newer, "unorthodox" 2TB upgrade methods (Borflovski and/or Comer's) may have something inherently different/wrong that won't allow the MFS programs to operate normally, can't say for sure.

The source for my KS commands post and what they do is from a long-time TiVo engineer that generously participates on the TCF from time-to-time. It was reviewed by him about 45 days ago and was updated with a couple of his suggestions. I suppose I could add a line to the KS post to the effect that the programs may be hazardous to 2TB upgrades until we're clear that they are or aren't. I agree that if they are a risk to the 2TB upgrades that fair warning would be appropriate.


----------



## Tivoitis

Tivoitis said:


> Thanks for the reply ... I planned poorly though and am still pulling old shows off my current drive (750GB) using Tivo Desktop (there isn't any faster method, is there?), so it'll be a while before I can actually do my first swap.
> 
> My WD20EURS has a manufacture date of 10/13/2010, and was factory set to "quiet" mode (code 128 when read with hdparm) and was factory set to an idle timeout of 8 seconds. I already disabled the idle timeout though - what's the reasoning behind using a timeout of 5 minutes versus just disabling it? I also just went ahead and copied the old drive, expanded and supersized it from the start, so I guess I'll be testing that configuration first.


I just completed a second upgrade, again with a WD20EURS (mfg date of 11/06/2010), which was factory set to "quiet" mode (code 128) and factory set to a disabled idle timeout. I'm now pretty sure that the first one also came with the idle timeout disabled from the factory.


----------



## richsadams

Tivoitis said:


> I just completed a second upgrade, again with a WD20EURS (mfg date of 11/06/2010), which was factory set to "quiet" mode (code 128) and factory set to a disabled idle timeout. I'm now pretty sure that the first one also came with the idle timeout disabled from the factory.


Good info. I didn't know the EURS series' default AAM was 128...or that the Intellipark timeout was disabled. Valuable! :up: Thanks for that and enjoy!

EDIT: Now that I look at the specs it is indeed an A/V dedicated drive. At around $115 that's a very good option for a lot of folks.


----------



## SUOrangeman

Potentially silly question from a newbie (been rading, but havent' seen the answer):

Any differences between retail Non-XL and XL drives (aside from capacity)?

For example, could I upgrade an XL to 2TB and use the original 1TB XL drive in a non-XL? Could I use a 320GB non-XL drive as a starting base for upgrading an XL to 2TB?

-SUO


----------



## lessd

SUOrangeman said:


> Potentially silly question from a newbie (been rading, but havent' seen the answer):
> 
> Any differences between retail Non-XL and XL drives (aside from capacity)?
> 
> For example, could I upgrade an XL to 2TB and use the original 1TB XL drive in a non-XL? Could I use a 320GB non-XL drive as a starting base for upgrading an XL to 2TB?
> 
> -SUO


Yes the software is different and can't be interchanged, a XL can be upgraded to 2Tb using the original XL hard drive, you than could upgrade the non XL TP using the original 320Gb drive to the 1Tb drive you took from the XL but why do it that way, just upgrade the non XL with the 2Tb drive and you will still have two TiVos one with 317 hours and one with 157 hours + you only have one upgrade to do.


----------



## jsidlosky

I can't tell if this is designed for the Tivo Premier will allow a base Tivo HD 160gb model to upgrade to ~280-319 hours with a 2TB WD20EDVS drive?

It appears as though this breaks through the 1.2tb limit on TivoHD, can someone confirm?


----------



## lessd

jsidlosky said:


> I can't tell if this is designed for the Tivo Premier will allow a base Tivo HD 160gb model to upgrade to ~280-319 hours with a 2TB WD20EDVS drive?
> 
> It appears as though this breaks through the 1.2tb limit on TivoHD, can someone confirm?


There exist another image (forgot the name but you can search for it) that will work on the TiVo-HD and original Series 3 (using WinMFS) and bring you up to 2Tb, I don't think this Premier expansion software will do that job.


----------



## richsadams

lessd said:


> There exist another image (forgot the name but you can search for it) that will work on the TiVo-HD and original Series 3 (using WinMFS) and bring you up to 2Tb, I don't think this Premier expansion software will do that job.


Actually this jfms will indeed work with TiVo HD's, but not the original Series3 (due to a partition issue). The other (Broflovski) is a separate program, nothing to do with winMFS...and a bit more complicated.


----------



## teiland

jsidlosky said:


> I can't tell if this is designed for the Tivo Premier will allow a base Tivo HD 160gb model to upgrade to ~280-319 hours with a 2TB WD20EDVS drive?
> 
> It appears as though this breaks through the 1.2tb limit on TivoHD, can someone confirm?


Yes, I just did this upgrade on my TiVo HD and it works as advertised using the original 160GB drive to a WD20EVDS. But, I had to put the original 160G drive in and allow it to update to 11.0j. Copy and expand with JMFS, then supersize with WinMFS. It would not work prior to updating the 160GB drive to 11.0j, I think it was on 9 something.

I have tried to do the same thing with my expanded 1TB drive. When I install back in the TiVo it complains that the external drive is missing (I don't have an external drive). If I let it continue, it repairs the drive for a couple of hours then reboots and I'm back to 1TB capacity.

-TE


----------



## jsidlosky

teiland said:


> Yes, I just did this upgrade on my TiVo HD and it works as advertised using the original 160GB drive to a WD20EVDS. But, I had to put the original 160G drive in and allow it to update to 11.0j. Copy and expand with JMFS, then supersize with WinMFS. It would not work prior to updating the 160GB drive to 11.0j, I think it was on 9 something.
> 
> I have tried to do the same thing with my expanded 1TB drive. When I install back in the TiVo it complains that the external drive is missing (I don't have an external drive). If I let it continue, it repairs the drive for a couple of hours then reboots and I'm back to 1TB capacity.
> 
> -TE


Thanks for that feedback. I did this copy/expand twice now and it just gets stuck on the first Welcome to Tivo screen. The upgrading to 11.0j is what I didn't do.

I'm upgrading now and will try again.

Question: Did you have to run the WIDDLE15 program on the drive to shut off intellisense parking? I don't have a way to write a floppy disk sadly, and couldn't get the ISO to boot with it on there.


----------



## lessd

richsadams said:


> Actually this jfms will indeed work with TiVo HD's, but not the original Series3 (due to a partition issue). The other (Broflovski) is a separate program, nothing to do with winMFS...and a bit more complicated.


The* Broflovski *image is loaded on the Hard Drive using WinMFS (that's the way i did it anyways), but once in the TiVo you can't use WinMFS anymore for backups etc. on that *Broflovski* hard drive image.


----------



## richsadams

lessd said:


> The* Broflovski *image is loaded on the Hard Drive using WinMFS (that's the way i did it anyways), but once in the TiVo you can't use WinMFS anymore for backups etc. on that *Broflovski* hard drive image.


Ah, got it...I gave it a go with MFSTools. Good to know! :up:


----------



## Tivoitis

For the Tivo HD upgraders, I finally filled up my first upgrade (via JMFS onto a WD20EURS drive). Using TivoPlayList, I was able to see that my storage maxed out at 1670 GB. After I used WinMFS to turn on Supersize, the drive maxed out at 1848 GB.


----------



## hpflyby

Well I screwed up...
I booted to windows, started up Disk Manager and Let windows write a new MBR to my Stock Tivo drive. (Tivo Premier)

Is there anyway to get the Tivo Bootpage back?


----------



## lessd

hpflyby said:


> Well I screwed up...
> I booted to windows, started up Disk Manager and Let windows write a new MBR to my Stock Tivo drive. (Tivo Premier)
> 
> Is there anyway to get the Tivo Bootpage back?


No you have to find another Premier drive and copy it back to your drive than do a C&D all and you will be back with a working TP.


----------



## tinkererguy

Never tried this feature of WinMFS myself, but perhaps Fix Boot Page will save you, see info here:
http://www.mfslive.org/winmfs/


----------



## hpflyby

tinkererguy said:


> Never tried this feature of WinMFS myself, but perhaps Fix Boot Page will save you, see info here:
> QUOTE]
> 
> Tried this already... did not work.
> Thanks for the suggestion though!


----------



## hpflyby

lessd said:


> No you have to find another Premier drive and copy it back to your drive than do a C&D all and you will be back with a working TP.


What is C&D?
Thanks!


----------



## Jonathan_S

hpflyby said:


> What is C&D?
> Thanks!


Clear & Delete.
A TiVo menu command to return the TiVo to a basically factory default state. (All recordings, settings, wishlists, season passes, thumbs data, etc, etc get wiped)

Note: It takes a while to run.


----------



## slimjim867

richsadams said:


> Yikes! That's a terrible price.  (Or is that just an example and the store nearby is giving them away? ) You can generally find 2TB drives for ~ $100 to ~$125 on sale now.
> 
> Yes, in a sense it does matter what drive you use. Unless you just can't wait I'd order one of the WD or Hitatchi drives discussed earlier. AFAIK no one is using Seagate drives for these upgrades to date, so no known data exists. It's generally better to stick with what's been proven successful. YMMV of course.
> 
> I'm sure others will chime in but you can see this post on the cousin to this thread for more thoughts
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8146832#post8146832


FWIW....
I've had 3 Hitachi Disks this year. 2 out of the 3 needed replacement. One of the replacements is intermittently noisy and so has just been replaced. No cross shipping so i have had to deal with several credit card charges to monitior.


----------



## richsadams

slimjim867 said:


> FWIW....
> I've had 3 Hitachi Disks this year. 2 out of the 3 needed replacement. One of the replacements is intermittently noisy and so has just been replaced. No cross shipping so i have had to deal with several credit card charges to monitior.


What a pain! Can you post the full model number? TIA.


----------



## ovitevol

Thanks (a LOT) Comer and Richsadams for the software and tips! 

I have successfully upgraded my Tivo Premiere using WD20EARS drive (manufacture date: 10/13/2010; performed hddscan to adjust AAM to 128) I tested the upgraded drive by doing soft reboot and did not hang. Hence, I did not perform the wdidle3.exe

I would suggest to move richsadams's post (#332) to the top of this thread. I have gathered all the pieces of information I need in this forum before #332 posted. That would have saved a lot of time. 

Now my Tivo has 317HD hours for recording! 

Thanks again Comer and Richsadams


----------



## cds618

Hello,

I upgraded my Tivo about 2 weeks ago. About a week later it appears the ethernet port has stopped working. I called Tivo & they are sending a new Tivo. I was wondering if I can just take the 2TB drive out of this Tivo & put it into the new one or do I have to set up the new one & then copy that drive to the 2TB drive.

Thanks for the help.


----------



## Jonathan_S

cds618 said:


> Hello,
> 
> I upgraded my Tivo about 2 weeks ago. About a week later it appears the ethernet port has stopped working. I called Tivo & they are sending a new Tivo. I was wondering if I can just take the 2TB drive out of this Tivo & put it into the new one or do I have to set up the new one & then copy that drive to the 2TB drive.
> 
> Thanks for the help.


You can move the drive between 2 TiVos as long as their both the same model. But, before the drive will work you'll need to run a clear & delete on it in the new TiVo. (That'll rebind it to the new TiVo).

There's no way to transfer it and retain your recordings and season passes (Well any non-copyprotected recordings could be transfered to a computer before moving the drive).
But you shouldn't have to redo the copy and expand process.


----------



## stanlam

cds618 said:


> Hello,
> 
> I upgraded my Tivo about 2 weeks ago. About a week later it appears the ethernet port has stopped working. I called Tivo & they are sending a new Tivo. I was wondering if I can just take the 2TB drive out of this Tivo & put it into the new one or do I have to set up the new one & then copy that drive to the 2TB drive.
> 
> Thanks for the help.


I thought Tivo will void your warranty if you upgraded your hard drive. Since you already used it for 2 weeks, I'm sure Tivo knew you upgraded through the daily TV guide updates. Hmmm??? You sure got lucky.


----------



## stanlam

I just got a brand new WD10EADS western Digital 1 TB hard green hard drive through the warranty program. The original one I bought, with the same model #, busted in 1 year. This one has a manufactuer date of 10 November 2010. Does anybody know if I still need to run Widdle on this one? I don't see anybody talking about this drive anymore.


----------



## richsadams

stanlam said:


> I thought Tivo will void your warranty if you upgraded your hard drive. Since you already used it for 2 weeks, I'm sure Tivo knew you upgraded through the daily TV guide updates. Hmmm??? You sure got lucky.


Although TiVo is aware of any upgrade if they take the time to review their logs as long as the original hard drive is installed (or reinstalled), the unit is otherwise unchanged and no mention of the upgrade is made to the CSR TiVo will honor their warranty.



stanlam said:


> I just got a brand new WD10EADS western Digital 1 TB hard green hard drive through the warranty program. The original one I bought, with the same model #, busted in 1 year. This one has a manufactuer date of 10 November 2010. Does anybody know if I still need to run Widdle on this one? I don't see anybody talking about this drive anymore.


The only way to find out would be to perform the upgrade and see if TiVo will boot up. Then if it boots up properly try a menu restart. If it restarts you're good to go. If either fail you'll need to run wdidle3.exe to adjust the Intellipark feature's timeout.


----------



## stanlam

So I received my WD20EVDS hard drive the other day. I wanted to run some test to make sure it's not defective. Here's the interesting part, I did a slow and full format in windows. It took about 1 day for format the hard drive. I didn't have any problems. Then I decided to run the Western digital program called LifeGuard Diagnostic. This program takes 2 days to run and it failed both times saying to many bad sectors. Now I'm waiting for a new hard drive from the warranty. Interesting huh?

Here's my question that is not related. After I get my replacement 2TB hard drive, what should I do with my original Premiere? Can I back up the original premiere hard drive onto a DVD so I can use the original Premiere hard drive for other purposes. My only concern is that in the future I might need to image another 2TB since they don't seem to be that reliable.


----------



## richsadams

stanlam said:


> So I received my WD20EVDS hard drive the other day. I wanted to run some test to make sure it's not defective. Here's the interesting part, I did a slow and full format in windows. It took about 1 day for format the hard drive. I didn't have any problems. Then I decided to run the Western digital program called LifeGuard Diagnostic. This program takes 2 days to run and it failed both times saying to many bad sectors. Now I'm waiting for a new hard drive from the warranty. Interesting huh?
> 
> Here's my question that is not related. After I get my replacement 2TB hard drive, what should I do with my original Premiere? Can I back up the original premiere hard drive onto a DVD so I can use the original Premiere hard drive for other purposes. My only concern is that in the future I might need to image another 2TB since they don't seem to be that reliable.


Although I'd avoid running any Windows programs on your new drive at all, running Western Digital's Lifeguard was an excellent move. It probably saved you a lot of grief down the road. The larger the hard drive the more opportunity there is for problem sectors.

With older TiVo drives being so small the temptation to repurpose them was just as small so putting it on the shelf as a solid backup was a no brainer. These days it's hard to put a 1TB drive away for safe keeping. However that's exactly what I would do, at least for now. Unfortunately there's no option to create a truncated backup of the OS as there is with other TiVo drives using winMFS or MFSTools...the entire drive would need to be duplicated...and then you're back in the same boat. So I would strongly recommend keeping the original TiVo hard drive on the shelf. If your TiVo fails for some reason (other than HDD failure) you can easily slip it back in for warranty service. If a new drive fails you can also slip it in and be back up and running almost instantly. Plus you can continue to use the original drive to image new drives if/when needed.

It's a big ask I know, but keeping the original intact is your best, safest bet at least until someone comes up with a way to image just the OS for safe keeping.


----------



## WesleyMac

comer said:


> _Supersize_ has been released. You will get 317 HD hours from 2TB drive. Enjoy!


Is the link on Comer's post #212 the link to the bootable CD image? When I view the post, it says that links in signatures are not visible until after I have posted 10 times - this is my second, and I hope I can make 10 without being a nuisance.


----------



## richsadams

WesleyMac said:


> Is the link on Comer's post #212 the link to the bootable CD image? When I view the post, it says that links in signatures are not visible until after I have posted 10 times - this is my second, and I hope I can make 10 without being a nuisance.


Welcome to the forum (well, sort of...I see you posted once a few years ago).  Here you go...

http://www.mediafire.com/?pfc9n8o30tc64

Happy upgrading!

BTW, I think they cut the posting count for seeing/posting links to five now.


----------



## WesleyMac

Thanks, Rich. 
P.S. re number of posts needed to view images and links, the text that appears in lieu of the links states that 10 are needed and that I have only two (three with this!). Anyway, many thanks.


----------



## richsadams

WesleyMac said:


> Thanks, Rich.
> P.S. re number of posts needed to view images and links, the text that appears in lieu of the links states that 10 are needed and that I have only two (three with this!). Anyway, many thanks.


I know the text message says 10 but IIRC one of the moderators said they changed the actual post count required to 5...but left the text at 10 to scare off spammers. Who knows.

Anyway, just noticed that you're right next door...so happy upgrading and try and stay dry!


----------



## netholio

Very very happy with this "procedure". I had a spare WD10EVDS laying about because of a previous TS session on a tivo HD.... it's now in my Premiere and working great!


----------



## RickNY

Thanks Comer! Just sent some PayPal thanks your way.. Great work.


----------



## pbolya

I am looking to upgrade my Premier with Comer's method (thanks Comer). I have a 1TB Premiere XL and looking to buy a new Western Digital Caviar Green WD30EZRSDTL 3TB drive to upgrade the Premier to 3TB. 

Has enyone successfully upgraded to 3TB before using this method ?

Are there any issues with WD30EZRSDTL to use in the TiVo (e.g. not recommended for always on A/V etc...) ? Are there any other 3TB disks I should consider instead? 

Are there any 2.2TB barrier issues?

Any information would be greatly appriciated!

Thanks,
Peter


----------



## richsadams

pbolya said:


> Are there any 2.2TB barrier issues?


Yes. Unfortunately TiVo's file structure is limited to 2TB's.


----------



## pbolya

richsadams said:


> Yes. Unfortunately TiVo's file structure is limited to 2TB's.


That's a bummer. So I guess I need to upgrade to 2TB and keep downloading the shows I won't watch immediatelly to my PC (Have 6.2 TB disc space in it).


----------



## richsadams

pbolya said:


> That's a bummer. So I guess I need to upgrade to 2TB and keep downloading the shows I won't watch immediatelly to my PC (Have 6.2 TB disc space in it).


That's it for now. Wow! That is a lot of TV to watch!

FWIW there were a couple of folks selling "4TB" TiVo upgrades (2TB internal and 2TB external) on ebay. That went on for a very short while and then they disappeared. There were a couple of members that tried it out here as well, Comer being one but IIRC everyone eventually ran into some file corruption issues. Spike also confirmed on his website (http://mfslive.org/) that TiVo is limited to 2TB's as well. Perhaps one day there will be a breakthrough.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## wikiwiki2004

I bought 2 2TB WD20EARS date june 10, 2010. Was initially going to use them as an external drive but tivo won't configure them because they are unsupported. So doing comers upgrade instead. crossing fingers and hoping this works!


----------



## TheTivoPenguin

richsadams said:


> I know the text message says 10 but IIRC one of the moderators said they changed the actual post count required to 5...but left the text at 10 to scare off spammers. Who knows.


 _"To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 5 posts."_
Looks like it may be 10 and not 5, I can't see links 

OT - this thread has been a lifesaver - thank you very much for all of the info here, it was a long read. I should be utilizing this very soon.

Now to gently spam 4 more posts


----------



## richsadams

TheTivoPenguin said:


> _"To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 5 posts."_
> Looks like it may be 10 and not 5, I can't see links
> 
> OT - this thread has been a lifesaver - thank you very much for all of the info here, it was a long read. I should be utilizing this very soon.
> 
> Now to gently spam 4 more posts


Got it. I thought they had changed the count requirement, but I guess that was just a discussion. 10 seems overkill...5 maybe, but I don't think 10 is really reasonable. Not my call though.

In any case, welcome and enjoy!


----------



## wikiwiki2004

woohoo! got one tivo updated! now working on the second one! 317 hours of hd programming! Thanks for all your work Comer!


----------



## chetk

does the premiere upgrade work for the series 3 thx. looking to upgrade my s3 if i can, used mfslive on other tivo and worked but looking for a least 1.5tb is that possible? or can i go bigger.


----------



## richsadams

chetk said:


> does the premiere upgrade work for the series 3 thx. looking to upgrade my s3 if i can, used mfslive on other tivo and worked but looking for a least 1.5tb is that possible? or can i go bigger.


Unfortunately due to differences in partition structures the jmfs program does not work on the original Series3 TiVo. The maximum capacity for the Series3 internal TiVo drive is 1.1 TB plus the capacity of the original drive (250GB) or approximately 1.26TB. You can upgrade using winMFS or MFStools. Everything you need to know can be found here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160

Happy upgrading!


----------



## Marconi

Does anyone know where I can get a Premier drive image? (I need just an image, not a drive.)


----------



## lessd

Marconi said:


> Does anyone know where I can get a Premier drive image? (I need just an image, not a drive.)


Does such an image even exist ?


----------



## marspinball

Does the JMFS CD now work on the THD so that it can be supersized to 317 hours.

Thanks, Martin


----------



## richsadams

marspinball said:


> Does the JMFS CD now work on the THD so that it can be supersized to 317 hours.
> 
> Thanks, Martin


http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8300471#post8300471


----------



## KRKeegan

WD20EARS on sale at Dell.com for $69.95 after $20 mail in rebate with free shipping.

Full details and rebate form at:

http://www.techdealdigger.com/pr/cheap-western-digital-wd20ears-2tb-35-hard-drive-deals/3101


----------



## richsadams

KRKeegan said:


> WD20EARS on sale at Dell.com for $69.95 after $20 mail in rebate with free shipping.
> 
> Full details and rebate form at:
> 
> http://www.techdealdigger.com/pr/cheap-western-digital-wd20ears-2tb-35-hard-drive-deals/3101


Thanks for that. :up: It's truly amazing how cheap these are getting! I just hope they aren't employing six-year olds to build them so they can make sort of profit. Sheesh!


----------



## chetk

looking for some help trying to use wdidle3 but it keeps telling me that kernal not found? can anybody help


----------



## lessd

chetk said:


> looking for some help trying to use wdidle3 but it keeps telling me that kernal not found? can anybody help


Your drive (WD only) must be connected directly (no USB ports) just the SATA port and you must boot into Dos or equivalent (no Windows). Then run wdidle3 /d and all should work.


----------



## chetk

thanks i figured it out.


----------



## pbolya

Comer, you are the man. 7h of disk check (I don't watch what I put in my body but my TiVo... that is a different story) and 6h of upgrade later I now too have a Premiere with 2TB (317h HD) disk. Everything checked out fine. Too bad we can't use a 3TB or bigger disk. 

I have done upgrades to my various TiVos more than 20 times in the past decade but none of them were as easy as this one. Thanks (donation on the way). I hope a lot of people are sending you contributions. You well deserve it!


----------



## alyssa

Do I need to disable intellipark on a WD20EVDS?


----------



## richsadams

alyssa said:


> Do I need to disable intellipark on a WD20EVDS?


Maybe. If it was manufactured after 09/15/10 probably not, but there's no way of knowing unless you perform the upgrade, see if it boots up and if it boots up if it will reboot from a menu restart. If it fails you'll need to follow the directions to run wdidle3.exe which can be found on the original Drive Upgrade FAQ:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160 (Section IV, #29)


----------



## alyssa

Thanks Rich
I admire your stamina for answering all our questions over the years.

eta; looks like wdidle for me as the date is 09.10.10...


----------



## Southie Boy

Problem with my setup. Wondering if someone can help.
I took a virgin 320 GB drive from a premiere unit, and a new 2TB and connected them to the sata bus in my system. (running nvidia sata chipset). Booted the system from the JMFS disk. After it did the scan for TiVo drives, it reported that none were present. I did a DIR command under [email protected]/dev/disk/by-id, and I can see the 2TB drive as well as the 320GB (TiVo) drive. JMFS just won't spot the TiVo drive.

Any ideas?


----------



## richsadams

alyssa said:


> eta; looks like wdidle for me as the date is 09.10.10...


If you have the patience you could try upgrading without it. IIRC some of the folks with A/V drives (like the EVDS series) reported not having to tweak the Intellipark setting on drives manufactured as far back as March. Worst case you'd have to pull the drive back out and run it (doesn't affect the data).


----------



## alyssa

richsadams said:


> ...IIRC some of the folks with A/V drives (like the EVDS series) reported not having to tweak the Intellipark setting on drives manufactured as far back as March.......


Will do & report back. I've got to pull apart my entertainment area, reorganize it, do severe cable management & some cabinet mod's. It's gonna be a while, in other words.


----------



## richsadams

alyssa said:


> Will do & report back. I've got to pull apart my entertainment area, reorganize it, do severe cable management & some cabinet mod's. It's gonna be a while, in other words.


Understood. Been there, done that...heck, who am I kidding..._always_ doing that! What ever happened to "everything will be wireless soon" anyway?


----------



## Southie Boy

Comer,
Thanks for the great, and easiest ever tool. The problem I noted earlier was due to a Vitamin D deficiency that was caused by my head being shoved far into a place that the sun never shines. Got that all squared away, and everything is good.
There will be a little something extra in your PayPal account today, I hope it gets you into that Lear Jet you've been eying.


----------



## Southie Boy

So, now that I have a shiny new Premiere with gobs of storage, I am faced with another dilemma. I am going to retire (sell) my upgraded lifetime TiVo HD, but I would love to get the programs (plenty of which are copy protected cable channel content, copy protection courtesy of Time Warner Cable) off the HD and onto the Premiere. MRV won't cut it because of the copy protection. Anyone have a slick step by step to do that in Linux? I'm sure it has to be more than just moving the contents of a partition over. If someone has a clue, I'd love to hear. The destination drive is freshly upgraded, expanded and Supersized with no programming content whatsoever.


----------



## David Platt

Southie Boy said:


> So, now that I have a shiny new Premiere with gobs of storage, I am faced with another dilemma. I am going to retire (sell) my upgraded lifetime TiVo HD, but I would love to get the programs (plenty of which are copy protected cable channel content, copy protection courtesy of Time Warner Cable) off the HD and onto the Premiere. MRV won't cut it because of the copy protection. Anyone have a slick step by step to do that in Linux? I'm sure it has to be more than just moving the contents of a partition over. If someone has a clue, I'd love to hear. The destination drive is freshly upgraded, expanded and Supersized with no programming content whatsoever.


Unfortunately, there's no way to do it if the shows are copy-protected. You can hack the TiVo to disable copy-protection for future recordings, but AFAIK there's no way to remove it from past recordings. They're stuck on the TiVo they were recorded on.


----------



## richsadams

Southie Boy said:


> So, now that I have a shiny new Premiere with gobs of storage, I am faced with another dilemma. I am going to retire (sell) my upgraded lifetime TiVo HD, but I would love to get the programs (plenty of which are copy protected cable channel content, copy protection courtesy of Time Warner Cable) off the HD and onto the Premiere. MRV won't cut it because of the copy protection. Anyone have a slick step by step to do that in Linux? I'm sure it has to be more than just moving the contents of a partition over. If someone has a clue, I'd love to hear. The destination drive is freshly upgraded, expanded and Supersized with no programming content whatsoever.


David is correct (as usual) so you'll need to watch your recordings "as is" and then sell your TiVo HD.

Congrats on the upgrade!


----------



## Bai Shen

A 2TB WD Green EARS drive will work for a Premiere upgrade, correct? Is there anything special I need to do to it? I just got it a month or two ago and was using it for storage in my system.


----------



## richsadams

Bai Shen said:


> A 2TB WD Green EARS drive will work for a Premiere upgrade, correct? Is there anything special I need to do to it? I just got it a month or two ago and was using it for storage in my system.


See here for more info:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8305812#post8305812

You can adjust the AAM to make it quieter and if it was manufactured prior to 09/15/10 you may need to adjust the Intellipark timeout. You can find more information about adjusting the AAM and Intellipark settings on the Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ (specifically Section IV, #32 and Section V, #14 respectively):

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160

Happy upgrading!


----------



## Bai Shen

richsadams said:


> See here for more info:
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8305812#post8305812
> 
> You can adjust the AAM to make it quieter and if it was manufactured prior to 09/15/10 you may need to adjust the Intellipark timeout. You can find more information about adjusting the AAM and Intellipark settings on the Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ (specifically Section IV, #32 and Section V, #14 respectively):
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb...60#post5616160
> 
> Happy upgrading!


You're second link doesn't work.

Is it worth it to spend the extra cash for the A/V drives vs a regular Green?


----------



## richsadams

Bai Shen said:


> You're second link doesn't work.
> 
> Is it worth it to spend the extra cash for the A/V drives vs a regular Green?


Link works now. Some think extra $$$ for a dedicated A/V drive is worth it, some don't think so and don't mind setting the AAM themselves.


----------



## alyssa

Southie Boy said:


> .......I would love to get the programs (plenty of which are copy protected cable channel content, copy protection courtesy of Time Warner Cable) off the HD and onto the Premiere.


I'm in the same situation. I decided to keep my old tivo set up until I watch everything/need the cash/or get sick of looking at it. My new premier will record all the new stuff & in a pinch I'll have 4 tuners in the living room.
The cable card rental is between $1.75-$2/month.

On a side note, anyone know if the slide (bluetooth) remote & the IR glow remote can operate in the same room without pairing to the tivo?


----------



## Southie Boy

David Platt said:


> Unfortunately, there's no way to do it if the shows are copy-protected. You can hack the TiVo to disable copy-protection for future recordings, but AFAIK there's no way to remove it from past recordings. They're stuck on the TiVo they were recorded on.


So...... If i were to do a drive size expansion on my current HD TiVo by copying the contents of the existing drive to a new larger drive using JMFS are you telling me the files carrying the copy protection flag will not transfer to the upgrade drive?


----------



## Tivoitis

Southie Boy said:


> So...... If i were to do a drive size expansion on my current HD TiVo by copying the contents of the existing drive to a new larger drive using JMFS are you telling me the files carrying the copy protection flag will not transfer to the upgrade drive?


If you copy your current HD Tivo drive over to a new drive and then put that new drive back into the same HD Tivo, everything will transfer over (because JMFS does straight copy of the drive). You will see all the shows and they will still be copy protected.

If your current HD Tivo drive is the original never-been expanded drive, then you'll be able to expand the new drive via JMFS. If your current HD Tivo has a drive that was already expanded (whether by JMFS or by WinMFS), then you won't be able to expand the new drive using JMFS.

If you're hoping to take the HD Tivo drive, copy and expand it onto a new drive, and drop that new drive into the Premiere, that won't work.


----------



## alyssa

David Platt said:


> .... You can hack the TiVo to disable copy-protection for future recordings,.....


I imagine the hack requires a soldering pencil.....?


----------



## richsadams

alyssa said:


> I imagine the hack requires a soldering pencil.....?


Yep.


----------



## Bai Shen

richsadams said:


> Link works now. Some think extra $$$ for a dedicated A/V drive is worth it, some don't think so and don't mind setting the AAM themselves.


-nods- I'm debating on wether to use the EARS drive currently in my machine or to order a new AV drive.


----------



## SMWinnie

I know this has been discussed but can't seem to find the previous posts. Starting yesterday, I've had a green "serious problem...wait three hours" screen. Rebooting gets to "a few minutes more" before dropping to the green screen.

I vaguely remember that the next step is either to check WDidle (which I think I did before installing the drive) or to kickstart. Little help?


----------



## richsadams

SMWinnie said:


> I know this has been discussed but can't seem to find the previous posts. Starting yesterday, I've had a green "serious problem...wait three hours" screen. Rebooting gets to "a few minutes more" before dropping to the green screen.
> 
> I vaguely remember that the next step is either to check WDidle (which I think I did before installing the drive) or to kickstart. Little help?


An mfsAssert (GSOD) indicates data corruption. It may be due to a power fluctuation (particularly if you don't have TiVo on a UPS), signal issue or hardware problem including the hard drive itself. It probably doesn't have anything to do with the Intellipark feature (addressed with wdidle3.exe).

If you haven't already (but it sounds like you have), try power cycling your TiVo (pull the plug, wait about 10 seconds for the drive to spin down and then plug it back in). That may or may not fix things.

If not the Kickstart instructions are here...

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2

Since it's already trying to run KS57, you should probably try running KS58 to see if it can recover. If that doesn't work try running KS54 (SMART diagnostic) to see if a fail code appears and what it is.

Note that the instructions for running Kickstarts on TiVo Premiere and Premier XL's is slightly different than for other models...details are listed near the end of the Kickstart post.

Hope that helps and let us know how it goes.


----------



## SMWinnie

richsadams said:


> An mfsAssert (GSOD) indicates data corruption. It may be due to a power fluctuation (particularly if you don't have TiVo on a UPS), signal issue or hardware problem including the hard drive itself. It probably doesn't have anything to do with the Intellipark feature (addressed with wdidle3.exe).
> 
> If you haven't already (but it sounds like you have), try power cycling your TiVo (pull the plug, wait about 10 seconds for the drive to spin down and then plug it back in). That may or may not fix things.
> 
> If not the Kickstart instructions are here...
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2
> 
> Since it's already trying to run KS57, you should probably try running KS58 to see if it can recover. If that doesn't work try running KS54 (SMART diagnostic) to see if a fail code appears and what it is.
> 
> Note that the instructions for running Kickstarts on TiVo Premiere and Premier XL's is slightly different than for other models...details are listed near the end of the Kickstart post.
> 
> Hope that helps and let us know how it goes.


Thanks, Rich. I did power cycle without success and KS54 never got me to the SMART screen. I went home over lunch and tried a KS58. The Premiere downloaded and applied the service update but then went from "a few minutes more" to the GSOD.

From here, I guess I should pull the drive and run WD's diagnostic tools? (Or, since I don't think I'll ever trust the drive anyway, get a new 2TB drive and pull the original 320GB drive out of storage.)


----------



## sundiego

Great forum- thank you Comer and Rich!

Since I have 3 premieres and thanks to Dell deal of 2TB WD drive, I am all set to upgrade!

1 question- if I get premiere image file, is there a simpler way to burn/expand that on to my other 2 premieres? Otherwise each time I would have to wait for copying original disk right? 

Rgds,
Sun


----------



## richsadams

SMWinnie said:


> Thanks, Rich. I did power cycle without success and KS54 never got me to the SMART screen. I went home over lunch and tried a KS58. The Premiere downloaded and applied the service update but then went from "a few minutes more" to the GSOD.
> 
> From here, I guess I should pull the drive and run WD's diagnostic tools? (Or, since I don't think I'll ever trust the drive anyway, get a new 2TB drive and pull the original 320GB drive out of storage.)


Bummer. Yep, as long as you have the original you could slip it back in and be back in business...plus use it to image a new drive. If you still experience problems at least you'd know it's something else (but it's most likely the drive).

You could run Western Digital's Lifeguard on it to see how things go. I know what you mean about it being in the back of your mind though...trust is a precious thing. I think I'd get an RMA and be done with it.

These things happen. Um, happy New Year!


----------



## richsadams

sundiego said:


> Great forum- thank you Comer and Rich!
> 
> Since I have 3 premieres and thanks to Dell deal of 2TB WD drive, I am all set to upgrade!
> 
> 1 question- if I get premiere image file, is there a simpler way to burn/expand that on to my other 2 premieres? Otherwise each time I would have to wait for copying original disk right?
> 
> Rgds,
> Sun


Welcome to the forum. The last part, yes, you'll need to upgrade each TiVo individually. Once TiVo has been set up the image is actually tied to that particular TiVo. It is possible to use an image from one TiVo in another, identical model. However it will throw an error when it boots up and you have to run Clear and Delete Everything. CD&E wipes all of the cable card info and of course any recordings, etc. essentially creating a brand new TiVo. So if you want to keep anything at all...the wait is worth it.

Happy upgrading!

BTW, this is all Comer's fault...er, baby!


----------



## shaggy2002

I have read a lot of these posts and am ready to upgrade to 2 TB. I purchased a WD20EVDS (manu 11 SEP 2010 bought from Amazon.) I gather from all the posts I read I do not need to set AAM adjustments since it is a WD20EVDS. Where I am confused is if I need to disable Intellipark or not. I read if manufactured before "november you are good" but think that was from a year ago. If someone could answer this I would appreciate it, as I would like to do the widdle while my drive is out of the tivo.


----------



## richsadams

shaggy2002 said:


> I have read a lot of these posts and am ready to upgrade to 2 TB. I purchased a WD20EVDS (manu 11 SEP 2010 bought from Amazon.) I gather from all the posts I read I do not need to set AAM adjustments since it is a WD20EVDS. Where I am confused is if I need to disable Intellipark or not. I read if manufactured before "november you are good" but think that was from a year ago. If someone could answer this I would appreciate it, as I would like to do the widdle while my drive is out of the tivo.


You are correct, the EVDS is a dedicated A/V drive series from Western Digital. The AAM is already set at the lowest/quietest level - 128.

You can find more information about adjusting the Intellipark settings (for WD drives manufactured prior to 09/15/10) on the Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ (specifically Section V, #14):

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160

Hope that helps and happy upgrading!


----------



## shaggy2002

richsadams said:


> You are correct, the EVDS is a dedicated A/V drive series from Western Digital. The AAM is already set at the lowest/quietest level - 128.
> 
> You can find more information about adjusting the Intellipark settings (for WD drives manufactured prior to 09/15/10) on the Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ (specifically Section V, #14):
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160
> 
> Hope that helps and happy upgrading!


Rich,

I read that last night, but that is what confused me.

"This issue affects all recent Western Digital EADS, EARS, and EAVS drives. It also affects EVVS drives manufactured after September 18 and EVDS drives manufactured since November. Drives built prior to these dates work perfectly fine; they do not exhibit the issue. The manufacture date is printed on the top of every drive."

my question is, November what? 2010, 2009, 2008?? The post goes back to like 2007. I appreciate all of your help in advance!


----------



## alyssa

shaggy,
I'm in the process of copying to an evds drive with a date of sept 10, 2010. I plan on NOT running wdidle3.exe on it. I'm hopeful the Intellipark feature will be disabled. I will edit my post later on tonight with the results.


----------



## richsadams

shaggy2002 said:


> Rich,
> 
> I read that last night, but that is what confused me.
> 
> "This issue affects all recent Western Digital EADS, EARS, and EAVS drives. It also affects EVVS drives manufactured after September 18 and EVDS drives manufactured since November. Drives built prior to these dates work perfectly fine; they do not exhibit the issue. The manufacture date is printed on the top of every drive."
> 
> my question is, November what? 2010, 2009, 2008?? The post goes back to like 2007. I appreciate all of your help in advance!


It is confusing. That specific reference was for 2009. WD changed the firmware along about 09/15/10 so most drives manufactured after that date no longer require the Intellipark setting to be adjusted...some earlier and a few still needed it adjusted with dates shortly after that so it's still a bit of a crap shoot. I'll see if I can't scare up bkdtv to see if he'll update that portion of the post though.


----------



## alyssa

I successfully did a soft restart of my newly upgraded EDVS. It's manufacture date is Sept 10, 2010. I did not use wdidle3. 

Richard, thanks for suggesting trying the drive without using wdidle3.exe.


----------



## richsadams

alyssa said:


> I successfully did a soft restart of my newly upgraded EDVS. It's manufacture date is Sept 10, 2010. I did not use wdidle3.
> 
> Richard, thanks for suggesting trying the drive without using wdidle3.exe.


Sweet! Enjoy your "new" TiVo!


----------



## shaggy2002

Alyssa,

Did you supersize yours? I am trying to determine if there are any cons on supersizing. I am thinking about not supersizing for now and trying later. Anyone have thoughts/ideas?

I currently have mine copying. 18 GB of 320 GB are copied.


----------



## alyssa

I can't think of a reason to not supersize. I think it adds about 30 GBs more space. 

I would try the drive & see if it'll do a soft reboot before using wdidle.


----------



## richsadams

shaggy2002 said:


> Alyssa,
> 
> Did you supersize yours? I am trying to determine if there are any cons on supersizing. I am thinking about not supersizing for now and trying later. Anyone have thoughts/ideas?
> 
> I currently have mine copying. 18 GB of 320 GB are copied.


There's no downside to supersizing. It simply recovers a small amount of space reserved for TiVoClips.


----------



## shaggy2002

Upgraded to 2 TB is done. That was way easier than when I upgraded my Tivo HD. I did the supersize option and did not use widdle. I restarted tivo through menu and everything booted back up fine.

Thanks to COMER for his software, and Rich and Alyssa for their advice!


----------



## richsadams

shaggy2002 said:


> Upgraded to 2 TB is done. That was way easier than when I upgraded my Tivo HD. I did the supersize option and did not use widdle. I restarted tivo through menu and everything booted back up fine.
> 
> Thanks to COMER for his software, and Rich and Alyssa for their advice!


Excellent! IIRC your drive was manufactured Sept 11th? If not let me know. Otherwise enjoy all of that new real estate!


----------



## SMWinnie

richsadams said:


> SMWinnie said:
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks, Rich. I did power cycle without success and KS54 never got me to the SMART screen. I went home over lunch and tried a KS58. The Premiere downloaded and applied the service update but then went from "a few minutes more" to the GSOD.
> 
> From here, I guess I should pull the drive and run WD's diagnostic tools? (Or, since I don't think I'll ever trust the drive anyway, get a new 2TB drive and pull the original 320GB drive out of storage.)
> 
> 
> 
> Bummer. Yep, as long as you have the original you could slip it back in and be back in business...plus use it to image a new drive. If you still experience problems at least you'd know it's something else (but it's most likely the drive).
> 
> You could run Western Digital's Lifeguard on it to see how things go. I know what you mean about it being in the back of your mind though...trust is a precious thing. I think I'd get an RMA and be done with it.
> 
> These things happen. Um, happy New Year!
Click to expand...

[Epilogue]

Let's see. Popped the original 320GB drive in the box and we were back up and running as soon as the Premiere could get current program data. (Interestingly, I _think_ TiVo Central Online even automagically repopulated my kids' Season Pass list. There are some Season Passes on there that they asked for after I shelved the original drive.)

Running WD Data LifeGuard gave the following result:
Test Option: EXTENDED TEST 
Model Number: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 
Unit Serial Number: WD-WMAZAnnnnnnn 
Firmware Number: 51.0AB51 
Capacity: 2000.40 GB 
SMART Status: PASS 
Test Result: FAIL 
Test Error Code: 08-Too many bad sectors detected. 
Test Time: 08:40:12, January 09, 2011​Now, I'm a casual user but that sure smells like a bad drive to me. RMA time.

[Stan]
I left the original drive in the Premiere until after Comcast showed up to pair the CableCard. This was a lifesaver - if I had not done that, I would be facing a drive replacement *and* a truck roll. Noting that Comer's method requires copying the whole 320GB drive regardless of whether the drive is empty or full of shows, and noting that there's no truncated backup file available, there's really no reason not to have a 320GB drive with Comcast's pairing info sitting on a dark shelf.
What I failed to do was run the low-level drive check before comerizing it and dropping it in the TiVo. If this had been the grownups' TiVo, then I would be dealing with a bunch of lost hard-to-replace shows and the loss of at least six marital harmony points. (As it stands, the kids' five-episode buffer of Cartoon Network shows will get rebuilt in a week or so.) The replacement drive *will* get run through the WD Data LifeGuard extensive test before comerizing.
[/Stan]

[/Epilogue]


----------



## richsadams

SMWinnie said:


> Popped the original 320GB drive in the box and we were back up and running as soon as the Premiere could get current program data.<snip>


Nice recap Stan. Cartman could learn a few things from you! :up:

Enjoy!


----------



## shaggy2002

Rich,

my drive was manufactured Sept 10, 2010.


----------



## alyssa

Having the original drive with the cable card info is huge! I've got all 3 of mine labeled & stored just in case.


----------



## richsadams

shaggy2002 said:


> Rich,
> 
> my drive was manufactured Sept 10, 2010.


Thanks for that...good to know.



alyssa said:


> Having the original drive with the cable card info is huge! I've got all 3 of mine labeled & stored just in case.


Very sound advice.


----------



## JavaJoe_2

I have a New/Used Premier (eBay $94, hopefully going to be lifetime) and a New Premier XL(with Lifetime). 
I bought the Samsung SpinMaster 2T for the XL upgrade. I plan to install the XL HD in the Premier. Do I need to reimage the HD out of the XL to install in the Premier?? Or can I just install it and be good to go. For $87 I might just get another SpinMaster for the Premier.
My original plan was: New Samsung (imaged) goes in the XL, old XL HD (1T?) goes to the Premier, the Premier HD (320g??) goes in my Pioneer 57H series2 LifeTime (I bought the Weaknee's SATA to IDE kit). And then sell the Pioneer (with the old drive and new drive) to help offset my new TiVo's.
Ya think I got the itch?? It's this forum's fault.
Thanks in advance for your help!
PS: I watched the TiVo Upgrade YouTube Video's!! They Rock! I just wish my old computers had SATA connectors.
PPS: As of now I have not installed cable cards in either unit...a deciding factor.


----------



## richsadams

JavaJoe_2 said:


> I have a New/Used Premier (eBay $94, hopefully going to be lifetime) and a New Premier XL(with Lifetime).
> I bought the Samsung SpinMaster 2T for the XL upgrade. I plan to install the XL HD in the Premier. Do I need to reimage the HD out of the XL to install in the Premier?? Or can I just install it and be good to go. For $87 I might just get another SpinMaster for the Premier.
> My original plan was: New Samsung (imaged) goes in the XL, old XL HD (1T?) goes to the Premier, the Premier HD (320g??) goes in my Pioneer 57H series2 LifeTime (I bought the Weaknee's SATA to IDE kit). And then sell the Pioneer (with the old drive and new drive) to help offset my new TiVo's.
> Ya think I got the itch?? It's this forum's fault.
> Thanks in advance for your help!
> PS: I watched the TiVo Upgrade YouTube Video's!! They Rock! I just wish my old computers had SATA connectors.
> PPS: As of now I have not installed cable cards in either unit...a deciding factor.


Welcome to the forum. Unfortunately you can only swap drives between identical TiVo's, Premiere to Premiere or Premiere XL to Premiere XL for example as their images are different. At this time there is no way to create a truncated backup of a Premiere/Premiere XL drive either.

If it were me I'd just upgrade both to 2TB and be done with it. I would also get them both set up with cable cards, etc. prior to upgrading and keep the original drives on the shelf. That way if an upgraded drive goes south you'll always have a drive you can both use to get back up and running immediately as well as to use to upgrade another drive.

FWIW all of the TiVo upgrade videos I've watched to date either have missing information or minor to major mistakes in them. Follow Comer's steps in the first post and you'll be good to go.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## alyssa

I just contributed to Comer's beer fund & noticed the paypal page came up in Canadian dollars. Not a major thing because the exchange rate is close to the same but disconcerting.


----------



## tinkererguy

tinkererguy said:


> My guess is probably yes, that 14.6 has issues with bluetooth dongle at boot time, that trigger a green screen immediately or within hours. Just a hunch, little data to back up this "thinking out loud"...


14.7 showed up on my Premiere at 5am yesterday, Sunday Jan 9th, but my TiVo unfortunately rebooted for a mysterious reason when recording 2 shows at 9:30pm that same day, then saw it was applying this 14.7 update at that time.

The good news though is that it finished in about 40 minutes, with the bluetooth dongle (slider remote receiver) still plugged in, so apparently they've fixed that problem. Tried 2 more manual reboots a couple hours later, no problem again.

Now my fingers are crossed that stability is better (after I cleared up the bluetooth issue, I've only had 3 unexplained reboot incidents in the 2 months I've had the Premiere, which is somewhat tolerable). I won't say the HD UI is much faster, if at all though, this is just an incremental upgrade.

At least the SD UI is still snappy though, as it always has been, and the slider remote keyboard still works in SD mode. The SD UI is still much faster than TiVo S3 SD UI. So the "wife acceptance factor" is still kind of OK, and will remain so, assuming it becomes more stable than is has been.


----------



## tinkererguy

In other words, as we suspected, this bluetooth dongle (slider remote receiver) issue likely never had anything to do with comer's upgrade procedure which copies everything, although I never did hear for sure if somebody tested non-upgraded TiVo Premiers for the same hang on power up issue with the 14.6 code, but it just doesn't matter much at all anymore as we're all moving to 14.7 soon likely anyway.

Thanks again comer for a great CD!


----------



## Bai Shen

The mirror link in the first post doesn't work.


----------



## lessd

Bai Shen said:


> The mirror link in the first post doesn't work.


Just tried that link, worked for me See http://www.mediafire.com/?pfc9n8o30tc64


----------



## Bai Shen

lessd said:


> Just tried that link, worked for me See http://www.mediafire.com/?pfc9n8o30tc64


That's not the mirror link.


----------



## txporter

Finally got off my duff and supersized my 2TB premiere. Quick and painless (once I was able to get a computer to boot off the CD). My machine which I use for video editing, etc just refuses to boot off CD. Not sure what the problem is. Luckily my wife is out of town and her machine was available.

Thanks for your great work, comer!


----------



## rodbeezy

I need to reformat my comp and need to backup 1.4 TB of data. I planned on using a WD20EVDS temporarily to house the backup data until I get the data back on my reformatted system. Of course this will require the EVDS to be in NTFS. Can I then repurpose the WD20EVDS as a TiVo upgrade with jmfs even though the drive will be in NTFS?


----------



## alyssa

I'd write 0's to it. It might be overkill but it give's a clean slate(or platter).
WD has a easy utility.


----------



## rodbeezy

@alyssa

that sounds like a good option. thanks!


----------



## gil sonnier

i have a premier that i want to put a WD20EARS in. do i need to disable intellipark.
in some of the first post Ive read it says yes. but in later post,some said you don't have to.any advice lately on this.	also i was wondering, does comer's copy tool have a supersize option in it?
thanks for any advise.


----------



## SMWinnie

SMWinnie said:


> The replacement drive *will* get run through the WD Data LifeGuard extensive test before comerizing.


Replacement 2TB WD EARS passed the extensive test. Now comerized, up and running.

Drive was manufactured 2 Nov 2010. Out of the box, WDIDLE3 reported Intellipark enabled with the timeout set at 8 seconds. Ran WDIDLE3 to "disable" (well, set to 62 minutes) Intellipark.


----------



## richsadams

gil sonnier said:


> i have a premier that i want to put a WD20EARS in. do i need to disable intellipark.
> in some of the first post Ive read it says yes. but in later post,some said you don't have to.any advice lately on this.	also i was wondering, does comer's copy tool have a supersize option in it?
> thanks for any advise.


Welcome to the forum. If your new hard drive was manufactured prior to 09/15/10 you will probably need to adjust the Intellipark feature's timeout. The only way to find out is to perform the upgrade, install the drive and see if TiVo boots up. If it boots up try a menu restart. If it boots and reboots normally you would not have to make any adjustments. See this post for more info:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160 (Section V, #14)

Yes, as the very first line in the very first post of this thread reads "revision 104 - Nov-06-2010 - with Supersize!". Happy upgrading.


----------



## strejcek

OK, so I thought I would answer some questions relevant to a drive upgrade with the Premiere and the Premiere XL. Since I couldn't find the answers to my questions in this thread, I had to learn through trial and error; and let me tell you, it was a heck of a lot of more trial than error.

Q. Can you replace a faulty drive using the drive image from one Premiere to another Premiere?
A1. Yes you can replace a Premiere drive using the image of another Premiere drive.
A2. Yes you can replace a Premiere XL drive using the image of another Premiere XL drive.
A3. Yes you can replace a Premiere XL drive using the image of a regular Premiere; however, you will have to do a Clear and Delete everything, and it will load the software for a standard Premiere, during the setup process, which is the same but different from the XL.

What does this mean? After the Clear and Delete (took about two hours), and after running the guided setup, I had to re-setup my channel lineups because my XL was not caching my guide data despite the several hundred connections I forced to TiVo. After nailing down the guide issue, I lost the Showcases option a few days later and it would not load the 14.7 software; confirmed by TiVo tech support after reviewing my logs; my XL was downloading it but would not install it, and I'm surmising it is because the core software version on my XL was that of a standard Premiere (different software versions confirmed by TiVo tech support). Long story short, it's not worth the aggravation of trying to interchange drive images.

I did this out of necessity, not knowing the headaches that would follow, because the drive in my XL took a dump and TiVo told me my unit was out of warranty, incorrectly, otherwise I would have had them send me a replacement XL.

Q. Is the drive image on a brand new Premiere pre-mirrored to the TiVo unit and internal drive?
A. No, the image on a brand new unit, that has never been plugged in, is not mirrored to the unit. This image can be used for a replacement drive. Upon powering up the replacement drive in the old TiVo, it goes through the guided setup as if it were a brand new unit.

This is all probably common knowledge, but I couldn't really find the concrete answers I was looking for, which is the reason for this post. Thanks to Comer for his hard work and great knowledge; his software worked like a champ.


----------



## richsadams

As mentioned a few posts above...



> Unfortunately you can only swap drives between identical TiVo's, Premiere to Premiere or Premiere XL to Premiere XL for example as their images are different.


FWIW you can still use the drive from one TiVo to image a drive in another (identical) TiVo even if it has been set up. On the initial boot up there is an error screen and if you run C&DE it will return it to "as new" condition.

Glad to hear things worked out. Enjoy!


----------



## Raymond Day

I bought a TiVo Premiere and looked if I could copy the hard drive to a 2TB drive on Google. I found it and burt and ISO and took the 320GB hard drive out of my TiVo Premiere and put it in a Atom CPU D510 PC and put the HD green 2TB on the 2nd SATA and booted the DVD on a USB DVD drive.

Jmfs Live DVD I put it on a DVD-R and it booted and it was so very easy. This shows the hard drives good and says what it's going to do very good. It took about 3 or more hours to copy the 320GB WD green hard drive that came with the TiVo Premiere. It's been about 5 days now and my TiVo Premiere is working super with the 2TB drive.

Thank you who makde Jmfs Live CD. It works very good and tells you very good what to do. Show what hard drives it's going to copy and to were. Very nice.

I guess it will not work with old TiVo's but it be neat is one CD would.

Thanks again for Jmfs Live CD. Were I downloaded it, it's named "premiere_linux_inc_supersize_jmfs-rev104.iso"

-Raymond Day


----------



## windracer

richsadams said:


> At this time there is no way to create a truncated backup of a Premiere/Premiere XL drive either.


Can't wait for this ... I like having truncated images around "just in case" and WinMFS has been perfect for that over the past few years.


----------



## richsadams

windracer said:


> Can't wait for this ... I like having truncated images around "just in case" and WinMFS has been perfect for that over the past few years.


You and me both. Putting a 160GB drive or whatever on the shelf as a backup is no big deal. However putting a 1TB drive on the shelf just in case is a little more painful and very tempting for a repurpose. I don't know if Spike or anyone else is working on this or not, but it would certainly be welcome.


----------



## tome_9499

I'm about to upgrade my Premiere to 2TB, and wanted to make certain that I purchase the right SATA drive to complete the upgrade. I know that the USB drive expansion only allows you to use the WD DVR Expander. Are there any similar restrictions on internal HDD upgrades?

Also, I am replacing a Tivo HD (1GB). Is there any fast and reliable way to transfer my recordings from the Tivo HD to the Tivo Premier? I don't want to do them one at a time over the network. It would take days, and is flaky in my experience. 
Thanks,

Tom

SVR2000 - Lifetime
Series 2 DT (500MB) - $12.95
HD (1GB) - $6.95
Premier - ???


----------



## Bai Shen

gil sonnier said:


> i have a premier that i want to put a WD20EARS in. do i need to disable intellipark.
> in some of the first post Ive read it says yes. but in later post,some said you don't have to.any advice lately on this.


I didn't. Got the drive from Amazon yesterday, popped the Tivo open and did the upgrade today. Totally forgot about checking manufacturer date and making any changes until after I had it put back together.

So far everything seems to be working.



> also i was wondering, does comer's copy tool have a supersize option in it?
> thanks for any advise.


Yes. The cd will offer to automatically expand for you, but you need to go back to the menu to get the supersize option.

Thanks for the hard work, Comer! The cd worked like a charm.


----------



## richsadams

tome_9499 said:


> I'm about to upgrade my Premiere to 2TB, and wanted to make certain that I purchase the right SATA drive to complete the upgrade.


Drive recommendations:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8263939#post8263939


tome_9499 said:


> I know that the USB drive expansion only allows you to use the WD DVR Expander. Are there any similar restrictions on internal HDD upgrades?


Do you mean are you limited to what drive you can use for an upgrade? Not really...as long as it's a like-for-like type (SATA). FWIW there's no benefit to installing a faster drive (7200 RPM for example) or one with a large cache. TiVo's requirements are very basic as compared to other applications. Concerns with TiVo drives are generally acoustics and heat. The WD GP drives (which are what TiVo is now using) generally fit the bill, are in wide use and well-tested here.



tome_9499 said:


> Also, I am replacing a Tivo HD (1GB). Is there any fast and reliable way to transfer my recordings from the Tivo HD to the Tivo Premier? I don't want to do them one at a time over the network. It would take days, and is flaky in my experience.


Other than over your network? The short answer is no. Once upon a time I tried connecting two TiVo's together directly using an Ethernet crossover cable to move recordings from one to the other. That worked fine, but the recording transfer speeds were no better than over my normal, hard-wired network because the limitations are with TiVo itself, not the network. (FWIW the Premier's transfer capabilities are much better.) Using TiVo's MRV abilities is the fastest, easiest way to transfer recordings. A hardwired transfer may be faster and more reliable than WiFi depending on your setup.

There are other options like TiVo Desktop or KMTTG, but that involves a third element, a computer so although the transfer speeds could be faster from/to the computer and TiVo, it would ultimately take longer.

Hope that helps and happy upgrading!


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Comer, TIA for getting this jmfs solution out there. This is gonna be easy.

Quick question: Will this boot CD handle older TiVos as well? How far back? Even the IDE ones?


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Spreading the joy here. $20 rebate on up to FIVE(5) *2TB* WD20 EADS or EARS drives, from many online vendors (newegg, amazon, etc.). Brings net price down to $70 at Newegg (with code), or $80 Amazon.

It's good until 16 JAN.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> Comer, TIA for getting this jmfs solution out there. This is gonna be easy.
> 
> Quick question: Will this boot CD handle older TiVos as well? How far back? Even the IDE ones?


Only Premiere, Premiere XL, TiVo HD and TiVo HD XL.


----------



## marspinball

I purchased two WD20EURS from buy.com. Manufacture dates were November 5th and 6th. Both had the intellipark feature disabled and AAM at 128 out of the box. Ran the WD test utilities/scan which took about five hours to run (each drive). I just let those run overnight.

I got 318 hours on my THD and the whole process only took two hours. All my settings and recordings were intact. Also noticed the THD booted up in about half the time as compared to the original drive. Additionally the new drive runs cooler and is quieter than the stock drive.

I used JMFS for copy and expand. Based on this thread I could not locate anyone who supersized a THD with JMFS but a couple who used WinMFS. So after the copy and expand with JMFS I just rebooted the computer back into Windows, ran WinMFS and supersized, took less than a minute!!

I will upgrade my Premiere once I get the cable card installed and that one should be even easier.


----------



## richsadams

marspinball said:


> I purchased two WD20EURS from buy.com. Manufacture dates were November 5th and 6th. Both had the intellipark feature disabled and AAM at 128 out of the box. Ran the WD test utilities/scan which took about five hours to run (each drive). I just let those run overnight.<snip>


Nice work. Enjoy!


----------



## rainbow

Circuit City has the WD2DEARS on sale for $99.99 (with $20 mail in rebate from WD thru 1/16/11 purchase) or WD2DEADS for $10 more.

I had read elsewhere in the forum that there doesn't seem to be much difference between the 2 (one has 32mb cache and the other 64). 

If you were buying now, which would you go for?

note: I see that Newegg has an addtl $10 off of the EARS using code EMCKJJG27, so I might go thru them to get the drive. (plus 1.5pc rebate if secured thru fatwallet.


----------



## jcthorne

Just adding on for one more data point.

Just installed a 2TB EARS WD drive. 64MB cache and production date of 10/10/10 (guess this drive is all tens!). Completed Comers copy, expand and supersize without errors (thanks Comer!) and works perfectly in my new Premier. It also completed the 14.6 to 14.7 software update and several soft boots without diffeculty.

Got it for $80 AR from Amazon.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> Only Premiere, Premiere XL, TiVo HD and TiVo HD XL.


Why not the Series 3, does anyone know? Seems pretty similar to the THD.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> Why not the Series 3, does anyone know? Seems pretty similar to the THD.


I gave that one a try. Turns out it has a different partition structure.


----------



## richsadams

rainbow said:


> Circuit City has the WD2DEARS on sale for $99.99 (with $20 mail in rebate from WD thru 1/16/11 purchase) or WD2DEADS for $10 more.
> 
> I had read elsewhere in the forum that there doesn't seem to be much difference between the 2 (one has 32mb cache and the other 64).
> 
> If you were buying now, which would you go for?
> 
> note: I see that Newegg has an addtl $10 off of the EARS using code EMCKJJG27, so I might go thru them to get the drive. (plus 1.5pc rebate if secured thru fatwallet.


The WD20EARS will work fine. More about it here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8263939#post8263939

FWIW Amazon has the WD20EARS for $79 ARB w/free shipping. Amazon's much easier to deal with than Newegg for returns and Amazon also packs their hard drives better.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1291451834&sr=1-1


----------



## richsadams

jcthorne said:


> Just adding on for one more data point.
> 
> Just installed a 2TB EARS WD drive. 64MB cache and production date of 10/10/10 (guess this drive is all tens!). Completed Comers copy, expand and supersize without errors (thanks Comer!) and works perfectly in my new Premier. It also completed the 14.6 to 14.7 software update and several soft boots without diffeculty.
> 
> Got it for $80 AR from Amazon.


Sweet! :up: Enjoy!


----------



## Gregor

Ran this overnight with $80 WD drive from Amazon. Took several hours - I used a MacBookPro and a couple of USB-SATA connectors, for a Premiere drive.

Works like a charm.

Note that the Rebate as posted on Amazon is for up to 5 drives, so let the mass upgrading begin!


----------



## richsadams

Gregor said:


> Ran this overnight with $80 WD drive from Amazon. Took several hours - I used a MacBookPro and a couple of USB-SATA connectors, for a Premiere drive.
> 
> Works like a charm.
> 
> Note that the Rebate as posted on Amazon is for up to 5 drives, so let the mass upgrading begin!


2TB's of recording heaven! :up:


----------



## tommymarvel

Cementing Comer's legend status with another successful 2TB upgrade. I used the wd20eurs from Buy.com and completed the backup via two separate Thermaltake USB 2.0 docks. Tivo estimates 317 hours HD capacity.

For those considering a dual dock like the Thermaltake duet over USB 2.0--it didn't work for me. The live CD would only recognize one drive at a time until I borrowed another dock and connected the drives separately.

Oh yeah, I got the 14.7 update too.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Gregor said:


> Ran this overnight with $80 WD drive from Amazon. Took several hours - I used a MacBookPro and a couple of USB-SATA connectors, for a Premiere drive.
> 
> Works like a charm.
> 
> Note that the Rebate as posted on Amazon is for up to 5 drives, so let the mass upgrading begin!


I know....I got three 2TBs for the new Premiere's on the way, I just added two more for the HDTiVos, too. Gotta pull the trigger today though, rebate ends 16 JAN.


----------



## Gregor

Note the rebate form wants the serial #s of the drives - so copy that off before you put the drive in the Tivo....


----------



## supersnoop

Fry's has the Western Digital Elements external 2TB drive on sale for $89.99. Pop open the external case and there's a WD20EARS inside. I pulled the drive and I'm getting it ready for a THD 2TB setup. And I'll use the external case with an old drive.


----------



## richsadams

supersnoop said:


> Fry's has the Western Digital Elements external 2TB drive on sale for $89.99. Pop open the external case and there's a WD20EARS inside. I pulled the drive and I'm getting it ready for a THD 2TB setup. And I'll use the external case with an old drive.


That's an option now and then but the issue with doing that is that it voids the drive warranty. The other downside to WD's external drives is that they only carry a 12 month warranty. Their bare drives have a three-year warranty. But if that's not an issue (and hopefully it won't be) then enjoy.

Still time to get the same (bare) drive from Amazon for $79.99 AR w/free shipping. But as ThreeSoFar noted, deal ends today.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1291451834&sr=1-1


----------



## gt7610c

FYI to all, WD posted a new $20 rebate/VISA card ends 1/31 valid at the usual places.

Ran WD Data Lifeguard full test and came back ok. 
Successfully copied/expanded/supersized a WD20EARS drive. 
Prod date 27 Oct 10 that came w/intellipark disabled, had to set AAM to 128. Now to send Comer some beer money


----------



## richsadams

gt7610c said:


> FYI to all, WD posted a new $20 rebate/VISA card ends 1/31 valid at the usual places.
> 
> Ran WD Data Lifeguard full test and came back ok.
> Successfully copied/expanded/supersized a WD20EARS drive.
> Prod date 27 Oct 10 that came w/intellipark disabled, had to set AAM to 128. Now to send Comer some beer money


Thanks for that and enjoy!

Link to $79.99 (AR) WD20EARS HDD

Link to $20 WD rebate (Visa Cash Card) good through Jan 31st.


----------



## jcthorne

Please pardon the related but slightly off topic question. Seems there are quite a few folks here that know a thing or three about hard drives.

For PC use (not tivo), can I use one of the new 3TB SATA drives from WD in a standard SATA to USB enclosure (like the Antech MX-100) or dock or does the enclosure need to be something different for these new drives larger than 2.2TB?

Also, Amazon has the Seagate 2TB LP drive on sale for $75, free shipping and no rebate.


----------



## richsadams

jcthorne said:


> Please pardon the related but slightly off topic question. Seems there are quite a few folks here that know a thing or three about hard drives.
> 
> For PC use (not tivo), can I use one of the new 3TB SATA drives from WD in a standard SATA to USB enclosure (like the Antech MX-100) or dock or does the enclosure need to be something different for these new drives larger than 2.2TB?
> 
> Also, Amazon has the Seagate 2TB LP drive on sale for $75, free shipping and no rebate.


Regarding the 3TB drive, it depends on a couple of things, the enclosure and your operating system. I don't believe the Antec MX-1 is rated for 3TB but you should contact them to find out (they are very responsive). If you have an Apple or Linux computer, no problem. If you're running Windows it depends on the OS (XP, Vista, W7, etc.) and if you're running 32 bit or 64bit. For 32 bit systems there's a 2.2TB limit but there are work arounds and IIRC some of the new 3TB external (and possibly some internal) drives use a special host controller. 64 bit systems can utilize the new 3TB drives. You'd need to do some research. Here's area a couple of documents to get you started:

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/869E4925CC72E233862577E100235119/$file/Deskstar_3TB_FAQ_finalwebv2.pdf

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010...3tb-drive-brings-more-than-32-bit-can-handle/

FWIW I used to be a Seagate man for years but ever since they acquired Maxtor their QC has suffered a great deal so anyone buying Seagate drives these days should proceed with caution. Another Seagate drive caveat is that the AAM (auto acoustic management) cannot be adjusted so being aware of the drive acoustic specs is very important. Stock TiVo (WD) drives are about 2.6 bels and WD AV GP drives seek noise is around 2.4 bels for reference. Also know that all drive manufacturers tend to under report drive noise.

Hope that helps!


----------



## jcthorne

Thanks, appreciate the information. Unfortunatly still no real answers. I did contact Antech and they tell me that they only tested either of thier enclosures to 2TB as that was all that was available when they were designed.

The Hitachi page you referred me to seems to indicate as others have told me, that for external storage via USB, the OS does not matter. IE 3TB drives are fine on XP using this method, just not as internal drives or boot drives. The controller in the enclosure does the translation anyway.

I have searched high and low and NONE of the enclosure manufactures state thier enclosures work for greater than 2TB. Not that they won't, just untested. I had hoped someone here had some first hand knowledge on these issues they could offer.

Thanks


----------



## richsadams

FWIW the Antec MX-1's spec page said that it worked with all drives "up to 1TB" for quite a while after 2TB drives had been introduced. It turned out that 2TB drives worked fine in them but it took them months to update their info. Might be worth a try.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Comer: Very nice job on the software. I tested one of my new 2TB drives just by upgrading from a stock HDTiVo drive off the shelf. Now it's upgrading the first TiVo Premiere drive (before I even booted it).

One question (for anyone): Will it be able to copy/mfsadd from a 1TB HDTiVo and use the full 2TB drive? The 1TB was upgraded via the mfsLive CD.

Some simple improvement ideas if there's ever a new version.
When [C]opying, give a start time, and stop time (keep both visible when it finishes), or at least a net transfer time after it's done.
Why not turn on an extra terminal or two at a root prompt? (Alt-F2, Alt-F3)
Show the current time on the menu, or maybe all the time.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

What's a good Linux tool (one either on Comer's jmfs image or on most bootable CD distros) to test a new hard drive to confirm it's healthy? Long/overnight is fine....


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> One question (for anyone): Will it be able to copy/mfsadd from a 1TB HDTiVo and use the full 2TB drive? The 1TB was upgraded via the mfsLive CD.


IIRC a couple of other folks have done exactly that. As long as you're continuing to expand there shouldn't be a problem. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, or let me know if it doesn't work.



ThreeSoFar said:


> What's a good Linux tool (one either on Comer's jmfs image or on most bootable CD distros) to test a new hard drive to confirm it's healthy? Long/overnight is fine....


If it's a WD drive:

Western Digital's Lifeguard (Write Zeroes)


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> IIRC a couple of other folks have done exactly that. As long as you're continuing to expand there shouldn't be a problem. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, or let me know if it doesn't work.
> 
> If it's a WD drive:
> 
> Western Digital's Lifeguard (Write Zeroes)


No Linux Version of Lifeguard, that I see. I was hoping for something that just came with Comer's jmfs boot CD.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> No Linux Version of Lifeguard, that I see. I was hoping for something that just came with Comer's jmfs boot CD.


Ah, for Linux, sorry. Outside of the SMART program, I'm not sure.


----------



## bhcv

Thanks for the great program and super instruction. My tivo Premieres now have
317 HD hours.


----------



## Kingsam88

so i didn't read this entire thread but i got the gist of it and i dont exactly want to break open my tivo i want to use that esata port on the back with a mimicked image of one of those my book av things i dont know if its it possible or anything just thought i would ask


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Kingsam88 said:


> so i didn't read this entire thread but i got the gist of it and i dont exactly want to break open my tivo i want to use that esata port on the back with a mimicked image of one of those my book av things i dont know if its it possible or anything just thought i would ask


Please, buy a capital letter or two, and maybe a comma. Seriously: Your note is nearly unreadable, if you expect help, make yourself clear enough that people don't just click "ignore" and move on.

Short answer: DON'T use eSata. Crack it open and upgrade, you'll be happy with how easy it is, and happier still when it doesn't die on you on a month/year losing all your recordings.

ETA: Oh, and welcome to the forum. Hope you stick around. (but only if I can understand your next post.)


----------



## richsadams

Kingsam88 said:


> so i didn't read this entire thread but i got the gist of it and i dont exactly want to break open my tivo i want to use that esata port on the back with a mimicked image of one of those my book av things i dont know if its it possible or anything just thought i would ask


Welcome to the forum. I'm not sure what you mean by "mimicked image" but you can connect the approved Western Digitial My Book AV DVR Expander for additional storage.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit.../ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295645730&sr.com=8-1

More here:

https://www3.tivo.com/store/accessories-networking.do#A00097

If you have anything else in mind it would mean opening your TiVo and pulling the hard drive.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: I see ThreeSoFar beat me to the answer...and agreed, upgrading the internal drive is the way to go...one less fail point.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> I see ThreeSoFar beat me to the answer...and agreed, upgrading the internal drive is the way to go...one less fail point.


Not often that happens, Rich. I've been on a TiVo tear this weekend tho.

Got my three Premiere's yesterday....upgraded the first to 2TB before even booting it up. Just now tried the soft boot and it WORKED (I had thought I may need wdidle3, but it worked fine). The 2TB WD20EARS was dated Sep2010.

My TivoHD upgrade (from 1TB to 2TB, copying all shows with jmfs) is 60% done. Been going probably four or five hours. I'm still using the PCI SATA card inside the Pentium IV (or is it PIII?) for upgrades. The USB SATA docking port that's supposed to work with the Mac Mini still hasn't arrived.


----------



## 747sportsfan

For the mildly adventurous, and yet budget constrained, Staples on Sun/Mon 1/23-24 has the 2 TB WD External My Book Essential on sale down to 99.99 from 179.99. There is a $20 Staples Easy Rebate (ie online submission) and the kicker is that one is able to buy a $25 off $75 coupon from ebay or ejunkies type site for a couple of bucks, so one can realistically get a 2 TB drive for under $60 (depending on the tax where you live) after using the coupon and the rebate.

The drive is on the front page as a Sunday/Monday special. If you are searching online, the Staples Item Number is 819933 and it is yet to be determined if this is just an in-store deal or not.

The relevant thing to the tivo is that lo and behold, the drive in the enclosure is the WD 20EARS which has been recommended as a good upgrade drive to expand and supersize by comerizing in the current thread. And while there does not appear to be a great how to open the WD Essential enclosure available by a google search, for the adventurous and somewhat patient, it is not a difficult endeavor. From the spine end of the drive, both top and bottom, slowly pry with a narrow flat head screwdriver, the slim plastic case back away from the plug in side of the drive enclosure. By twisting and sliding, slowly inching the case back, you will move the drive further and further towards seperation. There are clips inside the plastic enclosure case which keep the drive steady, but as more of the drive is moved, you can wiggle the drive out of the clips and after a short while the drive and its housing are free of the stubborn enclosure. Remarkably, from there, you unsnap a couple of plastic clips/holders and the only thing preventing you from having a bare 2TB drive are a pair of screws attaching the guts of the power (SATA, USB, Power led) to the drive. Undo those screws and you have a drive that you can use as your target drive for the Comer expansion and Supersize.

If you have read this far, there are a couple of software/firmware upgrades that WD suggests for the My Book Essentials that you should probably do, certainly before the Comer procedure (wdc.com/wdproducts/updates/?family=wdsmartwareutilities is the firmware update and then make sure you do part 2 of that to disable the Virtual CD Manager for Windows). They are pretty straightforward so that when you run your WD diagnostics, you should end up with a clean drive with darn near the full 2 TB available for the Comer treatment.

And not at a huge expense. Not sure if the drive is eligible also for the WD Rebate also of $20 that seems to be running all month, but if so, that should make even the grumpiest of the Woot refurb buyers happy to be able to cheaply increase the Tivo Premiere's capacity.

Sorry for the long post. Hope it helps some people, or at least one person.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

This is looking disappointing, and after about 12 hours of backing up throughout the day that may all be for naught. 

I used jmfs to upgrade my 1TB HDTiVo drive (which was upgraded from its stock drive long ago with mfslive cd). After expanding, jmfs reported 287 HD hours, so it looked like it worked.

But upon booting the newly upgraded 2TB drive, the TiVo reported that it could not detect the EXTERNAL STORAGE. (I've NEVER had external storage.)

There were two options at that point--Hard reboot or press:down::down::down:ENTER to permanently remove the external storage and lose recordings. I'd already chosen the latter before I realized the former MAY have had a chance. Anyway, the divorce took a while, and it's in welcome-powering up right now....


----------



## retiredqwest

You can't use JMFS to copy and expand anything but the stock THD/THDXL drives.

Unless you want to browse thru this thread for my messages about this, you can read this thread...
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462179

Tivoitis has got it down in one message on using JMFS on a THD.

I didn't notice your message until you said you were doing the copying.... by then it was too late to say anything.


----------



## Kingsam88

I'm sorry that i wasn't using i guess correct grammar on a forum.... Just not what I'm used to. 

Anyways, i still would imagine the idea i have is quite if not completely possible. i really don't know why no one has tried it and i don't honestly see how it could be that hard. With the right amount of time and effort that is. As for why do it in the first place, well i already bought the $30 eSATA enclosure and i don't really want that to go to waste. 

I would imagine a way to do it would to re-image the non-verified drive to look and seem like the Western Digital drive or "mimic" it.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

retiredqwest said:


> You can't use JMFS to copy and expand anything but the stock THD/THDXL drives.
> 
> Unless you want to browse thru this thread for my messages about this, you can read this thread...
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462179
> 
> Tivoitis has got it down in one message on using JMFS on a THD.
> 
> I didn't notice your message until you said you were doing the copying.... by then it was too late to say anything.


Thanks for chiming in after the fact though. If I'd done my research here, I'd have found this and saved a day. No big, no harm. I have the stock HD drive for upgrading with, and will do so at some point. But getting the current 1TB drive empty enough with transfers and watching will take some time.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Kingsam88 said:


> I'm sorry that i wasn't using i guess correct grammar on a forum.... Just not what I'm used to.
> 
> Anyways, i still would imagine the idea i have is quite if not completely possible. i really don't know why no one has tried it and i don't honestly see how it could be that hard. With the right amount of time and effort that is. As for why do it in the first place, well i already bought the $30 eSATA enclosure and i don't really want that to go to waste.
> 
> I would imagine a way to do it would to re-image the non-verified drive to look and seem like the Western Digital drive or "mimic" it.


I've no experience with using the eSata port. Upgrading the internal drive has always been trivially easy, and when I saw the MANY problems people were having with the eSata port, I've always just recommended against it.

It's a VERY bad failure case when it goes bad. You lose everything you've recorded, even though it isn't necessarily all on the failed external drive.

When a single internal drive fails or begins to, the ddrescue mfs tool has a pretty good chance at recovering your shows (not trivial to use, but not brain surgery either).

PS: Your previous post's grammar wasn't really the problem. It was just that it was a giant runon sentence with no punctuation or capitals or whitespace or anything to break up the various parts of it. I literally had to read it three times before I got what you wanted enough to speak to it. I nearly gave up after two. I touch-type very fast, so the caps and punctuation and such are easy for me to do. Written communication has been critical to my work for quite some time, and it's also something I enjoy doing (reading and writing) quite a bit. I am a bit sad to see it being abused, but believe me--you're not the first. It's a dying skill/art.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> Got my three Premiere's yesterday....upgraded the first to 2TB before even booting it up. Just now tried the soft boot and it WORKED (I had thought I may need wdidle3, but it worked fine). The 2TB WD20EARS was dated Sep2010.


 Sweet! Did you happen to notice the exact date in September? I've got a WD20EARS sitting here I'm going to pop into our Premiere XL with a date of Oct 14, 2010 so I think it'll be fine. I'm going to run wdidle3.exe just to check out what the timeout is set for but not make any adjustments so I can see if it has the Intellipark issue. TIA.


----------



## richsadams

747sportsfan said:


> For the mildly adventurous, and yet budget constrained, Staples on Sun/Mon 1/23-24 has the 2 TB WD External My Book Essential on sale down to 99.99 from 179.99.<snip>


Welcome to the forum. You can currently buy the same drive from Amazon for $99.99 and receive a $20 Visa Cash Card from WD making the total $79.99:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...XK0I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295680112&sr=8-1

Deals like that are very common now. Only the bare drives are eligible for the current WD rebate. Also be aware that if you remove the hard drive from a WD (or any brand) enclosure it voids the one-year warranty. (The same bare drive has a three-year warranty.) Bottom line, there's really no reason to buy an external drive just to get the hard drive inside. You'll pay about as much or more and end up with a hard drive with no warranty.

FWIW the jmfs program formats the new drive so none of the software/firmware modifications or updates mentioned (from WD or anywhere else) have any bearing when it comes to using a hard drive in TiVo (or any Linux based application) so no drive "prep" is required prior to performing the upgrade.

Nice thought though and happy upgrading!


----------



## richsadams

retiredqwest said:


> You can't use JMFS to copy and expand anything but the stock THD/THDXL drives.


Well, that's not good news. With winMFS you can use upgraded drives to image new ones as long as you continue to expand (750GB > 1TB for example). Apparently not so with jmfs...that's too bad.


----------



## richsadams

Kingsam88 said:


> I'm sorry that i wasn't using i guess correct grammar on a forum.... Just not what I'm used to.
> 
> Anyways, i still would imagine the idea i have is quite if not completely possible. i really don't know why no one has tried it and i don't honestly see how it could be that hard. With the right amount of time and effort that is. As for why do it in the first place, well i already bought the $30 eSATA enclosure and i don't really want that to go to waste.
> 
> I would imagine a way to do it would to re-image the non-verified drive to look and seem like the Western Digital drive or "mimic" it.


Trust me, if something is possible when it comes to TiVo it's most likely already been tried, but I'm still not clear about what you want to do (or why). If you're suggesting running TiVo by substituting the internal hard drive for one housed in an external enclosure connected via the eSATA port, there are a multitude of roadblocks and reasons that won't work, but I'm not sure that's what you mean.

If you're concerned about voiding your warranty by opening TiVo and installing a new hard drive you shouldn't be. Although it's true that TiVo knows when an upgrade has been performed (if they were to view their logs), if something goes south and you need warranty assistance all you need to do is slip the original drive back in and return it. If you do have trouble and need to discuss it with a TiVo CSR, there's no need to mention the upgrade. TiVo is fully aware of enthusiasts performing upgrades but tends to turn a blind eye as long as the box is returned intact. IIRC in 10 years or so there have only been two reports of TiVo denying warranty service...and on both occasions the owners felt a need to discuss their upgrades for some reason.

FWIW the part that most often fails in TiVo (by far) is the hard drive. If you keep your original TiVo hard drive on the shelf and your new/upgraded hard drive fails, you can easily slip the original drive back in and be back up and running in a heartbeat. You can also use the original drive to simply image another new hard drive.

So as ThreeSoFar has recommended, upgrade the internal drive (use your enclosure for something else or return it) and you'll be fine.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> Sweet! Did you happen to notice the exact date in September? I've got a WD20EARS sitting here I'm going to pop into our Premiere XL with a date of Oct 14, 2010 so I think it'll be fine. I'm going to run wdidle3.exe just to check out what the timeout is set for but not make any adjustments so I can see if it has the Intellipark issue. TIA.


SEP 10, IIRC.


----------



## sa_smcvic

I've burned the ISO image to a CD, and my WIN XP computer will not boot from it. It asks gives me the "Boot from CD:" and asks me to insert a SYSTEM disk. Do I need a Linux OS PC to do this procedure? 

I've tried my WINXP HP computer and it won't boot either. I verified the ISO file is on the CD and the CD is finalized. The downloaded jmfs 104 zip file only unzips into only one file for me. Is that correct?

This is my first time in the TIVO community, so any help would be appreciated. 

Thanks.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

sa_smcvic said:


> I've burned the ISO image to a CD, and my WIN XP computer will not boot from it. It asks gives me the "Boot from CD:" and asks me to insert a SYSTEM disk. Do I need a Linux OS PC to do this procedure?


No. Burned properly, this CD HAS a Linux OS bootable image. 


sa_smcvic said:


> I've tried my WINXP HP computer and it won't boot either. I verified the ISO file is on the CD and the CD is finalized. The downloaded jmfs 104 zip file only unzips into only one file for me. Is that correct?
> 
> This is my first time in the TIVO community, so any help would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks.


If you are seeing the .iso file listed on a directory/folder when the CD is in, you burned the CD wrong. You wrote the .iso as a single data file on a regular data CD. Instead, you need to burn the .iso as a bootable CD. Someone current on how to do that on Windows will have to chime in, but I know Roxio CD Creator or similar software would know what to do with it.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> SEP 10, IIRC.


Ah, right on the "cusp". Good to know. Thanks! :up:


----------



## bowlingblogger

Just upgraded my new Woot! Premiere with a WD20EARS, and it couldn't have been easier thanks to comer's nifty tool (beer money will be on the way). My EARS has a build date of 9/22/10 and when I booted the wdidle disk it reported that the Intellipark timer was set to 8 seconds. I preemptively set it to 300 seconds in case it wouldn't boot once I installed it, but from some reports in this thread and the main expansion thread it looks like I may not needed to do that. Oh well! Just glad to have 317 hours.


----------



## richsadams

sa_smcvic said:


> I've burned the ISO image to a CD, and my WIN XP computer will not boot from it. It asks gives me the "Boot from CD:" and asks me to insert a SYSTEM disk. Do I need a Linux OS PC to do this procedure?
> 
> I've tried my WINXP HP computer and it won't boot either. I verified the ISO file is on the CD and the CD is finalized. The downloaded jmfs 104 zip file only unzips into only one file for me. Is that correct?
> 
> This is my first time in the TIVO community, so any help would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks.


Welcome to the forum. As ThreeSoFar pointed out, you've probably copied the .iso file rather than having created a boot disk. You'll need a program to convert the .iso file to a boot disk CD. Mac and Linux have one built in but Windows does not. There are a number of Windows programs that will do that both retail and free such as these for XP:

http://iso.snoekonline.com/iso.htm

Download one of those programs and follow the directions.

Caveat: I haven't used any of the programs listed (haven't really used XP for a while) so I can't say which one is better than another, but I'd go for the one with the easiest instructions and see how it goes.

Once you have the boot disk all you need to do is insert it in your PC's CD/DVD drive and shut it down. Restart it and it should boot into the jmfs Linux program (you may get a screen prompt to boot from the CD, just say "yes" or "okay", etc.) If it boots into Windows instead it means that your PC's boot sequence will need to be changed in the BIOS settings (quite easy) to allow it to boot from the optical (CD/DVD) drive first. More about that here:

http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/change-boot-order-xp-vista/

Each manufacturer has a different way to enter the BIOS settings. The linked article has a short list or you may have to do a little research. However most have a prompt when you first boot up your machine. For instance when I first boot up an old Dell I have, in the upper RH corner it says "F2 = Setup". While that screen is present if I hold down the F2 key on my keyboard it automatically enters the computer's BIOS settings where I can change the order of the drive sequence to ensure that it will look at the CD/DVD ROM drive first, then the hard drive, etc. when it boots up.

Once your PC has booted into the jmfs program, just follow the instructions on the first post of this thread.

Hope that helps and happy upgrading!


----------



## retiredqwest

sa_smcvic said:


> I've burned the ISO image to a CD, and my WIN XP computer will not boot from it. It asks gives me the "Boot from CD:" and asks me to insert a SYSTEM disk. Do I need a Linux OS PC to do this procedure?
> 
> I've tried my WINXP HP computer and it won't boot either. I verified the ISO file is on the CD and the CD is finalized. The downloaded jmfs 104 zip file only unzips into only one file for me. Is that correct?
> 
> This is my first time in the TIVO community, so any help would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks.


You created a data CD because it just copied the file to the CD.

Find the file on the hard drive and double-click it and see what happens.

Hopefully the burning software will know what to do with it. If you aren't sure of what is going on. Look for an option for creating a cd-rom iso or an option to burn a CD image.


----------



## richsadams

bowlingblogger said:


> Just upgraded my new Woot! Premiere with a WD20EARS, and it couldn't have been easier thanks to comer's nifty tool (beer money will be on the way). My EARS has a build date of 9/22/10 and when I booted the wdidle disk it reported that the Intellipark timer was set to 8 seconds. I preemptively set it to 300 seconds in case it wouldn't boot once I installed it, but from some reports in this thread and the main expansion thread it looks like I may not needed to do that. Oh well! Just glad to have 317 hours.


Excellent! Sure makes having a 2TB Premiere fairly "cost effective" that way. 

Enjoy!


----------



## sa_smcvic

Thanks for the ISO image newbie help. I have a better understanding of what a boot cd is now. 

I was not successfull in expanding and supersizing my 2TB drive using my source 160GB TIVO HD drive. It reported successfull, but my TIVO still reported 21 HD hours. My original disk had a software version 11.0j. I'm not sure if winmfs will help make my 2TB drive useful. I don't want to now purchase a 1TB drive.

If anyone can help outside this premiere forum, please feel free to PM me if it's not meant to be distributed here.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!


----------



## richsadams

sa_smcvic said:


> Thanks for the ISO image newbie help. I have a better understanding of what a boot cd is now.
> 
> I was not successfull in expanding and supersizing my 2TB drive using my source 160GB TIVO HD drive. It reported successfull, but my TIVO still reported 21 HD hours. My original disk had a software version 11.0j. I'm not sure if winmfs will help make my 2TB drive useful. I don't want to now purchase a 1TB drive.
> 
> If anyone can help outside this premiere forum, please feel free to PM me if it's not meant to be distributed here.
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!


Sounds like something went wrong during the upgrade. I would try from scratch again.

The software version doesn't matter and winMFS won't help in this situation (except if you wanted to run Supersize alone).


----------



## alyssa

richsadams said:


> ....You'll need a program to convert the .iso file to a boot disk CD. Mac and Linux have one built in but Windows does not. There are a number of Windows programs that will do that both retail and free such as these for XP:
> 
> http://iso.snoekonline.com/iso.htm
> 
> ....


From that list, I like the [email protected] program, but I use Win7.


----------



## supersnoop

sa_smcvic said:


> Thanks for the ISO image newbie help. I have a better understanding of what a boot cd is now.
> 
> I was not successfull in expanding and supersizing my 2TB drive using my source 160GB TIVO HD drive. It reported successfull, but my TIVO still reported 21 HD hours. My original disk had a software version 11.0j. I'm not sure if winmfs will help make my 2TB drive useful. I don't want to now purchase a 1TB drive.
> 
> If anyone can help outside this premiere forum, please feel free to PM me if it's not meant to be distributed here.
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!


You cannot supersize a TiVo HD drive with jmfs. You have to use the supersize option in WinMFS.

This thread is specific to the Premier box. If you want to upgrade a TiVo HD with a 2TB drive, read here.


----------



## richsadams

supersnoop said:


> You cannot supersize a TiVo HD drive with jmfs. You have to use the supersize option in WinMFS.
> 
> This thread is specific to the Premier box. If you want to upgrade a TiVo HD with a 2TB drive, read here.


Thanks for the link the the TiVoitis THD 2TB Upgrade thread...didn't even realize it existed. Nice. :up:


----------



## wp746911

I was one of the 'early' upgraders to my premiere (2tb drive)- done within the first few weeks. I think when I did this that some of the HD space was wasted (total free space was less than 200 hours). If I remember correctly this has been fixed with the supersize instructions- what can I do to change mine from an earlier 2tb version to one with supersize?


----------



## richsadams

wp746911 said:


> I was one of the 'early' upgraders to my premiere (2tb drive)- done within the first few weeks. I think when I did this that some of the HD space was wasted (total free space was less than 200 hours). If I remember correctly this has been fixed with the supersize instructions- what can I do to change mine from an earlier 2tb version to one with supersize?


Take a look at your total HD recording space in the System Information menu, it s/b around 288 (if it's not, something else is up).

For a Premiere or Premiere XL do as retiredqwest advises below and reconnect your drive to your computer, run jmfs and run Supersize.

Owners that upgraded their TiVo HD/HDXL early can follow the instructions using winMFS to Supersize your TiVo HD's hard drive and then see what your total HD recording space is in System Info:

http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462179

http://www.mfslive.org/winmfs/

After Supersizing your total HD recording space s/b about 317 hours.


----------



## retiredqwest

wp746911 said:


> I was one of the 'early' upgraders to my premiere (2tb drive)- done within the first few weeks. I think when I did this that some of the HD space was wasted (total free space was less than 200 hours). If I remember correctly this has been fixed with the supersize instructions- what can I do to change mine from an earlier 2tb version to one with supersize?


Just get the latest copy of JMFS and just plug in the 2TB drive. You'll see the Supersize option..... just run it and then put the drive back in the TP and it should show 317 hrs HD.


----------



## richsadams

retiredqwest said:


> Just get the latest copy of JMFS and just plug in the 2TB drive. You'll see the Supersize option..... just run it and then put the drive back in the TP and it should show 317 hrs HD.


Apologies, that's correct if the TiVo is a Premiere or Premiere XL...and after looking that's what the OP has. I was under the impression that he had a TiVo HD for some reason.


----------



## jcthorne

I am trying to diagnose a playback problem that 'could' be hard drive related.

If i transfer a large 1080res movie file to the tivoe using pytivo (h.264 video and ac3 audio) as I have been doing for years, the file begins to play fine but will occaisionally 'hickup' where the video freezes for a few moments (audio usually continues) and then jumps ahead a minute or so and begins playing normally again.

I can rew the video back to before the anomoly occures and it plays through the same section again perfectly so its not the file itself. Could this be a result of the EARS drive I used? Any way to find out? Would an AV certified or higher performance drive be likely to help? Has anyone else seen this behaviour?


----------



## ThreeSoFar

jcthorne said:


> I am trying to diagnose a playback problem that 'could' be hard drive related.
> 
> If i transfer a large 1080res movie file to the tivoe using pytivo (h.264 video and ac3 audio) as I have been doing for years, the file begins to play fine but will occaisionally 'hickup' where the video freezes for a few moments (audio usually continues) and then jumps ahead a minute or so and begins playing normally again.
> 
> I can rew the video back to before the anomoly occures and it plays through the same section again perfectly so its not the file itself. Could this be a result of the EARS drive I used? Any way to find out? Would an AV certified or higher performance drive be likely to help? Has anyone else seen this behaviour?


Name/model of drive wouldn't be causing this, IMO.

Is it happening with more than one file? If it's the same file, that file itself may be corrupt at that/those points.


----------



## jcthorne

I has happened with every 1080res movie I have played. about 10 so far. Again, if I play the section of the film that hickups a second time, it plays fine. If I play the same file through again, it hickups in a different point. Could be bitrate or HD data stream related. Hard to diagnose. Might even depend on what the Premiere was doing in the background at the time.


----------



## jonja

I've upgraded the hard drive in my Tivo HD to 1TB over a year ago but decided to go with the 1TB WD Expander for the $60 Woot Premiere I bought last week (Newegg had the Expander for $80).

As a very technical person myself, I am starting to suffer buyer's regret wishing I had just picked up a WD20EURS and gone right to 2TB for $30 more. I have had lots of problems with my Tivo HD in the past -- all resolved now -- and have gotten a little squirrely about breaking the warranty on a Refurb, though I do find the arguments you can just put the original HD back in pretty convincing or I'd never had done it for the Tivo HD. And as I see it, for $80, I get 1.32 gigs and a lot less hassle. On the other hand, I like having a single point of failure and lower power usage and I don't really mind the hassle that much!...

Alas the DVR Expander has already shipped (I was going to cancel it). So here is my question. I know with the 1TB upgraded Tivo HD, that you can't add the My DVR Expander later for more capacity (unlike the XL). Is this still true for an already upgraded Premiere? I didn't see this in the FAQ. If I upgrade my Premiere to 2TB, can I add the DVR Expander for 3TB?? I hate paying for return shipping, and if I can always go to 3TB later, I may keep it.


----------



## Juano11

I've had good luck, for general use, with the WD 2TB EARS drives lately.

Has anyone had a problem with these in their Premiere using this upgrade process?

Thanks

John


----------



## retiredqwest

jonja said:


> I've upgraded the hard drive in my Tivo HD to 1TB over a year ago but decided to go with the 1TB WD Expander for the $60 Woot Premiere I bought last week (Newegg had the Expander for $80).
> 
> As a very technical person myself, I am starting to suffer buyer's regret wishing I had just picked up a WD20EURS and gone right to 2TB for $30 more. I have had lots of problems with my Tivo HD in the past -- all resolved now -- and have gotten a little squirrely about breaking the warranty on a Refurb, though I do find the arguments you can just put the original HD back in pretty convincing or I'd never had done it for the Tivo HD. And as I see it, for $80, I get 1.32 gigs and a lot less hassle. On the other hand, I like having a single point of failure and lower power usage and I don't really mind the hassle that much!...
> 
> Alas the DVR Expander has already shipped (I was going to cancel it). So here is my question. I know with the 1TB upgraded Tivo HD, that you can't add the My DVR Expander later for more capacity (unlike the XL). Is this still true for an already upgraded Premiere? I didn't see this in the FAQ. If I upgrade my Premiere to 2TB, can I add the DVR Expander for 3TB?? I hate paying for return shipping, and if I can always go to 3TB later, I may keep it.


NO the DVR expander will not work with the 2TB TP. I personally tried it. It just loops thru the process and never does install it.

"Series 4 TiVo: TCD746320 (aka TiVo Premiere), TCD748000 (aka TiVo Premiere XL)

TiVo Premiere come with a 320GB SATA internal hard drive, faster dual processor and HD user interface. TiVo Premiere XL is like TiVo Premiere but come with a 1TB SATA internal hard drive and THX certification.

Like Series 3, Series 4 TiVos have an eSATA or external port.
However, you can only add TiVo certified My DVR Expander using Tivo menu aka. plug and play method.

As of now, Series 4's file system can handle up to 4 TiB of disk space but there seems to be a bug in TiVo software that prevents it from using anything over 2 TiB (about 2.2 TB) reliably. So for now, 2 TiB is the most you can have."

That is why weaknees, dvrupgrade and dvr_dude on ebay don't sell anything above 2TB.


----------



## alyssa

jonja said:


> I've upgraded the hard drive in my Tivo HD to 1TB over a year ago but decided to go with the 1TB WD Expander .....


Personally, I'd stay *far* away from any MyDVR or MyBook product. There track record sucks.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Just booted my MacBook Pro with the jmfs CD, which booted fine. However, it did not recognize any live TiVo drive attached with the Thermaltake drive dock attached that has one blank and one virgin Premiere drive. I thought this should work, has anyone seen this work?

Going to try again and not plug in the USB until after boot and see if that helps.

ETA: No that did not help. Next step is to try the same boot disk in the mini, with the dock attached via esata.

ETA2: And the mini has no esata......grrrr. This aint gonna work is it?


----------



## jonja

ThreeSoFar said:


> Just booted my MacBook Pro with the jmfs CD, which booted fine. However, it did not recognize any live TiVo drive attached with the Thermaltake drive dock attached that has one blank and one virgin Premiere drive. I thought this should work, has anyone seen this work?
> 
> Going to try again and not plug in the USB until after boot and see if that helps.
> 
> ETA: No that did not help. Next step is to try the same boot disk in the mini, with the dock attached via esata.
> 
> ETA2: And the mini has no esata......grrrr. This aint gonna work is it?


Try booting with VirtualBox. I formatted an ext3 drive once with a Linux Live CD that booted under VB, using a Linux VM. It even supports USB.


----------



## Gregor

ThreeSoFar said:


> Just booted my MacBook Pro with the jmfs CD, which booted fine. However, it did not recognize any live TiVo drive attached with the Thermaltake drive dock attached that has one blank and one virgin Premiere drive. I thought this should work, has anyone seen this work?
> 
> Going to try again and not plug in the USB until after boot and see if that helps.
> 
> ETA: No that did not help. Next step is to try the same boot disk in the mini, with the dock attached via esata.
> 
> ETA2: And the mini has no esata......grrrr. This aint gonna work is it?


USB Docks with dual drives seem to be problematic. I have 2 usb sata/pata drive docks that worked fine.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Gregor said:


> USB Docks with dual drives seem to be problematic. I have 2 usb sata/pata drive docks that worked fine.


So the individual (one per USB) ones are working, but these dual ones are iffy?

I need to return this to amazon if that's the case.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> So the individual (one per USB) ones are working, but these dual ones are iffy?
> 
> I need to return this to amazon if that's the case.


Dual drive docks won't work. Each drive has to have it's own dock or adapter.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> Dual drive docks won't work. Each drive has to have it's own dock or adapter.


OK, so what are the fastest ones?


----------



## jonja

OK, now I feel shamed. Given that I've done this with my Tivo HD and WinMFS, not sure why I don't just put in a 2TB and be done with it?

So I got a RMA for the not-yet-arrived WD 1 TB My DVR and I ordered a 2TB WD20EURS for $111 from Buy.com. It sounds like the latest DVR optimized drive based on all of the discussions here. I like the idea of energy sipping in a new Energy Star device.

My new Premiere is a Woot Refurb and I have to admit I am nervous that something will go wrong and I will need warranty service. With my Tivo HD, I never requested it because it was easier/cheaper to try to fix it myself (after 90 days Tivo makes you pay $150 to fix something UNDER warranty. Only paid $60 for the Tivo Premiere. Should have bought two..) Does keeping the 320gig as a backup really work to ensure you can get warranty service?? I have Lifetime on the Premiere (same on my old Tivo HD 1TB, which I am now trying to sell).


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> OK, so what are the fastest ones?


If you're talking about USB docks or adapters, they're all basically the same. There's a USB 2.0 limit of 480Mbps. In actuality the speeds are usually about two-thitds to half that. When USB 3.0 rolls out things will improve markedly. 3.0 is rated at 4.8Gbps...it'll never hit that in the real world but even half of that will be 10 times better!

As long as you have a quality product, brand name and all of that you s/b fine. I'm partial to having docks myself. I like being able to swap drives out quickly (both 3.5" and 2.5"). I have a Voyager Q like this. I like it because it also has a Firewire port for my Macs (much faster than USB). It's a bit spendy though. For all-around stuff I also have a Thermaltake BlacX dock like this one. Both work great.

If it's a once-in-a-while thing a SATA/USB adapter like this one will work perfectly fine too.


----------



## richsadams

jonja said:


> OK, now I feel shamed. Given that I've done this with my Tivo HD and WinMFS, not sure why I don't just put in a 2TB and be done with it?
> 
> So I got a RMA for the not-yet-arrived WD 1 TB My DVR and I ordered a 2TB WD20EURS for $111 from Buy.com. It sounds like the latest DVR optimized drive based on all of the discussions here. I like the idea of energy sipping in a new Energy Star device.
> 
> My new Premiere is a Woot Refurb and I have to admit I am nervous that something will go wrong and I will need warranty service. With my Tivo HD, I never requested it because it was easier/cheaper to try to fix it myself (after 90 days Tivo makes you pay $150 to fix something UNDER warranty. Only paid $60 for the Tivo Premiere. Should have bought two..) Does keeping the 320gig as a backup really work to ensure you can get warranty service?? I have Lifetime on the Premiere (same on my old Tivo HD 1TB, which I am now trying to sell).


Nothing to be ashamed of...we all have those "d'oh" moments.  The WD20EURS should work fine in your TiVo HD. Mind you that although it is a dedicated A/V GP "green" drive, it's power saving is helpful but the only "DVR optimization" you'll get is that the AAM (auto acoustic management) is already set to 128 which is the quietest setting. Due to some things already being built in and others not being applicable, TiVo can't take advantage of the rest of the A/V specific features of the EURS (or EVDS, EVCS, etc.) line. That's not a good or bad thing...just is. Again, you s/b perfectly happy with your new drive.

FWIW TiVo has a full replacement parts and labor warranty for the first 90 days. After that TiVo's are still under a limited one-year labor warranty. More here:

http://www.tivo.com/buytivo/dvrlimitedwarranty.html

Replacements are $49 after 90 days through the first year. After a year TiVo generally offers to exchange a unit (providing they have them) for $149. The part that fails most often (by far) is the hard drive, so you're ahead of the game. FWIW drives don't fail that often either and the one you have has a three-year warranty.

Yes, absolutely...saving the original hard drive as a back up is a good idea. Not only can you slip it back in if it needs warranty service (of course there's no need to mention the upgrade to the CSR), but it will also get you up and running immediately should your new drive fail. Finally you can always use it to image a new/replacement drive in the future. That's pretty easy with a small 320GB drive, but the 1TB I have sitting on the shelf eats at me a little bit. I'd love to repurpose it...but I know better. 

Happy upgrading!


----------



## jonja

Got the WD20EURS today. Manufacture date of 26 Dec 2010. Can I assume everything is set in terms of that soft boot issue and the noise settings? The drive is just a month old today.


----------



## Fofer

My new Premiere is setup and now I'm eyeing the HD upgrade procedure. I'll be doing it from the bootable CD linked in the OP, via my Mac.

I've got a 2TB WD20EARS, manufacture data Oct 16 2010. I'm hoping I won't need to run wdidle3.exe but if I want to adjust the AAM (to 128) can this be done with a SATA-USB adapter? My only Windows machine at the moment is a laptop.

Lastly - does doing this upgrade preclude me, in the future, from perhaps plugging in a DVR Extender for even more space? Or is that still an available option? Just wondering.


----------



## richsadams

jonja said:


> Got the WD20EURS today. Manufacture date of 26 Dec 2010. Can I assume everything is set in terms of that soft boot issue and the noise settings? The drive is just a month old today.


Hopefully. The only way to know will be to perform the upgrade, install it and see if it boots up. If it does try a menu restart. If it boots up initially and reboots from a menu restart then you're good to go. Based on several other posts it should work without having to adjust the Intellipark timeout.

Best of luck and let us know how it goes!


----------



## richsadams

Fofer said:


> I'm hoping I won't need to run widdle but if I want to adjust the AAM (to 128) can this be done with a SATA-USB adapter?


 Yes. Only wdidle3.exe requires a direct SATA connection.



Fofer said:


> Lastly - does doing this upgrade preclude me, in the future, from perhaps plugging in a DVR Extender for even more space?


Yes again. The "plug and pray" ability to attach an eSATA drive is lost after any upgrade (although an expansion drive can be manually married/blessed using winMFS or MFSTools in the case of 1TB or smaller upgrades...using winMFS or MFSTools as the upgrade program.) Due to the current partition structure TiVo cannot handle anything more than 2TB's anyway.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## Fofer

Thanks for the prompt reply richsadams, I'll post about my upgrade experience when I'm done.


----------



## jonja

richsadams said:


> Yes. Only wdidle3.exe requires a direct SATA connection.


I hope then my WD20EURS works without tweaking then. I do not have direct access to a 3.5" SATA connector (I am not opening up my iMac, and my laptops don't have 3.5" drives).

Rich, do you know if eSATA will work with wdidle3.exe? I have an eSATA port on my Thinkpad and an enclosure with eSATA on it (though not sure if it can support beyond 1TB. It is a Macally triple play, USB/FW400/eSATA).


----------



## runt

So, the currently recommended upgrade size is 2TB, right?

My current choices are
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514 for a 2TB drive,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490 for a 1TB drive or 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136513 for a 1.5TB drive.


----------



## richsadams

jonja said:


> I hope then my WD20EURS works without tweaking then. I do not have direct access to a 3.5" SATA connector (I am not opening up my iMac, and my laptops don't have 3.5" drives).
> 
> Rich, do you know if eSATA will work with wdidle3.exe? I have an eSATA port on my Thinkpad and an enclosure with eSATA on it (though not sure if it can support beyond 1TB. It is a Macally triple play, USB/FW400/eSATA).


Oh, come on...opening an iMac is a piece of cake! I'm looking at mine right now and...oh, wait. 

Unfortunately eSATA won't work. If it's not a direct SATA port connection on the motherboard the only other option is a PCI SATA card.

Again, with the December manufacture date...plus the EURS being an A/V dedicated drive my bet is you won't have to worry about the Intellipark setting.


----------



## richsadams

runt said:


> So, the currently recommended upgrade size is 2TB, right?
> 
> My current choices are
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514 for a 2TB drive,
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490 for a 1TB drive or
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136513 for a 1.5TB drive.


Those are all fine drives and will work for your TiVo upgrade. At this point I would go with Amazon.com. Their packaging is much better than Newegg's. The drive I just bought from Amazon had double-box packing. The last drive I bought from Newegg was a bare drive in a static-cling envelope floating around with a bunch of packing peanuts. Amazon's return policy is superior as well.

The WD20EARS is a good choice. At Amazon it's only $79.99 AR:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...XK0I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296081623&sr=8-1

The WD10EARS is fine as well, but for $10 more you can go from 1TB to 2TB's of recording goodness. Again, I'd buy it from Amazon for the packing and to save $5 over Newegg.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1296081814&sr=1-1

The WD15EARS is also good, but again...Amazon. (For only $5 more you can get the 2TB drive.)

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1296081914&sr=1-1

My policy has always been to go with as much storage capacity as I can afford.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> Those are all fine drives and will work for your TiVo upgrade. At this point I would go with Amazon.com. Their packaging is much better than Newegg's. The drive I just bought from Amazon had double-box packing. The last drive I bought from Newegg was a bare drive in a static-cling envelope floating around with a bunch of packing peanuts. Amazon's return policy is superior as well.


No argument here, but Rich, you guys on the West coast have it bad when it comes to Newegg. I use them a LOT and it always comes VERY quickly and only once DOA (of over 20 drives). I've NEVER seen just peanuts with a drive delivery from their New Jersey location. It's always been bubble wrap, wrapped around the anti-static envelope, and often double boxed as well.

Still, it's a bit subpar compared to Amazon, and their (Newegg's) return policy is awful. If a couple bubbles pop along a corner of the corner of the drive, and it finds its way to the edge of the outer box....


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> No argument here, but Rich, you guys on the West coast have it bad when it comes to Newegg. I use them a LOT and it always comes VERY quickly and only once DOA (of over 20 drives). I've NEVER seen just peanuts with a drive delivery from their New Jersey location. It's always been bubble wrap, wrapped around the anti-static envelope, and often double boxed as well.
> 
> Still, it's a bit subpar compared to Amazon, and their (Newegg's) return policy is awful. If a couple bubbles pop along a corner of the corner of the drive, and it finds its way to the edge of the outer box....


Wait...that kinda _sounds_ like an argument.  FWIW I've received DOA drives from both companies, but Amazon makes it a breeze to return anything...newegg, not so much. Sounds like their packing may have improved and that's a good thing.


----------



## jonja

I am using WD Lifeguard on the WD20EURS right now with extended test. So far so good. Can't use jtms to clone the drive yet since the cable company has yet to pair the cablecards with the premiere. Might come tomorrow if there is no snow. And I probably should let the Premiere actually run with the cablecards for a couple of days before making the upgrade.

Incidentally, I turned the video input to the Premiere today (still using the Tivo HD as my primary Tivo) and got greeted with a blank screen. The Premiere has been active for just 5 days now (running analog channels). I had to unplug it and reboot the Premiere. Is this normal for the Premieres? I am running HD menus. Am I going to regret getting the Premiere?


----------



## zand94

The WD20EARS is a good choice. At Amazon it's only $79.99 AR:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...XK0I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296081623&sr=8-1

I just came home with both of my woot TPs and the drives above I had ordered from amazon. The MFG dates are 9/19/10 and 10/22/10

From looking through this thread and a few others it looks like my Sept drive may need tweaked but the october drive should not... is that correct?

Alex


----------



## Mahty

jonja said:


> I am using WD Lifeguard on the WD20EURS right now with extended test. So far so good.


I'm also currently running the Extended Test of the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows toolset on a brand new WD20EURS before I try the jmfs/WinMFS combo method on a TiVoHD. (WinMFS is needed for the Supersize step on a TiVoHD).

I'm doing this test on an iMac running Windows XP in the VMware Fusion environment with the connection to the WD20EURS via a USB docking station. This configuration is so inefficient that it will take a currently estimated 55 hours to test the WD20EURS! (Less than 9 hours to go as I type and so far so good!)

I used this same setup to test a couple of new WD15EVDS drives this past year and those (successful!) Extended Tests lasted 52 hours and 40 hours, respectively. (I'm guessing the second Extended Test might have been faster because I upgraded VMware Fusion at some point in time between the two tests. And/or maybe there were just fewer other processes taxing the iMac CPU at the time.) I think my only real option to speed things up would have been to boot my iMac directly into Windows XP, but I didn't want to be without my Mac OS for what still might have been a potentially extended period.

Afterthought: Hmm ... out of curiosity, perhaps I'll try the test with a direct-boot-into-Windows at some point. I guess I would only need to start the test and let it run for a few hours in order to get a reasonable ballpark estimate of what the time savings might be (might have been).


----------



## jonja

Mahty said:


> I'm doing this test on an iMac running Windows XP in the VMware Fusion environment with the connection to the WD20EURS via a USB docking station. This configuration is so inefficient that it will take a currently estimated 55 hours to test the WD20EURS! (Less than 9 hours to go as I type and so far so good!).


Got my iMac running Lifeguard using Bootcamp (Win7). As you might imagine, it's not so bad: 19 hours ;-) But I may use Virtualbox when I create the image using jtms for the Premiere.


----------



## lessd

ThreeSoFar said:


> No argument here, but Rich, you guys on the West coast have it bad when it comes to Newegg. I use them a LOT and it always comes VERY quickly and only once DOA (of over 20 drives). I've NEVER seen just peanuts with a drive delivery from their New Jersey location. It's always been bubble wrap, wrapped around the anti-static envelope, and often double boxed as well.
> 
> Still, it's a bit subpar compared to Amazon, and their (Newegg's) return policy is awful. If a couple bubbles pop along a corner of the corner of the drive, and it finds its way to the edge of the outer box....


For any DOA drive I have ever gotten from Newegg they E-Mailed a free return lable and I sent it back recieving a full refund (I would order another drive at the same time) so *other than having to make a phone **call* I found it as good as Amazons return system.


----------



## richsadams

zand94 said:


> I just came home with both of my woot TPs and the drives above I had ordered from amazon. The MFG dates are 9/19/10 and 10/22/10
> 
> From looking through this thread and a few others it looks like my Sept drive may need tweaked but the october drive should not... is that correct?
> 
> Alex


There's a good chance you won't have to do anything about the Intellipark settings for either one.


----------



## Davelnlr_

Just got this in for my Server, and decided to try it out on the Tivo instead:
Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB 5900 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive...$79.95 at Newegg.

Took the copy, and shows 317 hrs. Will report back on how well it works.


----------



## dmk1974

I'm about ready to take the plunge and upgrade my three TiVo Premieres. Of course I'll try this method on one first.

Just a couple of quick questions:

1.) I've had all 3 boxes since October 2010 so I think they are ok and all. Comcast cable card in each. If I follow the full drive copy method, I'll keep my shows, season passes, and cable card pairing info, correct?

2.) I've seen some scary reviews for the WD20EARS on Amazon and Newegg. For TiVo use, is this really the preferred drive to get? I have a 1 TB Caviar Black drive on a shelf at home. Sounds like the Black may be overkill and doesn't gain anything, but I never had any issues with it in my old TiVo HD box. 2TB is highly desired though so if everyone thinks it's ok, it sure is a good deal!

Thanks!


----------



## ThreeSoFar

dmk1974 said:


> I'm about ready to take the plunge and upgrade my three TiVo Premieres. Of course I'll try this method on one first.
> 
> Just a couple of quick questions:
> 
> 1.) I've had all 3 boxes since October 2010 so I think they are ok and all. Comcast cable card in each. If I follow the full drive copy method, I'll keep my shows, season passes, and cable card pairing info, correct?


Correct. You'll use "C"opy, which results in a dupe (same size). And then expand, which takes it up to full size.



dmk1974 said:


> 2.) I've seen some scary reviews for the WD20EARS on Amazon and Newegg. For TiVo use, is this really the preferred drive to get? I have a 1 TB Caviar Black drive on a shelf at home. Sounds like the Black may be overkill and doesn't gain anything, but I never had any issues with it in my old TiVo HD box. 2TB is highly desired though so if everyone thinks it's ok, it sure is a good deal!


Not sure what the reviews said. Nor really the difference between their black and green models. I'm curious to say what Richadams says here, but I know he's been recommending the EARS, and that's enough for me (that's what I got, five of them to max out the $20 per rebate that expired a week ago or so.


----------



## dmk1974

Thanks for the quick reply. I like both amazon and Newegg, but it looks like Newegg is $10 cheaper since they have a promo code (both sites have the $20 rebate Visa GC as well). In the end, $70 for a 2.0 TB drive is awesome (as long as it works)!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514


----------



## Starflight

Hi Comer, the upgrade was a snap. The $$ is in the Ethernet via paypal.

Upgraded two Tivo Premieres to 317 HD Hours using Western Digital 2TB WD20EVDS.

Manufacture date of 10 Nov 2010

The AAM default was 128.

The Intellipark feature default was 8 seconds. The Tivo restart does pass with the 8s timeout.

Use wdidle3 /S[10000000000] (1 and 10 zeros) to disable the Intellipark feature. Saw the /S option on another web site. Passing it along.

Used the PC's two internal Sata ports. The procedure took about 3hrs. The copy rate averaged about 35MB/s.

Many thanks to Comer for the upgrade tool and to richsadams for the helpful advice contained in this thread.


----------



## richsadams

Starflight said:


> Hi Comer, the upgrade was a snap. The $$ is in the Ethernet via paypal.
> 
> Upgraded two Tivo Premieres to 317 HD Hours using Western Digital 2TB WD20EVDS.
> 
> Manufacture date of 10 Nov 2010
> 
> The AAM default was 128.
> 
> The Intellipark feature default was 8 seconds. The Tivo restart does pass with the 8s timeout.
> 
> Use wdidle3 /S[10000000000] (1 and 10 zeros) to disable the Intellipark feature. Saw the /S option on another web site. Passing it along.
> 
> Used the PC's two internal Sata ports. The procedure took about 3hrs. The copy rate averaged about 35MB/s.
> 
> Many thanks to Comer for the upgrade tool and to richsadams for the helpful advice contained in this thread.


Welcome to the forum and thanks very much for the details! :up:

To be clear, you did NOT adjust the Intellipark setting on your WD20EVDS and your TiVo still rebooted with a menu restart correct? I wanted to confirm as a couple of others said the same thing (with WD drives manufactured after Sept 15th) although the Intellipark timeout was still set to 8 seconds. The clarification will let others that follow know that they no longer have to mess around with making that adjustment on newer drives. TIA.

Enjoy all of that new real estate!


----------



## richsadams

dmk1974 said:


> Just a couple of quick questions:
> 
> 1.) I've had all 3 boxes since October 2010 so I think they are ok and all. Comcast cable card in each. If I follow the full drive copy method, I'll keep my shows, season passes, and cable card pairing info, correct?


 As ThreeSoFar said, yes, everything remains intact as this is a full copy program. Running them for a while to be sure everything was working properly was a wise move. :up:



dmk1974 said:


> 2.) I've seen some scary reviews for the WD20EARS on Amazon and Newegg. For TiVo use, is this really the preferred drive to get? I have a 1 TB Caviar Black drive on a shelf at home. Sounds like the Black may be overkill and doesn't gain anything, but I never had any issues with it in my old TiVo HD box. 2TB is highly desired though so if everyone thinks it's ok, it sure is a good deal!
> 
> Thanks!


WD's Black (or Blue) series of HDD's don't offer any performance enhancements over their GP drives when it comes to TiVo. The GP drives generally run cooler as well.

It looks like the larger drives get the more issues folks have with them. Makes sense for the reasons one can imagine I guess. I haven't looked in the past week or so but the reviews I've read give most of the WD line about equal ratings (as good as or better than other manufacturers). If there were one or another line that was having problems it would be pretty apparent pretty quickly...especially here...there's no holding back on the TCF!  I'm about to drop a WD20EARS into my Premiere XL myself. Quite a few others here are using the same drive as well...so far w/o reporting any problems. Only time will tell with these sorts of things, but my bet is that it's a perfectly good option.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## tome_9499

Hi,

I'm using (2) sata to USB converters to image my premiere 320 GB drive on to a seagate barracuda 2TB drive. How long is it going to take? seems like days!

Thanks ,

Tom


----------



## ThreeSoFar

tome_9499 said:


> Hi,
> 
> I'm using (2) sata to USB converters to image my premiere 320 GB drive on to a seagate barracuda 2TB drive. How long is it going to take? seems like days!
> 
> Thanks ,
> 
> Tom


I'm curious, what's the throughput being shown by the copy command?

On my old Dell (it's either a Pentium III or IV, I forget which), with an internal PCI SATA adapter that can fit both drives, I get about 21000kBps.


----------



## Davelnlr_

I was getting 37000 on my 3Ghz AMD dual core.

Update on the Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS. It is still working great. With the original drive (WD 320GB?) I was unable to use the HDGUI, it would take foreever between screens, and give me circles. I turned the HDGUI back on to make sure everything was working ok after upgrading the drive last night, and it is MUCH snappier now. No green circles or delays. Seems a lot faster. This is a 5900rpm drive. What speed is the original drive, and why would this one be faster?


----------



## p_wallace

Will this work for an old R20 DTV tivo? Is there a size limit for the HD or will any IDE HD work. I assume the the interface is IDE since this unit is so old SATA wasn't around back then. Also does this work using an external enclosure or do I need to crack open a computer and mount the drive internally. 
THANKS
Pete


----------



## Starflight

richsadams said:


> To be clear, you did NOT adjust the Intellipark setting on your WD20EVDS and your TiVo still rebooted with a menu restart correct? I wanted to confirm as a couple of others said the same thing (with WD drives manufactured after Sept 15th) although the Intellipark timeout was still set to 8 seconds. The clarification will let others that follow know that they no longer have to mess around with making that adjustment on newer drives. TIA.


The default setting for Intellipark is 8s. The restart after the initial boot succeeded with the Intellipark at 8s. Only one restart was attempted.

However, the Intellipark feature is now disabled using the wdidle3 tool.


----------



## richsadams

Starflight said:


> The default setting for Intellipark is 8s. The restart after the initial boot succeeded with the Intellipark at 8s. Only one restart was attempted.


Thanks for the confirmation that you don't have to do tweak the Intellipark settings on the newer drives now.

Enjoy!


----------



## richsadams

p_wallace said:


> Will this work for an old R20 DTV tivo? Is there a size limit for the HD or will any IDE HD work. I assume the the interface is IDE since this unit is so old SATA wasn't around back then. Also does this work using an external enclosure or do I need to crack open a computer and mount the drive internally.
> THANKS
> Pete


I don't think anyone has tried but I'd be almost certain that it would not work. The jfms program was designed for the Premiere and Premiere XL series' partition structure. It happens to work (except for Supersize) with TiVo HD/HDXL's, but not with the original Series3. The latter two models have different partition structures. Given that it doesn't work with a Series3 I wouldn't hold out any hope that it would work with any earlier models.

FWIW I believe your TiVo has a PATA drive, but you'd need to verify that.

It will work using an external adapter or dock, but again on the TiVo Premiere or Premiere XL.


----------



## ripple

richsadams said:


> p_wallace said:
> 
> 
> 
> Will this work for an old R20 DTV tivo? Is there a size limit for the HD or will any IDE HD work. I assume the the interface is IDE since this unit is so old SATA wasn't around back then. Also does this work using an external enclosure or do I need to crack open a computer and mount the drive internally.
> THANKS
> Pete
> 
> 
> 
> I don't think anyone has tried but I'd be almost certain that it would not work. The jfms program was designed for the Premiere and Premiere XL series' partition structure. It happens to work (except for Supersize) with TiVo HD/HDXL's, but not with the original Series3. The latter two models have different partition structures. Given that it doesn't work with a Series3 I wouldn't hold out any hope that it would work with any earlier models.
> 
> FWIW I believe your TiVo has a PATA drive, but you'd need to verify that.
> 
> It will work using an external adapter or dock, but again on the TiVo Premiere or Premiere XL.
Click to expand...

When I saw "R20 DTV" I thought the OP was asking about the R20 or HR20/HR21 DTV non-TiVo boxen.
I'm still not sure what the OP was seeking, but:
- The true R20 is not a TiVo - it's an SD DVR that D* made but which is not a TiVo.
- The HR10-250 was the last/only high-def D* TiVo...I've got one here, along with 2x SD-DVR40s, all upgraded, that I'm going to give to a good home in a separate thread.
- There was also an HR20 DVR, but it's also not a TiVo.
- There's still a plan to have a new MPEG4-capable TiVo box for D*, but it's not available at this time.
http://support.directv.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/77/~/directv-relationship-with-tivo---new-hd-dvr

Assuming that the OP was really talking about the R20 or HR20 D* DVR (neither of which is a TiVo), then read on...

I recently gave up on D* ever usefully providing reliable HD signal strength during inclement weather, and/or another true D*-HDTiVo, and went with 2x Tivo Premieres plus one HDXL. I'm working through the upgrades on the Premieres. I'd have to say that if there are questions about the D* non-TiVo boxes, this isn't the place to ask...PM me if you need pointers but there's a place that rhymes with MealMatabase.com...

The really short answer: JMFS is the wrong tool for what you need--in fact, you don't need any tool that "speaks" MFS.

The not-as-short-as-I'd-like-it answer is that if you're trying to upgrade a D* DVR (such as the HR21 that I had to ship back), and you don't care about saving recordings, then all you need to do is plug in a larger drive of a compatible type--the OS-equivalent is in firmware and there's nothing on the drive itself. The bad news is that when last I went through this, there was no method/software to copy recordings from one drive to another *and* take advantage of all the new space. A "DD" image under linux of the old drive onto the new one was recognized and worked with all the recordings preserved, but no expansion. If a new blank drive was inserted and the HR21 booted, it would create the necessary partitions etc. and "marry" the new drive...but there was no way to copy over recordings. Things may have changed, but as I noted above I don't think this is the board you're seeking. Good luck.


----------



## ripple

Davelnlr_ said:


> ThreeSoFar said:
> 
> 
> 
> I'm curious, what's the throughput being shown by the copy command?
> 
> On my old Dell (it's either a Pentium III or IV, I forget which), with an internal PCI SATA adapter that can fit both drives, I get about 21000kBps.
> 
> 
> 
> I was getting 37000 on my 3Ghz AMD dual core.
Click to expand...

Hmm. I'm doing the copy-then-expand-then-supersize on a modern but low-end system that was scheduled to become my new firewall...but the results are interesting. AMD Dual core 45W CPU (2.4GHz IIRC) plus low-end Zotac MB (NewEgg special - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500045) with both old and new drives cabled directly to MB over SATA, and I'm getting about 7800 kBps as reported by JMFS. This is going to take all day...and perhaps this low-wattage system is *not* going to have enough horsepower to be the new whole-house firewall plus part-time media server...

I almost wonder if there's a way to force the CPU to wake up and go at a higher power level, or where the bottleneck is exactly...

--ripple


----------



## dmk1974

Well, my WD20EARS from Amazon arrived a day early today! I think I'm going to give it a shot in my main family room TiVo tonight. The manufacture date on the drive is 10/13/2010.

Based on what I have read, that means I do not have to do anything to the drive and can just install it per the instructions at the start of this thread, correct? Or is it worthwhile taking the time to do a full scan with the WD software and then run the wdidle3 /S[10000000000] program as well? Thanks!


----------



## richsadams

dmk1974 said:


> Well, my WD20EARS from Amazon arrived a day early today! I think I'm going to give it a shot in my main family room TiVo tonight. The manufacture date on the drive is 10/13/2010.
> 
> Based on what I have read, that means I do not have to do anything to the drive and can just install it per the instructions at the start of this thread, correct? Or is it worthwhile taking the time to do a full scan with the WD software and then run the wdidle3 /S[10000000000] program as well? Thanks!


I'd try using it w/o adjusting the Intellipark timeout first. It shouldn't need it, but please report back if so. I would however use hddscan to adjust the AAM to 128 to make it as quiet as the OEM TiVo drive.

I always run Western Digital's Lifeguard Extended scan on new drives for a little peace of mind. IIRC it took something like 60 hours to run on my 2TB WD20EARS though. If you don't have that kind of time or patience you could just run the Quick Scan which takes about five minutes. That will tell you if there any obvious issues with the drive.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## Fofer

Do you run hddscan before or after the copy/expand/supersize? Or does it not matter?


----------



## richsadams

Fofer said:


> Do you run hddscan before or after the copy/expand/supersize? Or does it not matter?


It doesn't matter, it's a firmware change and won't affect the data. I suppose a purist might recommend running it afterward since it does affect the drive's seek speed...but I'm not sure that would really make any difference in the upgrade process.


----------



## dmk1974

richsadams said:


> I'd try using it w/o adjusting the Intellipark timeout first. It shouldn't need it, but please report back if so. I would however use hddscan to adjust the AAM to 128 to make it as quiet as the OEM TiVo drive.
> 
> I always run Western Digital's Lifeguard Extended scan on new drives for a little peace of mind. IIRC it took something like 60 hours to run on my 2TB WD20EARS though. If you don't have that kind of time or patience you could just run the Quick Scan which takes about five minutes. That will tell you if there any obvious issues with the drive.
> 
> Happy upgrading!


Thanks Rich. I hooked up my new 10/13/2020 WD20EARS drive to my Windows 7 PC and I ran the Quick Scan from the WD Lifeguard Tools (no errors...only took a couple minutes). I then downloaded and ran the hddscan program and set the AAM to 128. Downloaded the jmfs-rev104.iso file and burned it to a CD.

Powered down the PC, opened up the TiVo and pulled out the 320 GB drive and hooked it up to the PC (all PC connections are internal SATA). Running the upgrade right now! Copying looks like it will take a while (average rate is showing as about 36650 kB/s.

Will report back later on!

UPDATE:

Great success! The copy took about 2h 40min. Then just a couple more minutes for the expand and supersize. Shut down the PC, transplanted the new 2.0 TB drive into the TiVo, put the M-Card back in the slot and then connected it back to my TV. Took the usual 5-6 minutes or so to boot up and now I have up to 317 HD hours! Woohoo! Hopefully it will run perfectly for a few years!

Now, do I upgrade the other two as well? Hmmmm.....

Thanks comer and richsadams for your help!


----------



## richsadams

dmk1974 said:


> Thanks Rich. I hooked up my new 10/13/2020 WD20EARS drive to my Windows 7 PC and I ran the Quick Scan from the WD Lifeguard Tools (no errors...only took a couple minutes). I then downloaded and ran the hddscan program and set the AAM to 128. Downloaded the jmfs-rev104.iso file and burned it to a CD.
> 
> Powered down the PC, opened up the TiVo and pulled out the 320 GB drive and hooked it up to the PC (all PC connections are internal SATA). Running the upgrade right now! Copying looks like it will take a while (average rate is showing as about 36650 kB/s.
> 
> Will report back later on!


Sweet! I think most folks are reporting that the copy process takes about three hours or so.


----------



## mattack

Since 'supersize' doesn't work on Tivo HD (and in fact makes it so that the drive size is the same as the original to Tivo), can you make it so that that feature is PREVENTED if you're trying to use a Tivo HD drive? Other than that, using jmfs was a nice and easy way to upgrade my Tivo HD drive!


----------



## richsadams

mattack said:


> Since 'supersize' doesn't work on Tivo HD (and in fact makes it so that the drive size is the same as the original to Tivo), can you make it so that that feature is PREVENTED if you're trying to use a Tivo HD drive? Other than that, using jmfs was a nice and easy way to upgrade my Tivo HD drive!


That's a question for The author, Comer.


----------



## dmk1974

richsadams said:


> Sweet! I think most folks are reporting that the copy process takes about three hours or so.


Thanks Rich! Seems to have gone perfectly! I updated post #591 so my experience using the WD20EARS in the TiVo Premier is captured all in one post.


----------



## p_wallace

richsadams said:


> I don't think anyone has tried but I'd be almost certain that it would not work. The jfms program was designed for the Premiere and Premiere XL series' partition structure. It happens to work (except for Supersize) with TiVo HD/HDXL's, but not with the original Series3. The latter two models have different partition structures. Given that it doesn't work with a Series3 I wouldn't hold out any hope that it would work with any earlier models.
> 
> FWIW I believe your TiVo has a PATA drive, but you'd need to verify that.
> 
> It will work using an external adapter or dock, but again on the TiVo Premiere or Premiere XL.


I must again apologize for my stupidity. My tivo is an R10. I am somehow getting my DTV DVR model #'s (and I don't think they are correct for them 
either,) mixed up in this discussion instead of the tivo.
You say that this upgrade probably won't work for this old of a receiver. You are probably correct about the PATA drive. I get confused about as easily about computer abbreviations as I am about my model number! Do you have any ideas about any upgrades for this model that would allow me to increase the recording space or can you point me to a location that might? BTW have you got any ideas as to what is causing my problem with failure to record shows due to lack of space messages? I know that there should be space on the drive if it were functioning correctly or maybe there is something else causing the messages?
THANKS
Pete


----------



## richsadams

p_wallace said:


> I must again apologize for my stupidity. My tivo is an R10. I am somehow getting my DTV DVR model #'s (and I don't think they are correct for them
> either,) mixed up in this discussion instead of the tivo.
> You say that this upgrade probably won't work for this old of a receiver. You are probably correct about the PATA drive. I get confused about as easily about computer abbreviations as I am about my model number! Do you have any ideas about any upgrades for this model that would allow me to increase the recording space or can you point me to a location that might? BTW have you got any ideas as to what is causing my problem with failure to record shows due to lack of space messages? I know that there should be space on the drive if it were functioning correctly or maybe there is something else causing the messages?
> THANKS
> Pete


Sorry, no experience with an R10. However it looks like you have company...

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=463351


----------



## Fofer

richsadams said:


> I'm partial to having docks myself. I like being able to swap drives out quickly (both 3.5" and 2.5"). I have a Voyager Q like this. I like it because it also has a Firewire port for my Macs (much faster than USB). It's a bit spendy though.


Thanks for the recommendation; I just ordered one of these for myself. It's first task will be used for this Premiere upgrade. Afterwards, looks like it'll be a helpful tool, for all the random hard drives I've got hanging around and that come into my workspace.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> I'm partial to having docks myself. I like being able to swap drives out quickly (both 3.5" and 2.5"). I have a Voyager Q like this. I like it because it also has a Firewire port for my Macs (much faster than USB). It's a bit spendy though. For all-around stuff I also have a Thermaltake BlacX dock like this one. Both work great.
> 
> If it's a once-in-a-while thing a SATA/USB adapter like this one will work perfectly fine too.


Rich,

Do you know the kBps speeds the jmfs copy gets with these various units?

Have you ever used the jmfs style (ddrescue) copy from one firewire to another on your Mac booting the jmfs cd?

In particular, if I get one USB and one Firewire, what would the speed be and which one should be firewire?


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> Rich,
> 
> Do you know the kBps speeds the jmfs copy gets with these various units?
> 
> Have you ever used the jmfs style (ddrescue) copy from one firewire to another on your Mac booting the jmfs cd?
> 
> In particular, if I get one USB and one Firewire, what would the speed be and which one should be firewire?


I've always used the motherboard's SATA ports on a PC I keep around for these sorts of things so I've no idea what the transfer rates would be.

I don't think it would matter which drive is in which dock since it will default to the lowest common denominator, which in this case will be the USB drive...so it would be like doing it with two USB drives I would think. That being said I'd think the transfer rate would probably be around 320Mbps since USB rarely ever hits it's maximum capacity of 480Mbps. I guess if it were me I'd put the OEM TiVo drive in the Firewire dock just so it can be read a little faster but again I doubt that it will make much difference.


----------



## Gregor

ThreeSoFar said:


> Rich,
> 
> Do you know the kBps speeds the jmfs copy gets with these various units?
> 
> Have you ever used the jmfs style (ddrescue) copy from one firewire to another on your Mac booting the jmfs cd?
> 
> In particular, if I get one USB and one Firewire, what would the speed be and which one should be firewire?


I think the speed is going to be dependent on the slowest connection, ie the USB.

I used 2 USB SATA adapters on my Macbook Pro and the copy took 10-12 hours, with a full 320 GB drive. I'll be upgrading the Woot Premiere sometime after Wed when I get the cablecard, and it will be empty when I copy it, so it should take a lot less time.

In any case, I'm going to do that copy on an old windows laptop that I can let run for awhile.


----------



## richsadams

Gregor said:


> I'll be upgrading the Woot Premiere sometime after Wed when I get the cablecard, and it will be empty when I copy it, so it should take a lot less time.


It's not a truncated copy so the time is dependent on the size of the drive (and the transfer speed), not data content. In other words, it doesn't matter if the drive is empty or full.


----------



## Gregor

Thanks, Rich, I'll plan accordingly!


----------



## comer

Kingsam88 said:


> I'm sorry that i wasn't using i guess correct grammar on a forum.... Just not what I'm used to.
> 
> Anyways, i still would imagine the idea i have is quite if not completely possible. i really don't know why no one has tried it and i don't honestly see how it could be that hard. With the right amount of time and effort that is. As for why do it in the first place, well i already bought the $30 eSATA enclosure and i don't really want that to go to waste.
> 
> I would imagine a way to do it would to re-image the non-verified drive to look and seem like the Western Digital drive or "mimic" it.


I think Tivo looks for a specific ID string to enable eSata device. Unless someone can reprogram firmware in the enclosure, there is no way to make a generic solution to add an external drive without opening Tivo and pairing drives using external tools (jmfs)


----------



## jonja

Gregor said:


> I think the speed is going to be dependent on the slowest connection, ie the USB.
> 
> I used 2 USB SATA adapters on my Macbook Pro and the copy took 10-12 hours, with a full 320 GB drive. I'll be upgrading the Woot Premiere sometime after Wed when I get the cablecard, and it will be empty when I copy it, so it should take a lot less time.
> 
> In any case, I'm going to do that copy on an old windows laptop that I can let run for awhile.


I successfully comerized a 2TB HD for my Tivo Premiere over the weekend. I went with the WD20EURS.

I found WinMFS to be a snap in the past but I had big trouble with JMFS. The interface was simple enough but the transfer speed was as bad as yours. It took about 10 hours on my iMac but it did work. I think Linux for some reason couldn't get a full USB 2.0 connection on the iMac and reverted to USB 1.1 speeds. It was painfully slow but I am a happy camper now.

(Before the iMac, I tried my ThinkPad but it has USB 3.0 ports that won't work my new USB Enclosure. Later when I tried the single USB 2.0 port (hidden on the back), it worked).


----------



## richsadams

Per my post on TiVoitis' other thread, I can't recall...has someone with a TiVo HDXL (1TB HDD) used jmfs to upgrade to a 2TB drive? I can't see any reason it wouldn't work, but it would be good to have confirmation. TIA


----------



## jonja

Using the Linux CD (JMFS), I also tried to set some firmware settings on the WD20EURS using HDPARM.

This website (http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/tivo_upgrade/) recommends:

hdparm -k 1 -B 1 -M 128 -W 1 /dev/sda

where sda may be sdb or sdc as the case may be.

But most of the settings I tried, just gave me errors about not being supported. I couldn't even get hdparm -i (identify drive) to work over USB (though it did work over eSATA). Curiously, over eSATA I couldn't get hdparm -M to work (just wanted to verify the acoustic setting was 128), but over USB while '-i' didn't work, '-M' *did *work (yes it was acoustic 128).

It was all very voodoo and I googled hdparm and found that sometimes when the scsi subsystem is used, hdparm doesn't fully function. As if I have anyway of controlling that.

I also changed my mind about the -B 1 setting, which sets it for most aggressive power management, which sounded to me like Intellipark head parking to me. So I issued -B 254 instead, which forces it to be less power conserving (without turning it off). But honestly, both times it gave me an error about not being supported and I got the feeling it did nothing at all!

The only setting that worked was -k (save the settings) and -W (write caching, which was already on!)


----------



## Fofer

richsadams said:


> Fofer said:
> 
> 
> 
> I'm hoping I won't need to run wdidle3.exe but if I want to adjust the AAM (to 128) can this be done with a SATA-USB adapter?
> 
> 
> 
> Yes. Only wdidle3.exe requires a direct SATA connection.
Click to expand...

Hmm. Well, I tried using hddscan (specifically to adjust AAM to 128) on a Windows 7 laptop, and the 2 TB hard drive connected via a SATA->USB bridge. It recognized the drive, but all of those options were grayed out. Like the previous poster, I wonder if this edit can't be done via USB?

I have a new SATA multi-dock on the way, so I'll be trying again, but I'm wondering if the only way to do this is with a real SATA port on a desktop PC.


----------



## Fofer

jonja said:


> Using the Linux CD (JMFS), I also tried to set some firmware settings on the WD20EURS using HDPARM.
> 
> This website (http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/tivo_upgrade/) recommends:
> 
> hdparm -k 1 -B 1 -M 128 -W 1 /dev/sda
> 
> where sda may be sdb or sdc as the case may be.
> 
> But most of the settings I tried, just gave me errors about not being supported. I couldn't even get hdparm -i (identify drive) to work over USB (though it did work over eSATA). Curiously, over eSATA I couldn't get hdparm -M to work (just wanted to verify the acoustic setting was 128), but over USB while '-i' didn't work, '-M' *did *work (yes it was acoustic 128).


Indeed, yours is already set to 128, as richsadams explained:



richsadams said:


> The WD20EURS should work fine in your TiVo HD. Mind you that although it is a dedicated A/V GP "green" drive, it's power saving is helpful but the only "DVR optimization" you'll get is that the AAM (auto acoustic management) is already set to 128 which is the quietest setting.


----------



## richsadams

Fofer said:


> Hmm. Well, I tried using hddscan (specifically to adjust AAM ro 128) on a Windows 7 laptop, and the 2 TB hard drive connected via a SATA->USB bridge. It recognized the drive, but all of those options were grayed out. Like the previous poster, I wonder if this edit can't be done via USB?
> 
> I have a new SATA multi-dock on the way, so I'll be trying again, but I'm wondering if the only way to do this is with a real SATA port on a desktop PC.


Short answer is that HDDScan works for setting the AAM with a USB dock. I've done it a few times as have lots of others here. My only guess in your case is that the SATA bridge might be getting in the way. Try it with the fancy new Voyager dock and I'll bet it'll work.

Now, here's the long story for anyone else that might question the results like I just did. I don't have a PC laptop (well, my wife does for work but I stay as far away from it as possible  ). However I do have Win7 Ultimate running on my spiffy new MacBook Air via Bootcamp. I just so happened to have a WD20EARS sitting here that I'm going to drop into our Premiere XL and it needed the AAM set. Thanks for the reminder! :up: I connected my BlacX dock to the MBA, inserted the WD20EARS and fired up HDDScan > Features > IDE Features.

It showed that AAM was enabled (green "light" on) and the "Set" and "Disable" controls were active. As expected the AAM indicated that it was set to 254 in the LH window and the "Recommended" was 128 in the RH window. So I clicked on the slider and pushed it from the far RH side to the far LH side. Now both windows showed 128. I clicked on the "Set" button, closed it out, shut it down.

Now here's an oddity. I reopened everything and it says that the AAM is back at 254! I tried it with a WD10EARS and the same thing. So I thought I'd try it on my dusty, er, trusty Dell PC using the USB dock. It showed the same results. I could set the AAM to 128, close it out, but when I opened it again it showed that it was back to 254. How is that possible?  Soooo with your thoughts in mind I popped the Dell open and connected each drive directly to the SATA port on the MB. Surprisingly HDDScan said both drives were set to 128. That was very odd, but I'm happy that it worked. I've no idea why the "before and after readings" were different when it was attached via the USB dock.

Bottom line, if you use a USB dock to change the AAM on a WD drive, it does work.


----------



## Fofer

Cool - good to know, and thanks. I'll try again with the new Voyager dock when it arrives.


----------



## brshoemak

I just finished an upgrade on a Tivo Premiere to a 2TB drive (WD20EARS). Did the wdidle3, ran extended test through WD Lifeguard tools, used Tivo boot disk (which was awesome). Didn't change AAM settings with hdscan - didn't research enough beforehand apparently. Did the whole Copy, Expand, Supersize.

Two items:

1) Will the stock AAM setting only affect sound or does it affect performance also. I have a media server right next to the Premiere with Caviar Blacks so that will drown out any noise the Green drive would make.

2) I did the Supersize command, it said it completed successfully, but when I look at the Tivo Recording Capacity I only get 290 vs. 317 like many others do (ONLY is a relative term in this case). Has this happened to anyone else?

Great work on the boot disk, that was about the easiest process I have ever seen.


----------



## ItsRounder

jonja said:


> I found WinMFS to be a snap in the past but I had big trouble with JMFS. The interface was simple enough but the transfer speed was as bad as yours. It took about 10 hours on my iMac but it did work. I think Linux for some reason couldn't get a full USB 2.0 connection on the iMac and reverted to USB 1.1 speeds. It was painfully slow but I am a happy camper now.


My Premiere drive is starting to fail manifesting in stuttering, video artifacts, skipping huge chunks of time while fast forwarding etc. I'm currently using JMFS to hopefully get the drive cloned to a 500GB drive using a MacBook and two USB to Serial ATA enclosures and it's also painfully slow. I thought it was so slow because the drive is going bad which still may be the case but my experience seems to closely match your own. The average rate is currently just shy of 5000kB/s. Fortunately the original drive is a 320 and not something bigger but for those of you who haven't started yet, definitely go with pure SATA if possible. I've used both enclosures for backups and generally see somewhere around 30MB/s so there's something else going on here.


----------



## jonja

You are the third data point here using a Mac with JMFS and getting glacial transfers. But rest assured, it does work! I suspect the USB drivers on that Linux Live distribution used by JMFS aren't working with the Mac chipsets at full USB 2.0 speeds. The transfer looked to be at USB 1.1 speeds, and it took place on both enclosures I had, pretty much identically.

Ironically, I wasn't even going to use my Mac for this but the peculiar incompatibilities around my ThinkPad's USB 3.0 ports made me switch to the Mac. I really wanted to use the ThinkPad because I have an eSATA port on it and an enclosure with an eSATA port. I got the eSATA port-based enclosure recognized but never got the USB Enclosure to work (it's new but I've only tested it on the Mac previously). Later, I recalled I had a dedicated USB 2.0 port off the back of the ThinkPad and indeed, after I had comerized the HD, I tested and found the ThinkPad did recognize the enclosure on that port. Good info for the future.


----------



## richsadams

brshoemak said:


> 1) Will the stock AAM setting only affect sound or does it affect performance also. I have a media server right next to the Premiere with Caviar Blacks so that will drown out any noise the Green drive would make.


TiVo's OEM hard drives are WD A/V GP drives so the AAM is already set to 128. Adjusting the AAM on non-A/V drives won't affect TiVo's performance one way or the other. So if you're happy with things as-is, there's no reason to worry about it.



brshoemak said:


> 2) I did the Supersize command, it said it completed successfully, but when I look at the Tivo Recording Capacity I only get 290 vs. 317 like many others do (ONLY is a relative term in this case). Has this happened to anyone else?


I've read about others experiencing the same issue. I haven't tried it, but you should be able to go back and set it again to get the full 317 hours. It shouldn't affect the existing data as it just reclaims the small amount of space reserved for TiVo Clips. I believe you can also do the same thing using winMFS or MFSTools as well.


----------



## DrTivol

sorry if the answer is buried in this thread somewhere, i've been reading and reading and thought i'd just ask.

I just got a new tivo premiere and i'm upgrading to a 2TB WD20EARS. I'm going back and forth on whether i should do the wdidle3.exe and disable the intellipark.

So here is the question: I have a Dec 2010 (330GB orig and 2TB upgrade). Won't the 330GB original have intellipark and has anyone looked at what it's set to?

thanks!


----------



## ThreeSoFar

DrTivol said:


> sorry if the answer is buried in this thread somewhere, i've been reading and reading and thought i'd just ask.
> 
> I just got a new tivo premiere and i'm upgrading to a 2TB WD20EARS. I'm going back and forth on whether i should do the wdidle3.exe and disable the intellipark.
> 
> So here is the question: I have a Dec 2010 (330GB orig and 2TB upgrade). Won't the 330GB original have intellipark and has anyone looked at what it's set to?
> 
> thanks!


This is exactly the upgrade I just did, and I did not need the wdidle3 at all, soft reboot is no issue.

But Rich, would Acoustic Management help at all compared to how those shipped?


----------



## DrTivol

ThreeSoFar said:


> This is exactly the upgrade I just did, and I did not need the wdidle3 at all, soft reboot is no issue.
> 
> But Rich, would Acoustic Management help at all compared to how those shipped?


I'm going back and forth on this because many say it's not needed for the reboot issued, however if you read enough threads others talk about hitting the 300k parking limit at something like 3 months. Is this still a concern or not?


----------



## ThreeSoFar

DrTivol said:


> I'm going back and forth on this because many say it's not needed for the reboot issued, however if you read enough threads others talk about hitting the 300k parking limit at something like 3 months. Is this still a concern or not?


No idea what you mean by this limit, please elaborate.


----------



## DrTivol

ThreeSoFar said:


> No idea what you mean by this limit, please elaborate.


Sure. I've read things like this:

Quote:The problem is this: The Green Power is designed and marketed as a "green" drive, where power efficiency is the primary engineering concern. As part of this concern, the drive is designed to unload the read/write heads after approximately 8 seconds of inactivity. That in itself is not a bad thing  in fact, it's a common attribute of notebook drives, which have different reasons for saving power (battery life). However, certain software (notably, SpeedFan and some distributions of Linux) can cause issues because they access the drive regularly every 10 seconds or every minute or so. This causes a cycle of rapid loading and unloading that is stressful to the drive  far more stressful than "ordinary" use in which the drive is either working steadily or completely idle.

It is worth noting that there are no actual failures attributed to this problem as yet  just a number of drives that are reporting rapid (and unusual) increases in load/unload cycles via the drive's SMART reporting feature. Some drives are approaching the rated specification of 300,000 load/unload cycles after less than a year of ownership. While the drives are extremely unlikely to give up the ghost right as the counter crosses 300,000, exceeding the specification indicates the point where the risk of failure begins to increase.

In some ways, the solution is simple: Don't use software that accesses the drive every 10 seconds. However, for those who can't or won't deal with this on the software level, Western Digital offers a firmware update that either disables the head unload feature or modifies it so that the unload timer is set to longer than 8 seconds (up to 5 minutes is supported). A separate utility is used to control the feature once the new firmware is installed. In either case, the power saving gained by unloading the heads will be lost, but that's probably safer than dealing with potential drive failures down the road. More information about the firmware update (including a new, lower power spin up mode) can be found in this product change notice.

and then you find the people that say don't disable it:

**DO NOT USE** the wdidle3.exe /d command. This turns the timer off however many people have reported that the drives eventually slow down to a crawl and/or generate errors using this command. The best is to change the timer to 300 seconds.


----------



## Fofer

So we're talking about Intellipark. Do those folks then recommend turning it ON for newer drives (apparently) that come with it already disabled? Sorry, I'm confused.


----------



## DrTivol

Fofer said:


> So we're talking about Intellipark. Do those folks then recommend turning it ON for newer drives (apparently) that come with it already disabled? Sorry, I'm confused.


for the newer WD drives (at least some of the models) it's on and it's set to 8 secs. Now this of course was interfering with the soft reboot and the solution was either A) set it to 300 secs or B) disable it. And then option C) was to leave it alone as some were perhaps not having the issue (??? i'm guessing here).

And now i see that people say if you don't do anything then you hit this load cycle limit rather quickly --- mainly because we are using the drives with linux on tivo and this wasn't necessarily the intended usage. Result here is that people think the drive will fail sooner. Finally, there is also postings that completely disabling it will cause the above problems mentioned.

So my question from above is what is the intellipark set to with the current drives that are being shipped with Tivo Premiere's? Is it 8sec, 300sec, disabled. I realize it's an AV drive but if it has intellipark then what's it set to?


----------



## DrTivol

Here are a couple really nice links:

http://chbits.blogspot.com/2009/07/fixing-wd-gps-drives-with-wdtler-and.html

and this one:

http://webdiary.com/i/?tag=wdidle3

In this one they have a quote from WD:

Quote:WD drives are designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the heads in a park position (unloading the heads) and turning off unnecessary electronics, resulting in substantial power savings. WD defines this mode as Idle 3.

Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal. This effectively negates the power-saving advantages of low-power drives, such as WD GreenPower™ models, and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles. Although the increase in load/unload cycles is within design margins (drive has been validated to 1 million load/unload cycles without issue) a balance between life of product, logging requirements, and low power consumption can be achieved depending on what is critical to the system. Present SMART normalized values have not been re-normalized to 1 million cycles so advisory reporting on this attribute does not mean failure of product.

As soon as i finish copying my drive i'm going to run the wdidle3 utility on the original drive and see what the intellipark setting is (unless of course it doesn't have this feature).


----------



## Fofer

Ugh, I don't want to be fearful of my drive dying in 3 months, taking all of my recordings with it, because I didn't set Intellipark properly.

Yes, I'm dying of curiosity to know what the original drive is set at...


----------



## L David Matheny

Fofer said:


> Ugh, I don't want to be fearful of my drive dying in 3 months, taking all of my recordings with it, because I didn't set Intellipark properly.
> 
> Yes, I'm dying of curiosity to know what the original drive is set at...


FWIW, my WD20EVDS was set to 8 sec. I disabled it. Now I wonder if 300 sec would have been better.


----------



## richsadams

Wow! Things can really get crazy around here! 

Bottom line for DrTivol's OP...if your WD20EARS has a manufacture date of December 10, 2010 there's a very high probability that you won't need to make any adjustments to the Intellipark setting.

FWIW the "cut off date" (for lack of a better term) for having to deal with the Intellipark issue with WD GP drives is September 15, 2010. It was a little before then that WD made an adjustment to their GP drive line's firmware which allowed them to play nice with TiVo once more. So even though the Intellipark setting remains at the default 8 seconds, drives made after that date (and a few before - as far back as March 2010 on their A/V GP drives) have no problem booting up and will reboot from a menu restart normally as attested to by a number of folks here.

Since TiVo is never idle (the buffer is recording 24/7 on both tuners) the Intellipark feature is never implemented and never cycles

Of course there may be an exception to the rule but it hasn't reared it's ugly head so far. The only way to find out is to perform the jmfs upgrade install the new drive and boot it up and then perform a menu restart. If it boots up and reboots normally life is good.

If you're using a something other than an A/V dedicated drive (like a WD20EARS) and you want to enjoy the same acoustics as the original TiVo drive you can run HDDScan and adjust the AAM to 128. More in Section IV, #32 here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160

Hope that helps.


----------



## richsadams

Fofer said:


> Ugh, I don't want to be fearful of my drive dying in 3 months, taking all of my recordings with it, because I didn't set Intellipark properly.
> 
> Yes, I'm dying of curiosity to know what the original drive is set at...


The Intellipark default setting on all WD GP hard drives is 8 seconds. For drives manufactured prior to 09/15/10 I always recommended using wdidle3.exe to adjust the setting to 5 minutes (/s300) having read a few horror stories about disabling it completely. That always took care of the boot/reboot issue without any apparent ill affects with respect to drive function or lifespan.



L David Matheny said:


> FWIW, my WD20EVDS was set to 8 sec. I disabled it. Now I wonder if 300 sec would have been better.


It's an easy fix for anyone wanting to change it again. Since it's a basic firmware change it won't affect any data.


----------



## DrTivol

Rich,

I appreciate your input here. I'm past the soft-reboot reason and the fact that i have a newer drive. So this one was leaning me towards not running wdidle3.exe . Then i ran across all the discussions about the load cycle count. This one was then convincing me to run it. Finally, i threw my hands up in the air when i read the thread that completely disabling it could cause further problems.

You are right that having the drive used in a DVR causes a continuous stream to be generated (written and possibly read), however the part i'm not sure about is how often does that data get written to disk. The threads outside of the tivocommunity are usually using the drive in a NAS and RAID mode with Linux. The claim the GP drives aren't designed for linux and this is where the 8 sec issue comes into play. 

So i currently have the same opinion as you: that the continuous writing of the video stream is probably not allowing the intellipark to kick in. And that got me to wondering what the original HD is set to in the Tivo? I agree the default is 8 secs, so i was just thinking that maybe WD sets it differently for the drives they ship to TIVO. If they don't then this should be a NON ISSUE --- leading the discussion back to running wdidle3.exe just for the soft-reboot issue.

by the way, for the life of me i can't seem to create a CD or USB mem stick with wdidle3.exe. I'd prefer a USB option. I followed the instruction in the FAQ and on other webpages after searching. Non of these are working for me.


----------



## DrTivol

richsadams said:


> If you're using a something other than an A/V dedicated drive (like a WD20EARS) and you want to enjoy the same acoustics as the original TiVo drive you can run HDDScan and adjust the AAM to 128. More in Section IV, #32 here:
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160
> 
> Hope that helps.


Can't you also run right from the copy/expand/supersize boot disk:

hdparm -M 128 /dev/sda


----------



## DrTivol

O.k. i finally got the wdidle3.exe boot USB stick going (must have been the storm in Chicago last night!).

So i just ran it on the original WD3200AVVS (WD AV-GP) drive:

c:> wdidle3.exe /R

and the response is that the timer is disabled!!! My drive was manufactured on 09 Dec 2010.

This does it for me!!!!

Initially on my new drive i tried:

wdidle3.exe /D and it says that it set it to 62 minutes .... hmm

searched around and found that if i run:

wididle3.exe /S[10000000000] (ten zeros) it completely disables it. So that's what i did. Now it's time to fire it up.


----------



## L David Matheny

richsadams said:


> Since TiVo is never idle (the buffer is recording 24/7 on both tuners) the Intellipark feature is never implemented and never cycles





richsadams said:


> The Intellipark default setting on all WD GP hard drives is 8 seconds. For drives manufactured prior to 09/15/10 I always recommended using wdidle3.exe to adjust the setting to 5 minutes (/s300) having read a few horror stories about disabling it completely. That always took care of the boot/reboot issue without any apparent ill affects with respect to drive function or lifespan.
> 
> It's an easy fix for anyone wanting to change it again. Since it's a basic firmware change it won't affect any data.


This is where I get confused. If the Intellipark feature never activates in a TiVo because the drive is never idle (except when rebooting), how can there be horror stories about disabling it completely? What harm could that do? Have people maybe attempted to change this setting on an incompatible drive, with its firmware data values stored in different locations? That could certainly cause problems.


----------



## richsadams

L David Matheny said:


> This is where I get confused. If the Intellipark feature never activates in a TiVo because the drive is never idle (except when rebooting), how can there be horror stories about disabling it completely? What harm could that do? Have people maybe attempted to change this setting on an incompatible drive, with its firmware data values stored in different locations? That could certainly cause problems.


Your first question is a really good one and if someone here doesn't chime in could probably be answered by someone on one of the hard drive forums. I've read stories about folks disabling Intellipark and then running a SMART diagnostic to find that the load cycles skyrocket. I have suspicions as to why that could happen, but my thoughts have no foundation in anything more than theory. As to your second question, I don't think that's possible, but again, I'd only be guessing.

Simply extending the timeout seems the logical step to prevent hanging at boot or reboot. Folks that have extended it haven't reported load cycle increases, etc. Whether or not those load cycles will eventually impact the performance or a drive's actual lifespan I don't know.

FWIW WD GP drives never had this problem until the autumn of 2009 when WD changed their firmware. TiVo itself was caught off guard when people's TiVo HDXL's began hanging after a version update. It took them about 60 days to resolve the problem with another version update. Along about March 2010 WD changed the firmware on their dedicated A/V GP drives so that Intellipark became a non-issue for TiVo upgrades. It wasn't until early September 2010 that they made (ostensibly) the same firmware change to the rest of their GP hard drive line.

Folks have actually installed pre-September 15, 2010 drives that have booted up normally, then tried a soft reboot and encountered the hang...and then tried to power cycle them (which used to work) and they hung then as well. It wasn't until they adjusted the Intellipark timeout that the drives would boot up and reboot from a menu restart. So it would seem that Intellipark was actually not active until the drive is first booted up on those particular drives. Once the timeout was extended they booted up and rebooted fine.

In other circumstances the drives (again pre-Sept 15 '10) wouldn't boot up at all. Once the Intellipark setting was changed (timeout extended or disabled) they booted and rebooted normally.

So it's been an odd road this past year-and-a-half or so. The good news is that whatever the issue was seems to have been resolved in early September, 2010. To date everyone that has performed an upgrade using a WD GP hard drive (both standard and A/V) manufactured after September 15th have not had to adjust the Intellipark setting and have not encountered the initial boot or soft reboot (menu restart) problem.


----------



## DrTivol

Rich,

That's all great and would agree 100%. However, why does Tivo's original HD have the intellipark timer disabled?


----------



## L David Matheny

richsadams said:


> Your first question is a really good one and if someone here doesn't chime in could probably be answered by someone on one of the hard drive forums. I've read stories about folks disabling Intellipark and then running a SMART diagnostic to find that the load cycles skyrocket. I have suspicions as to why that could happen, but my thoughts have no foundation in anything more than theory. As to your second question, I don't think that's possible, but again, I'd only be guessing.
> 
> Simply extending the timeout seems the logical step to prevent hanging at boot or reboot. Folks that have extended it haven't reported load cycle increases, etc. Whether or not those load cycles will eventually impact the performance or a drive's actual lifespan I don't know.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> So it's been an odd road this past year-and-a-half or so. The good news is that whatever the issue was seems to have been resolved in early September, 2010. To date everyone that has performed an upgrade using a WD GP hard drive (both standard and A/V) manufactured after September 15th have not had to adjust the Intellipark setting and have not encountered the initial boot or soft reboot (menu restart) problem.


OK, thanks. I thought Intellipark was what initiated the park/load cycles, thus causing hangs when rebooting. I agree with you that, disabled or not, Intellipark should not be a factor in a drive that is continually writing video data. Eight seconds of HD video would be about 12MB, right? Could the old firmware have been so wrongheaded as to park the heads while the buffer was being filled? Of course, that would cause skyrocketing load cycle counts with Intellipark enabled, not disabled, so I still don't understand.

If I open the box again, maybe a good compromise would be the 300 seconds that you mentioned. Or (considering the time a TiVo takes to boot), maybe 600 seconds would provide a better cushion, if 600 is allowed.


----------



## richsadams

Well I finally found/made time to run Comer's program to upgrade our TiVo Premiere XL to 2TB's...happily and successfully! Details (pretty much like everyone else's):

- Hard drive: WD20EARS (from Amazon for $79.99 AR last month)
- Manufacture date: 10/14/10
- AAM: 254
- Intellipark timeout: 8 seconds
- Connections: Direct to 2 SATA ports on MB (older Dell PC w/2.79GHz P4)
- Copy time: 8 hours (1TB OEM - Transfer rates between 39,000 kB/s and 50,000 kB/s.)

I had run WD's Lifeguard extended diagnostic previously (took over 60 hours) to verify that there were no issues with the new drive. I also adjusted the AAM to 128 with HDDScan using a BlacX SATA/USB dock prior.

The jmfs copy/expand/supersize programs ran perfectly and as described.

Copied the OEM 1TB drive to the 2TB drive, no glitches, no errors. Expanded the 2TB drive and shut the system down. Disconnected the OEM drive, fired jmfs up again and ran Supersize. I did not adjust the Intellipark setting. Installed the drive and it successfully booted up and then successfully performed a menu restart. The initial boot process had to be performing some housekeeping as it was excruciatingly long at 10+ plus minutes. A second power cycle was normal. 

Checked the original TiVo Drive, a WD10EVVS. The AAM was set to 128 (as would be expected of a dedicated A/V drive) and the timeout/idle setting was not enabled.

So we now have 317 hours of HD recording goodness. The original TiVo drive is sitting safely on the shelf for any future needs. 

Thanks very much to Comer for a great program and to everyone here for all of the valuable input and feedback! :up:


----------



## richsadams

DrTivol said:


> Rich,
> 
> That's all great and would agree 100%. However, why does Tivo's original HD have the intellipark timer disabled?


At one time (fall of 2009) the Intellipark setting (known only as "idle timeout" at the time) was enabled on OEM 1TB hard drives installed in TiVo HDXL's (Premieres hadn't been released). As mentioned that caught TiVo with their collective pants down when they pushed a regular update and TiVo's hung on the "Welcome! Powering up..." screen. Although they (TiVo) overcame the issue with an OS update for the TiVo HDXL's I suspect that it didn't sit well with TiVo that WD made a firmware change without notifying their customers. Based on how they "fixed" the issue with the THDXL's my WAG is that the OS now auto-disables the timeout on the first boot. Or they may have arranged to have new drives delivered w/o Intellipark enabled to avoid any issues in the future. I kind of doubt that WD is creating drives specifically for Tivo though. Although they buy quite a few, by comparison to the total out there, it seems more likely that the OS takes care of it because it would certainly increase raw materials costs otherwise. That's just speculation on my part though.

So my gut feeling is that disabling Intellipark on a WD A/V GP drive (WD20EURS for example) won't have any ill effects with respect to the performance or lifespan of the hard drive in question. How doing so might affect the standard WD GP drive series (WD20EARS for instance) I have no idea. It seems like it shouldn't make any difference, but the only folks that would really know work at WD. When this whole thing took off over a year ago several of us contacted WD to ask for an explanation. We all received e-mails (from the same or similarly named person  ) that justified their dedication to save energy and so forth but never addressed our questions specifically. Subsequent e-mails to WD went unanswered.

So it's hard to say what's right or wrong or what settings will make a difference with respect to the Intellipark settings on WD drives manufactured prior to September 15, 2010 or so. Only time will tell. I'm just glad that the drives manufactured after that date no longer have to be tweaked.


----------



## wireless200

Just completed the upgrade to 2TB. It went ok. I think I touched one drive and the power glitched or something and I had to start over. But second time it finished ok and worked. 

I started filling out the rebate on the WD drive and it asked for the serial # so I had to go back in and pull out the drive again. 

The second time I powered back up the unit it seemed to hang on the "just a few minutes more" screen. I uplugged and rebooted and it started back up all the way.

So I'll see how it goes. But thanks much Comer and Rich. Actually it was a little easier than the the S3 upgrade because there was no interim step of putting the image on the computer hard drive. For the TP, it copies drive-to-drive. 

I have the W20EARS. Is that the one that needs intellipark adjusted or anything? Bought it from newegg. I don't want to pull it out again and look at the manufacture date but I will if I have to.

Good job!


----------



## richsadams

wireless200 said:


> I have the W20EARS. Is that the one that needs intellipark adjusted or anything?


The need to adjust the Intellipark setting depends on when the drive was manufactured. If it was after September 15th probably not. Since it booted up initially I'm guessing not but the only way to find out would be to perform a menu restart. If it boots up okay again then you're golden. If it hangs on the "Welcome!" screen and you don't want it to hang after TiVo pushes an update (you could power-cycle it to get it going again) you should adjust the Intellipark setting.

As mentioned earlier I almost gave up on the first boot up after I upgraded. TiVo stayed on the "Almost there..." screen for well over 10 minutes. I decided to let it go and it finally booted up. I put my ear to the case and could hear the hard drive working while I was waiting so I suspect there was some housekeeping going on. (A hang will generally result in silence from the hard drive.) The second time I power-cycled it, it booted up in the normal amount of time, maybe 3 to 4 minutes or so. It was painful waiting that first time though.

Congrats and enjoy!


----------



## Fofer

richsadams said:


> Short answer is that HDDScan works for setting the AAM with a USB dock. I've done it a few times as have lots of others here. My only guess in your case is that the SATA bridge might be getting in the way. *Try it with the fancy new Voyager dock and I'll bet it'll work.*


Indeed it did! Thanks...

Copying from 320 GB to 2TB drive now... via USB... it's been taking many hours. But I'm patient!


----------



## wireless200

richsadams said:


> The need to adjust the Intellipark setting depends on when the drive was manufactured. If it was after September 15th probably not. Since it booted up initially I'm guessing not but the only way to find out would be to perform a menu restart. If it boots up okay again then you're golden. If it hangs on the "Welcome!" screen and you don't want it to hang after TiVo pushes an update (you could power-cycle it to get it going again) you should adjust the Intellipark setting.
> 
> [...]


It hangs up on the menu reboot but not the unplug reboot. I'm going to check the manufacture date tomorrow. I didn't bother to check since it was newegg and they should have gone through their prior 9-15 stock by now. Works fine otherwise. Can I use widdle on windows to check it or do I have to do something with the linux disc?


----------



## richsadams

wireless200 said:


> It hangs up on the menu reboot but not the unplug reboot. I'm going to check the manufacture date tomorrow. I didn't bother to check since it was newegg and they should have gone through their prior 9-15 stock by now. Works fine otherwise. Can I use widdle on windows to check it or do I have to do something with the linux disc?


It does sound like you'll need to adjust the Intellipark timeout. More in Section IV, #29 here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5616160#post5616160

My recommendation is to set the timeout to 300 seconds (5 minutes). The setting is "/s300" (without the quotes).

I've only used the DOS boot disk, but I'm sure if you download the Windows version it should work.

Let us know what the manufacture date is and how things go. TIA!


----------



## nooneuknow

richsadams said:


> My recommendation is to set the timeout to 300 seconds (5 minutes). The setting is "/s300" (without the quotes).


I have made it a point to turn my CAPS LOCK on when using wdidle3.exe. In doing so, I have /D (Disabled) the Idle Timer, with no ill effects. I did read somewhere that it is case sensitive.

People need to also be aware that there are multiple versions floating around out there. I've been using v1.05, and always check for a newer version, direct from WD, before proceeding.

I have done this with drives manufactured last year, as well as the year before that, and a couple manufactured recently.

Best of luck to all.


----------



## wireless200

richsadams said:


> [...]
> Let us know what the manufacture date is and how things go. TIA!


Well it successfully menu rebooted twice this morning. Don't know what happened yesterday because I let it sit for a long time twice. Maybe like yours it just had a lot of housekeeping to do. I dunno but I'll try again and meanwhile probably order another one for my other TP. Thanks for the help.


----------



## BL535

Thank you Comer for your software and detailed instructions. It was reassuring when your software recognizes the original TIVO disk and the new disk and walks you through the process.:up:


----------



## Fofer

*Success!* Took a long time for the copy... almost 12 hours or so, I did it on an old Windows laptop, via USB... but I now have 317 hours of HD goodness on my new (iPad empowered) TiVo Premiere! I'm a happy camper. I soft rebooted, and all seems well. (My 2TB drive had an October 15 manufacturer date.) I just used the online Season Pass Manager to transfer over my season passes. Now to let it start gathering content, and it'll be the primary DVR in my house.

I've been going through the old shows on my 750 GB Series 3 TiVo, and will probably end up selling it off soon.

Thanks SO much to comer for making this tool -- I've upgraded TiVo's in the past, but this tool was just so much easier (and more straightforward) than any one has ever been in the past. It rocks!

And thanks too goes out to richsadams, for being a real beacon of support and encouragement. Your help and patience is appreciated!


----------



## richsadams

Excellent to hear all of the success stories! S/b a great weekend for a lot of folks.

BTW, don't forget to donate to Comer's charity beer fund (link on the original post).

Enjoy!


----------



## BigT4187

Greetings all! I am reading my way through all the posts in this thread and can't wait to try this on my TiVo Premiere! I have a few questions to jump start me as I read through all the posts.

1 - Is this drive still a good choice? (http://amzn.to/gYeyhx)

2 - Will I need to tweak the hard drive with the "wdidle.exe" or "hddscan" tools?

3 - What size torx driver do I need to perform the surgery? Torx 10?

4 - The newest version of the software will "supersize" the drive, right?

5 - Will all my settings, cable card pairings, Season Passes, ratings, wishlists and recordings copy over?

Thanks in advance!


----------



## MikeAndrews

I finally got my round tuit! I had gotten to the point that my Premiere was telling me that it wouldn't record anything new because it wouldn't have any space.

I tried using my dual SATA dock on my original Intel Macbook Pro. It took some reasearch to get it to boot from CD. (Hold down the C key at boot, and the keyboard has to connect directly - not through a hub.)

If only I had read this far before I ran into:



retiredqwest said:


> JMFS only recognizes 1 drive in a dual bay dock. Because the underlying Linux OS it uses does not support USB port multiplying. Same thing happens with a Blacx Duet on a USB port.





comer said:


> They do, of course. That particular driver is missing from the distrib I used to put JMFS together.


The symptoms I had were it would say "cannot enumerate USB hub." It would see the original Tivo drive but once I connected the new drive, JMFS copy complained that the TiVo disk was not readable.

I tried using an old, non-hard-drive-bootable Dell laptop. Same symptoms.

Being Mr. hard drives, I looked around and tore apart my fairly newly built USB - SATA DVD burner.

With each disk dock plugged into each USB port it worked! The copy took about 5 hours at 14-15Kbps. I went right through to SuperSize.

I was so confident on not getting any errors I even installed the disk and put in all of the screws in the Premiere enclosure. Man that first boot takes a long time. I think I lost a few more hairs.

*Success!*

*THANKS Artem!*

Is it sad that getting 327 HD hours seems to be not tenuf? My first jolly geek moment was going to the HD UI and seeing that what was the 99% totally full disk is now at 14% used. 

Notes: I have a Western Digital AV-GP WD20EURS 2 TB "Green" "AV drive." It didn't need any firmware changes. I note that the original 320GB TiVo OEM drive is also a WD Green Drive.


----------



## richsadams

BigT4187 said:


> Greetings all! I am reading my way through all the posts in this thread and can't wait to try this on my TiVo Premiere! I have a few questions to jump start me as I read through all the posts.
> 
> 1 - Is this drive still a good choice? (http://amzn.to/gYeyhx)
> 
> 2 - Will I need to tweak the hard drive with the "wdidle.exe" or "hddscan" tools?
> 
> 3 - What size torx driver do I need to perform the surgery? Torx 10?
> 
> 4 - The newest version of the software will "supersize" the drive, right?
> 
> 5 - Will all my settings, cable card pairings, Season Passes, ratings, wishlists and recordings copy over?
> 
> Thanks in advance!


Well...let's see here...

1. A fine choice...it's working for me and plenty of other folks here.

2. If the drive was manufactured prior to 09/15/10 you may may need to adjust the Intellipark timeout setting. FWIW I bought the same drive from Amazon about a month ago and the one I received was manufactured on 10/14/10 and did not require the adjustment. You may want to run HDDScan to adjust the AAM to 128 to match the A/V drive acoustics.

3. 10

4. Yes, on a TiVo Premiere or Premiere XL.

5. Yes...jmfs performs a direct data copy so everything remains intact.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## richsadams

netringer said:


> I finally got my round tuit! .


Congrats!

P.S. That first boot is a bit of a nail biter!  Life is good now though eh?


----------



## Donni

richsadams said:


> Well...let's see here...
> 
> 1. A fine choice...it's working for me and plenty of other folks here.
> 
> 2. If the drive was manufactured prior to 09/15/10 you may may need to adjust the Intellipark timeout setting. FWIW I bought the same drive from Amazon about a month ago and the one I received was manufactured on 10/14/10 and did not require the adjustment. You may want to run HDDScan to adjust the AAM to 128 to match the A/V drive acoustics.
> 
> 3. 10
> 
> 4. Yes, on a TiVo Premiere or Premiere XL.
> 
> 5. Yes...jmfs performs a direct data copy so everything remains intact.
> 
> Happy upgrading!


Don't forget Torx 15, you need it to open the hard drive bracket


----------



## Fofer

Congrats, netringer!



netringer said:


> Is it sad that getting 327 HD hours seems to be not tenuf? .


Pretty sure mine reported 317, and I supersized.


----------



## richsadams

Fofer said:


> Pretty sure mine reported 317, and I supersized.


You are correct sir.


----------



## wireless200

Donni said:


> Don't forget Torx 15, you need it to open the hard drive bracket


My 10 worked ok on the HD bracket.


----------



## Gregor

10 worked fine for me as well. Just be careful not to strip the head.


----------



## richsadams

Donni said:


> Don't forget Torx 15, you need it to open the hard drive bracket


TiVo stopped using Torx 15 on Series3's. AFAIK all screws are now Torx 10, case, bracket, drive, everything.


----------



## lessd

richsadams said:


> TiVo stopped using Torx 15 on Series3's. AFAIK all screws are now Torx 10, case, bracket, drive, everything.


All the TPs I have worked on have T15 on the drive bracket, and i never saw a T10 on a TiVo-HD drive bracket, worked on one made in Nov of 2009 and it had a T15 on the drive bracket. You can make a T10 work if the T15 screw is not too tight.


----------



## richsadams

lessd said:


> All the TPs I have worked on have T15 on the drive bracket, and i never saw a T10 on a TiVo-HD drive bracket, worked on one made in Nov of 2009 and it had a T15 on the drive bracket. You can make a T10 work if the T15 screw is not too tight.


Hmmm...I've upgrade a my own Premiere XL (pre-ordered at introduction) and a Premiere (purchased last month)...both only used Torx 10's. Our TiVo HD had all Torx 10's as well.

Must be some different builds out there. If that's the case having a Torx 15 handy would be a good idea...can't hurt.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

lessd said:


> All the TPs I have worked on have T15 on the drive bracket, and i never saw a T10 on a TiVo-HD drive bracket, worked on one made in Nov of 2009 and it had a T15 on the drive bracket. You can make a T10 work if the T15 screw is not too tight.


Agreed...T15 still in use on the drive bracket itself (where it connects to the drive, not the motherboard).


----------



## generaltso

I ordered a Premiere XL from Woot yesterday, and I'd like to add as much drive space as possible. After reading this thread, it appears that 2TB is the max total size regardless of whether the box is a standard Premiere or XL. But I did see one post near the beginning that said the barrier is 2TB plus the original drive size. Does that mean that it should be possible to get an XL to 3TB total size?

Assuming I'm limited to 2TB total, I need to decide if I'm going to replace the internal drive with a 2TB or just add a 1TB DVR Expander drive. Replacing the internal avoids a second point of potential failure. But adding the external gives me the same 2TB of total storage while keeping the box in a 100&#37; supported configuration.

Are there other advantages or disadvantages to either solution that I'm missing?

Thanks!


----------



## ThreeSoFar

generaltso said:


> I ordered a Premiere XL from Woot yesterday, and I'd like to add as much drive space as possible. After reading this thread, it appears that 2TB is the max total size regardless of whether the box is a standard Premiere or XL. But I did see one post near the beginning that said the barrier is 2TB plus the original drive size. Does that mean that it should be possible to get an XL to 3TB total size?
> 
> Assuming I'm limited to 2TB total, I need to decide if I'm going to replace the internal drive with a 2TB or just add a 1TB DVR Expander drive. Replacing the internal avoids a second point of potential failure. But adding the external gives me the same 2TB of total storage while keeping the box in a 100% supported configuration.
> 
> Are there other advantages or disadvantages to either solution that I'm missing?
> 
> Thanks!


Keep the original drive unchanged on the shelf. Pop it back in if you need warranty coverage.

Avoid the external.


----------



## generaltso

ThreeSoFar said:


> Avoid the external.


Is that just to avoid a second point of failure, or is there another reason? Does the free space indicator have the same accuracy with both options?

I guess I could just use the XL with the stock drive for a while since either upgrade option will preserve my recordings. If I wait long enough, maybe WD will release a 2TB expander. But I've never been good at waiting, so that probably won't happen.

Is it even worth trying to upgrade to a 3TB drive, or has that already been tried with an XL and proven not to work?


----------



## alyssa

The premiere's can only be upgraded to a 2TB HD. I don't quite understand why but it is so. 
I believe he's recommending not going with a external because if the external goes bad you'll lose all your recordings, and the WD DVR's have a *bad* track record. 
The Comer upgrade is really the way to go. Plus once you do the upgrade, keep the old HD for backup. If the new HD goes bad then you still have your cablecard pairing & you can either drop it into your tivo or upgrade another HD from it.


----------



## richsadams

alyssa said:


> The premiere's can only be upgraded to a 2TB HD. I don't quite understand why but it is so.
> I believe he's recommending not going with a external because if the external goes bad you'll lose all your recordings, and the WD DVR's have a *bad* track record.
> The Comer upgrade is really the way to go. Plus once you do the upgrade, keep the old HD for backup. If the new HD goes bad then you still have your cablecard pairing & you can either drop it into your tivo or upgrade another HD from it.





ThreeSoFar said:


> Keep the original drive unchanged on the shelf. Pop it back in if you need warranty coverage.
> 
> Avoid the external.


+1 :up:


----------



## generaltso

alyssa said:


> The premiere's can only be upgraded to a 2TB HD.


Yeah, everything I've seen indicates that to be the case. But has anyone tried a 3TB drive in an XL or only in a standard Premiere? I'm willing to try it, but I won't bother if it's already been done.


----------



## BigT4187

Still reading through the posts. Although I did order my 2TB hard drive.

more questions ... 

- When I get the drive, do I need to format the drive at all to confirm the AAM and Intellipark timeout settings? 

- Can I just plug the 2TB drive into my PC and run HDDScan and wdidle.exe without the drive being formatted?

Thanks for putting up with my questions.


----------



## lessd

BigT4187 said:


> Still reading through the posts. Although I did order my 2TB hard drive.
> 
> more questions ...
> 
> - When I get the drive, do I need to format the drive at all to confirm the AAM and Intellipark timeout settings?
> 
> - Can I just plug the 2TB drive into my PC and run HDDScan and wdidle.exe without the drive being formatted?
> 
> Thanks for putting up with my questions.


No format is needed and you (if you want ) can run wdidle3, some newer WD drives don't require that so you could try not running wdidle3 and if the drive gives you a problem in a soft boot, you than can run wdidle3 without any data loss at any time.


----------



## BigT4187

lessd said:


> No format is needed and you (if you want ) can run wdidle3, some newer WD drives don't require that so you could try not running wdidle3 and if the drive gives you a problem in a soft boot, if needed you can than run wdidle3 without any data loss at any time.


Thanks for the quick reply!!


----------



## alyssa

generaltso said:


> Yeah, everything I've seen indicates that to be the case. But has anyone tried a 3TB drive in an XL or only in a standard Premiere? I'm willing to try it, but I won't bother if it's already been done.


To my limited knowledge, it's been tried in an XL. IIRC, even the upgrade sellers haven't been able to break the 2 TB ceiling.


----------



## KenVa

I understand people have had luck using this tool to upgrade a Tivo HD. Can this be done starting from a 1TB that I upgraded to with WinMFS before this tool was created, or would I have to go back to the orig disk? I'm hoping to be able to copy the previously upgraded disk. 

I already used this to upgrade my Premiere disk to a 2TB and it worked perfectly.


----------



## richsadams

KenVa said:


> I understand people have had luck using this tool to upgrade a Tivo HD. Can this be done starting from a 1TB that I upgraded to with WinMFS before this tool was created, or would I have to go back to the orig disk? I'm hoping to be able to copy the previously upgraded disk.


Unfortunately you have to use the original drive for the upgrade. You could transfer (non-copy) protected shows to your other TiVo and move them back again after the upgrade.


----------



## KenVa

richsadams said:


> Unfortunately you have to use the original drive for the upgrade. You could transfer (non-copy) protected shows to your other TiVo and move them back again after the upgrade.


By the time I read your response I has already finished doing the copy. I figured by that time I would just try it out, so I expanded it using the tool and then tried to Supersize it, but that failed. I put the drive in the tivo HD and it works !!!!

It shows 318 hours of HD recording space. I really didn't have much time to play with it this morning, but previous recording seem to work and everything seems fine. Is there something that will not work or may not upgrade? I'll have to check it out more tonight.


----------



## Royski

I upgraded with a Newegg WD20EARS ($69.99 after rebate) this weekend. Worked great. The drive was manufactured in December 2010 and I didn't bother with the WD software.


----------



## richsadams

KenVa said:


> By the time I read your response I has already finished doing the copy. I figured by that time I would just try it out, so I expanded it using the tool and then tried to Supersize it, but that failed. I put the drive in the tivo HD and it works !!!!
> 
> It shows 318 hours of HD recording space. I really didn't have much time to play with it this morning, but previous recording seem to work and everything seems fine. Is there something that will not work or may not upgrade? I'll have to check it out more tonight.


Well, that's excellent news! I was passing on what I recalled the author (Comer) saying (and relying on the instructions in the first post), so it's great to know that an already upgraded drive can be upgraded again...thanks very much for that. :up:

COMER: Do you see any issues?


----------



## retiredqwest

KenVa said:


> By the time I read your response I has already finished doing the copy. I figured by that time I would just try it out, so I expanded it using the tool and then tried to Supersize it, but that failed. I put the drive in the tivo HD and it works !!!!
> 
> It shows 318 hours of HD recording space. I really didn't have much time to play with it this morning, but previous recording seem to work and everything seems fine. Is there something that will not work or may not upgrade? I'll have to check it out more tonight.


There is a thread for the THD and JMFS if you would like to use that to continue.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462179

If I remember correctly, I copied and expanded a stock THD to various size HD's and JMFS did not even recognize them! BUT, that may have been using REV .68 versus REV 1.04 that is available now.

So I'm copying the stock THD to a 1TB WD10EADS and will report back later with what I find.... in the other thread.


----------



## wesbc

Well I'm about to make the jump to 2TB using a newly sourced Hitachi CoolSpin 5K3000. AAM is not a supported feature but the drive is quite enough. Need to find out about the power management option. Also I now noticed that the Tivo drive was installed upside down. Is that what everyone is doing with their new drives? It's kinda odd.


----------



## jcthorne

Mine was not installed upside down. Mine had the circuit board down.


----------



## wesbc

Well I suppose it doesn't really matter, I have to install my drive down because if the drive was installed right side up, it would become too tall for the cover to go back on. I suppose it depends on the bracket and they might have changed them later on as mine is one of the first ones off the line. 

Anyway just installed with the newest Hitachi 5900rpm model, HDS5C3020ALA632. AAM was not a feature available to be set. The only thing I'm a little curious about is I read somewhere about enabling power management. I see that this drive have Advanced Power Management, but it's currently disabled and don't know what value is needed. Also I do see Power Management under HDDscan but not sure if that's something I need to touch.

Anyway, It's booting up now, so far so good and the drive is pretty quiet. Though it's sitting on top of an older replay which might be masking any noise.


----------



## richsadams

wesbc said:


> Well I suppose it doesn't really matter, I have to install my drive down because if the drive was installed right side up, it would become too tall for the cover to go back on. I suppose it depends on the bracket and they might have changed them later on as mine is one of the first ones off the line.
> 
> Anyway just installed with the newest Hitachi 5900rpm model, HDS5C3020ALA632. AAM was not a feature available to be set. The only thing I'm a little curious about is I read somewhere about enabling power management. I see that this drive have Advanced Power Management, but it's currently disabled and don't know what value is needed. Also I do see Power Management under HDDscan but not sure if that's something I need to touch.
> 
> Anyway, It's booting up now, so far so good and the drive is pretty quiet. Though it's sitting on top of an older replay which might be masking any noise.


Congratulations on your "new" TiVo! FWIW there's no need to make any adjustments to APM. TiVo is recording 24/7 and the drive never has the opportunity to spin down.

When you have a moment can you please post the exact model number of your new hard drive? TIA and enjoy!


----------



## wesbc

richsadams said:


> Congratulations on your "new" TiVo! FWIW there's no need to make any adjustments to APM. TiVo is recording 24/7 and the drive never has the opportunity to spin down.
> 
> When you have a moment can you please post the exact model number of your new hard drive? TIA and enjoy!


Thanks for the input, I figured as much regarding the APM. So far so good, all my show was copied over and it's up and running with no issue so far.

Here's the link to the drive I got from newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475&cm_re=hitachi_2tb-_-22-145-475-_-Product

Link to Hitachi.

http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/desktop/deskstar/deskstar-5k3000

There was a really good deal on it Tuesday during their shell shocker for $60 after the $10 rebate, and before that it was $70 after the rebate. This is a fairly new drive. I wanted to go the WD route but the 2 EARS I got both failed extended diag test which was disappointing.


----------



## rkrenicki

richsadams said:


> Well, that's excellent news! I was passing on what I recalled the author (Comer) saying (and relying on the instructions in the first post), so it's great to know that an already upgraded drive can be upgraded again...thanks very much for that. :up:
> 
> COMER: Do you see any issues?


I too have been interested in this. I have two Premieres, both with WD10EARS drives in them. One drive I expanded myself, and the other was a DVR-Dude drive from ebay.

I have been feeling a bit cramped with all my HD recordings, so I have been thinking about upgrading to WD20EADS/WD20EARS or WD20EURS, but I wanted to expand the drive again if at all possible. I will be ordering the drive(s) next week and get back with results, but this is promising that someone else was able to do it.


----------



## retiredqwest

ultatryon said:


> I too have been interested in this. I have two Premieres, both with WD10EARS drives in them. One drive I expanded myself, and the other was a DVR-Dude drive from ebay.
> 
> I have been feeling a bit cramped with all my HD recordings, so I have been thinking about upgrading to WD20EADS/WD20EARS or WD20EURS, but I wanted to expand the drive again if at all possible. I will be ordering the drive(s) next week and get back with results, but this is promising that someone else was able to do it.


Even though this is a TP thread, the original post was concerning a THD that had been copied and expanded using Winmfs. And using JMFS to copy and expand that as the source and expanding to a larger drive for the THD.

Since I have a TP:
I'll copy and expand the 320G to a 500G. 
Then see if the 500G will copy and expand to a 2TB.

I want to use the 500G since it will take less time to do the second step.

Be back later....

well more like tomorrow.....


----------



## rkrenicki

retiredqwest said:


> Even though this is a TP thread, the original post was concerning a THD that had been copied and expanded using Winmfs. And using JMFS to copy and expand that as the source and expanding to a larger drive for the THD.
> 
> Since I have a TP:
> I'll copy and expand the 320G to a 500G.
> Then see if the 500G will copy and expand to a 2TB.
> 
> I want to use the 500G since it will take less time to do the second step.
> 
> Be back later....
> 
> well more like tomorrow.....


That is true, I have a few drives kicking around that I could try that on as well.

Either way I will be upgrading to 2tb, but if I can get around shuffling content around on my tivos and TTG, all the better.


----------



## BigT4187

Wow! What a smooth upgrade! Everything went as expected. The hardest part was putting the cover back on the TiVo Premiere! Some details:


My Western Digital 2TB drive arrived today (http://amzn.to/gYeyhx) with a manufacture date of Dec 04 2010.
I removed the 320GB drive from the TiVo Premiere
I connected both drives to my PC via SATA cable directly to the motherboard.
I booted up the live CD and it detected both drives
I started the copy. It took just under 2 hours to complete.
I expanded the new 2TB drive
I "supersized" the new 2TB drive
After the "supersize" was complete, I powered down the PC and disconnected the 320GB original TiVo Premiere hard drive
I booted up the Hitachi tools to set the AAM to 128
Since the manufacture date on the new drive was 12/04/2010 I decided to try and NOT set the IntelliPark setting.
I put the new hard drive in the TiVo, remembered to connect the power & data cables. 
I put the cover back on, reconnected the cable, HDMI, LAN and power cables and waited
The TiVo booted up in a few minutes and I confirmed 317 hours of HD recording time.
I restarted the TiVo via the menus and crossed my fingers
The TiVo booted up without any issues at all.
The original TiVo 320GB drive is now sitting in my closet in an anti-static bag just in case it is ever needed.

Thanks to Comer for this wonderful tool (a donation will be on its way as soon as I finish posting this.)

Also, thanks to Rich for his help and guidance.

If you are considering doing this upgrade, do not be concerned at all. Like I said, everything went smoothly.

Thanks again.


----------



## richsadams

wesbc said:


> Thanks for the input, I figured as much regarding the APM. So far so good, all my show was copied over and it's up and running with no issue so far.
> 
> Here's the link to the drive I got from newegg.
> 
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475&cm_re=hitachi_2tb-_-22-145-475-_-Product
> 
> Link to Hitachi.
> 
> http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/desktop/deskstar/deskstar-5k3000


Thanks for the info on the Hitachi drive...great to know. Although the link to the specs on the Hitachi website is for a 3TB model, they are probably about the same. One of the key issues for a lot of people are the acoustics. It lists it as 2.4 to 2.5 Bels idle which is only slight higher than the WD GP drive line. It doesn't list the seek acoustics...which are the most important really...but with the idle being what it is it s/b fairly quiet. Can you hear the drive in a quiet room?

Thanks again and enjoy!


----------



## richsadams

BigT4187 said:


> Wow! What a smooth upgrade! Everything went as expected. The hardest part was putting the cover back on the TiVo Premiere!


Nice work Tony, and thanks for the details! :up: (Although you left out the part about struggling to reinstall one of the drive bracket screws.  )

Enjoy your "new" TiVo!


----------



## richsadams

ultatryon said:


> That is true, I have a few drives kicking around that I could try that on as well.
> 
> Either way I will be upgrading to 2tb, but if I can get around shuffling content around on my tivos and TTG, all the better.


Thanks for taking the time to be a guinea pig! I know I'm looking forward to the results.


----------



## wesbc

richsadams said:


> Thanks for the info on the Hitachi drive...great to know. Although the link to the specs on the Hitachi website is for a 3TB model, they are probably about the same. One of the key issues for a lot of people are the acoustics. It lists it as 2.4 to 2.5 Bels idle which is only slight higher than the WD GP drive line. It doesn't list the seek acoustics...which are the most important really...but with the idle being what it is it s/b fairly quiet. Can you hear the drive in a quiet room?
> 
> Thanks again and enjoy!


The Hitachi link is for the 5K3000 series of drives which includes the 1.5, 2 and 3 TB. 2.5 Bels idel for the 3 TB and 2.4 for <3 TB which are the 1.5 and 2. Yeah too bad they don't list the seek.

I had to unplug my old replay to hear the new Tivo and wow can't believe how loud it was compare to the new Tivo. With 2 show recording at the same time I do not hear a thing sitting 6-8 ft from it. I even shut off my air purifier as that was keeping me from hearing anything. Only if I press my ears next to it do I hear the drive doing it's thing. I'm definitely satisfied with the performance of this drive so far.


----------



## BigT4187

richsadams said:


> Nice work Tony, and thanks for the details! :up: (Although you left out the part about struggling to reinstall one of the drive bracket screws.  )
> 
> Enjoy your "new" TiVo!


You know what, Rich .... I thought it was just me. That one screw was a pain. 

I'll take that small hassle for the rest of the procedure going so smoothly!


----------



## richsadams

wesbc said:


> The Hitachi link is for the 5K3000 series of drives which includes the 1.5, 2 and 3 TB. 2.5 Bels idel for the 3 TB and 2.4 for <3 TB which are the 1.5 and 2. Yeah too bad they don't list the seek.
> 
> I had to unplug my old replay to hear the new Tivo and wow can't believe how loud it was compare to the new Tivo. With 2 show recording at the same time I do not hear a thing sitting 6-8 ft from it. I even shut off my air purifier as that was keeping me from hearing anything. Only if I press my ears next to it do I hear the drive doing it's thing. I'm definitely satisfied with the performance of this drive so far.


Excellent to know. I will keep the reference info for future recommendations. :up:


----------



## richsadams

BigT4187 said:


> You know what, Rich .... I thought it was just me. That one screw was a pain.
> 
> I'll take that small hassle for the rest of the procedure going so smoothly!


LOL, you're not alone on that one and it is certainly worth the trouble!


----------



## retiredqwest

retiredqwest said:


> Since I have a TP:
> I'll copy and expand the 320G to a 500G.
> Then see if the 500G will copy and expand to a 2TB.
> 
> I want to use the 500G since it will take less time to do the second step.
> 
> Be back later....
> 
> well more like tomorrow.....


Well, for some reason my copy to the 2TB did not work. It got stuck on the "missing external device" screen.

I'm copying it again right now.....

The copy and expand from the 320G to the 500G did work.

more later.......


----------



## HSW

Just did my second successful upgrade. This one was an XL unit upgraded to a 2TB WD20EARS drive. Ran Wdidle and hdscan first. The original drive was 50&#37; full and copied everything perfectly except it took 7 hours. Thanks for this great program.


----------



## richsadams

HSW said:


> Just did my second successful upgrade. This one was an XL unit upgraded to a 2TB WD20EARS drive. Ran Wdidle and hdscan first. The original drive was 50% full and copied everything perfectly except it took 7 hours. Thanks for this great program.


Congrats and thanks for the update!

FWIW as mentioned earlier, this is a full copy program so it doesn't matter what the drive content is (full, empty or somewhere in between), the copy process/time will always be the same.

Enjoy!


----------



## Juano11

Just completed an upgrade of my TiVo Premiere with a WD20EARS drive.

It worked exactly as described. I had upgraded my TiVoHD in the past using InstantCake. This process was equally as easy.

Ran the WD Diagnostics full scan which took about 6-8hrs (I just let it run ovenight)

Connected the two drives to SATA ports on my motherboard and disconnected all the other drives except one optical drive.

Booted from the CD, both drives recognized, and ran the copy process (Approx 2-3 hrs)

Expand (seconds to minutes)

Supersize (seconds to minutes)

Removed old tivo drive and reconnected my regular HDDs to the motherboard. Adjusted the acoustic settings with HDD scan (Seconds to minutes)

Install the new drive...Yes, a couple of those screws were hard to get to. I definitely needed both a T10 & T15 bit. T10 to remove the case and drive mount. T15 to remove the drive from the mount itself.

Power up....SUCCESS! 317hrs of HD goodness for me!

My EARS drive was manufactured in November 2010, did not mess with intellipark, just soft-rebooted fine.

Thanks to Comer, Rich, and everyone else who contributed to this thread.

John

P.S. Comer, a few dineros will be headed your way soon.....


----------



## retiredqwest

retiredqwest said:


> Well, for some reason my copy to the 2TB did not work. It got stuck on the "missing external device" screen.
> 
> I'm copying it again right now.....
> 
> The copy and expand from the 320G to the 500G did work.
> 
> more later.......


I tried this again and got the same results.

So, using the stock drive 320G to a 500G and then upto 1 2TB does not work for me. And I doubt that using other sizes would make a difference.

I had my doubts JMFS would expand a TP drive twice.


----------



## richsadams

retiredqwest said:


> I tried this again and got the same results.
> 
> So, using the stock drive 320G to a 500G and then upto 1 2TB does not work for me. And I doubt that using other sizes would make a difference.
> 
> I had my doubts JMFS would expand a TP drive twice.


Thanks for doing all of that hard work. :up: Now I'm trying to wrap my head around this.

So, we're talking about a TiVo Premiere correct?

Upgrading from original to larger 500GB drive = Yes?

Upgrading from upgraded 500GB drive to 1TB drive = Yes?

Upgrading from upgraded 1TB drive to 2TB drive = No?

I'm confused (nothing new). TIA for setting me straight.


----------



## retiredqwest

richsadams said:


> Thanks for doing all of that hard work. :up: Now I'm trying to wrap my head around this.
> 
> So, we're talking about a TiVo Premiere correct?


Yes this was using the stock 320G drive from a Tivo Premiere.



> Upgrading from original to larger 500GB drive = Yes?


yes



> Upgrading from upgraded 500GB drive to 1TB drive = Yes?


Went straight from the 500G to the 2TB



> Upgrading from upgraded 1TB drive to 2TB drive = No?


didn't do that....



> I'm confused (nothing new). TIA for setting me straight.


one of the many pleasures of advancing age......

I don't believe the drive sizes matter too much, JMFS will only expand a TP drive once.

And in retrospect, I doubt that too many people would use JMFS on a target drive less than 2TB.


----------



## richsadams

retiredqwest said:


> one of the many pleasures of advancing age......


 Yours or mine? Ha!



retiredqwest said:


> I don't believe the drive sizes matter too much, JMFS will only expand a TP drive once.


Ah, got it. Thanks.


----------



## speed_phreak

retiredqwest said:


> I don't believe the drive sizes matter too much, JMFS will only expand a TP drive once.


This is a very interesting revelation... I had a 1tb WD green (non AV) laying around when I bought my TiVo, so I immediately upgraded it with Comer's JMFS disk. Now, I have seen how capable I am at filling up that 1tb drive and just purchased a 2tb wd av-gp drive, but have yet to try to upgrade to it.

I am very concerned that I might not be able to further upgrade my already upgraded drive... I gotta send all my recordings to the PC, write down SP's, and start over? blah!!!

Anyone else tried this successfully? Comer?

TIA


----------



## peter888chan

speed_phreak said:


> This is a very interesting revelation... I had a 1tb WD green (non AV) laying around when I bought my TiVo, so I immediately upgraded it with Comer's JMFS disk. Now, I have seen how capable I am at filling up that 1tb drive and just purchased a 2tb wd av-gp drive, but have yet to try to upgrade to it.
> 
> I am very concerned that I might not be able to further upgrade my already upgraded drive... I gotta send all my recordings to the PC, write down SP's, and start over? blah!!!
> 
> Anyone else tried this successfully? Comer?
> 
> TIA


Aside from having to wait several hours for the drives to copy, it couldn't hurt. Worse case after doing the copy/expand is you find it doesn't work. Then you put the 1TB back in. If you still have the original drive, upgrade from that - you lose the shows though.


----------



## MikeAndrews

retiredqwest said:


> ...That is why weaknees, dvrupgrade and dvr_dude on ebay don't sell anything above 2TB.


I noted just yesterday that Weaknees is still offering a 2TB+2TB setup for the Premiere.

I'm not interested.


----------



## retiredqwest

netringer said:


> I noted just yesterday that Weaknees is still offering a 2TB+2TB setup for the Premiere.
> 
> I'm not interested.


I don't think they offered that kit when I last looked....... $549, no thanks.


----------



## Fofer

netringer said:


> I noted just yesterday that Weaknees is still offering a 2TB+2TB setup for the Premiere.


Does this mean the below is no longer true?



richsadams said:


> Fofer said:
> 
> 
> 
> Lastly - does doing this upgrade preclude me, in the future, from perhaps plugging in a DVR Extender for even more space? Or is that still an available option? Just wondering.
> 
> 
> 
> Yes again. The "plug and pray" ability to attach an eSATA drive is lost after any upgrade (although an expansion drive can be manually married/blessed using winMFS or MFSTools in the case of 1TB or smaller upgrades...using winMFS or MFSTools as the upgrade program.) Due to the current partition structure TiVo cannot handle anything more than 2TB's anyway.
> 
> Happy upgrading!
Click to expand...


----------



## richsadams

Fofer said:


> Does this mean the below is no longer true?


That's a good question. AFAIK the partition structure hasn't changed. I'm almost certain it's not a plug and pray option...they would have had to have blessed the second drive. However it doesn't say what they are offering outside of "two 2TB drives". I don't know how they'd squeeze a 2nd drive inside so it must be an external.

So we need a guinea pig...er...volunteer to drop some coin and do a little diagnosis. Did you say you're up for it?


----------



## Fofer

richsadams said:


> That's a good question. AFAIK the partition structure hasn't changed. I'm almost certain it's not a plug and pray option...they would have had to have blessed the second drive. However it doesn't say what they are offering outside of "two 2TB drives". I don't know how they'd squeeze a 2nd drive inside so it must be an external.


More info:


----------



## speed_phreak

comer said:


> No, sorry  You can expand only once from stock drive. You can not expand an already expanded drive.


Doh... but you have to go pretty deep to find that.... here

This really should be a *NOTE:* in post #1, to warn people to plan their upgrades more carefully....


----------



## richsadams

Fofer said:


> More info:


Skipped right over that I guess. Thanks! :up:


----------



## wesbc

Well to report back on my Hitachi 2TB drive upgrade. Since upgrading the drive, I've had 3 instances where the Tivo would freeze and stop responding to the remote. Front panel amber light wouldn't even light up from button presses. First time it was recording 2 show and I had to unplug the unit. Other two time system rebooted itself one just recently while nothing was recording but I was watching something recorded.

This is disappointing. I'm not sure if this is drive related, or something else.

Question, if I need to swap drive, I should be able to use the same instruction here to copy from a 2TB to another 2TB without losing any show right. I would just skip the expand and supersize.


----------



## richsadams

I had an odd incident tonight with my TiVo Premiere XL (upgraded w/2TB WD20EARS). At almost exactly 5:30 p.m. PST a recording I was watching froze. It didn't pixelate or anything just stopped as if I had hit pause. I hit play, pause, TiVo Central, etc. and saw the amber light on the front panel blink, but no activity. I waited it out a bit and it suddenly started playing again for a moment and then stopped again. About 45 seconds later it started playing again and responded to all commands as if nothing had ever happened.

I was aware of the time as the NBC Nightly News began recording at the same moment TiVo froze. When I went to play the NBC NN back it started, then macroblocked badly...garbled picture and sound and then started playing normally but the first minute or so of the recording was missing...exactly in sync with the freeze up.

I've no idea why that happened but I have seen something similar when this particular TiVo was stock. I know a corrupted signal and/or cable card problem can cause I/O error issues (it's even happened on our Series3) which can cause TiVo to crash. So I'm inclined to believe it's not the upgraded drive, but it's worth noting on this forum what we're seeing I think.

Hopefully it's a fluke and life will continue to be good.


----------



## wesbc

Rich thanks for the insight. With my instances, when the Tivo froze, no button press of the remote is registered with the Tivo, no amber light blink on front panel. I tried to wait out the first instance but after about 2-3 min, I just unplugged. The other two instance, the Tivo froze, then within a 1min it starts playing for 5-10 sec, then froze again and auto reboot shortly after. Again no remote button press was registered. This is similar to instances on several thread I've read and those user have experienced the issue since last year so at least I know it's not related to any recent software update.

The Hitachi drive supports SATA3 which is up to 6Gbps. Of course that's backward compatible, but just not sure how Tivo handles it. I know someone else from another forum that is using this same drive for upgrade of their Tivo so hopefully he can shed some light for me.


----------



## MikeAndrews

richsadams said:


> I had an odd incident tonight with my TiVo Premiere XL (upgraded w/2TB WD20EARS). At almost exactly 5:30 p.m. PST a recording I was watching froze. ...
> 
> I've no idea why that happened but I have seen something similar when this particular TiVo was stock. I know a corrupted signal and/or cable card problem can cause I/O error issues (it's even happened on our Series3) which can cause TiVo to crash. So I'm inclined to believe it's not the upgraded drive, but it's worth noting on this forum what we're seeing I think.
> 
> Hopefully it's a fluke and life will continue to be good.


Keep trying to test/torture it. I can tell when mine is going to lock up and reboot when I get that non-responsiveness, audio/video pauses and manly slowness in the onscreen menus - with SD menus.

I had distorted colors and unplugged/reseated the HDMI cable. I haven't had another lock since that and temporarily unplugging the ethernet cable along with taking the WHS off the LAN, but I haven't tried hard to cause one. The loose HDMI cable leads me to believe that it could be yet another HDCP problem. Wanna bet that once again repeatedly processing the HDCP handshake is the major load?


----------



## JPS10

Searched this thread and elsewhere and was not able to find answers to these questions: 

1) Is it possible to use jmfs to save an image of the original HDD for future use without copying it to a new drive to be installed in Premiere this time?

2) If I do open my Premiere and ever have a warranty issue, is there a way Tivo can tell it has been opened if I return it with original drive? I know that this would void warranty but is there a seal of sorts or can Tivo track hardware changes when unit connects to Tivo service?

Thanks


----------



## ThreeSoFar

JPS10 said:


> Searched this thread and elsewhere and was not able to find answers to these questions:
> 
> 1) Is it possible to use jmfs to save an image of the original HDD for future use without copying it to a new drive to be installed in Premiere this time?


No.


JPS10 said:


> 2) If I do open my Premiere and ever have a warranty issue, is there a way Tivo can tell it has been opened if I return it with original drive? I know that this would void warranty but is there a seal of sorts or can Tivo track hardware changes when unit connects to Tivo service?


Not really. Series 1 units, maybe S2, had such a physical sticker. They just don't bother anymore. Obv. the non-stock drive would tip them off--but just save the original and pop it back in if you ever need service.

Caveat: Now, electronically...via the logs they have access to every time your TiVo "calls home", they can see that you have a non-stock drive. They just don't care. If you mention a drive upgrade, they of course have the option of not covering your warranty repair. Just don't mention it.


----------



## MikeAndrews

netringer said:


> Keep trying to test/torture it. I can tell when mine is going to lock up and reboot when I get that non-responsiveness, audio/video pauses and manly slowness in the onscreen menus - with SD menus.
> 
> I had distorted colors and unplugged/reseated the HDMI cable. I haven't had another lock since that and temporarily unplugging the ethernet cable along with taking the WHS off the LAN, but I haven't tried hard to cause one. The loose HDMI cable leads me to believe that it could be yet another HDCP problem. Wanna bet that once again repeatedly processing the HDCP handshake is the major load?


Thanks, Rich.

Wrong thread...but...Guess what happened after I ran Kickstart 57?

I got "HDMI connection not permitted" audio out, audio on, video on "HDMI connection not permitted." Unplugged the HDMI cable. The audio stays on. Plug it in. Drops. "HDMI connection not permitted" Blip. Wash. Rinse Repeat.

Rerouted and replaced the HDMI cable. restarted the Premiere twice. Did a reset on the TV. Fought grief like a pet had died for about an hour.

Finally fixed it by pulling the plug on the TV.

Can we send a squad of A-10s to the lab that invented HDCP to keep people from using the equipment they paid for to view the content they paid for.

BTW, on the Kickstart 57, The S.M.A.R.T. test passed. Every other test I ran on that session failed. I'm not in the mood to try another session.


----------



## wireless200

Just upgraded my second Premiere with a WD20EARS. It went smoothly. Took about an hour or so to copy and it booted up the first time. Excellent!


----------



## richsadams

netringer said:


> Can we send a squad of A-10s to the lab that invented HDCP to keep people from using the equipment they paid for to view the content they paid for.


Sending Warthogs to the house of whomever came up with HDCP is one of the best ideas I've heard in ages. After that they can visit the inventor of copy protection. 

Glad to hear things are good again! :up:


----------



## wesbc

So now it's the forth time my Tivo locked up and rebooted. This is while I was watching a recorded show and something else was recording. I had just paused a show and it wouldn't restart, no remote command was taking and then it rebooted.

So my question is, can I use the JMFS tool to copy this 2TB drive to another 2TB drive successfully? I shouldn't need to expand / supersize.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

wesbc said:


> So now it's the forth time my Tivo locked up and rebooted. This is while I was watching a recorded show and something else was recording. I had just paused a show and it wouldn't restart, no remote command was taking and then it rebooted.
> 
> So my question is, can I use the JMFS tool to copy this 2TB drive to another 2TB drive successfully? I shouldn't need to expand / supersize.


Probably. As long as the new drive is no smaller--and it's to the byte--the new drive must be at least as big as the one you're copying from. "2TB" drives can differ in exact usable size. Buying the exact model isn't even 100%, but is likely to work.

But you might consider a kickstart prior to trying a new drive. Search here for it. There's a code you can enter via the remote as TiVo is booting that will force TiVo to switch boot partitions. TiVo comes with two partitions where the OS and TiVo software live. When a new update comes out, it is built in the other partition, which then becomes the boot partition after the upgrade is put in place. This kickstart code forces that same behavior even without an upgrade. (NOTE: I'm not positive these codes still work on Premiere, but I would bet they do.)

My thought with the kickstart is that if it's data on the drive (part of TiVo's software, not shows) that is corrupted, the new one may have the same problem. This isn't very likely, though.


----------



## MikeAndrews

wesbc said:


> So now it's the forth time my Tivo locked up and rebooted. This is while I was watching a recorded show and something else was recording. I had just paused a show and it wouldn't restart, no remote command was taking and then it rebooted.
> 
> So my question is, can I use the JMFS tool to copy this 2TB drive to another 2TB drive successfully? I shouldn't need to expand / supersize.


MFSCOPY on the JMFS tool or Live MFS or WinMFS for that matter will work, any Linux Live CD will do it with dd.



Code:


dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024

_(In from disk a, out to disk b)_

BUT I'll bet you don't have a bad disk. Mine has done the freeze/reboot dance and I'm thinking the disk is OK. After I restarted to TV to clear HDCP confusion, my Premiere has stayed up but I've still gotten signs of impending failure with drops and slowdowns.

One suggestion so far has to been to see how solid the operation is when you keep the Ethernet cable unplugged as much as possible - with the SD menus. The HD menus will complain endlessly about no net access.


----------



## JamieP

netringer said:


> MFSCOPY on the JMFS tool or Live MFS or WinMFS for that matter will work, any Linux Live CD will do it with dd.
> 
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024
> 
> _(In from disk a, out to disk b)_
> ...


Just an aside: I've found that I get much better performance with dd_rescue and the "-k" switch. I cloned a 2TB recently, and it took < 5 hours and ran at over 120MB/sec.

From the dd_rescue help:



> -k use efficient in-kernel zerocopy splice


I'm using dd_rescue 1.23, but I understand the "splice" option was added starting in 1.15.

I haven't checked what version of dd_rescue is included in the mfslive or jmfs isos. I'm using a Fedora 14 system.

--Jamie


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> (I'm not positive these codes still work on Premiere, but I would bet they do.)


Kickstarts work fine on Series4/TiVo Premieres...although the procedure is a little different than on previous models.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2


----------



## dianebrat

Just to add on to previous comments I really only have one word for this thread:
*"Wow!"*
freeking wow, putting a 2TB WD Green drive into my new Premiere XL was one of the easiest upgrades I have ever done, and I've been upgrading my own Tivo's since 2000.


----------



## MikeAndrews

My Premiere just froze/locked/ rebooted as I was checking the temperature during the Oscars recording (the high of 37C). It went down just long enough to miss the entire people lost this year tribute. 

I'm glad I had the really (6 year) old S3 to switch to.

I'm going to replace the 2TB hard drive but I have no faith that will fix it.


----------



## richsadams

netringer said:


> My Premiere just froze/locked/ rebooted as I was checking the temperature during the Oscars recording (the high of 37C). It went down just long enough to miss the entire people lost this year tribute.
> 
> I'm glad I had the really (6 year) old S3 to switch to.
> 
> I'm going to replace the 2TB hard drive but I have no faith that will fix it.


Bummer. It doesn't seem like as many actors died last year compared to years before...they filled with lots of behind the scenes types so you didn't miss a great deal IMHO.

In any case, it does sound like there's an issue, but can't say if it's the drive or the machine or the signal or...

Did you try running some of the Kickstarts?

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2


----------



## jbell73

Ok, I'm having a nasty speed issue with copying the stock 320GB drive to a 2TB drive. This 2TB was already in my tivo, but the fan failed, and I suspected the HDD, ran some diags, and now the 2TB won't boot (all LED's just flash).

Now, I'm resolved to going back to a clean 2TB drive from the factory 320GB. My problem is that ddrescue is only running @ 2.2MB/sec .. So this process will take over 2 days to complete. I've done this many times before, and I've never had such slow performance before. Any ideas? This is what I've tried:

SATA <-> SATA on MB
SATA <-> USB 2.0 ~ no better
Tried swapping READ/WRITE drives ~ no change
Tried using another SATA port for Write Drive ~ no change
did ddrescue /dev/sdX /dev/null -> 80MB/sec or 122MB/sec on each of the drives (reading is not the problem)

I have no idea what else to try, and I have tried everything. Is dd_rescue a faster method? Could my WD20EARS be bad (it passes all of the diagnostics tests). I tried changing the settings with HDPARM and nothing made any difference (Acoustic mode to 254).

Ideas? I'm runnig this again, but it's so painful. After 12 hours of running it was only 25% complete. It should only take 5 hours or so.


----------



## MikeAndrews

jbell73 said:


> Ok, I'm having a nasty speed issue with copying the stock 320GB drive to a 2TB drive. This 2TB was already in my tivo, but the fan failed, and I suspected the HDD, ran some diags, and now the 2TB won't boot (all LED's just flash).
> 
> Now, I'm resolved to going back to a clean 2TB drive from the factory 320GB. My problem is that ddrescue is only running @ 2.2MB/sec .. So this process will take over 2 days to complete. I've done this many times before, and I've never had such slow performance before. Any ideas? This is what I've tried:
> ....


Is the destination drive a Western Digital Green drive? That throughput drop is *exactly* what I've run into with one 2TB WD Green drive in my NAS and I suspect it's a bad drive, maybe failing when the drive gets warm. I can actually see the 2MBpbs write for about a second followed by 2 seconds of ZERO throughput and then the 1 second 2MBbps burst, repeat until Summer.

#2 you can do the 320GB to 2TB drive copy using the copy step on Comer's JMFS live CD. Mine took about an hour and half.


----------



## jbell73

Yes, it is a WD Green 2TB drive (WD20EARS). 

I am doing the copy step from the JMFS live CD (320GB -> 2TB), and that is where I'm only seeing a 2.2MB/sec copy speed... It's expected to run for about 2 days to complete. 

It could be a bad drive, but read speeds are phenomenal, so maybe a write-only issue?

I don't have a spare 2TB drive to test with.


----------



## L David Matheny

jbell73 said:


> Yes, it is a WD Green 2TB drive (WD20EARS).
> 
> I am doing the copy step from the JMFS live CD (320GB -> 2TB), and that is where I'm only seeing a 2.2MB/sec copy speed... It's expected to run for about 2 days to complete.
> 
> It could be a bad drive, but read speeds are phenomenal, so maybe a write-only issue?
> 
> I don't have a spare 2TB drive to test with.


Did you run the WD Data Lifeguard extended diagnostic? Some people think they got bad drives right out of the box, so I ran that on my WD20EVDS. It took about seven hours (and reported no errors).


----------



## MikeAndrews

jbell73 said:


> Yes, it is a WD Green 2TB drive (WD20EARS).
> 
> I am doing the copy step from the JMFS live CD (320GB -> 2TB), and that is where I'm only seeing a 2.2MB/sec copy speed... It's expected to run for about 2 days to complete.
> 
> It could be a bad drive, but read speeds are phenomenal, so maybe a write-only issue?
> 
> I don't have a spare 2TB drive to test with.


THAT'S what mine is! I have two of those in a two drive enclosure. It is on writes where the issue shows.

Now we need to figure out what this issue is.

I'll try the WD utility.

I was thinking I'd have to send it in for a warranty replacement.


----------



## bsnelson

Another successful Premiere upgrade here; I went with a 2TB drive and from 99% full to only 14%  

The worst part was my slow PC with it's SATA add-on card; the average transfer speed was only 16MB/sec, so it took a while. A long while. 

Brad


----------



## Fofer

Not as long as it took me on my PC laptop using a pair of SATA->USB adapters...


----------



## jbell73

The odd thing is that the "DRIVE ERASE" test (using the WD DLGuard tools from within windows) seems to write very fast (~ 120Mb/s), and reports no errors, but pauses occasionally for about 1 second. If I run the full "extended test", the random read section takes forever, and it estimates completion in some 6000 minutes or something crazy. 

I tried to simply partition and format the drive in Windows 7, and the "Quick Format" took about 5 minutes, and then disk writes were running at about 5Mb/s after it was ready. I swapped in my 1TB WD system drive, and writes were back up to a more normal 60Mb/s.

At this point I have determined the drive is defective (there has to be a reason my Tivo was suddenly frozen on live TV and unusable, and constantly rebooting). I've already requested an RMA for the drive, and expect the replacement by the end of the week. 

These things are so cheap now @ amazon for just $79. Crazy cheap enough to just purchase a new one to test with and use in another system.


----------



## MikeAndrews

richsadams said:


> Kickstarts work fine on Series4/TiVo Premieres...although the procedure is a little different than on previous models.
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2





richsadams said:


> Bummer. It doesn't seem like as many actors died last year compared to years before...they filled with lots of behind the scenes types so you didn't miss a great deal IMHO.
> 
> In any case, it does sound like there's an issue, but can't say if it's the drive or the machine or the signal or...
> 
> Did you try running some of the Kickstarts?
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2


I did run Kickstart 5-4 earlier.

Rich, I may owe you a beer (in the interests of ending the crapping in this thread):
http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8403921#post8403921


----------



## Stuxnet

richsadams said:


> Kickstarts work fine on Series4/TiVo Premieres...although the procedure is a little different than on previous models.
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2


I can verify this, lol... it took me 6 reboots before I finally (out of desperation) figured that it wasn't the amber flicker at the start of the reboot, but one that happens several seconds after the boot initiates... At least I can now hit it on my first try (if I'm not distracted)...

Relatedly, how do you restart the Premiere after the KS54 runs its course... I ended up pulling the power cord, waiting 30 sec, and powering up...

I'm going to run the "overnight" in a few hours...


----------



## MikeAndrews

Stuxnet said:


> I can verify this, lol... it took me 6 reboots before I finally (out of desperation) figured that it wasn't the amber flicker at the start of the reboot, but one that happens several seconds after the boot initiates... At least I can now hit it on my first try (if I'm not distracted)...


My dilemma was whether you press (Enter) after the numbers and I'm suspecting that if you do it does a normal boot sequence. I trust that Rich would have put the (Enter) in the instructions if it was supposed to pressed.



Stuxnet said:


> Relatedly, how do you restart the Premiere after the KS54 runs its course... I ended up pulling the power cord, waiting 30 sec, and powering up...
> 
> I'm going to run the "overnight" in a few hours...


I'll probably do that, too, if and when I get the Amazon VOD download to complete, and I don't open up the Premiere and swap the disk before that.


----------



## richsadams

netringer said:


> My dilemma was whether you press (Enter) after the numbers and I'm suspecting that if you do it does a normal boot sequence. I trust that Rich would have put the (Enter) in the instructions if it was supposed to pressed.


No pressing "Enter", just the numbers.


----------



## richsadams

Stuxnet said:


> Relatedly, how do you restart the Premiere after the KS54 runs its course... I ended up pulling the power cord, waiting 30 sec, and powering up...


The SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is actually a Unix/Linux predictive diagnostic test and if you were in that environment you could exit out of it, but since you can't do that with TiVo a power cycle (pull the plug) is in order. You did the right thing.


----------



## jbell73

jbell73 said:


> At this point I have determined the drive is defective (there has to be a reason my Tivo was suddenly frozen on live TV and unusable, and constantly rebooting). I've already requested an RMA for the drive, and expect the replacement by the end of the week.


I just got my replacement drive, and the new 320GB -> 2TB Copy is running at a much faster 36MB/Sec (versus 2.2MB/sec) . At this rate the copy is expected to take 2.5 Hours. Much better than the 48+ Hours I was estimating before with the failed drive.

Lesson learned - don't try and fight incredibly slow copy speeds (especially when doing a SATA <-> SATA with an on-board controller.) Instead RMA the drive. I'm curious if my original copy would have even been done by now. 

-Jeff


----------



## Stuxnet

jbell73 said:


> I just got my replacement drive, and the new 320GB -> 2TB Copy is running at a much faster


Glad to hear that's working for you... Question... are you upgrading the "virgin" drive you just received, or did you go through setup before copying it to the 2TB.

I have a somewhat similar situation, except my failed original drive isn't as quite the trouble you had. for the time being, I've chosen not to RMA the existing drive. I posted HERE why.

I just received a SATA/USB connector I needed to work the upgrade, so I'll be testing my new WD20EARS tomorrow with the WD Data Lifeguard.


----------



## MikeAndrews

jbell73 said:


> I just got my replacement drive, and the new 320GB -> 2TB Copy is running at a much faster 36MB/Sec (versus 2.2MB/sec) . At this rate the copy is expected to take 2.5 Hours. Much better than the 48+ Hours I was estimating before with the failed drive.
> 
> Lesson learned - don't try and fight incredibly slow copy speeds (especially when doing a SATA <-> SATA with an on-board controller.) Instead RMA the drive. I'm curious if my original copy would have even been done by now.
> 
> -Jeff


I just checked to see which drive in my NAS is the slow one and with a quick copy two different drives in the same enclosure have the problem. I'm not going to believe I have two bad drives. More checking is due.

But lo! http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1297342&page=2


----------



## richsadams

netringer said:


> I just checked to see which drive in my NAS is the slow one and with a quick copy two different drives in the same enclosure have the problem. I'm not going to believe I have two bad drives. More checking is due.
> 
> But lo! http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1297342&page=2


I didn't get through all of the posts on that linked thread as well as another link within one of the posts, but did scan them...is there a consensus as to it being a batch of drives, Intellipark, etc.?

The WD20EARS I used to upgrade my Premiere XL had a transfer rate of between 39 and 50MBs w/direct SATA/MB connections for both drives. I changed the AAM from 254 to 128 but did not tweak the Intellipark setting on the new drive prior to upgrading.


----------



## generaltso

I noticed that my stock Premiere XL drive has wdidle set to 8 seconds, but the stock drive from my non-XL Premiere has wdidle set to Disabled. I upgraded both of them to 2TB WD Green AV drives. I set the one in the XL to 5 minutes, and the one in the non-XL to Disabled. It's been about 2 weeks, and the XL has spontaneously rebooted once and hung with a spinning green circle twice. Do you suppose I would be less likely to have these problems if I pull the drive out of the XL again and change wdidle to Disabled?


----------



## MikeAndrews

richsadams said:


> I didn't get through all of the posts on that linked thread as well as another link within one of the posts, but did scan them...is there a consensus as to it being a batch of drives, Intellipark, etc.?
> 
> The WD20EARS I used to upgrade my Premiere XL had a transfer rate of between 39 and 50MBs w/direct SATA/MB connections for both drives. I changed the AAM from 254 to 128 but did not tweak the Intellipark setting on the new drive prior to upgrading.


So far Googling finds me more than a few discussions of WD drives bogging down to 2Mbps on writes. I see 2mbs bursts followed by 2-3 second dead, dead nothing, lulls.

I have actual graphic proof...I'll post anon.

I didn't have a problem prior and these drives are several months old and were performing well right through the end of 2010. As above I need to try some more sleuthing although I've been hacking at it for several weeks.

I can move the drives to different enclosures.


----------



## richsadams

generaltso said:


> Do you suppose I would be less likely to have these problems if I pull the drive out of the XL again and change wdidle to Disabled?


My instincts tell me no, that it shouldn't make any difference one way or another...but then there's really not enough data to say anything for sure one way or another. You certainly could give it a try and see what happens...but only if you report back.


----------



## richsadams

netringer said:


> So far Googling finds me more than a few discussions of WD drives bogging down to 2Mbps on writes. I see 2mbs bursts followed by 2-3 second dead, dead nothing, lulls.
> 
> I have actual graphic proof...I'll post anon.
> 
> I didn't have a problem prior and these drives are several months old and were performing well right through the end of 2010. As above I need to try some more sleuthing although I've been hacking at it for several weeks.
> 
> I can move the drives to different enclosures.


Curiouser and curiouser...


----------



## generaltso

richsadams said:


> My instincts tell me no, that it shouldn't make any difference one way or another...but then there's really not enough data to say anything for sure one way or another. You certainly could give it a try and see what happens...but only if you report back.


I'll give it a shot. I can't imagine that it would make it any worse.


----------



## jbell73

netringer said:


> I didn't have a problem prior and these drives are several months old and were performing well right through the end of 2010. As above I need to try some more sleuthing although I've been hacking at it for several weeks.
> 
> I can move the drives to different enclosures.


I'm of the mindset that if things are running fine for a while, and suddenly it stops acting "normal", then you have a problem. I fought the slow 2TB WD20EARS for 2 days straight trying every combination I could, and it was just slow. Nothing reported any errors. What I would do is simply RMA one of your drives, while you can still read from them, and copy the data to the new drive you get.

My new drive worked the first try, without any issues. The same way the old one did when I first set it up. This tells me it can't be anything else than a bad drive.



Stuxnet said:


> Question... are you upgrading the "virgin" drive you just received, or did you go through setup before copying it to the 2TB.


Regrettably this is the virgin drive I am copying for the second time. So it will require a visit from Cox to pair the cable cards again. Next time I will pair them with the factory drive, and then copy/clone so the pairing is part of the copied data. The new 2TB drive is up and running (with the new MFS Supersize) @ 317 HR capacity, and quite happy.

-Jeff


----------



## Stuxnet

I had to run WD's Lifeguard diagnostics for Windows and HDDScan to test and set AAM since WD's Lifeguard DOS CD couldn't find my WD20EARS. FWIW, Hiren's BootCD for WD diagnostics and WDIDLE3 also came up emptyI'm not sure if that was because of the USB connection, or because the HDD lacks a partition table.

Since the drive mfr date is December 2010, I'm not going to bother w/intellipark unless the soft boot issue appears. That all said, will jmfs Live CD detect my Premiere drive and WD20EARS if they're both connected via individual USB/SATA? I'd prefer not to open up my PC to use the SATA cabling... of course if I'm without an alternative I guess I'll do that.


----------



## pruffy

What I want todo

Erase and llf current XL drive in premiere.
Then take original drive and copy that to former XL drive then expand the drive to its full 2tb potential.

So this way I would have a 2tb hdd with premiere software so it would now get program guide updates correctly. I don't really care about the shows on the hdd now but if they could be saved that would be neat.

Haven't messed with any tivos for awhile, if anyone could help that would be great.


----------



## Stuxnet

Thank you comer!

Just upgraded to a WD20EARS... What a voyage. First, it turned out that jmfs couldn't find my drives mounted to a usb dock (strike one). So I tried again from my laptop (strike two). Went back to the desktop and pulled the sata connectors from my HDD and DVD. Ooops... no DVD, so I moved jmfs to a bootable usb thumb drive. Reboot. Found the TiVo HDD, but not the WD20EARS... arrrggghhh... oops... inadvertently pulled the sata connector from the mobo... 3 hours later, finished supersize  

Detached the TiVo HDD and reconnected the desktop DVD and set AAM to 128 with the Hitachi tool. Lastly wdidle3... but it wouldn't run from CD... so back to the bootable thumb drive... even though the WD20EARS is dated December 2010, reset intellipark from 8 sec to 300 sec. Installed new drive in Premiere, came up in 6 minutes w/o network... then soft reboot w/network... and (whew) all is well. Now I have to put the desktop pc back together.... Tomorrow, lol.


----------



## wesbc

netringer said:


> BUT I'll bet you don't have a bad disk. Mine has done the freeze/reboot dance and I'm thinking the disk is OK. After I restarted to TV to clear HDCP confusion, my Premiere has stayed up but I've still gotten signs of impending failure with drops and slowdowns.
> 
> One suggestion so far has to been to see how solid the operation is when you keep the Ethernet cable unplugged as much as possible - with the SD menus. The HD menus will complain endlessly about no net access.


Ok, so I did take the suggestion to disconnecting network and it seems that the freeze / reboot problem went away and when I put in my network cable again, that after sometime freeze / reboot occurs. I did not have this problem with the original drive, so what have changed? More importantly what can be done to fix this?

Tivo is connected to a wireless router that's bridged to the main router. Have had this setup for sometime and nothing changed recently.


----------



## richsadams

Our 2TB upgraded TiVo Premiere XL rebooted and froze two nights ago. It was recording two programs at the time and I accessed Netflix. The screen went black a moment after I clicked on "Netflix" and TiVo rebooted. In addition, once it came back it was completely unresponsive (for a time) to all remote commands. The green menu background appeared once it booted up, but without any text. The amber front panel light blinked each time a button was pressed on the remote, but no activity. I let it sit for about three minutes and tried it again and finally got back to TiVo Central. It's been fine since then but I haven't had time to try Netflix on our TiVo again.

I ended up accessing Netflix on our Apple TV2 and it worked fine. I also downloaded an HD movie from Amazon VOD to our TiVo the next night and that worked fine (although I did see more macroblocking than normal).

This and several other network-related problem posts is also making me wonder if there's a connection between upgraded TiVo's using the jmfs program and network induced issues.


----------



## Fofer

Were you using the HD interface? I have heard it can freeze/reboot with Netflix.

I am sticking with the SD interface for now. The (incomplete, unstable) HD menus just piss me off. And the SD menus are blazing fast.

That said, I have had instances where using the iPad app to start a show has "unfrozen" an unresponsive Premiere.


----------



## richsadams

I'm right there with you regarding the HD menus. I use SD menus exclusively. I switch to the HD menus now and then just to see if they behave any better than they used to, but get ticked off and go back to the SD menus. 

This was only the second time the Premiere had an issue since I upgraded a little more than a month ago. At that time I checked the connections and found the HDMI cable a little loose so attributed it to that.

I'll have to try the iPad app if it freezes up again.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Doing a quick test with Netflix on one of our (jmfs upgraded) Premiere's now.

Both tuners recording (two red dots), went into Netflix, menu comes up OK.

Clicked Play on Serenity (HD). Playing fine.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> Doing a quick test with Netflix on one of our (jmfs upgraded) Premiere's now.
> 
> Both tuners recording (two red dots), went into Netflix, menu comes up OK.
> 
> Clicked Play on Serenity (HD). Playing fine.


Thanks for checking. That's good news. Again, it may be a fluke, but since there are several reports of problems occurring that seemed to be network-oriented it's a bit of a worry, particularly since nothing like that ever happened with the OEM drive. Only time will tell I guess.


----------



## richsadams

I finally found time to try and recreate the reboot/freeze on our upgraded (2TB) Premiere XL when using Netflix that I posted about earlier.

This time I had one recording in progress. From TiVo Central I once again headed to my Netflix Instant Queue. It opened and I was able to start playing back several movies and TV shows without any problem. HOWEVER when I backed out of Netflix and returned to the regular TiVo menus the background was black. I'm still using SD menus so no red, green, blue, etc. backgrounds, just text. Unlike before TiVo responded to the remote commands normally.

HOWEVER Part II...when I tried playing several recordings the screen remained black. The progress bar showed on the screen initially as normal, but no video. I could FF or RW even, but the counter stayed at :00...nothing.

I ended up performing a menu restart and TiVo booted back up and then acted normally afterward.

I tried Netflix again, just as I had before and then backed out to the regular menus, played recordings, etc. and everything performed normally. I even went into other IP source materials including Amazon VOD, YouTube, etc. and all was fine.

Soooo...I've no idea if this is a Netflix thing, a Premiere thing, an upgraded Premiere thing, a jmfs thing...or what.  I know this never happened with the OEM hard drive. I also know that it's going to stick in the back of my mind now and I do NOT like having to worry if TiVo is going to perform properly or not. 

Going forward I'll probably just use our Apple TV2 to watch Netflix (in fact the PQ via the Apple TV is generally better than on the TiVo) but it bothers me that there may be some sort of network problem with TiVo's that have been upgraded using the jmfs program. It may be a coincidence but I've experienced it three times now and there are several other posts about similar issues here as well.

If anyone runs into anything unusual...be sure to post so we can evaluate what it might be and hopefully figure out how to address it. TIA!


----------



## wesbc

My freeze then reboot occurs even when I'm not accessing any network feature which is odd. It's mostly happens while I am watching a recorded show, don't recall if it happens while watching live. The symptom is it'll always freeze, then unfreeze for 2-3 sec, then freeze again follow by a reboot, all the while the tivo would not response to any remote command, no light register on the front panel. Once I caught it where it wouldn't response to the remote and I knew the freeze was coming and it did.

So far with my bridge router shut off, I have not experience the issue. I'm really baffled by this. Could the supersizing of the drive taken up space that Tivo wants for their ads?


----------



## MikeAndrews

richsadams said:


> I finally found time to try and recreate the reboot/freeze on our upgraded (2TB) Premiere XL when using Netflix that I posted about earlier.
> 
> ...
> 
> Soooo...I've no idea if this is a Netflix thing, a Premiere thing, an upgraded Premiere thing, a jmfs thing...or what.  I know this never happened with the OEM hard drive. I also know that it's going to stick in the back of my mind now and I do NOT like having to worry if TiVo is going to perform properly or not.
> 
> Going forward I'll probably just use our Apple TV2 to watch Netflix (in fact the PQ via the Apple TV is generally better than on the TiVo) but it bothers me that there may be some sort of network problem with TiVo's that have been upgraded using the jmfs program. It may be a coincidence but I've experienced it three times now and there are several other posts about similar issues here as well.
> 
> If anyone runs into anything unusual...be sure to post so we can evaluate what it might be and hopefully figure out how to address it. TIA!





wesbc said:


> My freeze then reboot occurs even when I'm not accessing any network feature which is odd. It's mostly happens while I am watching a recorded show, don't recall if it happens while watching live. The symptom is it'll always freeze, then unfreeze for 2-3 sec, then freeze again follow by a reboot, all the while the tivo would not response to any remote command, no light register on the front panel. Once I caught it where it wouldn't response to the remote and I knew the freeze was coming and it did.
> 
> So far with my bridge router shut off, I have not experience the issue. I'm really baffled by this. Could the supersizing of the drive taken up space that Tivo wants for their ads?


You guys are running into exactly what I did with my 2TB upgrade. I could also tell the crash/reboot was coming on by drops, stutters, and remote no response.

Rich, for one thing, the crash after NetFlix abort bug is what TivoJerry says is fixed in the new software update for the Series 3, so it may also be present in the S4TP.

If there is some problem with the way that jmfs configures a 2TB drive, we need to know how many have been 100% OK.

I think I had problems only when the new 2TB drive was nearly full with 100s of suggestions after 2-3 weeks of life, and it first made itself known with a network upload. I did get some rare audio drops and pixellation glitches from day 1 but they didn't concern me. I have had few to none since going back to the OEM drive and letting it settle.

If there a way to view the system log - even if not over the network? Can I find it on the drive itself?

I'm going to burn in/soak the failed 2TB drive if possible to see if it really is defective.


----------



## richsadams

wesbc said:


> My freeze then reboot occurs even when I'm not accessing any network feature which is odd. It's mostly happens while I am watching a recorded show, don't recall if it happens while watching live. The symptom is it'll always freeze, then unfreeze for 2-3 sec, then freeze again follow by a reboot, all the while the tivo would not response to any remote command, no light register on the front panel. Once I caught it where it wouldn't response to the remote and I knew the freeze was coming and it did.
> 
> So far with my bridge router shut off, I have not experience the issue. I'm really baffled by this. Could the supersizing of the drive taken up space that Tivo wants for their ads?


I'd pull the Ethernet cable to see if things improve, but I've only experienced issues when accessing the network...otherwise it runs fine. That yours runs okay with the network basically off is worrisome. FWIW I don't think Supersize would impact performance with respect to freezing, etc. or we would have seen that in earlier upgrades.



netringer said:


> You guys are running into exactly what I did with my 2TB upgrade. I could also tell the crash/reboot was coming on by drops, stutters, and remote no response.
> 
> Rich, for one thing, the crash after NetFlix abort bug is what TivoJerry says is fixed in the new software update for the Series 3, so it may also be present in the S4TP.
> 
> If there is some problem with the way that jmfs configures a 2TB drive, we need to know how many have been 100% OK.
> 
> I think I had problems only when the new 2TB drive was nearly full with 100s of suggestions after 2-3 weeks of life, and it first made itself known with a network upload. I did get some rare audio drops and pixellation glitches from day 1 but they didn't concern me. I have had few to none since going back to the OEM drive and letting it settle.
> 
> If there a way to view the system log - even if not over the network? Can I find it on the drive itself?
> 
> I'm going to burn in/soak the failed 2TB drive if possible to see if it really is defective.


I know TiVo Level 2 folks can read individual DVR logs, but I only know enough to be dangerous so I'm not sure if any logs are viewable if you pull and read the drive. My 2TB drive is less than 50% full so it doesn't seem to be a capacity sort of thing. I didn't know about the Netflix "bug". I'll have to read up on that...thanks for the tip. :up:


----------



## richsadams

Been asleep at the wheel...found a thread discussing a Netflix reboot problem with TiVo Premiere's. So it may have (hopefully) nothing to do with the upgrade.


----------



## Fofer

Apparently this is fixed via a recent software update for the TiVoHD's and S3's.

So... when can we expect the same for the "Premiere" boxes?


----------



## richsadams

Fofer said:


> Apparently this is fixed via a recent software update for the TiVoHD's and S3's.
> 
> So... when can we expect the same for the "Premiere" boxes?


I hope an update will fix it, but based on TiVoJerry's description, the S3/HD issue was caused by using Netflix and experiencing a lost network connection...which as far as I can tell isn't what's happening with our Premiere. The first time TiVo rebooted when I clicked on Netflix. I suppose there could have been a coincidental loss at that moment, but it doesn't seem likely. The second time I accessed and played Netflix Instant Queue content without any problem...the problem showed up after returning to normal TiVo menus. They had no background and no recordings would play until the unit was rebooted.

Both situations tell me that it's Netflix/TiVo related, but not due to a lost network connection.

Whatever the case, I would indeed like to see them address the issues, whatever they are.


----------



## MoneyMINTR

anyone able to do this with an imac? I don't have a PC for SATA support.


----------



## richsadams

MoneyMINTR said:


> anyone able to do this with an imac? I don't have a PC for SATA support.


Yes, you can use two individual USB docks or adapters (not a dual dock). If you search you can probably find a couple of posts from folks that have done this successfully.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

MoneyMINTR said:


> anyone able to do this with an imac? I don't have a PC for SATA support.


The jmfs bootable CD works only in the Intel Macs, though. Or at least that's what I thought.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> The jmfs bootable CD works only in the Intel Macs, though. Or at least that's what I thought.


That's possible, but I'm not sure why that would be the case since it's a Linux based program. It would be good to know though.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> That's possible, but I'm not sure why that would be the case since it's a Linux based program. It would be good to know though.


There's certainly Linux kernels compiled to work on the older processors (G4?), and the jmfs source could be compiled for it. But the jmfs image has only the one bootable kernel, Intel.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> There's certainly Linux kernels compiled to work on the older processors (G4?), and the jmfs source could be compiled for it. But the jmfs image has only the one bootable kernel, Intel.


Ah, I did not know that.


----------



## ftballpack

Hey guys. I am debating which western digital hard drive to buy.

I am looking at buying either a WD20EURS or a WD20EVDS. I would buy the WD20EURS but I am concerned about the whole advanced formatting issues.

I currently have a THD with a 1tb drive, upgraded using winMFS and a stock Tivo Premiere. I plan on upgrading the Premiere now and the THD in the future.

Are their any known issues with using the WD20EURS and the THD together?

Which drive is the better buy guys? I can't decide. Newegg is selling them for a $10 difference.

The EURS has a 64mb buffer compared to 32mb with the EVDS...... 

power consumption:

WD20EURS: Read/Write @ 4.5W, Idle @ 4.0W
WD20EVDS: Read/Write @ 5.9W, Idle @ 4.9W

but does the advanced formatting slow the THD or the Premiere down at all by installing an advanced format drive such as a WD20EURS?

I am so confused.....



Thanks guys,
Scott


----------



## richsadams

ftballpack said:


> Hey guys. I am debating which western digital hard drive to buy.
> 
> I am looking at buying either a WD20EURS or a WD20EVDS. I would buy the WD20EURS but I am concerned about the whole advanced formatting issues.
> 
> I currently have a THD with a 1tb drive, upgraded using winMFS and a stock Tivo Premiere. I plan on upgrading the Premiere now and the THD in the future.
> 
> Are their any known issues with using the WD20EURS and the THD together?
> 
> Which drive is the better buy guys? I can't decide. Newegg is selling them for a $10 difference.
> 
> The EURS has a 64mb buffer compared to 32mb with the EVDS......
> 
> power consumption:
> 
> WD20EURS: Read/Write @ 4.5W, Idle @ 4.0W
> WD20EVDS: Read/Write @ 5.9W, Idle @ 4.9W
> 
> but does the advanced formatting slow the THD or the Premiere down at all by installing an advanced format drive such as a WD20EURS?
> 
> I am so confused.....
> 
> Thanks guys,
> Scott


Welcome to the forum. Nothing to be confused about, either drive will work fine. "Formatting issues" are not relevant to TiVo. Both drives are A/V dedicated drives so no need to make any adjustments. Both of these drives are being used successfully by folks here.

FWIW they are both cheaper at amazon.com and Amazon has a "friendlier" return policy.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...YPPW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300050098&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/WD-AV-GP-WD20...2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1300050472&sr=1-2

Happy upgrading!


----------



## dlbewley

I upgraded my Premiere XL to a 2TB WD20EARS, from Amazon for $79, without too much trouble:
tofu.org/drupal/node/180

I was unable to see the drive using the Hitachi Feature Tool, so I did not adjust the AAM. I can't hear the drive anyway. Intellipark seems to be a non-issue for me as well.


----------



## ftballpack

Thanks for the info guys. I am thinking I am going to go with the WD20EURS in my Premiere. Although the WD20EURS is more expensive than the WD20EARS, I personally like the reduced power use and at the same time, the 64 mb buffer should at least in theory result in a faster working drive with less issues than the WD20EVDS.

Also, from what I understand, advanced format drives should actually help to reduce drive errors, which is one of the reasons's why hard drive makers are going with advanced format drives in the new larger drives they are making. So, it would seem to be a natural choice to go with an advanced format drive if they do not slow the Tivo down at all.

I would have no problem doing adjustments to the WD20EARS but, a drive that costs $30-40 more and is made to run continuously should at least in theory be better able to handle the rigors of being in a Tivo, running all the time. So once again, this is why I am thinking of getting the WD20EURS.

Please reply back if you guys have experienced anything different or know of anything different with these specific drives, as I do not currently own any of the drives and it is is hard to compare the difference with the way drives "should be" as to the way they actually function.


----------



## richsadams

ftballpack said:


> Thanks for the info guys. I am thinking I am going to go with the WD20EURS in my Premiere. Although the WD20EURS is more expensive than the WD20EARS, I personally like the reduced power use and at the same time, the 64 mb buffer should at least in theory result in a faster working drive with less issues than the WD20EVDS.
> 
> Also, from what I understand, advanced format drives should actually help to reduce drive errors, which is one of the reasons's why hard drive makers are going with advanced format drives in the new larger drives they are making. So, it would seem to be a natural choice to go with an advanced format drive if they do not slow the Tivo down at all.
> 
> I would have no problem doing adjustments to the WD20EARS but, a drive that costs $30-40 more and is made to run continuously should at least in theory be better able to handle the rigors of being in a Tivo, running all the time. So once again, this is why I am thinking of getting the WD20EURS.
> 
> Please reply back if you guys have experienced anything different or know of anything different with these specific drives, as I do not currently own any of the drives and it is is hard to compare the difference with the way drives "should be" as to the way they actually function.


Other than possibly using slightly more or less power there isn't any difference between the two drives with respect to using them in TiVo. The demand TiVo puts on a hard drive is minimal compared to other applications.

As is often mentioned on the TCF, TiVo can't and/or doesn't take advantage of any of the advanced A/V drive features designed primarily for security systems (IntelliSeek, Preemptive Wear Leveling (PWL), SilkStream, IntelliPark, etc.).

With respect to the cache, there's no advantage there either. Your TiVo HD has a WD1600AVBS OEM hard drive with 2MB of cache. Your TiVo Premiere has a WD3200AVVS OEM hard drive which has 8MB. TiVo doesn't require anything more nor does anything more enhance performance.

Otherwise the drives (including the WD20EARS) are basically the same...retail prices do not reflect performance or MTBF (mean time between failures) percentages.

If you want to get the best out of your new hard drive, reduce any heat by keeping TiVo well ventilated and be sure it's on a UPS (like this one: http://www.amazon.com/APC-Back-UPS-shutdown-software-UPS-BE350G/dp/B001985SWW/ref=dp_cp_ob_e_title_1). Power surges, spikes, brown-outs and outages cause more hard drive data corruption and failures than any day-to-day use.

Either choice is fine...whatever you feel comfortable with.

Also, be sure to put your original hard drives on the shelf as backups. If one of your new drives fails you can always slip the original back in and be back up and running right away plus you can use the original to image a new hard drive any time.


----------



## ftballpack

So, what you are saying rich is that the only real difference I would experience between the two drives is the minor electrical use. Since the WD20EARS can be manually set to the same settings the WD20EURS defaults at. I am somewhat disappointed to hear that the hard drive + tivo together negates all of the extra features of the WD20EURS that help to keep the drive running well.

So how many years would I have to run my premiere with a WD20EURS in it compared to the WD20EARS to recover the extra cost of the WD20EURS over the WD20EARS in electrical savings? Would it likely be longer than the estimated life of the drive?


----------



## Fofer

Yes. You're putting more thought into this than TiVo's own engineers likely did.


----------



## richsadams

ftballpack said:


> So, what you are saying rich is that the only real difference I would experience between the two drives is the minor electrical use. Since the WD20EARS can be manually set to the same settings the WD20EURS defaults at. I am somewhat disappointed to hear that the hard drive + tivo together negates all of the extra features of the WD20EURS that help to keep the drive running well.
> 
> So how many years would I have to run my premiere with a WD20EURS in it compared to the WD20EARS to recover the extra cost of the WD20EURS over the WD20EARS in electrical savings? Would it likely be longer than the estimated life of the drive?


As Fofer says, no need to over think this. It's not a big deal either way. Both drive's life expectency is about the same so it really depends on if you want to take the time to adjust the AAM on the WD20EARS (which is really quite simple using HDDScan since you'll have the drive connected to your computer anyway). But since you're giving this some thoughtful consideration...here are a few more things to think about.

With respect to the other features being utilized or not, and how long a drive will last, probably a better way to look at it is that TiVo doesn't necessarily need them nor would they probably improve longevity. As mentioned, although it is running 24/7 TiVo never powers up or off (stressing a drive) and places a very low demand on hard drives overall. Drives used in enterprise service (servers, etc.) have some of the heaviest demand with potentially huge amounts of data I/O activity. Security DVR's with a dozen or more inputs and often multiple outputs would benefit from some of the WD's A/V features. AFAIK it's never been documented here, but the only advantage an A/V dedicated drive might have (besides being quieter) would be their ability to handle I/O errors by avoiding multiple reads when it encounters data issues like "normal" hard drives do. Rather than trying to repeatedly recover a read error, they're designed to more quickly "skip over" them.

However TiVo hard drives have a maximum of three input sources (2 x TV tuners and 1 x IP) and only one output. Generally the input source is steady even with the large amount of data HD requires. It does some housekeeping in the background periodically, but that's about it. At most it's doing four or five things at any one time, usually less. So as compared to other applications, TiVo's "work" is relatively relaxed.

That's not to say that drives don't wear out, they do. But a TiVo drive is more likely to fail due to manufacturer defects (bad sectors, head positioning mechanism issues, etc.) than to have the ball bearings seize up (and if they're about to do that you'll hear it long before they do). It's also true that Hi Def TiVo's put more strain on a drive than the original Series1's. My iMac puts more stress on a hard drive than my old DOS based computer. Drive technology has improved immensly over the years as well.

So if what you're worried about is replacing a hard drive, picking between one or the other of the drives you've suggested won't make much difference. One could fail in 90 days or run for years. The WD10EVCS I have in our Series3 has been rock solid for about three years now. But it could fail tomorrow. However drives rarely just quit. Generally there will be warning signs...glitches, reboots. PQ problems. If/when that starts happening you can run some of TiVo's built-in diagnostics called "Kickstarts" (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2) and either fix what ails it or prepare to replace it. That's why keeping the original drive on the shelf as a backup is a good investment...you can always image a new drive.

That's probably TMI but with respect to TiVo, recordings are probably more valuable than the drive itself. My "policy" is to replace the drive when the warranty is about to run out. In the case of WD GP drives, that's three years. When the time comes, pop the drive out clone it to a new one (using dd or some other program) and you're good for another three years or so. Which reminds me...it's about time to replace our Series3's hard drive. Thanks for that. 

Regarding your last question...my wife has the chemical engineering degree and I leave all of the "mathy" stuff to her.  My WAG would be "yes".

Buy a good drive, keep TiVo well ventilated, use a UPS and you should be fine. :up:


----------



## ItsRounder

comer said:


> You can "supersize" at any time without copying or starting over. You can not expand the same drive more than once.


My original drive failed so I took a 500GB drive that was laying around and used it while waiting to get my 1TB replacement. The original drive was a 320GB drive. I used jmfs to copy to the 500GB drive and expand it. Now that I've copied the 500 to the 1TB I'm finding that it's stuck at 500GB and I can't expand it. Is there any way to get around this or because I expanded the 500GB or am I now stuck with that?


----------



## generaltso

When I installed a WD20EVDS in my TPXL, I set wdidle to 5 minutes. I didn't think it was related, but any time the slide's bluetooth dongle was connected during a reboot, the box would hang on "Almost There". If I unplugged the dongle, it would boot up fine. Just for the heck of it, I opened up the TiVo and set wdidle to "Disabled". Low and behold, the box now boots normally with the bluetooth dongle attached. I've only tested it twice since it takes a full 10 minutes per reboot.

Do you suppose it's possible that the drive could really be idle for 5 minutes during a normal boot? Doesn't seem likely.


----------



## unitron

ItsRounder said:


> My original drive failed so I took a 500GB drive that was laying around and used it while waiting to get my 1TB replacement. The original drive was a 320GB drive. I used jmfs to copy to the 500GB drive and expand it. Now that I've copied the 500 to the 1TB I'm finding that it's stuck at 500GB and I can't expand it. Is there any way to get around this or because I expanded the 500GB or am I now stuck with that?


Use the free version of TiVo Desktop to copy off any shows you want to save to computer hard drive space, then do a truncated backup image, then restore it to the 1TB.

What you've got going on is the 500 has the maximum allowed number per drive of MFS partitions, so you need to start over and make larger versions of those partitions.

I'm only familiar with doing the backup restore thing with MFS Live (and I'm starting to play with WinMFS) on S1s and S2s, so can't tell you the exact procedure for whatever jmfs is.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

unitron said:


> Use the free version of TiVo Desktop to copy off any shows you want to save to computer hard drive space, then do a truncated backup image, then restore it to the 1TB.
> 
> What you've got going on is the 500 has the maximum allowed number per drive of MFS partitions, so you need to start over and make larger versions of those partitions.
> 
> I'm only familiar with doing the backup restore thing with MFS Live (and I'm starting to play with WinMFS) on S1s and S2s, so can't tell you the exact procedure for whatever jmfs is.


jmfs won't cut it. It's a pre-fabbed menu that strictly does a dd_rescue copy then an expand.


----------



## TheNJDevil

Hi everyone, my first post but been lurking around for a few months. I had an issue with the supersize upgrade and wondering what I could have done to possible cause the problem. I have a replacement unit and before I undertake the process again, I'd like to figure out what I could have done wrong. I'd consider myself a somewhat tech savvy person; put together PCs myself but no longer doing that as the kids keep me plenty busy but don't know anything about linux.

Here are the steps I performed:
- Bought a WD20EARS
- Did the AAM adjustment as outlined in Section IV, #32 using Hddscan (can't post link since I don't have enough posts)
- Carefully took out the TiVo HD from my Tivo Premiere
- Connected both the Tivo HD and the WD20EARS to my PC using SATA
- Booted from Jmfs
- Did the Copy, Expand, Supersize
- There were no errors so I took the WD20EARS and installed it into the Premiere

Upon starting, the Premiere would get stuck at the second bootup screen that says "Just a few mintues more". Unplugged the Tivo and tried one more time and got to the same point without successfully getting the Tivo to work.

I then removed the WD20EARS and put in the original Tivo Premiere HD. Same exact problem. It would only get to the second screen, "Just a few mintues more" and would not successfully start up.

This was a brand new Tivo and I waited 3 days before I did the Supersize. Could that have anything to do with it?

Right now I'm on a replacement unit that's been going for almost 2 months. And before I attempt this again, I'd like to figure out where I may have made a mistake. Any feedback or assistance is appreciated.


----------



## MikeAndrews

TheNJDevil said:


> ...
> 
> Upon starting, the Premiere would get stuck at the second bootup screen that says "Just a few mintues more". Unplugged the Tivo and tried one more time and got to the same point without successfully getting the Tivo to work.
> 
> I then removed the WD20EARS and put in the original Tivo Premiere HD. Same exact problem. It would only get to the second screen, "Just a few mintues more" and would not successfully start up.
> 
> This was a brand new Tivo and I waited 3 days before I did the Supersize. Could that have anything to do with it?
> 
> Right now I'm on a replacement unit that's been going for almost 2 months. And before I attempt this again, I'd like to figure out where I may have made a mistake. Any feedback or assistance is appreciated.


How long did you wait "just a few minutes more?" It takes a long time the first time you install the upgraded drive - like 15 minutes. It does a fsck drive check or something.

Let the TiVo cook for a half hour and see if it comes up. As long as you don't get a GSOD - Green Screen of Death, don't unplug it.


----------



## TheNJDevil

netringer said:


> How long did you wait "just a few minutes more?" It takes a long time the first time you install the upgraded drive - like 15 minutes. It does a fsck drive check or something.
> 
> Let the TiVo cook for a half hour and see if it comes up. As long as you don't get a GSOD - Green Screen of Death, don't unplug it.


I waited a good 15-20 minutes, maybe more.

So I should wait at least 30 minutes before throwing in the towel? I could swear I probably let it go for 30 minutes at least once.


----------



## MikeAndrews

The next thing to try is the kickstarts.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=5643823#post5643823


----------



## richsadams

netringer said:


> As long as you don't get a GSOD - Green Screen of Death, don't unplug it.


Never unplug TiVo if you get the MFS assert (GSOD). Doing so can cause irreparable data corruption. Always let TiVo go through the diagnostic and repair process and reboot itself. (Unless it goes into a reboot loop.)


----------



## TheNJDevil

richsadams said:


> Never unplug TiVo if you get the MFS assert (link removed due to number of posts). Doing so can cause irreparable data corruption. Always let TiVo go through the diagnostic and repair process and reboot itself. (Unless it goes into a reboot loop.)


I actually recall it going into a reboot loop with both drives (original Tivo HD and new WD) . . . I'm remembering a little bit more now.

When opening the Premiere is there a special way to power down the box before unplugging and opening?


----------



## richsadams

TheNJDevil said:


> When opening the Premiere is there a special way to power down the box before unplugging and opening?


Nothing special for the Premiere or any other TiVo for that matter...just unplug it. Avoid dropping metal objects on or touching the power supply when the case is off...it can still pack a punch.


----------



## jsquared222

Comers upgrade software works like a champ! Thanks Comer! I just upgraded my Premiere with a Western Digital WD20EARS hard drive and it was very easy. The hard drive manufacture date was December 2010. I had no soft reboot issues.


----------



## uforia

I upgraded my new (refurb) Premiere with the 2TB Hitachi Coolspin yesterday. Went off without a hitch and booted up fine the first time. I used the latest JMFS and did the copy/expand/supersize. Piece of cake.

I also tried the hdparm commands to adjust acoustics and APM. Based on what I read here I didn't expect it to work, and it didn't. But the Hitachi drive is pretty quiet. 

I have a WD20EARS on the way, but wanted to get this done this weekend. And the $69.99 for the 2TB Hitachi at Fry's this week was just too good of a deal. I'll be putting the WD in another Premiere I have on the way to upgrade the bedroom now.

Also, a bit interesting.... the stock HDD I pulled from the refurb Premiere had a round sticker on it that say "BAD HDD". That's really encouraging!!


----------



## richsadams

uforia said:


> I upgraded my new (refurb) Premiere with the 2TB Hitachi Coolspin yesterday. <snip>


Congrats and nice job! :up: Did you happen to write down the Hitachi's exact model number? If it's quiet enough it would be good to have an alternative going forward. TIA.

Enjoy!


----------



## uforia

richsadams said:


> Did you happen to write down the Hitachi's exact model number?


I didn't note anything off the drive itself. I didn't look closely thinking I could just check the box again later (it's a retail version). But the box doesn't have many details. It shows a mfg # 0S03222, but that number apparently associated with Fry's only (if you do a Google search with it).

Here is the link for those interested. It is a SATA3 (6Gbps) version and has a 3 year warranty.
http://www.frys.com/product/6554753


----------



## ThreeSoFar

uforia said:


> I didn't note anything off the drive itself. I didn't look closely thinking I could just check the box again later (it's a retail version). But the box doesn't have many details. It shows a mfg # 0S03222, but that number apparently associated with Fry's only (if you do a Google search with it).
> 
> Here is the link for those interested. It is a SATA3 (6Gbps) version and has a 3 year warranty.
> http://www.frys.com/product/6554753


These _might_ be it....the specs are similar:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475

http://www.amazon.com/Hitachi-Deskstar-3-5-Inch-CoolSpin-0F12117/dp/B004E9SGO0


----------



## 11274

Is there any info on how quiet the 2TB Hitachi Coolspin is relative to the WD20EARS?

I have 2 Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 which makes a lot of noise. Its not really the constant rotational noise that is the problem, but the crackle and pop of the head motion when its busy.

One of them is in an HD Tivo, and pretty much covered by the fan and insulation of the unit. 

The other I use in a small no fan usb enclosure with mythtv. The head motion noise is very noticeable, and thats the one I want to replace. The Coolspin caught my eye since Frys has it locally at $69. I would have to do mail order to get the WD for $79. But my main concern is any difference in head noise.


----------



## richsadams

uforia said:


> I didn't note anything off the drive itself. I didn't look closely thinking I could just check the box again later (it's a retail version). But the box doesn't have many details. It shows a mfg # 0S03222, but that number apparently associated with Fry's only (if you do a Google search with it).
> 
> Here is the link for those interested. It is a SATA3 (6Gbps) version and has a 3 year warranty.
> http://www.frys.com/product/6554753


What would be really helpful is to have both the model number listed on the box (there s/b a sticker with a alpha numerical line that starts off with "HD") as well as the actual model number from the label on the drive. This is important because Hitachi has a bad habit of changing drives in their retail/packaged products. Plus their retail products are often different from the OEM (bare) drives.

The issue is acoustics (noise). They have a few drives that are very quiet, but others sound like thrashing machines...and as many have discovered changing the AAM is often not an option anymore.

If you happen to open your TiVo again let us know the drive model. TIA!


----------



## wesbc

Well here's a little update with my freeze / reboot situation after upgrading to 2TB. I think I've narrowed it down to my HP EX490 Mediasmart sever. With it powered off, my Tivo seems to be happy, which I do not understand as I've had the two co-exist prior to the upgrade. I did also put in a new WD black 2TB and reloaded my mediasmart at the time, reinstall Tivo Expander and move back all my show on the mediasmart (about 1.5TB worth). This is a real head scratcher. Wish I have a some sort of packet analyzer... well actually a network admin that know how to use one too. LOL.


----------



## wesbc

km said:


> Is there any info on how quiet the 2TB Hitachi Coolspin is relative to the WD20EARS?


It's quiet. As with all green drive, they are very quiet. I have one in my Tivo and I can't hear a thing sitting a few feet away.


----------



## uforia

richsadams said:


> What would be really helpful is to have both the model number listed on the box (there s/b a sticker with a alpha numerical line that starts off with "HD") as well as the actual model number from the label on the drive. This is important because Hitachi has a bad habit of changing drives in their retail/packaged products. Plus their retail products are often different from the OEM (bare) drives.


Digging in the trash I found that the anti-static bag had a sticker on the other side I didn't see. There are a few different numbers, so I'll list them all. These are for the Hitachi Coolspin 2TB on sale this week at Frys:

C P/N: H3D20003254S
P/N: 0F12117
MLC: MNL580
Capacity: 2.0TB FW:580
HDS5C3020ALA632
JAN-2011

Hope this helps. Systems seems to be running fine, except for some "network unavailable" errors on the HDUI, which I expect are completely unrelated to the upgrade after some reading on the board.


----------



## richsadams

uforia said:


> Digging in the trash I found that the anti-static bag had a sticker on the other side I didn't see. There are a few different numbers, so I'll list them all. These are for the Hitachi Coolspin 2TB on sale this week at Frys:
> 
> C P/N: H3D20003254S
> P/N: 0F12117
> MLC: MNL580
> Capacity: 2.0TB FW:580
> HDS5C3020ALA632
> JAN-2011
> 
> Hope this helps. Systems seems to be running fine, except for some "network unavailable" errors on the HDUI, which I expect are completely unrelated to the upgrade after some reading on the board.


Thanks for that...good info. :up: That looks to be the drive (HDS5C3020ALA632)  ThreeSoFar referenced above:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475

http://www.amazon.com/Hitachi-Deskstar-3-5-Inch-CoolSpin-0F12117/dp/B004E9SGO0

We'll have to add this one to the options list.

Keep us apprised about your experiences. TIA!


----------



## lakesideguy

Hi Comer,
Thanks so much for all your work.
It really was as easy as your instructions.
I burned your ISO CD. I disconnected my hard drives on the PC and used those sata connections for the TIVO drive and the drive to be upgraded.

And now I have 2 TB in my Tivo Premier I just got 2 weeks ago and over 300 hours of HD recording. 

The drive was a WD20EARS green drive bought at Amazon for 79 bucks.
I did not have to use wdidle3 nor set the AAM.
Everything has been working perfectly over the past week.

The 79 was well worth the upgrade!!!!

Thanks!


----------



## MikeAndrews

wesbc said:


> Well here's a little update with my freeze / reboot situation after upgrading to 2TB. I think I've narrowed it down to my HP EX490 Mediasmart sever. With it powered off, my Tivo seems to be happy, which I do not understand as I've had the two co-exist prior to the upgrade. I did also put in a new WD black 2TB and reloaded my mediasmart at the time, reinstall Tivo Expander and move back all my show on the mediasmart (about 1.5TB worth). This is a real head scratcher. Wish I have a some sort of packet analyzer... well actually a network admin that know how to use one too. LOL.


Wow! Interesting. It was when I resurrected my HP Mediasmart that my Premiere started having problems.

Along the way I unplugged the TiVo (short term) and the Mediasmart (longer) from the LAN and I still had problems...butttttttt...what if the content transferred from the WHS to the TiVo is corrupted and that causes the TiVo to flake whenever it comes across it?


----------



## Fofer

Just having an HP Mediasmart on the same NETWORK is causing issues with a Premiere? WTF? How odd. Very, very odd.


----------



## Donni

wesbc said:


> Well here's a little update with my freeze / reboot situation after upgrading to 2TB. I think I've narrowed it down to my HP EX490 Mediasmart sever. With it powered off, my Tivo seems to be happy, which I do not understand as I've had the two co-exist prior to the upgrade. I did also put in a new WD black 2TB and reloaded my mediasmart at the time, reinstall Tivo Expander and move back all my show on the mediasmart (about 1.5TB worth). This is a real head scratcher. Wish I have a some sort of packet analyzer... well actually a network admin that know how to use one too. LOL.


I had the same problem like yours. To solve the problem, I just uninstall HP Mediasmart Expander for Tivo from my HP Mediasmart EX490. After that, Tivo works perfectly, even HP Mediasmart still connect to my home networking. I hope this solution can help other members, too.


----------



## lakesideguy

wesbc said:


> It's quiet. As with all green drive, they are very quiet. I have one in my Tivo and I can't hear a thing sitting a few feet away.


I just upgraded my Tivo Premier to 2 TB using the EARS drive same model. I can't hear it all inside my box.....

I don't know if that helps but even if it's quiter I can't see how it matters considering I cant even here the EARS drive anyway. I prefer reliability and as a matter of my own opinion I think Western Digital is better over my past 30 years of experience.


----------



## wesbc

Donni said:


> I had the same problem like yours. To solve the problem, I just uninstall HP Mediasmart Expander for Tivo from my HP Mediasmart EX490. After that, Tivo works perfectly, even HP Mediasmart still connect to my home networking. I hope this solution can help other members, too.


Thanks for the input. I'm going to try un-installing and re-installing and see. One of the reason I got the EX490 was because of the Tivo expander. This was really helpful when I only had the stock drive, but still I like off loading all my movies to it. I suppose I can put it on my PC, but the mediasmart would be online more often.

At least now I know the reason and do not have to worry about trying to swap the drive out of my Tivo.


----------



## ducker

Rich,
Is there an "official" of drives that have been utilized in a Premiere box? I'm looking to spec out all the parts I'll need to upgrade a Premiere box before I order it. and the link that brings me to your official guide looks like it contains a lot of dated information in the top post. (ie. limits of only 1gb drive expansions)

Thanks!


----------



## wesbc

ducker said:


> Rich,
> Is there an "official" of drives that have been utilized in a Premiere box? I'm looking to spec out all the parts I'll need to upgrade a Premiere box before I order it. and the link that brings me to your official guide looks like it contains a lot of dated information in the top post. (ie. limits of only 1gb drive expansions)
> 
> Thanks!


Right now the popular choice is any of the WD Green drives, was going to use one but 2 I bought both fail extended test. I'm using the Hitachi cool spin and have heard others using the Samsung F4. I think it's pretty safe with any of the 5X00rpm drives but be sure to do an extended test on them to safe you headaches of a bad drive. There's not much in parts, just the drive, unless you need some torx screw drivers for remove the drive.


----------



## ducker

Yea I already did one upgrade ages ago so I should still have my Torx drives. You're running an extended test through what tool?

Thanks.


----------



## wesbc

ducker said:


> Yea I already did one upgrade ages ago so I should still have my Torx drives. You're running an extended test through what tool?
> 
> Thanks.


I think the 2 main ones are the WD Data Lifeguard and Hitachi Drive fitness. I've used the WD tools on all sorts of drive, not just WD drive. I have had issue with connecting the drives to an external doc so if you are using one and have issue, be sure to test connecting directly to the Motherboard. With a 2TB drive, it'll take 5-6hr, but when you are going to store that much data, it's a small price to pay.


----------



## MikeAndrews

wesbc said:


> Thanks for the input. I'm going to try un-installing and re-installing and see. One of the reason I got the EX490 was because of the Tivo expander. This was really helpful when I only had the stock drive, but still I like off loading all my movies to it. I suppose I can put it on my PC, but the mediasmart would be online more often.
> 
> At least now I know the reason and do not have to worry about trying to swap the drive out of my Tivo.


Just so ya know, the HP WHS TiVo content is stored in a strange-to-TiVo format. I tried copying off the .tivo files and putting them to be transferred by PyTiVo and the TiVo will not play them. IIRC it sees them as 0 length. YeahIdid try renaming them to .Tivo like transferred files, too.

It was in trying to transfer them to the TiVo Premiere where I had my first crashes.


----------



## ducker

Noticed a Seagate at amazon going for $69. I don't see much in terms of comments regarding these drives, any particular reason? It's only $10 less then the WD green drive, my preference would be to go in the direction of the WD green, but always looking for a way to save a couple of dollars when buying hardware.
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST2000DL003/dp/B004CCS266/ref=pd_cp_e_1


----------



## unitron

ducker said:


> Noticed a Seagate at amazon going for $69. I don't see much in terms of comments regarding these drives, any particular reason? It's only $10 less then the WD green drive, my preference would be to go in the direction of the WD green, but always looking for a way to save a couple of dollars when buying hardware.
> http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST2000DL003/dp/B004CCS266/ref=pd_cp_e_1


The egg people have a 1.5 WD green on sale today.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...11-Index-_-InternalHardDrives-_-22136513-L03B

and the discount code is here:

http://promotions.newegg.com/neemai..._-EMC-032911-Index-_-Header-banner-_-AllDeals


----------



## ducker

yea its tempting... but if I'm going to upgrade a drive in a Premiere unit, why go with 1.5tb when you can do 2tb!


----------



## unitron

ducker said:


> yea its tempting... but if I'm going to upgrade a drive in a Premiere unit, why go with 1.5tb when you can do 2tb!


If you don't want one, feel free not to buy one.


----------



## wesbc

Anyone notice that their Tivo becomes sluggish as the drive fills up? Mine is at 40% full and I notice that even the Guide seems to be sluggish. As I page up and down it'll take nearly a full second for it to populate all the time slot and some individual ones make take a little bit longer. Paging through My Shows also seems to be slower as well, taking a full second or more for each page. Don't recall it being this slow before. 

Will be recording a boat load of movies from a free preview this weekend, hopefully I don't grind it to a halt.


----------



## gilbreen

Just wanted to add another data point and extend my thanks to comer for his great tool.

I updated both of our Premiere boxes using the Hitachi CoolSpin 2TB drives that have been previously mentioned. I, too, purchased them at our local Fry's for $69. I first tested the drives using SpinRite by grc.com to identify any bad sectors but none were found.

I followed the instructions in the forum provided by comer. Couldn't have been simpler or gone any smoother. It is nice to have gone from a drive that was 95% full to now only 13% full.

Thanks to all those who have posted info and suggestions along the way.


----------



## Fofer

wesbc said:


> Anyone notice that their Tivo becomes sluggish as the drive fills up? Mine is at 40% full and I notice that even the Guide seems to be sluggish. As I page up and down it'll take nearly a full second for it to populate all the time slot and some individual ones make take a little bit longer. Paging through My Shows also seems to be slower as well, taking a full second or more for each page. Don't recall it being this slow before.
> 
> Will be recording a boat load of movies from a free preview this weekend, hopefully I don't grind it to a halt.


are you using HD menus or SD menus?
HD was poorly implemented and slow. SD is fast.

what free preview is going on this weekend?


----------



## wesbc

Fofer said:


> are you using HD menus or SD menus?
> HD was poorly implemented and slow. SD is fast.
> 
> what free preview is going on this weekend?


Yeah, I'm using HD menus and I know it's slow, but it was liveable. Now it's seems like a dog. It did crash/reboot last night while just watching live TV so maybe it had to do some re-indexing. Guide seems to be better now.

Free preview for Stars and Encore for Fios from 3/31 - 4/4. That's one thing I like about having so much space, that I can record so much stuff that I can live with just the free preview I get.


----------



## richsadams

wesbc said:


> Anyone notice that their Tivo becomes sluggish as the drive fills up? Mine is at 40% full and I notice that even the Guide seems to be sluggish. As I page up and down it'll take nearly a full second for it to populate all the time slot and some individual ones make take a little bit longer. Paging through My Shows also seems to be slower as well, taking a full second or more for each page. Don't recall it being this slow before.
> 
> Will be recording a boat load of movies from a free preview this weekend, hopefully I don't grind it to a halt.


The 2TB on our Premiere XL is 70% and the 1TB on our Series3 is full. Honestly I haven't seen any real changes in response times from when they were new so what you're experiencing is 
worrisome.

EDIT: It's a bit of a PIA but you might try going into your Recently Deleted folder and permanently deleting everything there (our Premiere XL has just shy of 400 recordings in there! ) Also try removing any SP"s that you don't need. Those kinds of things seem to have helped other's TiVo's become a little snappier.


----------



## richsadams

wesbc said:


> Yeah, I'm using HD menus and I know it's slow, but it was liveable. Now it's seems like a dog. It did crash/reboot last night while just watching live TV so maybe it had to do some re-indexing. Guide seems to be better now.


 The fact that it crashed is even more worrisome. It's beginning to have the earmarks of a failing hard drive. If it gives you some more grief you might want to consider running some of the Kickstarts, particularly KS54 (SMART). It's not fool-proof but it may give you an indication of pending HDD failure.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2

It may be nothing but I'd start preparing for a worst case situation by transferring any recordings you can't live without (TiVo Desktop or KMTTG) JIC.


----------



## sirfergy

I upgraded my Premiere to a 1TB drive but now want to go to 2TB. Do I need to use the original disk or can I use the 1TB disk?


----------



## retiredqwest

sirfergy said:


> I upgraded my Premiere to a 1TB drive but now want to go to 2TB. Do I need to use the original disk or can I use the 1TB disk?


It all depends on how it was copied and by whom. Tivos will only operate with 16 partitions or less.

To see what the 1TB has do the following.

Connect just the 1TB..... no other drives. And run JMFS. After it loads, type X for exit and enter.

At the command prompt type 'fdisk -l' and it should show the drive as a 1TB and 'dev/sba'. This could be different depending on how you attach the drive to the computer. I connect mine directly to the motherboard sata ports.

Next type in '/root/mfslayout.sh /dev/sba' and hopefully it will scroll some info up the screen. If not make then you probably mistyped the aforementioned command.

Holding <shift> and pressing the pageup key will scroll back through the screens.

Look for this on your screen:

1 : start= 1, size= 63 ( 31.50K), type='Apple_partition_map', name='Apple'
13: start= 64, size= 343828320 (163.95G), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region 2'
2 : start= 343828384, size= 1 (512.00b), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 1'
3 : start= 343828385, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 1'
4 : start= 343844769, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 1'
5 : start= 344369057, size= 1 (512.00b), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 2'
6 : start= 344369058, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 2'
7 : start= 344385442, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 2'
8 : start= 344909730, size= 262144 (128.00M), type='Swap' , name='Linux swap'
9 : start= 345171874, size= 1048576 (512.00M), type='Ext2' , name='/var'
14: start= 346220450, size= 6291456 ( 3.00G), type='Ext2' , name='SQLite'
10: start= 352511906, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region'
12: start= 354150306, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region 2'
11: start= 355788706, size= 269353742 (128.44G), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region'

This is from my stock drive and it shows 14 partitions.

I'm guessing the 1TB has all 16 partitions in use. Hence, you will not be able to copy and expand that drive. You're stuck using the stock drive.

BUT, if the 1TB only has 15 partitions you should be able to copy and expand it since JMFS only writes 1 new partition.

I'd be curious if you try this and see what the results are.


----------



## sirfergy

Thanks, I'll try that when I get the chance.


----------



## MoneyMINTR

is there usage in JMFS to make a truncated back up image of the premier?


----------



## retiredqwest

MoneyMINTR said:


> is there usage in JMFS to make a truncated back up image of the premier?


no


----------



## MoneyMINTR

too bad. I just recycled my premier HD for a deteriorating series 3 hd.



retiredqwest said:


> no


----------



## hokie91

Ug, necer easy.... Used JMFS, USed WD 1.5TB EARS drive for Tivo Premiere, used CD boot methoid.. evertthuing went smooth....
Followed directions,
I did see on line about "splitting bad Blocks" in the copy, but that was it,

Expand and supersize worked, set HD management which gave usual errors.... now tivo started up... then GSOD!!! AHHHHH!!!!

Screen says let it run 3 hours,... I am not hopeful though.... any thoughts?

Thanks


----------



## Stuxnet

What do you mean by... "set HD management which gave usual errors"?


----------



## hokie91

There have been other comments on the newer hard drives that they don't take the "quiet " settings. Error is probably a strong word... the msg was liek command not compatible... so it did not execute as far as I could tell... still ruinning GSOD... should I wait till tomorrow then try a rwecopy if it is still GSOD?

TX

:




9) At this point you are done as far as the update goes although I highly recommend you carry out the next (optional) step which will set your drive to use aggressive power management (saving you money) and maximum acoustic silencing to keep your TiVo as quiet as possible. In my experience this command has no negatives and does not appear to impact TiVo's performance in any way. Issue the command:

hdparm -k 1 -B 1 -M 128 /dev/sdb

where /dev/sdb is the new TiVo drive. The options here have the following effect:

-k 1 = keep settings after drive is powered off.
-B 1 = set most aggressive power management mode.
-M 128 = set acoustic management to as quiet as possible.


----------



## Stuxnet

I wouldn't expect the EARS to have problems with the acoustic setting, but that shouldn't keep you from booting. It's there to quiet your seek noise (I doubt the "aggressive power management" claim). What is the mfr date for your EARS? Did you reset the intellipark timing w/wdidle3? Some of the 2010 drives through September have issues with the default settings... usually it manifests itself a frozen boot-up from a soft reset, not typically from a hard reset (power off/power on) as you're seeing.

If you haven't used wdidle3, I try that, and see if that solves your boot GSOD. If you've already done that, I'd re-download/burn jmfs live cd, checking the MD5 checksum before burning, and start over. Before you do that, run the extended WD diagnostics on your drive to be sure it comes up "faultless".


----------



## rspad53

My tivo hd with 500g wd expander was freezing up so
i hastily picked a seagate,st31000322cs(1tb), 
it was stated as a 7 on the noise list.
Hooked up on internal sata, I used winmfs in windows7 to copy/create the tivo image from my original tivo 160hd and all went smooth.
Except the noise level, even from 9 feet was very noticable.

So i ordered a wd15EVDS, nov 7 2010 mfg date, from newegg and to confirm some posts the packing was excellent, the oem drive was in
bubble wrap, placed snugly in a small box and then packed with paper in a larger box.

I now booted with my burned jmfs disk. It would not recognize the drives on my secondary Marvel controller(mb d975xbx2), so i had to put them in the primary.
I now used jmfs to copy the winmfs seagate to the new wd. 
The winmfs seagate had 15 partitions on it. btw i had to type in the root dir this: './mfslayout.sh /dev/sba' it would not work without the dot (current dir) in front of the slash to show the partitions. 
The copy took 7.5 hours, i expanded and then checked for aam value, which was already set at 128.
i did NOT do anything with intelipower. And did NOT supersize with jmfs but did run winmfs against drive which 
showed already supersized(as stated in thread).
The new wd worked perfectly and no soft reboot problems. shows 237hd hours. this was so easy i dont know why i didnt do it sooner.
Is it my imagination or is it booting quicker than it used to with the expander?
thank you to Comer and to atmuscarella for giving me the link.


----------



## hokie91

Stuxnet, 
Thanks for the advice... I ran the WD diagnostics and none of the tests would not complete due to "too many bad sectors." I ended up running the "zero drive" option erasing the whole drive. Them ran the wdidle and teh process worked fine and tivo booted.

No my question is do I trust that it was good or is the drive bad since it came up with all those bad sectors. I could return it and get another.

Any thoughts?

Thanks again.. advice was right on the mark!


----------



## richsadams

hokie91 said:


> Stuxnet,
> Thanks for the advice... I ran the WD diagnostics and none of the tests would not complete due to "too many bad sectors." I ended up running the "zero drive" option erasing the whole drive. Them ran the wdidle and teh process worked fine and tivo booted.
> 
> No my question is do I trust that it was good or is the drive bad since it came up with all those bad sectors. I could return it and get another.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Thanks again.. advice was right on the mark!


Bad sector issues won't appear until the drive tries to write to those particular sectors. I would definitely return it if it were mine. Better now than when you have compiled a lot of recordings.


----------



## Stuxnet

richsadams said:


> Bad sector issues won't appear until the drive tries to write to those particular sectors. I would definitely return it if it were mine. Better now than when you have compiled a lot of recordings.


@hokie91... I'm with Rich. I would return the drive. A bad sector isn't like a bad pixel. It often indicates an intrinsically faulty (or failing) drive. It might work fine for you for six months and then fail catastrophically.

Since you've already copied over your stuff to the new drive, you might considered running Darik's Boot and Nuke on it before returning. And be sure to fully test the replacement drive when you first take it out of the box.


----------



## hokie91

Yea... I think I agree and thanks for the advice on wiping the drive. What a great COmmunity... I'd still be pulling my heair out without the help. NewEgg has the 1.5TB WD green EARS for 59.99 free shipping now.


----------



## lynnalexandra

I hope I'm on the right thread. So many seem to apply. Thanks to the responses here, I'm going to buy a Tivo Premier (I have the upgrade offer so it's $470 with lifetime) - and upgrade to a 2TB drive.

I'd like to buy one of the pre-pared drives - by DVR dude or Tivo_Freak. put it in - andthen have comcast pair the cable cards. (I know I could use Comer's new program to prepare a 2TB drive but this is a terrible time personally to think I'll be able to get to that project between work and many ill family members.) my plan is to order the Tivo premier today.

I want help deciding which upgrade2 TB drive to get. On Ebay, Tivo-Freak is selling a 2TB Samsung drive for $105. Seems a great price. But I don't know him as a seller (good ratings though) - and I don't know if Samsung is a good drive choice.

Other possibility is to check back with DVR-Dude. I've dealt with him before and been very happy. Don't think the price will be that low - last I looked it was probably closer to $200. I don't recall which drives he uses, but I think I recall some WD drives - probably the ones liked here.

Any thoughts on which 2TB upgraded drive to get?

Thanks.
Lynn.


----------



## Stuxnet

Since you're time limited, I wonder if you should be considering a 2TB upgrade so soon. Unless you're planning to install the new drive before you activate your TiVo, you could be looking at two truck rolls to pair and re-pair your cable card.

If you're comfortable opening up your PC and swapping hard drives, you might reconsider the Comer process... a new 2TB HDD can be had for $80... and no additional truck roll is required.

The Comer upgrade might seem less daunting once you've watched this video which is a walk through of the upgrade process.

Video - Part II


----------



## lynnalexandra

Thanks for the link to the Youtube video. 

I am planning to install the new drive before setting up the Tivo and having Comcast do the cable cards. I'm comfortable putting in a pre-prepared drive. I've done that before and it was easy. I even did an upgrade by preparing the drive myself with winmfs. That turned out to have a few snafu's - but isn't too daunting. It's just knowing that I don't have those few hours to set aside. Setting aside the time interval to have Comcast come is the only interval I'll get for a few weeks. I'm working or out of town the next few weekends. So saving $50-100 to do the preparation myself isn't worth it right now - since I don't have the time.

So I am wondering about which prepared drive to buy. Also - once I swap drives, do I set tivo up as much as I can prior to Comcast coming - or do they have to come first - and run set up with the cards inside?

Thanks.
Lynn.


----------



## richsadams

lynnalexandra said:


> So I am wondering about which prepared drive to buy. Also - once I swap drives, do I set tivo up as much as I can prior to Comcast coming - or do they have to come first - and run set up with the cards inside?
> 
> Thanks.
> Lynn.


Hi Lynn. Go with DVR Dude. He has a good track record here and there have been issues with Samsung drives in the past (DVR Dude uses the recommended Western Digital drive.)

The ideal situation is to run your TiVo for 30 days or so to be sure it's working properly. But if you want to install the new drive right away, then yes, once you've dropped the new drive into TiVo follow the pre-setup directions in the owner's guide (or here) to prepare it for the cable folks. (More here.)

Here are a couple nice videos about it as well...

http://www.tivo.com/setupandsupport/cablecard-wizard/index.html

http://www.tivo.com/setupandsupport/tivo-hookup-wizard/index.html

Hope that helps and enjoy your new TiVo!


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> Hi Lynn. Go with DVR Dude. He has a good track record here and there have been issues with Samsung drives in the past (DVR Dude uses the recommended Western Digital drive.)
> 
> The ideal situation is to run your TiVo for 30 days or so to be sure it's working properly. But if you want to install the new drive right away, then yes, once you've dropped the new drive into TiVo follow the pre-setup directions in the owner's guide (or here) to prepare it for the cable folks. (More here.)
> 
> Here are a couple nice videos about it as well...
> 
> http://www.tivo.com/setupandsupport/cablecard-wizard/index.html
> 
> http://www.tivo.com/setupandsupport/tivo-hookup-wizard/index.html
> 
> Hope that helps and enjoy your new TiVo!


I used Samsungs on most of my S1, S2 and S3 upgrades, and had very good results. But my last few upgrades were all with the WD Green drives, also all good results.

I'm definitely in the "if it saves me $50-100 I'll do it myself" camp, so I've never considered the Weaknees, DVR-Dude, etc., solutions.

Of course, another option is to find a "friend" who is good with this sort of thing and have them hook you up. Then you get it for the drive cost, give or take....


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> I'm definitely in the "if it saves me $50-100 I'll do it myself" camp, so I've never considered the Weaknees, DVR-Dude, etc., solutions.


+1


----------



## nukleuz

I don't think this question has been asked so let me go ahead and ask;

Am i able to use a Dell Poweredge server to expand up to 4 drives at one time?
My server takes sata drives and i have about 4 caddy's in there


----------



## ThreeSoFar

nukleuz said:


> I don't think this question has been asked so let me go ahead and ask;
> 
> Am i able to use a Dell Poweredge server to expand up to 4 drives at one time?
> My server takes sata drives and i have about 4 caddy's in there


I bet with the linux CD it MIGHT be possible. The unix command "tee" takes input from a pipe and sends it two places--to a file, and to _its_ standard out. If somehow the file was instead stdin going to a restore command, the same source "file" (the original TiVo drive) could be used to feed stdin to four restore commands simultaneously. There's also a "named pipe" functionality, where a "file" can instead be a pipe to some other process. I'm not familiar with the specifics of named pipes, though, but I got this from google on how to set up named pipes.

What I'm thinking is something like this. Set up three named pipes, then three restore processes reading from them as their input. Notice each resotre is going to its own destination drive (a-d). That is:


mkfifo /tmp/TiVo1 /tmp/TiVo2 /tmp/TiVo3
cat /tmp/TiVo1 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sda &
cat /tmp/TiVo2 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sdb &
cat /tmp/TiVo3 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sdc &

What I'm not sure of though is whether these backgrounded (the & makes them background processes) restore commands will just wait for input or if they'll error out. If they wait patiently for input, this should all work fine.

The final step is to run this (syntax is from here), which will right to the three above restore commands as well as to this fourth one:

Option 2.7 To copy everything from original size Tivo drive to bigger dual drives and expand capacity but limit the drive to 137GB:

backup -qTao - /dev/hda | tee /tmp/TiVo1 | tee /tmp/TiVo2 | tee /tmp/TiVo3 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sdd



ETA TESTED IT AS FOLLOWS. I'm almost certain this will work.

$ cd /tmp
$ mkfifo TiVo2 TiVo3 TiVo1
$ cat TiVo1 | cat > dupe.TiVo1 &
$ cat TiVo2 | cat > dupe.TiVo2 &
$ cat TiVo3 | cat > dupe.TiVo3 &
$ cat /etc/passwd | tee TiVo1 | tee TiVo2 | tee TiVo3 > dupe.TiVo4
$ cksum /etc/passwd du*
1207031474 3667 /etc/passwd
1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo1
1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo2
1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo3
1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo4
$ ls -l ./* /etc/passwd
prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo1
prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo2
prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo3
[email protected] 1 user user 345165 Feb 27 2010 ./cityboom_casinomap_large.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo1
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo2
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo3
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3667 Jun 23 2009 /etc/passwd


----------



## nukleuz

ThreeSoFar said:


> I bet with the linux CD it MIGHT be possible. The unix command "tee" takes input from a pipe and sends it two places--to a file, and to _its_ standard out. If somehow the file was instead stdin going to a restore command, the same source "file" (the original TiVo drive) could be used to feed stdin to four restore commands simultaneously. There's also a "named pipe" functionality, where a "file" can instead be a pipe to some other process. I'm not familiar with the specifics of named pipes, though, but I got this from google on how to set up named pipes.
> 
> What I'm thinking is something like this. Set up three named pipes, then three restore processes reading from them as their input. Notice each resotre is going to its own destination drive (a-d). That is:
> 
> 
> mkfifo /tmp/TiVo1 /tmp/TiVo2 /tmp/TiVo3
> cat /tmp/TiVo1 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sda &
> cat /tmp/TiVo2 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sdb &
> cat /tmp/TiVo3 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sdc &
> 
> What I'm not sure of though is whether these backgrounded (the & makes them background processes) restore commands will just wait for input or if they'll error out. If they wait patiently for input, this should all work fine.
> 
> The final step is to run this (syntax is from here), which will right to the three above restore commands as well as to this fourth one:
> 
> Option 2.7 To copy everything from original size Tivo drive to bigger dual drives and expand capacity but limit the drive to 137GB:
> 
> backup -qTao - /dev/hda | tee /tmp/TiVo1 | tee /tmp/TiVo2 | tee /tmp/TiVo3 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sdd
> 
> 
> 
> ETA TESTED IT AS FOLLOWS. I'm almost certain this will work.
> 
> $ cd /tmp
> $ mkfifo TiVo2 TiVo3 TiVo1
> $ cat TiVo1 | cat > dupe.TiVo1 &
> $ cat TiVo2 | cat > dupe.TiVo2 &
> $ cat TiVo3 | cat > dupe.TiVo3 &
> $ cat /etc/passwd | tee TiVo1 | tee TiVo2 | tee TiVo3 > dupe.TiVo4
> $ cksum /etc/passwd du*
> 1207031474 3667 /etc/passwd
> 1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo1
> 1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo2
> 1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo3
> 1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo4
> $ ls -l ./* /etc/passwd
> prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo1
> prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo2
> prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo3
> [email protected] 1 user user 345165 Feb 27 2010 ./cityboom_casinomap_large.jpg
> -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo1
> -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo2
> -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo3
> -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo4
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3667 Jun 23 2009 /etc/passwd


Ahh...I don't think i'd be able to do it from what i'm seeing here 

I'll buy a standalone pc and use that instead

Thanks though


----------



## ThreeSoFar

nukleuz said:


> Ahh...I don't think i'd be able to do it from what i'm seeing here
> 
> I'll buy a standalone pc and use that instead
> 
> Thanks though


Not sure why not. Can you boot the mfslive CD in your server? If so you should be gtg.


----------



## nukleuz

ThreeSoFar said:


> Not sure why not. Can you boot the mfslive CD in your server? If so you should be gtg.


I don't know where to put all those commands or even where to start from

It sees all the drives but still asks for only one drive to copy to,so i'm currently just doing one for now but if you can guide me with a tutorial,i'd give it a shot


----------



## ThreeSoFar

nukleuz said:


> I don't know where to put all those commands or even where to start from
> 
> It sees all the drives but still asks for only one drive to copy to,so i'm currently just doing one for now but if you can guide me with a tutorial,i'd give it a shot


Ah, right--sorry.

That CD does have an option to drop to a command line, you'll need to do that for this to work.

There's not a "canned" menu option for a 1>4 drive upgrade like we're talking about.


----------



## nukleuz

ThreeSoFar said:


> Ah, right--sorry.
> 
> That CD does have an option to drop to a command line, you'll need to do that for this to work.
> 
> There's not a "canned" menu option for a 1>4 drive upgrade like we're talking about.


Ok so from the command prompt i need to type :
ETA TESTED IT AS FOLLOWS. I'm almost certain this will work.

$ cd /tmp
$ mkfifo TiVo2 TiVo3 TiVo1
$ cat TiVo1 | cat > dupe.TiVo1 &
$ cat TiVo2 | cat > dupe.TiVo2 &
$ cat TiVo3 | cat > dupe.TiVo3 &
$ cat /etc/passwd | tee TiVo1 | tee TiVo2 | tee TiVo3 > dupe.TiVo4
$ cksum /etc/passwd du*
1207031474 3667 /etc/passwd
1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo1
1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo2
1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo3
1207031474 3667 dupe.TiVo4
$ ls -l ./* /etc/passwd
prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo1
prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo2
prw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Apr 23 21:00 ./TiVo3
[email protected] 1 user user 345165 Feb 27 2010 ./cityboom_casinomap_large.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo1
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo2
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo3
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3667 Apr 23 21:00 ./dupe.TiVo4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3667 Jun 23 2009 /etc/passwd

and that's it?


----------



## ThreeSoFar

nukleuz said:


> Ok so from the command prompt i need to type :
> ETA TESTED IT AS FOLLOWS. I'm almost certain this will work.
> 
> [snip]...
> 
> and that's it?


No, that was my test, duplicating one file four times simultaneously. Here's an example geared toward your TiVos.

First, I'll assume that /dev/sda is your ORIGINAL TIVO hard drive, and that /dev/sdb /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd are your three BLANK hard drives. This is set up to make THREE identical copies of the one original drive (and expand to fit the new drive size). (The "$" I show here represents your prompt--your typing starts after that.) I also raised the swap size from 127 to 512.

The mfsinfo command just examines a particular drive to see if it is a TiVo drive and if so how big. We do that before the restore on the original, then after on the other three.

Note this can take HOURS AND HOURS, up to a day on slower systems. ANd doing it times three like this, give it a good long time. Your PowerEdge seems beefy enough, I would imagine this should not take over 12 hours, but that's just a guess.

Note that each of the commands running (one backup and three restores, all running simultaneously) will be sending output to your screen. If you like you can add a "q" to the option letters (between the "n" and the "x", so "-nqxzpi", for instance) for all but one of the restores to quiet this down.


$ cd /tmp
$ mfsinfo /dev/sda
$ mkfifo TiVo2 TiVo3
$ cat TiVo2 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sdb &
$ cat TiVo3 | restore -s 127 -nxzpi - /dev/sdc &
$ backup -qTao - /dev/sda | tee /tmp/TiVo2 | tee /tmp/TiVo3 | restore -s 512 -nxzpi - /dev/sdd
$ mfsinfo /dev/sdb
$ mfsinfo /dev/sdc
$ mfsinfo /dev/sdd


----------



## nooneuknow

Weaknees is back to selling 4TB Premieres (2TB int. +2TB ext.).

http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-premiere-hd-dvr-series4.php

Perhaps us DIY types can figure out how they are doing it?

You still lurking amongst us, Comer?


----------



## ThreeSoFar

nooneuknow said:


> Weaknees is back to selling 4TB Premieres (2TB int. +2TB ext.).
> 
> http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-premiere-hd-dvr-series4.php
> 
> Perhaps us DIY types can figure out how they are doing it?
> 
> You still lurking amongst us, Comer?


Why?

I say this every time it comes up only because newbs may not know the pain.

Those external drives are NOT a good solution. Too many moving/fallible parts. And when it fails, you lose ALL recordings--there's no way to avoid that.

Stick with 300 hours HD, that should do. If that's not enough, probably two tuners isn't either--get a SECOND unit.


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> Why?
> 
> I say this every time it comes up only because newbs may not know the pain.
> 
> Those external drives are NOT a good solution. Too many moving/fallible parts. And when it fails, you lose ALL recordings--there's no way to avoid that.
> 
> Stick with 300 hours HD, that should do. If that's not enough, probably two tuners isn't either--get a SECOND unit.


+1


----------



## nooneuknow

ThreeSoFar said:


> Why? I say this every time it comes up only because newbs may not know the pain. Those external drives are NOT a good solution. Too many moving/fallible parts. And when it fails, you lose ALL recordings--there's no way to avoid that. Stick with 300 hours HD, that should do. If that's not enough, probably two tuners isn't either--get a SECOND unit.


I'm fully aware of the fact that external drives are an -additional- fail point.

I have three 2TB Premieres and one 2TB TiVo HD (not counting the 2TB Premiere and 2TB TiVo HD that I set up for my folks in another room).

Guess what? They are all near capacity. So are all the 2TB drives that I have populating the SATA ports of my computer.

Due to some odd problem that I have with the sound cutting out on analog channels, which neither Cox nor TiVo will help me resolve, I have to try and record as much as I can in digital, and 99% of that is only available in HD.

I have a few "spare" 2TB drives laying around. Rather than use a true "external" drive, I'd like to just use an exact matching drive to the one I put inside, using a power brick to SATA power adapter, and a quality eSATA cable. I can build a "rack" for the drives to cradle in safely, out of sight, behind my tower of TiVos.

Why? Because I want to. Isn't that enough, considering that it seems the obstacle to Comer's attempts at this has a solution now?

I'm not a "newb". I've been lurking here for years, just not registered until recently. I figured being able to post was worth registering.

Also, considering the cost of adding more cable cards for each additional unit, the CCI byte restrictions, and just how much I use my TiVos, I'll gladly accept the risk.


----------



## nooneuknow

richsadams said:


> +1


I would have thought that you, of all people, would at least be interested enough in HOW weaknees got around a stumbling block that Comer couldn't (at the time), and if it can be replicated.

From what I'm reading elsewhere, it has to do with a "register" of some sort.

+1'ing ThreeSoFar is like giving my post a :down:

I'll let it slide, just this once.


----------



## retiredqwest

Read these posts about 4TB:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8232305#post8232305

then 2 weeks later:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8251170#post8251170

I would question the stability and reliability of a 4TB combo.

Last year several vendors had the 4TB package, then they all removed them. Now Weaknees is offering one...... but noone else. I'd wait a few months and see if the 4TB is still available.

I tried to add my 1TB Expander to the 2TB TP and it never did work. The expander did marry to the stock drive.

It would be interesting to see the partition tables for the 4TB..... but at $530 I'm not all that interested.


----------



## richsadams

nooneuknow said:


> I would have thought that you, of all people, would at least be interested enough in HOW weaknees got around a stumbling block that Comer couldn't (at the time), and if it can be replicated.
> 
> From what I'm reading elsewhere, it has to do with a "register" of some sort.
> 
> +1'ing ThreeSoFar is like giving my post a :down:
> 
> I'll let it slide, just this once.


Don't get me wrong, no disrespect intended. I am also interested in the Weakness setup and what they did to overcome the earlier problems they and everyone else had with the 4TB option. I was +1ing the concept of adding the secondary fail point. I haven't to date (knock on wood...touching head) ever lost all of my recordings but I know I would be very upset if I did so I tend to move whatever recordings I can't live without to my computer (and then an external storage drive). If copy protection is an issue there is a way to mod a TiVo to overcome that, but that's a different thread.

FWIW I believe another TCF member (aaronwt?) has built a Drobo type server to do something like you're considering...but with über large terabytes of space. You might want to run a search.

Me? I'm just waiting for the 3TB single drive upgrade...then 4TB...then...


----------



## ThreeSoFar

nooneuknow said:


> I'm fully aware of the fact that external drives are an -additional- fail point.
> 
> [snip]
> I'm not a "newb". I've been lurking here for years, just not registered until recently. I figured being able to post was worth registering.


Frankly, I didn't even look at your post count or TCF sub date. I assumed you were not a newb, but lots of newb*s* do use this thread as a resource and I wanted to save them that pain. I assume you're not suffering from dissociative disorder--the plural was also not directed at you.

FWIW, we added a couple free (non CC) HD tuners to our mix by putting an indoor antenna on our top floor Series 3 to give us a little more HD space on the OTA networks. We record and watch a TON, more than anyone I know, and since going to 2TB haven't come close to filling them. We have five dual tuner HD capable lifetimed TiVos (2S4, 1HDTiVo, 2S3), all but one at 2TB, the other at 1TB. You're the first to eat up more space than us that I've heard of.

And I differ from Rich here--I am *not[/i] interested in any solution dealing with an external drive specifically because it introduces too much risk to losing content. I don't want our "customers" on this thread to ever see just that side of the equation and be disappointed when they run into failure because of it, so I will take the opportunity your post and others like it presents to point out that fact.*


----------



## richsadams

ThreeSoFar said:


> And I differ from Rich here--I am *not[/i] interested in any solution dealing with an external drive specifically because it introduces too much risk to losing content.*


*FWIW I still agree. I'm not interested in an external solution either...only in what they did to overcome prior problems. That info might be adapted to allow us to use something larger than the current 2TB limited internal drives. 3TB drives are already out there and IIRC 4TB's are just around the corner.

We're also in the same boat...it will be quite a while before our 2TB PXL hits the wall. We also use our Series3 as a quasi-three and four tuner option but mostly for those fairly rare occasions when there are more than two programs we want to record on in the same timeframe.*


----------



## nooneuknow

retiredqwest said:


> Read these posts about 4TB:
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8232305#post8232305
> 
> then 2 weeks later:
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8251170#post8251170


I read those back when they were originally posted.

It's still a good reminder, though. I didn't jump on the Comer JMFS bandwagon until after the second revision was out, and after it had been out for long enough for others to hit max capacity and verify no disasters awaited.


----------



## nooneuknow

richsadams said:


> FWIW I still agree. I'm not interested in an external solution either...only in what they did to overcome prior problems. That info might be adapted to allow us to use something larger than the current 2TB limited internal drives. 3TB drives are already out there and IIRC 4TB's are just around the corner.


This! +1. Hopefully, the weaknees "fix" will lead to a way to do it with one internal drive (provided that JMFS, or a future update, will allow me to transfer everything, and then expand beyond the original expansion).



> If copy protection is an issue there is a way to mod a TiVo to overcome that, but that's a different thread.


Only TiVo HDs, last I knew of. Even then, all of them need to be modded, or problems arise when trying to transfer between modded and non-modded. I only have one active TiVo HD at this time, anyway. I'm not up-to-date enough on the subject to even guess if there could be transfers between HDs and Premieres when mods get thrown in.

Since the Premiere is still in its infancy, and will likely require many updates to be what it should have been at launch, I shudder at the thought of modding them, even if that is now possible. Since they are all lifetime subs, I don't want to lose my investment with the slip of a soldering iron, or with a TiVo software update.

I'm aware of the deal. I'm always searching the giant database known as the world-wide-web.


----------



## richsadams

nooneuknow said:


> Only TiVo HDs, last I knew of.


 Series3's as well.



nooneuknow said:


> Since the Premiere is still in its infancy, and will likely require many updates to be what it should have been at launch...


*BIG* +1! :up:


----------



## Techdem

Nice Tut!


----------



## Techdem

ThreeSoFar said:


> Why?
> 
> I say this every time it comes up only because newbs may not know the pain.
> 
> Those external drives are NOT a good solution. Too many moving/fallible parts. And when it fails, you lose ALL recordings--there's no way to avoid that.
> 
> Stick with 300 hours HD, that should do. If that's not enough, probably two tuners isn't either--get a SECOND unit.


AND the external sometimes drops, sometimes will record internally others it will freeze.


----------



## chucker

Anyone, is there another link to the jmfs software? I can't seem to get a reaction from the links in the first post. Thanks, Chuck


----------



## Stuxnet

The mediafire link works here.


----------



## chucker

Stuxnet said:


> The mediafire link works here.


You're right, internet explorer 9 to blame. Thanks for the confirmation.


----------



## akbungle

Sorry if I missed this but I just bought a TiVo Premiere from Ebay and they upgraded the hard drive to a 1TB. The problem is that when I booted it up it stuttered some at the "TiVo movie" and then periodically after that. So I popped the hood and found a Seagate 2.5 inch HDD barely hanging in the HDD carriage so I took that drive and did this upgrade then sent the drive back to the person(no more glitches). But now, finally, here is my problem: I made sure to "supersize" the drive but when I look at the settings screen it shows 150 hours recordable time and not the 236 I should have. Any thoughts on how I goofed this up?
Thanks in advance for any and all help!


----------



## retiredqwest

akbungle said:


> Sorry if I missed this but I just bought a TiVo Premiere from Ebay and they upgraded the hard drive to a 1TB. The problem is that when I booted it up it stuttered some at the "TiVo movie" and then periodically after that. So I popped the hood and found a Seagate 2.5 inch HDD barely hanging in the HDD carriage so I took that drive and did this upgrade then sent the drive back to the person(no more glitches). But now, finally, here is my problem: I made sure to "supersize" the drive but when I look at the settings screen it shows 150 hours recordable time and not the 236 I should have. Any thoughts on how I goofed this up?
> Thanks in advance for any and all help!


2TB = 317 hrs HD
1.5TB =237 hrs or so HD
1TB =150 hrs or so HD

Since you really don't say what you used for a target drive.....


----------



## akbungle

akbungle said:


> Sorry if I missed this but I just bought a TiVo Premiere from Ebay and they upgraded the hard drive to a 1TB. The problem is that when I booted it up it stuttered some at the "TiVo movie" and then periodically after that. So I popped the hood and found a Seagate 2.5 inch HDD barely hanging in the HDD carriage so I took that drive and did this upgrade then sent the drive back to the person(no more glitches). But now, finally, here is my problem: I made sure to "supersize" the drive but when I look at the settings screen it shows 150 hours recordable time and not the 236 I should have. Any thoughts on how I goofed this up?
> Thanks in advance for any and all help!





retiredqwest said:


> 2TB = 317 hrs HD
> *1.5TB =237 hrs or so HD*
> 1TB =150 hrs or so HD
> 
> Since you really don't say what you used for a target drive.....


Sorry I knew I missed something I did change to a 1.5TB drive and that's why I'm confused.


----------



## retiredqwest

akbungle said:


> Sorry I knew I missed something I did change to a 1.5TB drive and that's why I'm confused.


I think I know what happened, but not 100% sure. And I'd rather not speculate.

Did you get the original stock drive with this TIVO? You could use that to copy and expand to the 1.5TB.

My only other suggestion is to run JMFS against that drive and toggle the Supersize option again. That might give you 217 hrs or so HD. Supersize is just a bit stored on the hard drive.

If the latter does nothing....


----------



## akbungle

Yeah I was wondering the same thing. He did not give me the original drive so maybe it just mirrored the previous drive which limited me to the 150 hours. 

I have ordered a TiVo Premiere directly from TiVo doing an upgrade from my TiVo HD so I'm thinking I'll just take that drive and make both of my larger drives from that original one. In that case I'll also know that I'll have a good, solid image on the first one as well (since it has glitched once or twice but I assumed that was just a tuner signal thing but this way I can be more confident.)

There should be no issue making two copies from the one drive to serve two different TiVos, right?


----------



## retiredqwest

akbungle said:


> Yeah I was wondering the same thing. He did not give me the original drive so maybe it just mirrored the previous drive which limited me to the 150 hours.
> 
> I have ordered a TiVo Premiere directly from TiVo doing an upgrade from my TiVo HD so I'm thinking I'll just take that drive and make both of my larger drives from that original one. In that case I'll also know that I'll have a good, solid image on the first one as well (since it has glitched once or twice but I assumed that was just a tuner signal thing but this way I can be more confident.)
> 
> There should be no issue making two copies from the one drive to serve two different TiVos, right?


I have no personal experience doing that, but I know I've seen messages where people have done that.

You'd want to do this before you run setup on the new TP.

If it was me, I'd do a copy only from the 320G to another 320G or larger and mark that as the source drive for the Ebay TP. Then use that drive in the Ebay TP and run setup from there. If you are going to use cable cards, pair them. Then use that for the copy and expand and supersize.

Another thing to think about is upgrading them to a 2TB drive. The 320G takes 2-3 hrs to copy. The 1TB takes 8-9 hrs and a 1.5TB would take 12-13 hrs.


----------



## akbungle

retiredqwest said:


> I have no personal experience doing that, but I know I've seen messages where people have done that.
> 
> You'd want to do this before you run setup on the new TP.
> 
> If it was me, I'd do a copy only from the 320G to another 320G or larger and mark that as the source drive for the Ebay TP. Then use that drive in the Ebay TP and run setup from there. If you are going to use cable cards, pair them. Then use that for the copy and expand and supersize.
> 
> Another thing to think about is upgrading them to a 2TB drive. The 320G takes 2-3 hrs to copy. The 1TB takes 8-9 hrs and a 1.5TB would take 12-13 hrs.


Wow I just noticed in your last post that I think I must have missed a step. I believe I did just the copy and supersize steps and missed the expand part which would make total sense since the HDD I copied from was a 1TB drive.
Hopefully the other idea to make two copies from the one drive works otherwise I'll be using a 1.5TB drive but only getting the benefit of 1TB.
Oh and I think for this other drive I'll be using a 2TB drive but I got the 1.5TB because it was a good price on Amazon last week.

Thanks for all your help and ideas!!


----------



## hhickman

Well, I finally finished reading through this thread. 

I'll be taking the leap and Upgrading my 3 Tivo P to 2TB drives.


----------



## Stuxnet

hhickman said:


> Well, I finally finished reading through this thread.
> 
> I'll be taking the leap and Upgrading my 3 Tivo P to 2TB drives.


I found it helpful to view the video on upgrading the Premiere. You can access the first part here. Have fun!


----------



## akbungle

akbungle said:


> ............ But now, finally, here is my problem: I made sure to "supersize" the drive but *when I look at the settings screen it shows 156 hours recordable time and not the 236 I should have.* Any thoughts on how I goofed this up?
> Thanks in advance for any and all help!


Now I'm really confused I checked my "system Information" screen under recording capacity and it shows: up to 156 HD hours but then under my "recording quality" screen it shows 230 hours, 23 min for best quality so what is the deal on that one?


----------



## retiredqwest

akbungle said:


> Now I'm really confused I checked my "system Information" screen under recording capacity and it shows: up to 156 HD hours but then under my "recording quality" screen it shows 230 hours, 23 min for best quality so what is the deal on that one?


"Note: This setting has no effect on recordings from digital channels."

In other words..... those numbers mean nothing to HD recordings.....


----------



## bd3521

richsadams said:


> Welcome to the forum. You have several options. If it were me I would opt for one of these at this time:
> 
> WD10EVDS
> 
> WD20EVDS
> 
> Those are both A/V dedicated drives and do not need any AAM adjustments. If you buy them from Amazon or Newegg.com they s/b new enough that they won't need the Intellipark feature tweaked.
> 
> Probably the most popular drives being used here are these:
> 
> WD10EARS
> 
> WD20EARS
> 
> Hope that helps and happy upgrading!


So for the Premiere, the WD10EVDS is preferable over the WD10EARS?


----------



## richsadams

bd3521 said:


> So for the Premiere, the WD10EVDS is preferable over the WD10EARS?


Only if you don't want to take the time to adjust the AAM on the WD10EARS.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

You can make as many dupes as you like, for different TiVos, from the same source drive. All will work.

The one caveat is that all of the boxes except the on the source drive came from to begin with will report a "hardware error", and will not work at all, at first. This is due to the drive containing the hardware address (TSN) of the original system it came from and the other boxes not matching that address.

The menus work though, and once you go to the CADE option (Clear and Delete Everything), and once that process finishes (can take hours), it will work fine.


----------



## bd3521

richsadams said:


> Only if you don't want to take the time to adjust the AAM on the WD10EARS.


I could, I know linux pretty well and hardware.

Assuming I made adjustments, why would the WD10EARS be superior?

I could go either way but would rather take the out the box solution if they were equivalent.


----------



## richsadams

bd3521 said:


> I could, I know linux pretty well and hardware.


 HDDScan will do the trick.



bd3521 said:


> Assuming I made adjustments, why would the WD10EARS be superior?


 Never said it would be a superior solution. With respect to TiVo they are equals performance-wise. WD's non-A/V GP drives (such as the WD10EARS) are usually less expensive.



bd3521 said:


> I could go either way but would rather take the out the box solution if they were equivalent.


Any of the WD A/V GP line of drives would be a fine choice then.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## Stuxnet

bd3521 said:


> Assuming I made adjustments, why would the WD10EARS be superior?


Probably cheaper than the A/V drives... otherwise I would say "comparable" versus "superior".


----------



## akbungle

ThreeSoFar said:


> You can make as many dupes as you like, for different TiVos, from the same source drive. All will work.
> 
> The one caveat is that all of the boxes except the on the source drive came from to begin with will report a "hardware error", and will not work at all, at first. This is due to the drive containing the hardware address (TSN) of the original system it came from and the other boxes not matching that address.
> 
> The menus work though, and *once you go to the CADE option (Clear and Delete Everything), and once that process finishes (can take hours), it will work fine.*


Wow THANKS that totally saved me on my TiVo HD that I just replaced the HDD on. It kept giving me that "hardware error" "51" and saying it needed to restart and that it may take up to three hours but everytime it came back to say "hardware error" again. But after trying the Clear and Delete Everything option it came back and is now working great! Thanks again.


----------



## bd3521

Stuxnet said:


> Probably cheaper than the A/V drives... otherwise I would say "comparable" versus "superior".


Comparable? What would be different?

I understand the slight price difference but aren't the drives equivalent (specs, RPM, power usage, reliability, etc...) after configuring EARS?


----------



## Stuxnet

bd3521 said:


> Comparable? What would be different?
> 
> I understand the slight price difference but aren't the drives equivalent (specs, RPM, power usage, reliability, etc...) after configuring EARS?


http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/


----------



## richsadams

bd3521 said:


> Comparable? What would be different?
> 
> I understand the slight price difference but aren't the drives equivalent (specs, RPM, power usage, reliability, etc...) after configuring EARS?


WD A/V GP drives have a number of features designed to enhance DVR applications...mostly aimed at the security DVR market to address the high number of inputs (multiple cameras), recording at slow frame rates, etc. Those features are designed to improve the performance and/or add to the drive's longevity. The features add to the cost of manufacturing.

TiVo can't or doesn't need to take advantage of any of the A/V DVR features so with the exception of their acoustic settings there's no real advantage to using them when it comes to TiVo.


----------



## ducker

Good price on a 2TB drive:
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245
$69.99 with code EMCKEJK37
Good for about 24hours.

I haven't searched the tivo forums yet to see if anyone has any experience with this drive in a Premiere unit.


----------



## richsadams

ducker said:


> Good price on a 2TB drive:
> SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245
> $69.99 with code EMCKEJK37
> Good for about 24hours.
> 
> I haven't searched the tivo forums yet to see if anyone has any experience with this drive in a Premiere unit.


That is a good price for a 2TB drive. Although some folks here are using them 1TB Sammys have a checkered past with TiVo historically either not working at all or becoming glitchy or failing later. AFAIK there's no data on the newer 2TB drives though. It would be good to have some feedback...however caveat emptor.


----------



## ducker

richsadams said:


> That is a good price for a 2TB drive. Although some folks here are using them 1TB Sammys have a checkered past with TiVo historically either not working at all or becoming glitchy or failing later. AFAIK there's no data on the newer 2TB drives though. It would be good to have some feedback...however caveat emptor.


Good to know.. I'm going to ponder this situation prior to pulling the trigger on it. And decide tonight. I've had one drive that's been running for about 5 years (in a S2 box, and then a D* Tivo box) . I'm kinda curious as to what drive that one is


----------



## jcthorne

I just bought a WD Green 2tb at amazon on Friday for $73. This is a drive with long history of working well in the tivo.


----------



## ducker

jcthorne said:


> I just bought a WD Green 2tb at amazon on Friday for $73. This is a drive with long history of working well in the tivo.


I wish I knew about that on friday


----------



## jcthorne

ducker said:


> I wish I knew about that on friday


Yep, they are $78 today. They will go back down. I have an alert set at camelcamelcamel for this and several other items I and friends need on a regular basis. Buy them when the price drops. Amazon pricing can fluctuate several times a day.


----------



## unitron

jcthorne said:


> Yep, they are $78 today. They will go back down. I have an alert set at camelcamelcamel for this and several other items I and friends need on a regular basis. Buy them when the price drops. Amazon pricing can fluctuate several times a day.


All well and good provided that the drive they advertise is actually the drive they ship, said the guy who ordered two RE2s and got a box containing 2 "adult novelty items", and who ordered what in the pictures was a 512 byte sector WD20EADS with 32MB of cache and got a 4K platters WD20EACS with 16MB of cache.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

richsadams said:


> That is a good price for a 2TB drive. Although some folks here are using them 1TB Sammys have a checkered past with TiVo historically either not working at all or becoming glitchy or failing later. AFAIK there's no data on the newer 2TB drives though. It would be good to have some feedback...however caveat emptor.


Almost all of my Pre-Premiere upgrades of TiVos were done with Samsung Spinpoint drives, somewhere between 10 and 15 upgrades (mine and friends').

No problems at all.


----------



## Charles R

Will the CD boot fine without having any TiVo drives attached? I'm trying to test if my PC will work ok and it takes forever and finally displays Boot Failed. Does this mean Linux itself couldn't load via the CD or something else?

During bootup it displays...

Loading boot/vmlinuz... followed by boot failed.

Thanks.

UPDATE: The PC must not be supported as the CD booted fine on my Intel Mac.


----------



## Stuxnet

Charles R said:


> Will the CD boot fine without having any TiVo drives attached? I'm trying to test if my PC will work ok and it takes forever and finally displays Boot Failed. Does this mean Linux itself couldn't load via the CD or something else?
> 
> During bootup it displays...
> 
> Loading boot/vmlinuz... followed by boot failed.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> UPDATE: The PC must not be supported as the CD booted fine on my Intel Mac.


That, or your Mac is more tolerant of a dodgy CD burn. As you discovered, you don't need the TiVo drive attached to boot.


----------



## JavaJoe_2

Thanks, Comer!!
Beer is on the way....:up:


----------



## sliu2005

My TiVo Premiere is stuck in reboot loop, after plug in, it shows "welcome, starting up" screen, then all lights blink once, the screen goes blank, and returns to "welcome, starting up" screen. It does this continuously. 

I have upgraded to 2TB WD20EVDS based on instructions in this thread (thanks to Comer for his excellent work). It has been working flawlessly for months until recently. The first sign of trouble is, suddenly, all front panel lights started to blink, so I power cycled the TiVo. After that TiVo boots up ok, but then some time later the menu froze while it is recording. so I power cycled again. This is when the endless reboot loop occurred.

I plan to hook up the drive to PC and run WD tool to check for drive errors. If there's no bad sectors, it is probably data corruption, I'll use jmfs to copy from stock drive again (I have the stock drive as backup). Otherwise I'll get a replacement drive and also copy from stock drive. 

Either way, my recordings will be gone. My question is, if WD diagnostics tool report no bad sector (so it is just data corruption due to software bugs), is it possible to restore my recordings? TiVo support has no better suggestion other than replace the unit. I also saw the kickstart 54 option, but my TiVo Premiere won't start, so I cannot reboot from menu and use kickstart. 

I am thinking if the OS is corrupted, maybe I can restore the OS only, and leave the recordings intact? is there a way to achieve this? Any suggestions would be appreciated.


----------



## unitron

sliu2005 said:


> My TiVo Premiere is stuck in reboot loop, after plug in, it shows "welcome, starting up" screen, then all lights blink once, the screen goes blank, and returns to "welcome, starting up" screen. It does this continuously.
> 
> I have upgraded to 2TB WD20EVDS based on instructions in this thread (thanks to Comer for his excellent work). It has been working flawlessly for months until recently. The first sign of trouble is, suddenly, all front panel lights started to blink, so I power cycled the TiVo. After that TiVo boots up ok, but then some time later the menu froze while it is recording. so I power cycled again. This is when the endless reboot loop occurred.
> 
> I plan to hook up the drive to PC and run WD tool to check for drive errors. If there's no bad sectors, it is probably data corruption, I'll use jmfs to copy from stock drive again (I have the stock drive as backup). Otherwise I'll get a replacement drive and also copy from stock drive.
> 
> Either way, my recordings will be gone. My question is, if WD diagnostics tool report no bad sector (so it is just data corruption due to software bugs), is it possible to restore my recordings? TiVo support has no better suggestion other than replace the unit. I also saw the kickstart 54 option, but my TiVo Premiere won't start, so I cannot reboot from menu and use kickstart.
> 
> I am thinking if the OS is corrupted, maybe I can restore the OS only, and leave the recordings intact? is there a way to achieve this? Any suggestions would be appreciated.


As for what you propose in your final paragraph, I hope someone who knows more than do I responds, but if I were going to roll the dice on this I'd restore to a different drive, and after making sure that the non-MFS partitions were the same size as the ones on the 2TB drive, I'd use dd or dd_rescue to copy the good new ones on top of the suspect ones, leaving the partition map and the MFS partitions on the 2TB drive untouched.

But I haven't tried that particular experiment yet, so no guarantees whatsoever.

As far as kickstart is concerned I think you need to read up on it a lot more. You don't access it from the TiVo menu, you get into it by interrupting the boot process at just the right moment.

You could also ask someone more knowledgeable than am I whether trying the bootpage fix options in WinMFS is a viable idea in your case. I have no idea if WinMFS works with comer'ed drives or not, or even if it works with S4s or not.


----------



## richsadams

sliu2005 said:


> My TiVo Premiere is stuck in reboot loop, after plug in, it shows "welcome, starting up" screen, then all lights blink once, the screen goes blank, and returns to "welcome, starting up" screen. It does this continuously.
> 
> I have upgraded to 2TB WD20EVDS based on instructions in this thread (thanks to Comer for his excellent work). It has been working flawlessly for months until recently. The first sign of trouble is, suddenly, all front panel lights started to blink, so I power cycled the TiVo. After that TiVo boots up ok, but then some time later the menu froze while it is recording. so I power cycled again. This is when the endless reboot loop occurred.
> 
> I plan to hook up the drive to PC and run WD tool to check for drive errors. If there's no bad sectors, it is probably data corruption, I'll use jmfs to copy from stock drive again (I have the stock drive as backup). Otherwise I'll get a replacement drive and also copy from stock drive.
> 
> Either way, my recordings will be gone. My question is, if WD diagnostics tool report no bad sector (so it is just data corruption due to software bugs), is it possible to restore my recordings? TiVo support has no better suggestion other than replace the unit. I also saw the kickstart 54 option, but my TiVo Premiere won't start, so I cannot reboot from menu and use kickstart.
> 
> I am thinking if the OS is corrupted, maybe I can restore the OS only, and leave the recordings intact? is there a way to achieve this? Any suggestions would be appreciated.


Welcome to the forum...sorry to hear its under such frustrating circumstances. It's possible that it's data corruption, although very unlikely anything to do with "software bugs". Corruption generally occurs either when the hard drive is unable to correct I/O errors or when there are physical problems such as power outages, spikes, brown outs, etc. Be sure your TiVo is always connected to a UPS and that you have a clean coax connection (never run it through a surge protector, etc.). As you mention, it's also quite possible that the unit has run into bad sectors on the hard drive, it happens.

You should try running some of the Kickstarts before doing anything else. Your TiVo doesn't need to boot up fully to run them...in fact they won't run if it does. Have a look here, follow each one in the recommended order and see if things get better. (Note that the procedure for Premiere's is different than with other models...Premiere details are near the bottom of the post.)

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2

If there are still issues try reinstalling the original drive and see if it runs normally. If so, a replacement hard drive is probably in order.

Best of luck and let us know how it goes.


----------



## Wislander

Using a spare old computer motherboard (which only has 2 SATA connections) and case, 1 Gig of Ram, an old 2.7 Ghz AMD single core proc, an old 16x IDE CD drive, an old spare power supply, a PS/2 keyboard, and a CRT monitor no less, I was able to use this CD to upgrade/up-size my TiVo Premiere in about 2 hours. 

Even with the outdated scrap pile hardware listed above the CD worked perfectly without a hitch. Seriously, most of the hardware above is 4 - 10 years old and it still works just fine for this process. I am thinking of leaving the system configured and label it as TiVo Workstation.


----------



## unitron

Wislander said:


> Using a spare old computer motherboard (which only has 2 SATA connections) and case, 1 Gig of Ram, an old 2.7 Ghz AMD single core proc, an old 16x IDE CD drive, an old spare power supply, a PS/2 keyboard, and a CRT monitor no less, I was able to use this CD to upgrade/up-size my TiVo Premiere in about 2 hours.
> 
> Even with the outdated scrap pile hardware listed above the CD worked perfectly without a hitch. Seriously, most of the hardware above is 4 - 10 years old and it still works just fine for this process. I am thinking of leaving the system configured and label it as TiVo Workstation.


Sounds great as long as that isn't a GigaByte motherboard.

Although for a moment I was wondering how you used an IDE cd drive on a board with only 2 SATA ports, until I realised you meant a board whose number of SATA ports was limited to 2, not a board whose number of drive ports was limited to 2, both of which were SATA.


----------



## ftballpack

Hey guys,

So, I upgraded my Tivo Primere a few months back and installed a WD20EURs in the Tivo and everything had been working great.

I had to run kickstart 57 a few months back on the original drive literally the day before I did the hard drive swap, just to fix a strange booting issue.

Well, since I thought kickstart 57 was closesly related to checkdisk in Windows, I had been doing it somewhat frequently as a way to keep the new drive working at top performace.

Last night I decided to put the drive (the WD20EURS) into kickstart 57 manually and after going to the (GSOD) green screen of death for about 15 seconds it kept rebooting. Little did I know that kickstart 57 could actually corrupt a good drive with a limited drive swap 

I still have my original drive and understand that all the files on my expanded WD20EURS are lost. My question is how to properly go about reformatting my WD20EURS using Comer's bootdisk? Do I have to use GParted Live to remove the current partitions on the WD20EURS and then use Comer's boot disk? Can I just use Comer's boot disk to reimage the original drive over the WD20EURS that I corrupted?

Your help on this one is greatly appreciate guys.

Thanks,

ftballpack (Scott)


----------



## Wislander

unitron said:


> Sounds great as long as that isn't a GigaByte motherboard.


Actually, it is an ECE Power Motherboard so not too much different than a GigaByte brand. Have people had issues with GigaByte boards and this CD?



unitron said:


> Although for a moment I was wondering how you used an IDE cd drive on a board with only 2 SATA ports, until I realised you meant a board whose number of SATA ports was limited to 2, not a board whose number of drive ports was limited to 2, both of which were SATA.


Yeah, I guess I could have explained that better. It has two IDE channels and only two SATA connectors or I could have used a SATA CD/DVD drive. It's more of a comment of a "barebones" system can do this operation.


----------



## unitron

Wislander said:


> Actually, it is an ECE Power Motherboard so not too much different than a GigaByte brand. Have people had issues with GigaByte boards and this CD? ...


GigaByte boards with Express Recovery or Express Recovery II grab what they think is going to be your OS hard drive (and the OS they expect is Windows) and put a Host Protected Area (which is a sort of partition not recognized as a partition) on the end of it to make room for some sort of system backup file. This happens before they load any actual operating software from any boot source.

Since they don't recognize the Apple Partition Map used on TiVo drives they think a TiVo drive is an empty drive and fair game for the HPA.

It's also a really great way to hose a RAID array.

The problem has nothing to do with what kind of cd you boot with, but with how they (GigaByte boards) screw up hard drives.

If you boot with the MFS Live cd v1.4, you can run

hdparm -N /dev/hd"x"

where "x" is the IDE drive (or SATA drive connnected to an IDE port via an adapter) you want to know about,

(and probably hdparm -N /dev/sd"x" for SATA drives on SATA ports )

and it'll show you if all of your LBA blocks are accessible or not.

If you're on a non-GigaByte board there's a way to undo the HPA (but not the damage it's done to your Tivo partitions) with hdparm (a very dangerous program if you don't know what options and switches to use and which to avoid like the plague), but on a GigaByte board the operation fails because the board blocks it.


----------



## Stuxnet

ftballpack said:


> Can I just use Comer's boot disk to reimage the original drive over the WD20EURS that I corrupted?


Yes you can, but I'd suggest you download WD's diagnostic tool and fully test your drive before using Comer's jmfs program.


----------



## richsadams

Wislander said:


> I am thinking of leaving the system configured and label it as TiVo Workstation.


I have one of those! Wife thinks it should go in the trash heap but every time I think about it...I decide to do another upgrade! 

Congrats on your "new" TiVo BTW.


----------



## richsadams

ftballpack said:


> Well, since I thought kickstart 57 was closesly related to checkdisk in Windows, I had been doing it somewhat frequently as a way to keep the new drive working at top performance.


Hi Scott. Sorry to hear about your issues with TiVo. Windows' checkdisk and KS57 are two different worlds. In fact Windows and the Linux/Apple OS (the basis of TiVo's architecture) are two different worlds. That's why there's no need to "defrag" or do any of the housekeeping that helps Windows run better. I know I made mention of Windows' checkdisk in my KS post so to avoid any confusion like this I removed the reference.

It's difficult to say if KS57 corrupted your drive...odds are that's probably not the case but anything is possible. Running KS57 or KS58 should only be done when something is wrong. It won't make anything "better" otherwise.

That said, did you try running KS58? That may be able to repair the problem as it does a bit more work. More here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2

If that doesn't fix things it's possible that it's a data problem or it could be a drive problem. So as Stuxnet suggests, before re-imaging your drive running WD Lifeguard diagnostics (extended read/write/read) would be a good idea.

Also as mentioned, you won't need to reformat anything...jmfs will take care of that.

Best of luck and let us know how things go.


----------



## sliu2005

unitron said:


> As for what you propose in your final paragraph, I hope someone who knows more than do I responds, but if I were going to roll the dice on this I'd restore to a different drive, and after making sure that the non-MFS partitions were the same size as the ones on the 2TB drive, I'd use dd or dd_rescue to copy the good new ones on top of the suspect ones, leaving the partition map and the MFS partitions on the 2TB drive untouched.
> 
> But I haven't tried that particular experiment yet, so no guarantees whatsoever.
> 
> As far as kickstart is concerned I think you need to read up on it a lot more. You don't access it from the TiVo menu, you get into it by interrupting the boot process at just the right moment.
> 
> You could also ask someone more knowledgeable than am I whether trying the bootpage fix options in WinMFS is a viable idea in your case. I have no idea if WinMFS works with comer'ed drives or not, or even if it works with S4s or not.





richsadams said:


> Welcome to the forum...sorry to hear its under such frustrating circumstances. It's possible that it's data corruption, although very unlikely anything to do with "software bugs". Corruption generally occurs either when the hard drive is unable to correct I/O errors or when there are physical problems such as power outages, spikes, brown outs, etc. Be sure your TiVo is always connected to a UPS and that you have a clean coax connection (never run it through a surge protector, etc.). As you mention, it's also quite possible that the unit has run into bad sectors on the hard drive, it happens.
> 
> You should try running some of the Kickstarts before doing anything else. Your TiVo doesn't need to boot up fully to run them...in fact they won't run if it does. Have a look here, follow each one in the recommended order and see if things get better. (Note that the procedure for Premiere's is different than with other models...Premiere details are near the bottom of the post.)
> 
> If there are still issues try reinstalling the original drive and see if it runs normally. If so, a replacement hard drive is probably in order.
> 
> Best of luck and let us know how it goes.


Thanks unitron and richsadams for your suggestion. I am very sorry for my tardiness in replying since I am sick.

I have re-read the kickstart post from richsadams (I have to delete the link in the quote since I have less 5 posts), so it looks like power cycle have the same effect as select "restart" from TiVo menu. I followed Premiere specific instruction at the bottom of the that post, however, TiVo does not seem to respond to PAUSE button. It just reboots too fast for me to enter the code.

WD diagnostics tool reported S.M.A.R.T. failure, so it looks like bad sectors exists and the drive is about to fail. Called WD support for an advance replacement, when it arrives I will roll the dice and use jmfs to copy from old 2TB to new 2TB (probably takes forever), see if that works. If not, I'll research on dd_rescue and WinMFS. I was under the false impression that these tools do not apply to Premiere, hence comer's jmfs.

Will report back how it goes. thanks again for your help.


----------



## Wislander

unitron said:


> GigaByte boards with Express Recovery or Express Recovery II grab what they think is going to be your OS hard drive (and the OS they expect is Windows) and put a Host Protected Area (which is a sort of partition not recognized as a partition) on the end of it to make room for some sort of system backup file. This happens before they load any actual operating software from any boot source.


Ah.. yeah I turn all of the Express Recovery, BOIS Image, and Express Back-up tools that motherboard companies add to to their BIOS before I actually do anything with the system. Like you noted they always seem to cause more damage than they prevent in the long run. I actually worked on a Dell Dimension system once that placed a boot loader, in front of the Windows Boot loader and would not allow certain hardware upgrades to ever work. In this case it was a third party eSATA card.


----------



## unitron

Wislander said:


> Ah.. yeah I turn all of the Express Recovery, BOIS Image, and Express Back-up tools that motherboard companies add to to their BIOS before I actually do anything with the system. Like you noted they always seem to cause more damage than they prevent in the long run. I actually worked on a Dell Dimension system once that placed a boot loader, in front of the Windows Boot loader and would not allow certain hardware upgrades to ever work. In this case it was a third party eSATA card.


On the 2 GigaByte boards I acquired before I knew about this nasty tendency of theirs, there is no way to turn it off, and apparently they never released a bios update with the ability to do so enabled.

Also, there's no warning about it except in the fine print of the owner's manual.

Proprietary is one of the dirtiest words in the English language.


----------



## Stuxnet

sliu2005 said:


> It just reboots too fast for me to enter the code.


Well, that's what I thought when I initially tried the kickstart, but it turns out that the flash that occurs immediately upon start-up, is not the one you gotta catch. It's the next one several seconds later... at least on my premiere it worked that way. I must have tried to hit the first yellow flash a dozen times, before I stumbled into to the next one.


----------



## wluk

I am trying to upgrade my 1.5tb to 2tb WD EARS drive since last night. It took about 9 hours to copy the data over to the new (used) drive. However, when I tried to expand it, I got the unsuccessful message. So I ran the mfsadd.sh from command line and I got the following error.

MfsAdd exception: Negative seek offset

not sure what I should try next. I ran mfslayout on the new drive it shows the 215 HD hours (from my 1.5TB drive).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks!


----------



## wluk

I ran it with rev68 this time and I got more information on this screen.

MfsAdd exception
java.io.IOException: Negative seek offset
at java.io.RandomAccessFile.seek(Native Method)
at tivo.io.Utils.seekBlock(Utils.java:418)
at tivo.io.Utils.seekBlock(Utils.java:410)
at jmfs.MfsAdd.writeZones(MfsAd.java:221)
at jmfs.MfsAdd.writeChanges(MfsAd.java:246)
at jmfs.MfsAdd.add(MfsAdd.java:41)
at jmfs:MfsAdd.add(MfsAdd.java:279)
at jmfs.MfsAdd.main(MfsAdd.java:45)


----------



## Fofer

I was under the impression you couldn't upgrade an "already upgraded" drive like that. I thought you'd have to use the original drive and upgrade it directly to a 2 TB one.


----------



## wluk

for real? that's not good. 

I do have the original 320g image file. maybe I could restore the 320g image to the 2TB drive then run the expand that way. However, I will lose all my recording from my 1.5TB drive.


----------



## wluk

When I did the fdisk -l command. I got the following warning message. I don't know if it has any thing to do with my error.

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


----------



## retiredqwest

wluk said:


> I ran it with rev68 this time and I got more information on this screen.
> 
> MfsAdd exception
> java.io.IOException: Negative seek offset
> at java.io.RandomAccessFile.seek(Native Method)
> at tivo.io.Utils.seekBlock(Utils.java:418)
> at tivo.io.Utils.seekBlock(Utils.java:410)
> at jmfs.MfsAdd.writeZones(MfsAd.java:221)
> at jmfs.MfsAdd.writeChanges(MfsAd.java:246)
> at jmfs.MfsAdd.add(MfsAdd.java:41)
> at jmfs:MfsAdd.add(MfsAdd.java:279)
> at jmfs.MfsAdd.main(MfsAdd.java:45)


mfslayout.sh should tell you how many partitions are on the 1.5TB drive. If it is 16 then you can not copy and expand that drive as Tivo does not utilize more than 16. Don't know if that is causing the error.

Googling that error message talks about maxing out a history file..... way over my head.


----------



## retiredqwest

wluk said:


> When I did the fdisk -l command. I got the following warning message. I don't know if it has any thing to do with my error.
> 
> WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


I tested using JMFS on the TP and doing a C&E more than once.

The stock TP has 14 partitions.

1 : start= 1, size= 63 ( 31.50K), type='Apple_partition_map', name='Apple'
13: start= 64, size= 343828320 (163.95G), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region 2'
2 : start= 343828384, size= 1 (512.00b), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 1'
3 : start= 343828385, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 1'
4 : start= 343844769, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 1'
5 : start= 344369057, size= 1 (512.00b), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 2'
6 : start= 344369058, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 2'
7 : start= 344385442, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 2'
8 : start= 344909730, size= 262144 (128.00M), type='Swap' , name='Linux swap'
9 : start= 345171874, size= 1048576 (512.00M), type='Ext2' , name='/var'
14: start= 346220450, size= 6291456 ( 3.00G), type='Ext2' , name='SQLite'
10: start= 352511906, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region'
12: start= 354150306, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region 2'
11: start= 355788706, size= 269353742 (128.44G), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region'

JMFS will create 1 new partition when it expands a drive. So, yes you can expand from a 320G to 1.5TB then C&E to a 2TB using JMFS.

Anything over 16 partitions are seen as an external storage and you will have to run the divorce. AND the TP will go back to whatever the source drive size was.

Wluk,

I'd drop that 2tb drive in windows and delete any existing partitons and try it again. You may even want to first run WD diags against the drive to make sure it is not the problem.

Sad to say I never encountered any errors in my testing of JMFS.


----------



## wluk

there are 15 partitions on the 1.5tb drive if I read it correctly. does it mean I still have a chance to expand the 2tb drive.


----------



## wluk

the 2tb WD EARS drive only had 1 partition before. But I will take your suggestion and try deleting all partitions form windows then run the wd util and try it again tonight.

Need to put the 1.5tb drive back before tonight or my family will kill me.


----------



## retiredqwest

wluk said:


> the 2tb WD EARS drive only had 1 partition before. But I will take your suggestion and try deleting all partitions form windows then run the wd util and try it again tonight.
> 
> Need to put the 1.5tb drive back before tonight or my family will kill me.


Sounds like a plan.

When you try this again.... just do the copy only. Plug the 2TB back in the TP and make sure it boots up.

Then you do the expand and test it in the TP again.

And lastly do the supersize and see what happens then.

fdisk -l reporting the 2TB as a GPT partition is strange to say the least. I don't enough about MFS or JMFS to explain that one!

good luck


----------



## wluk

I was able to convert my drive from GPT to MBR. Now when I run fdisk -l, I don't get the GPT warning.

Will run the copy tonight and see what happen.


----------



## wluk

ok..I was able to restore the original tivo image using dd for windows to the 2tb WD EARS drive.

When I tried to expand it, now I am getting 

MfsAdd exception: Disk '/dev/sda' does not contain partition '/dev/sda15'

I chmod the disk but still got the same error.


----------



## sliu2005

Stuxnet said:


> Well, that's what I thought when I initially tried the kickstart, but it turns out that the flash that occurs immediately upon start-up, is not the one you gotta catch. It's the next one several seconds later... at least on my premiere it worked that way. I must have tried to hit the first yellow flash a dozen times, before I stumbled into to the next one.


Thanks. I will try it again after I copied the data from corrupted drive to new drive. If I can get kickstart to work, it will have a much better chance to repair the new drive (with corrupt data from old drive).


----------



## sliu2005

Before reporting status of my rescue effort, here's a summarize of my situation so far: My comer'ed 2TB TiVo Premiere is stuck in reboot loop continuously. WD diags tool reported S.M.A.R.T. failure, I got a replacement WD20EVDS today and attempt to save my recordings.

wdidle3 disabled the timer of the new drive, and now jmfs is copying from defective 2TB to the new 2TB. Based on current 1500MB/s rate, it would take more than 2 weeks to finish the copy! That is insane, not sure if can live that long before my family kills me 

I understand jmfs is designed to copy from stock drive to a larger drive, would copy from 2TB to 2TB work and preserve expanded/supersized partition? (I suppose I should only use Copy function, without touching expand/supersize functions since it was already done on the old drive)? If I am to wait for 2 weeks for the copy to finish, I better make sure this approach will work.

any alternative way to do this? how about dd_rescue from MFSLive? mfslive.org never mentioned TiVo Premiere, so does it even work with Premiere?


----------



## unitron

wluk said:


> When I did the fdisk -l command. I got the following warning message. I don't know if it has any thing to do with my error.
> 
> WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


I suspect that may have been because the EARS drive is an "advanced format" one.

I don't know of anybody's version of fdisk that'll show you TiVo partitions, but it looks like your drive was set up for Windows partitioning at some time even if actual partitions weren't written to it. Maybe it comes that way from WD.

To see TiVo partitions, use pdisk.


----------



## wluk

I was able to get rid of the GPT warning by converting it to MBR in windows.

Anyway, I did the copy again last night after converted to MBR but still doesn't expand.

Luckily, I still have the original 320gb image backed up with dd last year. I was able to restore it with dd for windows with multiple tries. You can't restore to any partition it has to be on the volume of the drive.

Once I got the image restored, Tivo asked me to remove the expansion partition or something like that. After that I was able to expand and supersize it.

I spent much of the time today to backup the videos from the 1.5tb and will load all the videos back to the 2tb. Even though I couldn't get all the videos backup, at least I have 317 hrs HD recording time on my tivo.

Thanks guys.


----------



## sliu2005

sliu2005 said:


> Before reporting status of my rescue effort, here's a summarize of my situation so far: My comer'ed 2TB TiVo Premiere is stuck in reboot loop continuously. WD diags tool reported S.M.A.R.T. failure, I got a replacement WD20EVDS today and attempt to save my recordings.
> 
> wdidle3 disabled the timer of the new drive, and now jmfs is copying from defective 2TB to the new 2TB. Based on current 1500 kB/s rate, it would take more than 2 weeks to finish the copy! That is insane, not sure if can live that long before my family kills me
> 
> I understand jmfs is designed to copy from stock drive to a larger drive, would copy from 2TB to 2TB work and preserve expanded/supersized partition? (I suppose I should only use Copy function, without touching expand/supersize functions since it was already done on the old drive)? If I am to wait for 2 weeks for the copy to finish, I better make sure this approach will work.
> 
> any alternative way to do this? how about dd_rescue from MFSLive? mfslive.org never mentioned TiVo Premiere, so does it even work with Premiere?


Just realized that jmfs in fact uses dd_rescue to copy the drive so never mind. Will have my fingers crossed for the next 2 weeks. It is unclear to me what data is corrupted, I only hope it will not prevent me from boot from the new drive. I will not know until 2 weeks later.

Anyone know why dd_rescue is so much slower than common Windows disk imaging software like Norton Ghost or Acronis TrueImage?


----------



## Stuxnet

sliu2005 said:


> Anyone know why dd_rescue is so much slower than common Windows disk imaging software like Norton Ghost or Acronis TrueImage?


dd is sector by sector, including the "empty" space. IIRC, Ghost can do that, but typically is used with compressed images, copying only what is referenced by the partition table.

I'm assuming your drives are using direct SATA connections, and not a USB/SATA drive dock. That would seriously bog down the transfer.


----------



## sliu2005

Stuxnet said:


> dd is sector by sector, including the "empty" space. IIRC, Ghost can do that, but typically is used with compressed images, copying only what is referenced by the partition table.
> 
> I'm assuming your drives are using direct SATA connections, and not a USB/SATA drive dock. That would seriously bog down the transfer.


Well, but 2 weeks for 2TB still seems to be unusually slow. Although I haven't tried to clone 2TB in Windows, based on past experience it may be a few days max.

Yes, I connected both drives to motherboard SATA ports. dd_rescue shows avg transfer rate is 1420 kB/s, a far cry from SATA 3Gbps limit. Maybe the linux distribution used by jmfs does not have proper SATA driver?


----------



## ThreeSoFar

sliu2005 said:


> Well, but 2 weeks for 2TB still seems to be unusually slow. Although I haven't tried to clone 2TB in Windows, based on past experience it may be a few days max.
> 
> Yes, I connected both drives to motherboard SATA ports. dd_rescue shows avg transfer rate is 1420 kB/s, a far cry from SATA 3Gbps limit. Maybe the linux distribution used by jmfs does not have proper SATA driver?


You're not on an old PC doing this, are you? I use an ancient Pentium III for my copying. It's slow, but it gets there.

Also, dd_rescue goes slower on the corrupt parts of the drive. Your instant throughput may actually drop when it gets to the bad parts.


----------



## sliu2005

ThreeSoFar said:


> You're not on an old PC doing this, are you? I use an ancient Pentium III for my copying. It's slow, but it gets there.
> 
> Also, dd_rescue goes slower on the corrupt parts of the drive. Your instant throughput may actually drop when it gets to the bad parts.


I am using my HTPC with i3-2100 3.1Ghz on ASUS P8H67-M EVO motherboard, it is quite new. Now here's what's get interesting. I switched to an ancient PC - AMD Athlon XP 2100, connecting drives via USB dock and adapter, and start over again. Now the speed is showing 2075 kB/s (vs 1420), a slight improvement. so It will took slight less than 2 weeks still 

Good point on dd_rescue slows down on bad sectors. from what I read, it should proceed with full speed until find bad sectors. however it shows 0 errors on both PCs. Maybe SMART failure triggered the slower mode for the entire drive?


----------



## retiredqwest

sliu2005 said:


> I am using my HTPC with i3-2100 3.1Ghz on ASUS P8H67-M EVO motherboard, it is quite new. Now here's what's get interesting. I switched to an ancient PC - AMD Athlon XP 2100, connecting drives via USB dock and adapter, and start over again. Now the speed is showing 2075 kB/s (vs 1420), a slight improvement. so It will took slight less than 2 weeks still


Since you've tried 2 different MB's then would it be safe to assume it it is not a JMFS driver problem?

And might one assume you used the SATA ports on the ASUS board?

If you still have the stock drive try copying that one as the source and see what speed you get.

Another thing to consider is that dock and adapter USB 2.0 and SATA II compliant?

If not then that just slows things down even more.

Just out of curiosity....

Right now I'm copying from the stock 320G to a 1TB eads (don't have a spare 2TB) using 1 sata port and a Thermaltake Blackx dock to a USB 2.0 port and the average rate so far is 30123 kB/sec.

This is on an ASROCK P43DE MB, 2 Gig ram. Q6600 cpu.


----------



## sliu2005

retiredqwest said:


> Since you've tried 2 different MB's then would it be safe to assume it it is not a JMFS driver problem?


I agree.



> And might one assume you used the SATA ports on the ASUS board?


Yes



> If you still have the stock drive try copying that one as the source and see what speed you get.


Thanks for the suggestion. In my eagerness of getting TiVo back in order, I missed the obvious. Tried this on the Athlon XP 2100, copying from stock drive to new 2TB, it shows 14,000 kB/s! so I guess the defective drive is the cause.



> Another thing to consider is that dock and adapter USB 2.0 and SATA II compliant?


Yes.

Once I hooked up the defective 2TB, copy rate slowed down again. So finally I narrowed down the cause to the defective drive itself. this time, it is even slower: only 800 kB/s!  The crazy thing is, it is because I lay the drive on the table with label side up. Once I flip the drive to label side down (after power down of course), the rate went back up to 2000 kB/s . This is way over my head.


----------



## retiredqwest

sliu2005 said:


> Thanks for the suggestion. In my eagerness of getting TiVo back in order, I missed the obvious. Tried this on the Athlon XP 2100, copying from stock drive to new 2TB, it shows 14,000 kB/s! so I guess the defective drive is the cause.
> 
> Once I hooked up the defective 2TB, copy rate slowed down again. So finally I narrowed down the cause to the defective drive itself. this time, it is even slower: only 800 kB/s!  The crazy thing is, it is because I lay the drive on the table with label side up. Once I flip the drive to label side down (after power down of course), the rate went back up to 2000 kB/s . This is way over my head.


Even if you were ever able to get a complete copy, I would doubt it would even work since you are copying corrupted data to the new drive.

If it were me I'd bite the bullet and just do the copy and expand and supersize from the stock drive.


----------



## sliu2005

retiredqwest said:


> Even if you were ever able to get a complete copy, I would doubt it would even work since you are copying corrupted data to the new drive.
> 
> If it were me I'd bite the bullet and just do the copy and expand and supersize from the stock drive.


I am hoping the corruption did not affect critical data. So far, dd_rescue shows 0 error count, so I am hopeful. Even if I cannot boot from new drive, I still have kickstart to try, which will have a much better chance of success on the new drive. Old drive has too many recordings for me to give up early.


----------



## will2be1

I upgraded by premiere (DVR Dude) to a 2tb drive. Now I would like to create a backup hard drive. Anyone have an idea of the easiest way to do this? Would simple backup software successfully achieve this (I currently use Paragon)?


----------



## ThreeSoFar

will2be1 said:


> I upgraded by premiere (DVR Dude) to a 2tb drive. Now I would like to create a backup hard drive. Anyone have an idea of the easiest way to do this? Would simple backup software successfully achieve this (I currently use Paragon)?


Your original hard drive, sitting on a shelf--that's your backup.


----------



## klug

I am new to this upgrade thing but I used Comers disc and followed his instructions but the program did not recognize the new WD 2T disc. Do I have to make the new disk a slave?


----------



## richsadams

klug said:


> I am new to this upgrade thing but I used Comers disc and followed his instructions but the program did not recognize the new WD 2T disc. Do I have to make the new disk a slave?


Welcome to the forum. To answer your question, no...and that solution begs the question, how do you have your original TiVo hard drive and your new 2TB hard drive connected to your computer? Also, what TiVo model are you upgrading?


----------



## klug

Sorry a bit short of detail. I have a Premiere XL and am trying to connect with USB to Sata2 using an HP laptop.


----------



## richsadams

klug said:


> Sorry a bit short of detail. I have a Premiere XL and am trying to connect with USB to Sata2 using an HP laptop.


Ah, okay. Laptop upgrades have only been marginally successful. BIOS issues are often problematic.

Both drives have to be connected at the same time and most folks use a PC and ideally connect both drives to SATA ports on the motherboard. Failing that option the use of SATA/USB docks or adapters works well also, it just takes much longer to complete the imaging. Here's a good example of a SATA USB dock adapter (two of these would be required; one of each drive):

http://www.amazon.com/Thermaltake-S...3MKW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306460332&sr=8-1

It sounds like you're trying to use one of these?

http://www.apdrives.com/

If so I don't know if anyone has ever tried using one of those.

Is there any chance you can get access to a desktop PC to perform the upgrade?


----------



## klug

I do have an old PC desktop I could try. You are right I was hoping to use that adapter thing. I looked a long time for info on this but saw nothing about laptop problems. Thanks for taking the time to help me. I will post if successful.


----------



## richsadams

klug said:


> I do have an old PC desktop I could try. You are right I was hoping to use that adapter thing. I looked a long time for info on this but saw nothing about laptop problems. Thanks for taking the time to help me. I will post if successful.


Sounds good...keep us posted and happy upgrading!


----------



## klug

I did the upgrade successfully on a Dell laptop E4310 using USB adapters. It took about 8 hours but worth the time. My old desktop did not do the job, I think that is more to do with the state of the PC than a failure of the process. Thanks to Comer for doing the spade work.


----------



## richsadams

klug said:


> I did the upgrade successfully on a Dell laptop E4310 using USB adapters. It took about 8 hours but worth the time. My old desktop did not do the job, I think that is more to do with the state of the PC than a failure of the process. Thanks to Comer for doing the spade work.


Nice! Congratulations and enjoy!


----------



## retiredqwest

For those that think you can use a 3TB in a TIVO read this message.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8544452#post8544452


----------



## generaltso

retiredqwest said:


> For those that think you can use a 3TB in a TIVO read this message.
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8544452#post8544452


TiVos don't even recognize 3TB drives. It has nothing to do with JMFS. I did a dd copy from a stock TPXL drive to a 3TB Western Digital with no expanding and the TiVo wouldn't boot from it.


----------



## retiredqwest

generaltso said:


> TiVos don't even recognize 3TB drives. It has nothing to do with JMFS. I did a dd copy from a stock TPXL drive to a 3TB Western Digital with no expanding and the TiVo wouldn't boot from it.


Ya know, I never even thought about trying that. So, I did a copy only of the TP to the Hitachi 3TB and shur nuff.... that same power loop.

Looks like the TIVO doesn't like drives > 2TB.


----------



## generaltso

retiredqwest said:


> Looks like the TIVO doesn't like drives > 2TB.


I'm guessing that it's the drive controller in the TiVo that just isn't capable of using the drive. I wonder if it has to do with the advanced format.


----------



## unitron

generaltso said:


> I'm guessing that it's the drive controller in the TiVo that just isn't capable of using the drive. I wonder if it has to do with the advanced format.


Apparently some people have used "advanced format" 2TB drives successfully.

Some 2TB drives (WD20EARS, WD20EACS, for example) are "advanced format" and some (WD20EADS, for example) are not.

I suspect it's the "_over _ 2TB" part that's the problem.


----------



## generaltso

unitron said:


> I suspect it's the "_over _ 2TB" part that's the problem.


Yeah, could be as simple as a hard size limitation.

My 3TB drive came with a SATA drive controller and a note saying that some computers won't recognize the drive and to use the included drive controller if that's the case. That makes me think that there's something unique about 3TB drives that older (or cheap) drive controllers can't handle.


----------



## unitron

generaltso said:


> Yeah, could be as simple as a hard size limitation.
> 
> My 3TB drive came with a SATA drive controller and a note saying that some computers won't recognize the drive and to use the included drive controller if that's the case. That makes me think that there's something unique about 3TB drives that older (or cheap) drive controllers can't handle.


For computers, it might be the 2TB limit, hardware-wise, or the limit of the partition table we've been using for over a quarter-century now, or the BIOS structure that's been around since then (and before) or a limit of XP/Server 2003 and older OS'es hard coded to expect 512 byte sectors.

Here's a quite good and informative article about the whole "advanced format" mess.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/ne...-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars


----------



## retiredqwest

Since it acts like when one forgets to plug in the drive cable.... the infinite power up loop. That it would be more a controller incompatibility than the OS on the drive.

No matter what the cause... a 3TB drive does not work in the TP.


----------



## AgentS

Ok. I'm having issues with my jmfs copy.

So my hard drive started going a few days ago on my Premiere. Symptoms lasted a few days and i decided to unplug my TiVo (to hopefully minimize the damage) for 2 days while my WD15EARS was being shipped to me. I started jmfs tonight and if started off fast. I have both devices connected via sata to my mobo. It's been running for approx 6 hrs now, and the last 4 or so hrs have been mostly at a crawl. I'm only at the 113 GB mark, and I'm already at 277 errors...and counting! I didn't think it was that bad considering it still works in the TiVo, albeit choppy sometimes. Do bad HDD's usually take this long to copy? 

Any suggestions? If it can't copy, what are my options? I knew this wouldn't be easy!

Thanks.


----------



## dwit

AgentS said:


> Ok. I'm having issues with my jmfs copy.
> 
> So my hard drive started going a few days ago on my Premiere. Symptoms lasted a few days and i decided to unplug my TiVo (to hopefully minimize the damage) for 2 days while my WD15EARS was being shipped to me. I started jmfs tonight and if started off fast. I have both devices connected via sata to my mobo. It's been running for approx 6 hrs now, and the last 4 or so hrs have been mostly at a crawl. I'm only at the 113 GB mark, and I'm already at 277 errors...and counting! I didn't think it was that bad considering it still works in the TiVo, albeit choppy sometimes. Do bad HDD's usually take this long to copy?
> 
> Any suggestions? If it can't copy, what are my options? I knew this wouldn't be easy!
> 
> Thanks.


Just a somewhat educated guess: If JMFS fails to make a copy, then you can try to see if Winmfs can make a usable truncated backup image of the original drive(no saved recordings). If winmfs cannot make a viable backup image, you may need to obtain a good Premiere image from "somewhere" and use winmfs, or other tools to image a new drive.

Did you ever try running the builtin Tivo "kickstart" diagnostics on the original drive while it was still in the Premiere?


----------



## retiredqwest

AgentS said:


> Ok. I'm having issues with my jmfs copy.
> 
> So my hard drive started going a few days ago on my Premiere. Symptoms lasted a few days and i decided to unplug my TiVo (to hopefully minimize the damage) for 2 days while my WD15EARS was being shipped to me. I started jmfs tonight and if started off fast. I have both devices connected via sata to my mobo. It's been running for approx 6 hrs now, and the last 4 or so hrs have been mostly at a crawl. I'm only at the 113 GB mark, and I'm already at 277 errors...and counting! I didn't think it was that bad considering it still works in the TiVo, albeit choppy sometimes. Do bad HDD's usually take this long to copy?
> 
> Any suggestions? If it can't copy, what are my options? I knew this wouldn't be easy!
> 
> Thanks.


Those are read errors. And it will take a long as JMFS has to in attempting to copy the source drive.

I found when I was playing with the 3TB drive that my stock drive was showing errors. So I plugged it back in the TP and it booted up just fine. 
So I pulled it and copied it to another 320G. It hit the errors at the same location as before and it took about 8 hrs to complete. I use a spare computer so I wasn't really paying attention as to how long.

Plugged that into the TP and it booted up just fine. I let it connect to TIVO and it downloaded the 14.8 update and it went through those motions and it booted back up and everything seems to work.

Then I took the Seagate 320G with 14.8 and copied it to a 1TB and it copied in the usual 3 hrs with no read errors. And of course that copy booted up in the TP as it should.

You could try the KS 54 on the stock drive to see what it says. I never did on my stock drive.


----------



## AgentS

AgentS said:


> Ok. I'm having issues with my jmfs copy.
> 
> So my hard drive started going a few days ago on my Premiere. Symptoms lasted a few days and i decided to unplug my TiVo (to hopefully minimize the damage) for 2 days while my WD15EARS was being shipped to me. I started jmfs tonight and if started off fast. I have both devices connected via sata to my mobo. It's been running for approx 6 hrs now, and the last 4 or so hrs have been mostly at a crawl. I'm only at the 113 GB mark, and I'm already at 277 errors...and counting! I didn't think it was that bad considering it still works in the TiVo, albeit choppy sometimes. Do bad HDD's usually take this long to copy?
> 
> Any suggestions? If it can't copy, what are my options? I knew this wouldn't be easy!
> 
> Thanks.


Thanks for the responses dwit and retiredquest. I let it sit overnight and checked it in the Am. Says it rescued 320009MB out of 320072MB. Now it's in the middle of "trimming failed blocks", so i still haven't tested it out yet. I hope those 63MB weren't important!

Wait a minute, i just realized that my "rescued" size is slowly going up during this phase. I hope that's a good sign!

Oh, and yes i tried kickstart. It was the one for the HDD....KS 54 i believe. That gave me a bunch of "fail 4's".


----------



## richsadams

dwit said:


> ...you can try to see if Winmfs can make a usable truncated backup image of the original drive(no saved recordings).


FWIW unfortunately wimMFS cannot make a truncated backup of Premiere drives as it can with earlier models.


----------



## richsadams

unitron said:


> For computers, it might be the 2TB limit, hardware-wise, or the limit of the partition table we've been using for over a quarter-century now, or the BIOS structure that's been around since then (and before) or a limit of XP/Server 2003 and older OS'es hard coded to expect 512 byte sectors.
> 
> Here's a quite good and informative article about the whole "advanced format" mess.
> 
> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/ne...-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars


Good info, thanks for that. :up: Here's an article from Storage Review that I found a while back offering some quick info about why 3TB drives can be problematic for Windows PC's and some Linux OS systems (although they are fully compatible with Apple's Mac OS X). It also includes some interesting benchmarks and comparisons.

http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_3tb_review_wd30ezrsdtl


----------



## dwit

Thanks. Piece of cake. Upgraded to a Hitachi 2 TB drive. Only had a few hours of shows on the drive. Whole process barely took 2 hours on an ancient Celeron4 2.4ghz machine.

Might be selling this drive(2TB) because I don't think I'm going to activate the Premiere. Too expensive. Was hoping the rebuilt woot units were still eligible with a change TSN for activation, but alas, no more.


----------



## aridon

I had a minor issue with my drive not being recognized after booting to linux. I kept getting an error saying No tivo drive detected. In fact none of the HD's were showing up.

Now I have an I7 rig right now with an Asus p6x58d. All my drives are obviously connected with SATA cables.

After searching the issue I only found a vague reference from older Tivos when being used on IDE systems that you needed to set the master / slave relationship to get the drive to be seen. Obviously with SATA this shouldn't be an issue. So i played around in my bios trying out different configurations with zero luck.

While messing around in the bios I noticed that my drives were being designated as IDE drives running enhanced mode. While my dvd drive was listed as being SATA. Well that would be the problem. At first I tried adjusting the bios settings to show the drives as SATA with no luck. This was not possible and I tried all of the possible combinations.

So disconnected all of my Sata ports (I have 8 on this MB, two at top and 6 below). When I saw this the light bulb came on because the HD's were being connected to the two slots at the top (6gb/s) while the DVD drive below (3gb/s). *AT first glance a layman would say they look identical as the interface is grouped tightly together and colored the same* (Asus fail there). They are not and use two different controllers.

ICH10R Southbridge SATA - 6 ports
Marvell 88SE9128 SATA 6Gb/sec - 2 ports

Simply moving the hard drives to the other controller (ICH10R) and rebooting immediately solved the problem. Instead of being seen as IDE drives the hard drives were now showing up as Sata drives.

Booting into Linux via the boot disk now showed the drives and the rest is obviously cake.

I couldn't find any mention of this and I know that there are plenty of people out there that might not check further than making sure their cables are plugged in. If they have my board its actually very difficult to see there is any difference what so ever between the two. I wanted to post this in case someone with less knowledge ran into the same problem. A quick google search revealed no postings on this so I wanted to document it for others in the unlikely event it has stumped someone.


----------



## dwit

aridon said:


> I had a minor issue with my drive not being recognized after booting to linux. I kept getting an error saying No tivo drive detected. In fact none of the HD's were showing up.
> 
> Now I have an I7 rig right now with an Asus p6x58d. All my drives are obviously connected with SATA cables.
> 
> After searching the issue I only found a vague reference from older Tivos when being used on IDE systems that you needed to set the master / slave relationship to get the drive to be seen. Obviously with SATA this shouldn't be an issue. So i played around in my bios trying out different configurations with zero luck.
> 
> While messing around in the bios I noticed that my drives were being designated as IDE drives running enhanced mode. While my CD drive was listed as being SATA. Well that would be the problem.
> 
> So disconnected all of my Sata ports (I have 8 slots on this MB, two at top and 6 below. All with the same connectors. When I saw this the light bulb came on because the HD's were being connected to the two slots at the top while the DVD drive below. *AT first glance they look identical as the interface is grouped tightly together and colored the same* (Asus fail there). They are not.
> 
> ICH10R Southbridge SATA - 6 ports
> Marvell 88SE9128 SATA 6Gb/sec - 2 ports
> 
> Simply moving the hard drives to the other controller (ICH10R) and rebooting immediately solved the problem. Instead of being seen as IDE drives the hard drives were now showing up as Sata drives.
> 
> Booting into Linux via the boot disk now showed the drives and the rest is obviously cake.
> 
> I couldn't find any mention of this and I know that there are plenty of people out there that might not check further than making sure their cables are plugged in. If they have my board its actually very difficult to see there is any difference what so ever between the two. I wanted to post this in case someone with less knowledge ran into the same problem. A quick google search revealed no postings on this so I wanted to document it for others in the unlikely event it has stumped someone.


All of my drives showed up whether they were ide drives or sata drives. I used a very old p4 motherboard and all of the drives showed in the bios as ide drives, also set on enhanced setting.

Maybe I just got lucky and connected to the right inputs on the first guess. But I was prepared to try the other inputs if the first ones chosen didn't work.


----------



## aridon

dwit said:


> All of my drives showed up whether they were ide drives or sata drives. I used a very old p4 motherboard and all of the drives showed in the bios as ide drives, also set on enhanced setting.
> 
> Maybe I just got lucky and connected to the right inputs on the first guess. But I was prepared to try the other inputs if the first ones chosen didn't work.


Aye, chances are its a specific issue with that controller and linux. A bios update may fix the issue but swapping to the other controller is far easier and safer


----------



## AgentS

AgentS said:


> Thanks for the responses dwit and retiredquest. I let it sit overnight and checked it in the Am. Says it rescued 320009MB out of 320072MB. Now it's in the middle of "trimming failed blocks", so i still haven't tested it out yet. I hope those 63MB weren't important!
> 
> Wait a minute, i just realized that my "rescued" size is slowly going up during this phase. I hope that's a good sign!
> 
> Oh, and yes i tried kickstart. It was the one for the HDD....KS 54 i believe. That gave me a bunch of "fail 4's".


24 hours of copying with 755 errors and my copy is a success! I haven't noticed any problems either (yet). A big thank you to everyone on here. :up:


----------



## retiredqwest

AgentS said:


> 24 hours of copying with 755 errors and my copy is a success! I haven't noticed any problems either (yet). A big thank you to everyone on here. :up:


Congrats..... You may want to consider doing a copy only from the stock drive to a 320G or larger to make a known good backup. In case something happens to the 2TB.

I'm on my SECOND WD20EVDS..... just a thought.


----------



## dwit

AgentS said:


> 24 hours of copying with 755 errors and my copy is a success! I haven't noticed any problems either (yet). A big thank you to everyone on here. :up:


Congrats!

The whole procedure, disassemble> jmfs program>reassemble, took 2 hours, 15 minutes for me. And this was on an old Celeron 4 machine.

Only had a few hours of shows on the original drive though. No errors at all on either drive.


----------



## richsadams

AgentS said:


> 24 hours of copying with 755 errors and my copy is a success! I haven't noticed any problems either (yet). A big thank you to everyone on here. :up:


Phew!


----------



## SMWinnie

I notice that NewEgg has deactivated the 2TB EADS on its website. I think that was the default drive for the "yes, I know how to run AAM" crowd - is there a new default? (Looks like the EARX is about to replace the EARS.)


----------



## unitron

SMWinnie said:


> I notice that NewEgg has deactivated the 2TB EADS on its website. I think that was the default drive for the "yes, I know how to run AAM" crowd - is there a new default? (Looks like the EARX is about to replace the EARS.)


As of mid-May, 2011, CompUSA had the WD20EADS in stock at $90.

Now their site says only available in their retail stores, but it's $10 cheaper.


----------



## Stuxnet

SMWinnie said:


> I notice that NewEgg has deactivated the 2TB EADS on its website.


Really? > 2TB Link Here


----------



## unitron

Stuxnet said:


> Really? > 2TB Link Here


That link leads to the "advanced format" WD20EARS, not the WD20EADS, which is the older 512 byte sector type.


----------



## Stuxnet

unitron said:


> That link leads to the "advanced format" WD20EARS, not the WD20EADS, which is the older 512 byte sector type.


Ooops... yes, you are right. I need to pay closer attention... NewEgg discontinued EADS some time ago... Amazon and Tiger Direct had it last I checked (a week back). FWIW, EARS works fine in my Premiere.


----------



## PedjaR

I am considering doing the 2TB upgrade and have a couple of questions.

1. Is WD20EARS still considered a good drive to use? If so, I read a few conflicting reports on the recommended settings for wdidle:
a) leave it alone, it works anyway
b) /S10000000000 (or is it /S[10000000000], i.e. does it need [])
c) /D
d) /s300

Which other drive would you recommend? I did read the whole thread, but the answers sometimes change with time, and some drives have been discontinued.

2. I have a Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H motherboard, with Xpress Recovery2. It appears that in some cases it may create a hidden partition (host protected area) without asking, which would hose the original Tivo drive, if it happens to be the drive it puts HPA on. The manual implies that it would not actually do that until explicitly evoked and unless the drive has unallocated space; it did not do it, as far as I can tell, on the drive with Windows XP in my computer, since there seems to be only one partition on it, and no unallocated space. However, there were some reports to the contrary, and I am unwilling to risk my Tivo drive, just hoping that the motherboard will not do it (the drive is an XL, currently hovering around 90%, full of stuff I'd much rather not lose, and thanks to Time Warner flagging just about everything, I cannot copy it to the computer). So, I will probably refrain from unhooking both of my existing drives and hooking up the Tivo drive and the blank drive; I'll try leaving the Windows OS drive connected to SATA 0, unhook the other one and buy one more SATA cable to be able to hook up both Tivo and blank drives. Anybody knows if this would make the whole thing safe?


----------



## Stuxnet

PedjaR said:


> I am considering doing the 2TB upgrade and have a couple of questions.
> 
> 1. Is WD20EARS still considered a good drive to use? If so, I read a few conflicting reports on the recommended settings for wdidle:
> a) leave it alone, it works anyway
> b) /S10000000000 (or is it /S[10000000000], i.e. does it need [])
> c) /D
> d) /s300


The EARS, EADS and WD's A/V drives are all fine candidates. For me, EARS was the cheapest, YMMV.

Re: WDIDLE3, a) is fine if you don't hang on a soft boot. If you do, you'll need to remove the HDD and reset WDIDLE3 timing. I didn't want that hassle, so I just changed it up front. c) and d) all have their proponents based on speculations about drive life ... speculations that we won't have data on for some time... I don't know about b) ... I went with d) ... it works for me without completely knocking out intellipark ... but heh, I only have 90 days of run time so far. Worst case ... my drive fails tomorrow, I lose some shows I have't backed up and I get another HDD. And I'd never know whether WDIDLE3 contributed to its demise.


----------



## unitron

PedjaR said:


> I am considering doing the 2TB upgrade and have a couple of questions.
> 
> 1. Is WD20EARS still considered a good drive to use? If so, I read a few conflicting reports on the recommended settings for wdidle:
> a) leave it alone, it works anyway
> b) /S10000000000 (or is it /S[10000000000], i.e. does it need [])
> c) /D
> d) /s300
> 
> Which other drive would you recommend? I did read the whole thread, but the answers sometimes change with time, and some drives have been discontinued.
> 
> 2. I have a Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H motherboard, with Xpress Recovery2. It appears that in some cases it may create a hidden partition (host protected area) without asking, which would hose the original Tivo drive, if it happens to be the drive it puts HPA on. The manual implies that it would not actually do that until explicitly evoked and unless the drive has unallocated space; it did not do it, as far as I can tell, on the drive with Windows XP in my computer, since there seems to be only one partition on it, and no unallocated space. However, there were some reports to the contrary, and I am unwilling to risk my Tivo drive, just hoping that the motherboard will not do it (the drive is an XL, currently hovering around 90%, full of stuff I'd much rather not lose, and thanks to Time Warner flagging just about everything, I cannot copy it to the computer). So, I will probably refrain from unhooking both of my existing drives and hooking up the Tivo drive and the blank drive; I'll try leaving the Windows OS drive connected to SATA 0, unhook the other one and buy one more SATA cable to be able to hook up both Tivo and blank drives. Anybody knows if this would make the whole thing safe?


If you get the N&O you may have noticed that CompUSA has the 20EARS for $79.99 (plus Bev's cut) this week.

As to GigaByte and HPAs, I have 2 GigaByte boards of about the same age as yours on which I learned about this issue the hard way, but both are tied up being actual computers right now (one for me and one for the TiVos), so I haven't done any extensive experimentation to figure out the exact algorithm it uses, i.e., under what circumstances it writes to which disk where.

If you put a "sacrificial" drive on the Primary Master IDE/PATA position, it may be content to put an HPA there and leave everything else alone.

If your XP drive is the first SATA, and you have no IDE/PATA drives, you can boot from the MFS Live cd v1.4 and run

hdparm -N /dev/sda

and see if you have an HPA on there or not.

There's a (possibly undocumented) variation on that command to remove the HPA, but the GigaByte board will prevent it from working. You'd have to use a different board, and it's only worth doing if you're trying to fix a drive that's going to be used in a TiVo. If there's one on your XP drive, just leave it.

If you do have one on your XP drive, maybe the motherboard will be happy with that and not try to put any on any other drives.

If not, you could use the Parted Magic boot cd to shrink the partition nearest the end to make room for an HPA, and then re-boot and let it make one, and maybe it'll be satisfied with that.


----------



## PedjaR

Thanks for the replies. 
I saw W20EARS on Amazon for $80, shipping included; I'd rather buy from them - a couple of times when I needed to return something, they were extremely easy to deal with.


----------



## Stuxnet

PedjaR said:


> Thanks for the replies.
> I saw W20EARS on Amazon for $80, shipping included; I'd rather buy from them - a couple of times when I needed to return something, they were extremely easy to deal with.


FWIW, 74.99 on NE thru June 16 w/discount code w/3 day free ship.


----------



## unitron

PedjaR said:


> Thanks for the replies.
> I saw W20EARS on Amazon for $80, shipping included; I'd rather buy from them - a couple of times when I needed to return something, they were extremely easy to deal with.


I don't own stock in either company, I was just thinking if you had to go over to Raleigh anyway, instant gratification factor.


----------



## unitron

Doing some further searching to learn from the trials and tribulations of others, it seems that those GigaByte boards that write HPAs tend to do so on drives they think are blank because they don't see a DOS/Windows/PC type partition table, which they won't on a TiVo drive, and really won't on a Series 1 byteswapped.

Unless the drive was used for something else first, in which case there may be remnants of one left.

(somewhere around here I've got a drive that reports PC-type partitions to fdisk and Apple/TiVo partitions to pdisk)


----------



## PedjaR

unitron said:


> I don't own stock in either company, I was just thinking if you had to go over to Raleigh anyway, instant gratification factor.


My bad, I misunderstood you. I thought that all CompUSA retail locations were closed (like the one on Glenwood) and that they had only online presence. Not so much, apparently. While West Cary to East Raleigh is not quite instant (and I rarely go that way), it is definitely way faster than waiting for online order, adn I will consider that.
However, until the Gigabyte thing is cleared, I won't be buying the drive.


----------



## PedjaR

unitron said:


> Doing some further searching to learn from the trials and tribulations of others, it seems that those GigaByte boards that write HPAs tend to do so on drives they think are blank because they don't see a DOS/Windows/PC type partition table, which they won't on a TiVo drive, and really won't on a Series 1 byteswapped.
> 
> Unless the drive was used for something else first, in which case there may be remnants of one left.
> 
> (somewhere around here I've got a drive that reports PC-type partitions to fdisk and Apple/TiVo partitions to pdisk)


I looked at my two drives. 
One I bought blank, and installed XP on it (using this motherboard). I do not see any hidden partition using Disk Management utility, which manual said I would. It has only one partition of 232.88GB (drive is supposedly 250GB).
The other drive I got as a part of a (dirt cheap) external drive package, used for a little bit as external storage with cable co. DVR, then when the case went bad, salvaged the drive and put it in. Has one partition of 232.82GB.
So, either the motherboard used them both for HPA, or neither.

Now I am unclear whether the board would write to both Tivo and blank drive, or only one of them, or neither; I also have no idea if it is better to leave the existing OS drive in or not. Probably too risky to try the upgrade with the info I have so far.

Also, looking around, I noticed that there are some Gigabyte motherboards that use HPA for virtual dual bios; this one has actual dual bios, so it would not do that.


----------



## unitron

PedjaR said:


> My bad, I misunderstood you. I thought that all CompUSA retail locations were closed (like the one on Glenwood) and that they had only online presence. Not so much, apparently. While West Cary to East Raleigh is not quite instant, it is definitely way faster than waiting for online order.
> Anyway, until the Gigabyte thing is cleared, I won't be buying the drive.


So I'm guessing you didn't see their flyer in Sunday's News & Observer.

I did because I got there before the coupon stealers cleaned out the racks, but I'm about a 3 hour drive from Glenwood Ave, so I'm not really in a postition to just pop by there.

Meanwhile Gov. Perdue says she's extremely disappointed in your failure to help stimulate the state's economy.


----------



## titsataki

I am a midst doing the upgrade. I got a WD20EARS connected it internally in my PC, used an external docking station for the tivo drive. They both got recognized fine. So now I chose copy and it is sitting on the screen saying copying non-tried blocks. Is there something that would show progress?
I do not see anything. Is that normal? Does it matter I have probably 18-20 hours of HD recordings?


Cheers

Nick


----------



## Stuxnet

titsataki said:


> I am a midst doing the upgrade. I got a WD20EARS connected it internally in my PC, used an external docking station for the tivo drive. They both got recognized fine. So now I chose copy and it is sitting on the screen saying copying non-tried blocks. Is there something that would show progress?
> I do not see anything. Is that normal? Does it matter I have probably 18-20 hours of HD recordings?


Assuming you're using jmfs live cd for the upgrade, you might want to watch this video (2 part) for insight. It takes significantly longer using a USB dock station.


----------



## titsataki

Stuxnet said:


> Assuming you're using jmfs live cd for the upgrade, you might want to watch this video (2 part) for insight. It takes significantly longer using a USB dock station.


thank you (I did not even think of checking youtube).

I had downloaded the previous version of jmfs image (I re downloaded)
I decided to forgo the dock station (although it is an e-SATA) and connected directly to my motherboard. It worked like a charm. I already installed it in my Premier and it works fine. I did do the supersize as well.

Thank you folks for your support and kudos to the creator or the process. :up::up:

Regards

Nick


----------



## PedjaR

unitron said:


> ...
> As to GigaByte and HPAs, I have 2 GigaByte boards of about the same age as yours on which I learned about this issue the hard way, but both are tied up being actual computers right now (one for me and one for the TiVos), so I haven't done any extensive experimentation to figure out the exact algorithm it uses, i.e., under what circumstances it writes to which disk where.
> 
> If you put a "sacrificial" drive on the Primary Master IDE/PATA position, it may be content to put an HPA there and leave everything else alone.
> 
> If your XP drive is the first SATA, and you have no IDE/PATA drives, you can boot from the MFS Live cd v1.4 and run
> 
> hdparm -N /dev/sda
> 
> and see if you have an HPA on there or not.
> ...


After some investigation, it looks like the issues with these motherboards have nothing to do with Xpress Recovery2 (that one has to be manually installed and invoked), but with BIOS backup to hard drive. The associated HPA is supposed to be small - 2113 sectors (but enough to hose the drive, of course). My motherboard does not have an option to turn it off, and when I ran hdparm, it confirmed HPA of exactly that size on primary drive. Secondary drive does not have HPA, but that drive was put in there already partitioned (from a failed external enclosure), so I can't be sure that it would not do the same kind of thing if it were considered blank (i.e. I am not completely sure that sacrificial drive thing will work). Also, some people say that this BIOS backup may not be on the drive with first SATA port (as Xpress Recovery2 is), but on the drive that initializes first (presumably frequently the same thing, but not always). 
My daughter's computer has a slightly newer version of the motherboard (GA-EG45-UD2H), and that one also had 2113-sector HPA on its only drive. However, that one has a BIOS option "Backup BIOS to HDD" (not in the manual, by the way), which seems to be exactly what is needed (it is on by default). There is a potential issue that some say this option does not really work.

I am left with several choices:
1. a) Hook up both drives using USB (get SATA->USB). On the up side, it should not create HPA on those. On the down side, it is slower, and I think wdidle does not work with USB; I'd really like to set it to more than 8s, it seems that it would be good for longevity sake. 
1.b) get non-WD drive that does not need wdidle, the rest like a)
2. Hook up blank drive using eSATA enclosure, and hook up Tivo drive using USB. Maybe wdidle will work? Anybody knows?
3. Put blank drive inside computer, and hook up Tivo drive using USB. This would be handy, as then wdidle thing should work. On the down side, HPA may be created on the blank drive, but if it is created on a blank drive before jmfs is even started, that should not prevent it from working fine in Tivo, right???
4. Put blank drive inside computer, and hook up Tivo drive using eSATA. Similar to 3, but faster. Downside - slightly increased chance of Tivo drive getting hosed with HPA.
5. Put both drives in the computer, leaving original HDD with HPA in as well, and hope that either "Backup BIOS to HDD" setting will work, or that motherboard will not feel the need to do backup on more than one drive.

Any ideas/recommendations?


----------



## Ely105

This is more of an FYI message. I decided to use the Seagate ST2000DL003 2TB drive in my Tivo Premiere (320G) upgrade. I used the CD to copy, expand and supersize on the drive and I saw no errors or issues at any point. When I installed it and powered up the Tivo it appeared stuck on the "Welcome powering up screen". After many minutes I power cycled and saw the same result. so i left it be while I tried the same process on a second drive (maybe the drive was a bum). Next morning saw the same results with a new drive but on the 3rd try (literally 3rd time was a charm) it proceeded past the power up screen and all the way into the tivo welcome video and menus. After several restarts it appears to be able to always boot correctly. I'm not sure why it froze on the first two attempts but hopefully I won't see that condition again. Thanks again for the easy utility. Hopefully someday we'll get USB 3.0 drivers in Linux so it doesn't take 6 hours to copy using USB2.


----------



## Fofer

Do you have a USB-Bluetooth dongle installed in your TiVo Premiere? That's been known to cause similar issues. Unplugging that before rebooting can help.


----------



## retiredqwest

PedjaR said:


> After some investigation, it looks like the issues with these motherboards have nothing to do with Xpress Recovery2 (that one has to be manually installed and invoked), but with BIOS backup to hard drive. The associated HPA is supposed to be small - 2113 sectors (but enough to hose the drive, of course). My motherboard does not have an option to turn it off, and when I ran hdparm, it confirmed HPA of exactly that size on primary drive. Secondary drive does not have HPA, but that drive was put in there already partitioned (from a failed external enclosure), so I cant be sure that it would not do the same kind of thing if it were considered blank (i.e. I am not completely sure that sacrificial drive thing will work). Also, some people say that this BIOS backup may not be on the drive with first SATA port (as Xpress Recovery2 is), but on the drive that initializes first (presumably frequently the same thing, but not always).
> My daughters computer has a slightly newer version of the motherboard (GA-EG45-UD2H), and that one also had 2113-sector HPA on its only drive. However, that one has a BIOS option Backup BIOS to HDD (not in the manual, by the way), which seems to be exactly what is needed (it is on by default). There is a potential issue that some say this option does not really work.
> 
> I am left with several choices:
> 1. a) Hook up both drives using USB (get SATA->USB). On the up side, it should not create HPA on those. On the down side, it is slower, and I think wdidle does not work with USB; Id really like to set it to more than 8s, it seems that it would be good for longevity sake.
> 1.b) get non-WD drive that does not need wdidle, the rest like a)
> 2. Hook up blank drive using eSATA enclosure, and hook up Tivo drive using USB. Maybe wdidle will work? Anybody knows?
> 3. Put blank drive inside computer, and hook up Tivo drive using USB. This would be handy, as then wdidle thing should work. On the down side, HPA may be created on the blank drive, but if it is created on a blank drive before jmfs is even started, that should not prevent it from working fine in Tivo, right???
> 4. Put blank drive inside computer, and hook up Tivo drive using eSATA. Similar to 3, but faster. Downside - slightly increased chance of Tivo drive getting hosed with HPA.
> 5. Put both drives in the computer, leaving original HDD with HPA in as well, and hope that either Backup BIOS to HDD setting will work, or that motherboard will not feel the need to do backup on more than one drive.
> 
> Any ideas/recommendations?


When Unitron talked about Gigabytre MB's causing problems, I ignored it as I used a GA-EP35-DS3P MB for 90% of my testing JMFS. It has Express Recovery I and I never had a problem with my copies or stock drives. And as you said ER has to be manually invoked, I suppose it is possible to happen otherwise.... but who knows.

Now that you mention the Bios backup to HDD option, I checked the manual and that option is not available. Since I no longer have that MB I can't check to see if it really is there.

I also have a GA-EP45-US3P and on page 51 that option is there.



> Dual BIOS Recovery Source
> If the main BIOS is corrupted, selects whether to recover the BIOS from the backup BIOS or from the HPA in the hard drive. (Default: HPA)


Since I'm using this for a server, I went and checked the bios.... except that option is not there! So, I checked the bios version and saw no mention of that feature being removed.

I also have a GA-X58A-UD3R with that option:



> Backup BIOS Image to HDD
> Allows the system to copy the BIOS image file to the hard drive. If the system BIOS is corrupted, it will be recovered from this image file. (Default: Disabled)


Whoa, now it is disabled by default. There must have been a reason for this setting being changed from one board to another.

I making a WAG, if you disable that option it will probably allow JMFS to do its job with no problems.

I'm not brave enuff to try it on my X58 MB since that is the one I'm using now  And I doubt that I ever changed that setting in the bios.


----------



## PedjaR

retiredqwest said:


> ...
> 
> Now that you mention the Bios backup to HDD option, I checked the manual and that option is not available. Since I no longer have that MB I can't check to see if it really is there.
> 
> I also have a GA-EP45-US3P and on page 51 that option is there.
> ...


Cant' trust the manual.

GA-EG45M-DS2H: manual does not mention this at all, no related bios setting, but there is such a thing, as motherboard definitely created an HPA; hence, no way to turn this "feature" off.

GA-EG45-UD2H: manual does not mention this at all, but there is a related bios setting, on by default; this setting should turn this off (but who knows for sure). My motherboard created HPA, but I did not change the option initially, so I can't tell if the setting works.

Can you check your hard drives with hdparm -N option and see if there are HPAs?


----------



## unitron

The manuals for either of my GigaByte boards only talk about backing up BIOS to floppy, although both have dual BIOS chips, and the only mention anywhere in the manual of using the hard drive for storage by the board itself (as opposed to the OS or the chump at the keyboard) is the whole XpressRecovery2 thing.

I think what happens is that it automatically tries to set aside room (the HPA) for the XpressRecovery2 file or files without waiting to see if you actually decide to use that feature, or maybe it sets aside an area to leave itself a note about where and whether it has an area set aside for it.

Apparently it happens at boot, and gets written to what it thinks will be the OS's boot drive, so it starts with the IDE/PATA controllers looking for a drive that hasn't been "OS'ed" yet, (and since it's looking for a DOS/Windows/IBM-compatible PC type partition table, a Tivo drive will look blank to it), and if no PATA drives it starts down the list of SATAs.

You can undo it with hdparm on a different brand board, but on that same GigaByte board the operation will fail, so apparently the board takes an active part it defending the HPA.

So if you have to use a GigaByte board, first attach a "sacrificial" drive (it can be your regular OS booting drive) to the place highest up the food chain (start with IDE Primary Master), boot from one of the Linux-based "live" cds (Parted Magic might be a good choice to have on hand), run hdparm -N /dev/driveinquestion to make sure you do have an HPA on that drive (you can use Parted Magic to shrink partitions to make room at the end of the drive, say about 10GB).

Then maybe it'll be happy with that and not mess with any of the other drive positions/ports. Maybe.

If I knew more for sure about this I'd start a separate thread just for HPA warnings.


----------



## PedjaR

unitron said:


> The manuals for either of my GigaByte boards only talk about backing up BIOS to floppy, although both have dual BIOS chips, and the only mention anywhere in the manual of using the hard drive for storage by the board itself (as opposed to the OS or the chump at the keyboard) is the whole XpressRecovery2 thing.
> 
> I think what happens is that it automatically tries to set aside room (the HPA) for the XpressRecovery2 file or files without waiting to see if you actually decide to use that feature, or maybe it sets aside an area to leave itself a note about where and whether it has an area set aside for it.
> 
> Apparently it happens at boot, and gets written to what it thinks will be the OS's boot drive, so it starts with the IDE/PATA controllers looking for a drive that hasn't been "OS'ed" yet, (and since it's looking for a DOS/Windows/IBM-compatible PC type partition table, a Tivo drive will look blank to it), and if no PATA drives it starts down the list of SATAs.
> 
> You can undo it with hdparm on a different brand board, but on that same GigaByte board the operation will fail, so apparently the board takes an active part it defending the HPA.
> 
> So if you have to use a GigaByte board, first attach a "sacrificial" drive (it can be your regular OS booting drive) to the place highest up the food chain (start with IDE Primary Master), boot from one of the Linux-based "live" cds (Parted Magic might be a good choice to have on hand), run hdparm -N /dev/driveinquestion to make sure you do have an HPA on that drive (you can use Parted Magic to shrink partitions to make room at the end of the drive, say about 10GB).
> 
> Then maybe it'll be happy with that and not mess with any of the other drive positions/ports. Maybe.
> 
> If I knew more for sure about this I'd start a separate thread just for HPA warnings.


On both of my motherboards, hdparm -N reports HPA of the size of 2113 sectors (~2MB) on primary drives (one has only primary drive, the other has a drive that was already partitioned before it got put in). 2113 sectors exactly matches what some people have reported happened to their drives and messed up their RAID configs. This fits BIOS backup, and is way too small for Xpress Recovery purposes, so I don't think there is much mistery as to the purpose of these HPAs (and some versions of motherboards actually do mention it in the manual).

What is unclear, as you mentioned, is whether leaving those already HPAed drives connected will satisfy the board so that it will leave other drives alone. Some people have reported that this HPA creation occured not necessarily on the first drive, as measured by the IDE/SATA port #, but rather on the drive that initialized first. I don't know if those two ways of finding first drive always match. If they do not necessarily match, there is a possibility of HPA appearing on any drive connected by IDE/SATA at the boot time.

Will jmfs recognize drives connected after the boot is over (either through eSATA or USB)? Waiting until boot is over to connect the drives should guarantee the potential HPA creation step does not see them.


----------



## retiredqwest

PedjaR said:


> On both of my motherboards, hdparm -N reports HPA of the size of 2113 sectors (~2MB) on primary drives (one has only primary drive, the other has a drive that was already partitioned before it got put in). 2113 sectors exactly matches what some people have reported happened to their drives and messed up their RAID configs. This fits BIOS backup, and is way too small for Xpress Recovery purposes, so I don't think there is much mistery as to the purpose of these HPAs (and some versions of motherboards actually do mention it in the manual).
> 
> What is unclear, as you mentioned, is whether leaving those already HPAed drives connected will satisfy the board so that it will leave other drives alone. Some people have reported that this HPA creation occured not necessarily on the first drive, as measured by the IDE/SATA port #, but rather on the drive that initialized first. I don't know if those two ways of finding first drive always match. If they do not necessarily match, there is a possibility of HPA appearing on any drive connected by IDE/SATA at the boot time.
> 
> Will jmfs recognize drives connected after the boot is over (either through eSATA or USB)? Waiting until boot is over to connect the drives should guarantee the potential HPA creation step does not see them.


I took a look at some of my drives this morning using Parted Magic and it found no HPA on the X58 machine 4 drives, nor on any of the stock Tivo drives.

I then ran JMFS and shelled out and used mfslayout.sh and each of the stock tivo drives have the correct amount of partitons and KB matches earlier results of my testing JMFS with those drives.


----------



## PedjaR

retiredqwest said:


> I took a look at some of my drives this morning using Parted Magic and it found no HPA on the X58 machine 4 drives, nor on any of the stock Tivo drives.
> 
> I then ran JMFS and shelled out and used mfslayout.sh and each of the stock tivo drives have the correct amount of partitons and KB matches earlier results of my testing JMFS with those drives.


Interesting. I ran Parted Magic and its Partition Editor mentions no HPA or secondary partition of any kind on the primary drive, and reports "total 488395055 sectors". 
hdparm -N shows that 488395055 sectors available, and 4888397168 total, HPA enabled, which seems to indicate an HPA of 2113 sectors. 
If I read this correctly, it appears that, in my case, hdparm -N is better in showing HPA than Parted Magic. Your case is probably different, since the other stuff did not find anything fishy either.


----------



## retiredqwest

PedjaR said:


> Interesting. I ran Parted Magic and its Partition Editor mentions no HPA or secondary partition of any kind on the primary drive, and reports "total 488395055 sectors".
> hdparm -N shows that 488395055 sectors available, and 4888397168 total, HPA enabled, which seems to indicate an HPA of 2113 sectors.
> If I read this correctly, it appears that, in my case, hdparm -N is better in showing HPA than Parted Magic. Your case is probably different, since the other stuff did not find anything fishy either.


I ran Parted Magic on my EP45 and it showed 2 partitions cuz I installed W7 64 bit and it asked if it could create a 100 meg partition before partitoning the rest of the drive. It is not referenced as HPA. And it has folders and files in there.

If you Google 'hpatool.zip' that tool is supposed to show and allow deleting HPA partitions. Its on the Gigabyte UK community forum. I'm not too enamored on trying this software on my X58 with 2 300G raptors in Mirror 1 for some strange reason. I may try it in the morning on the EP45.
I'm just using that computer as a server.

As far as JMFS, yes you can boot into it and add drives afterward. You just have to hit the (R)efresh key and let it scan for the drives. I know it works for USB.... never tried it for ESATA.


----------



## unitron

The MFS Live cd (v1.4) boots to a command line interface and hdparm is available as soon as you type hpdparm and hit Enter.

On the Parted Magic cd, one usually boots to the graphical interface with the icons and use of the mouse and all that, but you can click on the same thing that let's you reboot or shut down and there's an option to back out to a clunky, "early days of DOS"-looking menu, and from there you can get to the pure command line and invoke hdparm.

If I remember right that's also where you can start "testdisk", which isn't much use for TiVo drives, but can be a lifesaver if your computer's drive gets scrambled.

Following up on the "hpatool.zip" clue, it seems that GigaByte UK used to have an article that explained some of this, so naturally they've moved it or taken it down, but on a UK forum a user that seems to know whereof he speaks says that the board re-writes the BIOS to the HPA every time it boots.


----------



## unitron

More of my blatherings about the GigaByte HPA situation are here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8576155#post8576155


----------



## PedjaR

retiredqwest said:


> I ran Parted Magic on my EP45 and it showed 2 partitions cuz I installed W7 64 bit and it asked if it could create a 100 meg partition before partitoning the rest of the drive. It is not referenced as HPA. And it has folders and files in there.
> 
> If you Google 'hpatool.zip' that tool is supposed to show and allow deleting HPA partitions. Its on the Gigabyte UK community forum. I'm not too enamored on trying this software on my X58 with 2 300G raptors in Mirror 1 for some strange reason. I may try it in the morning on the EP45.
> I'm just using that computer as a server.
> 
> As far as JMFS, yes you can boot into it and add drives afterward. You just have to hit the (R)efresh key and let it scan for the drives. I know it works for USB.... never tried it for ESATA.


Thanks for the info about JMFS. I hope that eSATA will work with WD Lifeguard, wdidle, and Hitachi Feature Tools. Then I can hook up original Tivo drive with USB and use JMFS; it would be slow, but it would not be risky.

By the way, I used hdparm from MFS Live cd, per unitron's advice. It may also be able to remove the HPA, but only on another machine (if I can trust what I read), as this motherboard would fight that.


----------



## retiredqwest

PedjaR said:


> Thanks for the info about JMFS. I hope that eSATA will work with WD Lifeguard, wdidle, and Hitachi Feature Tools. Then I can hook up original Tivo drive with USB and use JMFS; it would be slow, but it would not be risky.
> 
> By the way, I used hdparm from MFS Live cd, per unitron's advice. It may also be able to remove the HPA, but only on another machine (if I can trust what I read), as this motherboard would fight that.


OK...... back to HPA for the last time in this thread for me.

Using msflive 1.4 cd I ran it on my X58 MB.

dev/sda 300G = HPA is not enabled
dev/sdb 300G = HPA is enabled

Mind you these are raid mirror 1

/dev/sdc = HPA is not enabled
/dev/sdd = HPA is not enabled
/dev/sde = HPA is enabled

My EP45: no raided HDD

/dev/sda = HPA is enabled
/dev/sdb = HPA is not enabled
/dev/sdc = HPA is not enabled
/dev/sdd = HPA is not enabled
/dev/sde = HPA is not enabled

This is the one I use for a server. And there is no option for Bios Backup to HDD

THD Stock 160G 
HPA is enabled

TP Stock 320G
HPA is not enabled

TP backup 320G
HPA is not enabled

I just tried JMFS again and I booted without a HDD connected and plugged in the USB from my Blacx dock and hit refresh and it found it. I see no reason why ESATA should be any different. My test computer Asrock MB does not have ESATA......

I just tried my dock on my X58 MB and it loaded the TP HDD via ESATA without a burp.

NOW, I have read that some MB's won't do this unless your turn on ACHI on the BIOS for that controller chip. I guess you may have to see what works.

And if you are copying the stock TP 320G drive..... USB only adds an hour or so to the 3 hrs it will take SATA direct to the MB.


----------



## Stuxnet

PedjaR said:


> Will jmfs recognize drives connected after the boot is over (either through eSATA or USB)? Waiting until boot is over to connect the drives should guarantee the potential HPA creation step does not see them.


I think the answer is "it depends". Rich mentions dock stations he has used w/success. In the other hand, I bought 2 eSATA USB docks from monoprice. I ran WD Lifeguard and HDDScan (to set AAM) on the new drive under Windows... the dock worked perfectly. When I booted jmfs it saw neither docked drive. BUMMER... So I had to open up my box, and use the HD and DVD/CD SATA cables... Since I didn't have a working CD, I had to create a bootable SB stick w/jmfs.


----------



## suggest THIS

Stuxnet said:


> FWIW, 74.99 on NE thru June 16 w/discount code w/3 day free ship.


Thanks. I jumped on this deal in anticipation of upgrading my new Premiere. When I ran wdidle3, it reported that idle was active and set for 30 seconds (I reset it for 300 seconds). The drive carries a manufactured date of 02 MAR 2011.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Ok, I've read through most of this thread, but I still am having problems.

First, I tried running the CD on a gigabyte motherboard, but it only detected one harddrive. I'm guessing this is the HPA problem you are all talking about. Has this screwed up my Tivo drive?

Also, I put them in another old dell I have and it detects both drives fine, but it is erroring out saying that there isn't enough room on my drive. (I'm copying from 320GB to 2TB so I know that's not the issue. Any ideas?


----------



## dwit

DavidTigerFan said:


> Ok, I've read through most of this thread, but I still am having problems.
> 
> First, I tried running the CD on a gigabyte motherboard, but it only detected one harddrive. I'm guessing this is the HPA problem you are all talking about. Has this screwed up my Tivo drive?
> 
> Also, I put them in another old dell I have and it detects both drives fine, but it is erroring out saying that there isn't enough room on my drive. (I'm copying from 320GB to 2TB so I know that's not the issue. Any ideas?


First thing I would do is reinstall the original 320 gb drive back in the Premiere to see if it is still funtioning properly. This is the ultimate test to determine if it is "screwed up", or not.

As for the "not enough room", are you sure you had selected the appropriate drive? Any other drives connected? If so, disconnect all hard drives execept the 2 relevant drives.

What brand and model is the target 2 TB drive?


----------



## DavidTigerFan

ok, I'll get that in a few minutes. I actually got the copy to start on the older computer after I switched around the SATA cables. Once that is done I'll plug the old drive back in and boot up.


----------



## retiredqwest

DavidTigerFan said:


> ok, I'll get that in a few minutes. I actually got the copy to start on the older computer after I switched around the SATA cables. Once that is done I'll plug the old drive back in and boot up.


AS far as JMFS detecting drives... more than once I've had too hit the (R)efresh key before it sees both drives. And it is far easier to just to have those 2 drives hooked up. Less chance of writing to the wrong target drive.

I'm not going to address that HPA situation as I'm not positive it creates a problem with TIVO drives. My stock THD 160G has HPA Enabled and it works.

On my stock TP 320G HPA is not enabled and it produces read errors when copying to another HDD... but it works as does the straight copy that I made of it.


----------



## dwit

DavidTigerFan said:


> ok, I'll get that in a few minutes. I actually got the copy to start on the older computer after I switched around the SATA cables. Once that is done I'll plug the old drive back in and boot up.


May as well proceed normally now. Complete the entire JMFS procedure. Then try booting the the new enlarged drive first. Though which one you try first is no issue. In fact, if the new drive operates, that is probably all you need to know that the original *was *good.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

ok, copy completed, expanding now.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Great, expand failed. Rebooting computer and trying again.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

That didn't work. Does the program not see the harddrive after it's been copied? Do I need to do a full copy again?


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Well just great. I put the original drive back into the premiere and it's hosed. It gets to the "almost there" screen and then cuts off all video after about 2-3 minutes.

A warning message about putting these drives into computers with Gigabyte motherboards in the original post would be helpful. 

Where do I go from here? Do I have to return the unit to Tivo now?


----------



## dwit

DavidTigerFan said:


> That didn't work. Does the program not see the harddrive after it's been copied? Do I need to do a full copy again?


I would go back to checking the original drive, reinstalled in the Premiere. 
Then maybe just brushing up on the basics of the process.

I have upgraded my own Premiere to a 2 TB Hitachi Cool spin, and for an acquaintance, I reimaged(essentially cloned) an original drive, and also upgraded a 2 TB WD GP drive, using the reimaged original.

I used 2 very old computers. One Celeron 4 on a Shuttle motherboard that is probably at least 8 years old, and a Pentium D system with an Asus mb about 6 -7 years old. Besides some curious inconsistencies in the *copying times*, all seemed to be textbook(exactly as outlined). All 3 copied/expanded drives seem to boot correctly in my Premiere. The acquaitance has not yet received his drives to test in his unit.

Having said all that, now my *original drive fails* to boot up. Oh well.

Good luck.


----------



## dwit

DavidTigerFan said:


> Well just great. I put the original drive back into the premiere and it's hosed. It gets to the "almost there" screen and then cuts off all video after about 2-3 minutes.
> 
> A warning message about putting these drives into computers with Gigabyte motherboards in the original post would be helpful.
> 
> Where do I go from here? Do I have to return the unit to Tivo now?


That will probably be your best recourse now.

*Do not* mention anything about trying to upgrade the drive, or even opening the unit up. That will almost certainly disqualify you from getting any warranty service consideration.

Double check your reinstallation. Make sure everything is connected correctly, and securely.

Funny thing too: sometimes these things, for whatever reason, may fail to boot up one time, and succeed another. Nothing left but to try getting it to boot on several tries.

Good luck.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Why would the expand fail after copying the drive?


----------



## Fofer

If you have one, make sure to uplug any USB-Bluetooth adapter first before attempting a reboot.


----------



## dwit

> ...Where do I go from here?...


Something else to try, after making sure the drive is just not going to boot: Try running the WD Lifegard diagnostics extended test on the drive. This supposedly attempts to correct errors it may find. Curiously, this worked for me even though no errors were reported. Unfortunately after successfully booting up, it ultimately failed to boot later on.

Some other possibilities: Borrow an original Premiere hard drive and attempt to reimage your original drive using the copy function with JMFS. Or ask an owner of a Premiere to reimage your original drive for you.

There are also drives of various capacities for sale on ebay, with the Premiere software already installed. I think recall seeing 2 TB drives for as low as $115.

Lastly, for now, some of the places that sell prepared Tivo drives(dvrdude, dvrupgrade, weaknees, etc) *may* be able to restore your original drive.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Ok, i put the original back in the premiere and just let it sit. Not sure if that helped, but it booted and I got all the screens to come up fine. I'm now attempting another copy and am currently waiting for that to complete. We'll see if it fails on the expand again or not.


----------



## retiredqwest

Just out of curiousity....

My stock THD has HPA enabled and it boots up normally.
The 1.5TB has HPA enabled and has been in the THD for 9 months.

My TP drives do not have HPA enabled.... even though the 2 TB was created on a Gigabyte MB and it has been in the TP for 5 months.

If you truely want to find out if HPA is enabled on the stock drive.

http://www.mfslive.org/download.htm

is the iso for MFSlive 1.4. Burn and then boot up with that CD with the stock drive ONLY.

Either let it boot or hit option 1 <enter>.

Then type 'fdisk -l'

That will you if it sees the drive, it should be '/dev/sda'

type 'hdparm -N /dev/sda' and it will tell you if HPA is enabled. And that is an uppercase 'N' not a lowercase 'n'.

Next try the Kickstart commands and see if that will show a problem and or maybe fix things.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2

edit: it can take up to 7 agonizing minutes for the TP to boot up sometimes.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Arrgh! Copy finished fine and I told it I wanted to expand the new drive. It then immediately errors out and tells me that the expand did not complete. Seriously, what am I doing wrong with this crap?

*Edit

I tried just booting with the newly copied drive and the software says that there is no Tivo drive detected in my system even though the copy went fine. Not sure what to do again.


----------



## dwit

DavidTigerFan said:


> Arrgh! Copy finished fine and I told it I wanted to expand the new drive. It then immediately errors out and tells me that the expand did not complete. Seriously, what am I doing wrong with this crap?
> 
> *Edit
> 
> I tried just booting with the newly copied drive and the software says that there is no Tivo drive detected in my system even though the copy went fine. Not sure what to do again.


What is the make and model of the 2 TB drive?

Have you tried the new drive in the Tivo?


----------



## DavidTigerFan

dwit said:


> What is the make and model of the 2 TB drive?
> 
> Have you tried the new drive in the Tivo?


It's a WD20 EARS. I just tried it in the tivo and all the lights blink except for the green. I'm guessing that means it isn't a good disk.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

HPA is enabled on both drives according to MFSlive software.


----------



## dwit

DavidTigerFan said:


> It's a WD20 EARS. I just tried it in the tivo and all the lights blink except for the green. I'm guessing that means it isn't a good disk.


That is just probably what it does for a drive without a proper Tivo image.

Well, I guess for now, be glad your original drive still works. Maybe just sleep on the upgrade for a day or two.

Maybe figure out how to access another pc, or trying the slower usb route with (a)some enclosures, etc. Maybe see if there are some bios settings to tweak on the mb. I know on both of my old computers, I have to enable SATA in the bios, as they are both primarily IDE by nature.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Damnit!

Because my original drive was still working, I put the 2 drives back in the computer with the gigabyte MB with the hope that nothing would be hosed. It doesn't look like anything did get hosed, but I'm getting the same error. Everything copies fine, but then when I go to expand the drive it errors out and says "Expand did not finish successfully"

I don't know what it could be at this point.


----------



## Fofer

dwit said:


> There are also drives of various capacities for sale on ebay, with the Premiere software already installed. I think recall seeing 2 TB drives for as low as $115.


Good to know - thanks for this.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

I might have something...

I had a spare 2TB that I save for my DROBO. I ran the WD diag on both drives and the one that has been giving me problems gave some error that "a WD drive was detected, but could not be read, please contact WD support". My spare DROBO drive detected fine.

I'm redoing the copy now and will try expanding in the morning.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Fofer said:


> Good to know - thanks for this.


Here's one for $107. I think I'd have done this had I known the problems I'd have had.

http://cgi.ebay.com/TiVo-Premiere-T...710?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item45f963ad96


----------



## unitron

DavidTigerFan said:


> Ok, I've read through most of this thread, but I still am having problems.
> 
> First, I tried running the CD on a gigabyte motherboard, but it only detected one harddrive. I'm guessing this is the HPA problem you are all talking about. Has this screwed up my Tivo drive?
> 
> Also, I put them in another old dell I have and it detects both drives fine, but it is erroring out saying that there isn't enough room on my drive. (I'm copying from 320GB to 2TB so I know that's not the issue. Any ideas?


Are you saying the cd (MFS Live v1.4 or the jmfs?) only detected one drive or the motherboard only detected one drive?

If the motherboard didn't detect it, it probably couldn't have created a Host Protected Area on it.

I'm not certain if the HPA is done by re-writing something in the drives firmware that reports the drive's size to the computer, or if, in addition to setting aside an area on the platter(s), and possibly writing a BIOS backup to that area, it also writes elsewhere on the platter(s) to indicate the existance of that area.

If it creates the HPA on the new drive that is to be written to, then it probably won't hurt except for the loss of a little space.

If, on the other hand, it does it on a drive that's already partitioned, there could be a problem, because the partition table or map will be reporting a larger total size than the drive itself will be reporting.

If this happens to a "PC" drive, with a DOS/Windows style partition table, then perhaps the motherboard rewrites the table to adjust it for the new loss of space.

A TiVo drive doesn't have one of those partition tables, it has a version of the old Apple Partition Map.

Since both get written at the front of the drive, an attempt by the motherboard to re-write the non-existing partition table would put ones and zeros in the same general area of the drive where the TiVo/Apple style partition map is, and that probably wouldn't end well.

If using a GigaByte board with both IDE and SATA ports, I would have a DOS/Windows drive (like maybe the one from which the computer usually boots) on the first place the board will look for an HPA candidate, which will be Master on the Primary IDE controller, followed by the rest of the IDE ports (not sure if it goes Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary--if it has a secondary header--Master, Secondary Slave, or Primary Master, Secondary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Slave), and then the SATA ports starting at port 0 or port 1 depending on how it starts the count.

----OR-----

If the HPA is strictly a case of "it re-writes the drive's firmware to indicate a smaller size, and then creates the HPA in the now hidden, secret area at the end of the drive beyond where the firmware now says the drive exists", then I'd put the new drive, the one that hasn't been written to yet, in that "sacrificial" postition--first of the IDEs or, if no IDEs, first of the SATAs--and let the board "shrink" the drive, then let the TiVo drive upgrading tools copy from a TiVo drive in a safe position to the new, apparently slightly smaller, drive. That way, all of the TiVo "stuff" will be on the part of the drive before the HPA, and the upgrading tools will think that that area was the full drive with which they had to work.

When placed in the TiVo, the new drive should report its size to the TiVo as being the slightly smaller same size as the upgrade tools thought it was, so it should work ok.

As I do not currently have the time, money, space, and hardware to spare to thoroughly test the foregoing hypothesis, or hypotheses, I make no guarantees.

As somebody else said on one of the upgrade guides, if you break it, you own both pieces.


----------



## unitron

DavidTigerFan said:


> HPA is enabled on both drives according to MFSlive software.


Here's what you do. And you do it very carefully.

Get out that old Dell.

Have no drives hooked up to it except for the cd or dvd from which you'll boot.

Hook up the new drive.

Boot with the MFS Live cd v1.4 (although if the jmfs cd just boots to a command prompt, instead of doing things automagically, you could see if it has hdparm on it).

Assuming the new drive is on the first SATA port,

hdparm -N /dev/sda

Let's say it returns something like

970773168/970772115 HPA enabled

(It could say HPA enable first, and the numbers might be reversed)

the larger number should be the full size of the drive.

Those numbers are actually Logical Block Areas (or whatever LBA is the acronym for), so you'd have to multiply them by 512 (or maybe 4096 on the new "advanced format" drives) to get a number that looks like it's in the ballpark of the size of the drive, but that's irrelevent to this procedure.

You want to use the larger number of the two.

hdparm -N p976773168 /dev/sda

The above is an example of doing the procedure on a 500GB drive.

You will have different numbers.

You will use the larger of the two numbers hdparm -N /dev/sda reports on either side of the dividing /

After you type in the above command with the uppercase N, preceeded by the hyphen that indicates it's a switch or option of the hdparm command, followed, after a space, by the lowercase "p", which is immediately followed (no space) by the larger of the two numbers *reported for your drive*, which is followed by a space and then the designation of the drive, examine it very carefully to make sure you have the number exactly right.

Get up, walk away from the computer, go have a smoke or get a glass of tea or something.

Come back and check that number again.

Then hit "Enter".

If you try this on the GigaByte board it will fail.

If it works on the Dell, see if the new drive will boot in the Tivo.

If it does, and if the original TiVo drive won't boot in the TiVo, then hook up only the original Tivo drive to the Dell, and go through the procedure again.

Obviously, the numbers will be different.

Again, you'll want to use the higher of the two numbers.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Unitron, thanks. I was actually able to get the copy, expand, and supersize to work with the new drive. It is booting now (hopefully). If it doesn't work I'll use your method. I think my gigabyte board might not have affected it.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Looks like it was the drive. Everything booted and I have 317 hours HD.

FYI, all the drives could be seen by the bios and the software could see it to copy from the old to the new. It just didn't work when I tried to expand it.

Also FYI, my gigabyte board is an old one, but it is model GA-P35-DS3L. It does have the xpress recovery2, but not sure why it didn't hose me.


----------



## dwit

DavidTigerFan said:


> Looks like it was the drive. Everything booted and I have 317 hours HD.
> 
> FYI, all the drives could be seen by the bios and the software could see it to copy from the old to the new. It just didn't work when I tried to expand it.
> 
> Also FYI, my gigabyte board is an old one, but it is model GA-P35-DS3L. It does have the xpress recovery2, but not sure why it didn't hose me.


Looks like one lesson here is to run diagnostics on the drive, preferably before beginning the upgrade procedures.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

dwit said:


> Looks like one lesson here is to run diagnostics on the drive, preferably before beginning the upgrade procedures.


Definitely.  I am going to set the idle on the WD drive as well just so I don't run into any issues with that in the future.


----------



## Am_I_Evil

hmmmmm...wth is this issue...HELP PLEASE!!!!

did a XL upgrade from 1tb to 2....TiVo booted fine but the menus don't do what they should...my shows is empty which is incorrect as my 1tb was full...clicking anything in Setting & Messages just takes me back to TiVo Central....

WTF is going on?

edit: tried to get to my to-do list...does the same thing as the other areas...just takes me back to TiVo central...

the box also currently has no internet...could that be affecting it?

lol... disregard this whole thing...used my laptop as a bridge and using my neighbors internet as mine is out and everything seems to be normal now


----------



## minimeh

I just completed the upgrade of my week-old TiVo Premier to a 2TB WD20EARS. Reading through this thread prepared me completely for the upgrade, and for that, a hearty thanks to all, especially *Comer* (hope you can put the donation to good use, Comer!).

A couple of notes on the experience.

In retrospect, I think I should have run the disk-boot version of the WD disk diagnostics tool. I ran the Windows version, and it took 17.5 hours to complete using a USB docking station (no options, I don't currently have a working desktop). I'm guessing that if you take the AV overhead and multi-taking of Windows out of the picture, it would be faster.

After the integrity check, I ran HDDScan to set the AAM level. Both version 3.1 and 3.3 report the the WD20EARS does not support AAM. Is that something new? The drive is dated 08 JUN 2011. Anyway, the drive is very quiet as-is.

Not having a SATA connection available, I wasn't able to use wdidle. No issues so far, When the drive blows up in 3 months, we'll see. 

I read in a post (or I have imagined it) that only a #10 Torqs drive is needed these days. However, the screws that mount the rails to the mother board on my box were #15 Torqs, while the others are 10s.

Other than that, everything just worked. Awesome.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

minimeh said:


> I read in a post (or I have imagined it) that only a #10 Torqs drive is needed these days. However, the screws that mount the rails to the mother board on my box were #15 Torqs, while the others are 10s.
> 
> Other than that, everything just worked. Awesome.


That's weird. I used nothing but a #10


----------



## richsadams

minimeh said:


> I just completed the upgrade of my week-old TiVo Premier to a 2TB WD20EARS. Reading through this thread prepared me completely for the upgrade, and for that, a hearty thanks to all, especially *Comer* (hope you can put the donation to good use, Comer!).
> 
> A couple of notes on the experience.
> 
> In retrospect, I think I should have run the disk-boot version of the WD disk diagnostics tool. I ran the Windows version, and it took 17.5 hours to complete using a USB docking station (no options, I don't currently have a working desktop). I'm guessing that if you take the AV overhead and multi-taking of Windows out of the picture, it would be faster.
> 
> After the integrity check, I ran HDDScan to set the AAM level. Both version 3.1 and 3.3 report the the WD20EARS does not support AAM. Is that something new? The drive is dated 08 JUN 2011. Anyway, the drive is very quiet as-is.
> 
> Not having a SATA connection available, I wasn't able to use wdidle. No issues so far, When the drive blows up in 3 months, we'll see.
> 
> I read in a post (or I have imagined it) that only a #10 Torqs drive is needed these days. However, the screws that mount the rails to the mother board on my box were #15 Torqs, while the others are 10s.
> 
> Other than that, everything just worked. Awesome.


Thanks very much for the feedback. :up:

Interesting that you didn't need to adjust the Intellipark setting. Wish WD would make up their mind one way or the other. 

First I've heard that HDDscan won't change the AAM on the WD20EARS. We'll need more data points to confirm, but AFAIK that's new.

Seems like TiVo goes from using all #10 Torx to both #10 and #15. Our Premiere XL used all #10. Wish TiVo would make up its mind. 

Congrats and enjoy your "new" TiVo!


----------



## Stuxnet

minimeh said:


> After the integrity check, I ran HDDScan to set the AAM level. Both version 3.1 and 3.3 report the the WD20EARS does not support AAM. Is that something new? The drive is dated 08 JUN 2011. Anyway, the drive is very quiet as-is.
> 
> Not having a SATA connection available, I wasn't able to use wdidle. No issues so far, When the drive blows up in 3 months, we'll see.
> 
> I read in a post (or I have imagined it) that only a #10 Torqs drive is needed these days. However, the screws that mount the rails to the mother board on my box were #15 Torqs, while the others are 10s.
> 
> Other than that, everything just worked. Awesome.


1. What OS is on your PC? If Win Vista/7, did you try to run HDDScan "as admininstrator"? I just received/installed a WD20EARS in my PC 2 weeks ago and for grins reset AAM (I didn't check the mfg date, but NewEgg generally has recent issues).

2. No SATA at all? I had no spares, but "borrowed" the one from my HDD when the USB dock proved futile.

3. You're right about the Torqs, you need 10 & 15 to do it right, though some have managed with 10s alone... I wouldn't recommend it.


----------



## minimeh

Stuxnet said:


> 1. What OS is on your PC? If Win Vista/7, did you try to run HDDScan "as admininstrator"?


The laptop that I used for the upgrade runs WinXP 32 on an administrative account, so no issues there. For grins I ran HDDScan on the hard drive in the laptop itself and HDDScan reported that _it_ supports AAM and gave me the ability to set it. So, nice thought, but I don't think OS/admin rights come into play here.



Stuxnet said:


> 2. No SATA at all? I had no spares, but "borrowed" the one from my HDD when the USB dock proved futile.


I did not attempt to pull out the laptop's drive and use its SATA connection. Obviously, the 3.5" drive wouldn't physically fit into the 2.5" drive space, and I don't have cabling.

I do have another laptop that has an eSATA connector exposed. I wonder if connecting a drive to the eSATA connector, using appropriate cabling or an enclosure, would work? Either pursuing that or taking the drive to a friend's desktop would be my next angles if I had issues. However, rather than being futile, doing the upgrade with 2 USB docking stations worked for me, albeit _s-l-o-w-l-y._



Stuxnet said:


> 3. You're right about the Torqs, you need 10 & 15 to do it right, though some have managed with 10s alone... I wouldn't recommend it.


No, the 10 drive rattles around pretty good in the 15 screw head. However, I'm not doubting that some drive rails are mounted with 10s and others with 15s.


----------



## richsadams

Stuxnet said:


> 3. You're right about the Torqs, you need 10 & 15 to do it right, though some have managed with 10s alone... I wouldn't recommend it.


Some boxes (ours included) have Torx 10's on the exterior as well as the sled...others have Torx 10 on the outside and Torx 15 on the sled.


----------



## richsadams

minimeh said:


> I wonder if connecting a drive to the eSATA connector, using appropriate cabling or an enclosure, would work?


That generally works on desktops. I don't know of any reason it wouldn't work on a laptop. The only issue might be something to do with BIOS settings, but others have used eSATA successfully for upgrades (just takes a while longer than a direct SATA MB connection, but less time than a USB connection).


----------



## wb5yyq

I get the "Welcome - starting up" error with my original Tivo Premiere HD (320gb), leading me to think the drive is bad. Pulled the drive and tested with the Western Digital tool; it passed the first test, but failed the extended test with bad sectors. What do I do now? Should I try to copy the original disk with errors? If the original is bad, now what do I do? Where can I find a Premiere image to use?


----------



## lessd

wb5yyq said:


> I get the "Welcome - starting up" error with my original Tivo Premiere HD (320gb), leading me to think the drive is bad. Pulled the drive and tested with the Western Digital tool; it passed the first test, but failed the extended test with bad sectors. What do I do now? Should I try to copy the original disk with errors? If the original is bad, now what do I do? Where can I find a Premiere image to use?


Purchased a drive that already has the image on it, you can find some on E-Bay or purchase a new TP from Amazon for about $84.


----------



## richsadams

wb5yyq said:


> I get the "Welcome - starting up" error with my original Tivo Premiere HD (320gb), leading me to think the drive is bad. Pulled the drive and tested with the Western Digital tool; it passed the first test, but failed the extended test with bad sectors. What do I do now? Should I try to copy the original disk with errors? If the original is bad, now what do I do? Where can I find a Premiere image to use?


When you say "Welcome-starting up error" do you mean that TiVo is stuck on that screen? Does it do anything else? When you plug TiVo in, try putting your ear to the case. Can you hear the hard drive spin up?

If it's stuck on "Welcome" screen it means that the motherboard cannot communicate with the hard drive. From your tests it sounds like it has some bad sectors. You might try running some of the Kickstarts to see if TiVo can repair the problem...

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2

If that doesn't work you'll probably need to do as lessd suggests and find another drive. You can either use that one as a replacement or to image a larger drive.

Note that if you do get a drive from another TiVo that you'll need to get an drive from an identical model. When you first boot it up you'll get an error message. To overcome that you'll need to run Clear and Delete Everything. Then you should prep it as a new TiVo which might entail having your cableco pair your cable card, etc. Once that's done you could use it to image a new/larger drive.

Another option would be to contact TiVo. If it's less than a year old they will generally replace it for $49. If it's more than a year old it's $149 but as lessd points out, you can buy a new TiVo Premiere for less than $90.

Best of luck and let us know how it goes!


----------



## Larry.A

I want to thank everyone that has put these scripts/apps together. I recently switched to FIOS from DirecTV and could not stand the user interface of the FIOS boxes. I used to have 2 fully hacked direcTV Tivos several years ago and I loved them so I decided to buy a couple of premiers and upgrade them with WD20EARS. I can not believe how simple this is now. widdle, automated 3 step proccess and bam I have 2TB of capacity each. My only problem is on one I can see the other Tivo on the "My Shows" list but when I select it it says there is nothin to display (wich of course there is) and on the second Tivo I can not see the other one at all. I have tested all the network diag and everything checks out. I have rebooted each several times with no luck. I can also stream netflix on both so I am pretty sure it is not a network issue. I did a search but I guess I did not use the right keywords because nothing came up. Any help would be apreciated.


----------



## dwit

Larry.A said:


> I want to thank everyone that has put these scripts/apps together. I recently switched to FIOS from DirecTV and could not stand the user interface of the FIOS boxes. I used to have 2 fully hacked direcTV Tivos several years ago and I loved them so I decided to buy a couple of premiers and upgrade them with WD20EARS. I can not believe how simple this is now. widdle, automated 3 step proccess and bam I have 2TB of capacity each. My only problem is on one I can see the other Tivo on the "My Shows" list but when I select it it says there is nothin to display (wich of course there is) and on the second Tivo I can not see the other one at all. I have tested all the network diag and everything checks out. I have rebooted each several times with no luck. I can also stream netflix on both so I am pretty sure it is not a network issue. I did a search but I guess I did not use the right keywords because nothing came up. Any help would be apreciated.


Don't know if this is the problem, but have you enabled *"Video Sharing"* on your account at Tivo.com (*"Change DVR Preferences"*)?


----------



## Larry.A

dwit said:


> Don't know if this is the problem, but have you enabled *"Video Sharing"* on your account at Tivo.com (*"Change DVR Preferences"*)?


Thanks for the tip. I just verified that video sharing is enabled, still no luck.


----------



## richsadams

Larry.A said:


> Thanks for the tip. I just verified that video sharing is enabled, still no luck.


I've run into that now and then. Try rebooting not only your TiVo's, but your network as well. IIRC I did it in this order to get things working:

1. Reboot router/modem (give it ten minutes or so to fully engage)
2. Reboot TiVo 1 (again, wait a few minutes)
3. Reboot TiVo 2

Also, if you just connected your TiVo's it may take 24 to 48 hours for them both to be recognized by the Mothership as being on the same account and ultimately to communicate with each other.

Hope that helps...others may have some more advice.


----------



## minimeh

minimeh said:


> Not having a SATA connection available, I wasn't able to use wdidle.





Stuxnet said:


> 2. No SATA at all? I had no spares, but "borrowed" the one from my HDD when the USB dock proved futile.


After looking into the whole intellipark issue some more, I'm convinced that I really need to set the value. So I bought a SATA extension cable, removed the laptop's HDD, plugged in the extension, then plugged in the WD20EARS to the extension, and booted up off of a boot CDROM.

Unfortunately, the WD20EARS was not recognized by the BIOS. I reseated both ends of the cable and tried again. No good. I attached the original WD disk from the TiVo and tried again. No good. I plugged in the laptop's own HDD (a Seagate st9120411 120GB) into the extension cable, and that _is_ recognized. So it seems the cable and connection to computer is ok.

I put the WD20EARS back into the Premier and powered it up. It booted up normally, at least demonstrating that the disk drive is still good and wasn't fried.

So, I'm clueless why the WD drives are not recognized by the BIOS of the laptop.

My next swing at it will be to drag the disk to somebody's desk top and see what unexpected issues arise there!


----------



## unitron

minimeh said:


> After looking into the whole intellipark issue some more, I'm convinced that I really need to set the value. So I bought a SATA extension cable, removed the laptop's HDD, plugged in the extension, then plugged in the WD20EARS to the extension, and booted up off of a boot CDROM.
> 
> Unfortunately, the WD20EARS was not recognized by the BIOS. I reseated both ends of the cable and tried again. No good. I attached the original WD disk from the TiVo and tried again. No good. I plugged in the laptop's own HDD (a Seagate st9120411 120GB) into the extension cable, and that _is_ recognized. So it seems the cable and connection to computer is ok.
> 
> I put the WD20EARS back into the Premier and powered it up. It booted up normally, at least demonstrating that the disk drive is still good and wasn't fried.
> 
> So, I'm clueless why the WD drives are not recognized by the BIOS of the laptop.
> 
> My next swing at it will be to drag the disk to somebody's desk top and see what unexpected issues arise there!


You could see if the EARS has a "throttle it back to SATA 1.5" jumper setting, and see it that makes the difference, although it may be the size that's the problem.

I've got an Asus motherboard (AGP video slot, DDR1 ram slots) with 2 IDE controllers and 2 SATA ports. I've got 2 160GB SATA drives usually attached to those 2 ports.

However, hooking up a 1TB SATA drive, even if jumpered as mentioned, causes it to hang when it gets to the "let's see if I've got anything attached to my SATA ports" part of the boot process.

Put a Marvell or JMicron chipset adapter on the drive and hook it to either of the IDE controllers, Master or Slave, and it boots just fine.


----------



## minimeh

As far as i can tell, the Seagate is a SATA 3.0. But I am suspicious that the size of the drives (320 GB and 2 TB) might be the issue. Hmm, maybe there's a BIOS update. I'll have to check that out, I guess.

On the plus side, I'm getting really good at taking out and putting back the TiVo HDD.


----------



## unitron

minimeh said:


> As far as i can tell, the Seagate is a SATA 3.0. But I am suspicious that the size of the drives (320 GB and 2 TB) might be the issue. Hmm, maybe there's a BIOS update. I'll have to check that out, I guess.
> 
> On the plus side, I'm getting really good at taking out and putting back the TiVo HDD.


Have you replaced your Tivo's case screws with Velcro or zippers yet?


----------



## minimeh

unitron said:


> Have you replaced your Tivo's case screws with Velcro or zippers yet?


Where's the challenge in that! 

A little investigation into the laptop turns out that it has the latest BIOS (it's not quite a year old). The largest HDD it is sold with is 160GB. So, looks like that's a show stopper.


----------



## richsadams

unitron said:


> Have you replaced your Tivo's case screws with Velcro or zippers yet?


Ha! Good one!  Actually, back in the days of "upgrading" Series1's (which entailed adding a second hard drive inside the box) we would often use velcro or zip ties to secure the second drive to the original drive sled. Others just used tape!










Where there's a will...


----------



## wb5yyq

Ok, so I found an identical drive on eBay for my ailing Premiere. After restarting several times, getting the Tivo downloads, resetting my zipcode, etc. it almost looks normal. Unfortunately, nothing will record (except the 30 min LiveTV). If I try to record the current channel, it goes thru the motions as if it is recording, but no record light, and no recordings. Scheduled recordings show in my To Do list, but don't record. I did notice that although the Tivo shows the correct time, in the system info the daylight savings is inactive. Could this be the problem? I could not play any of the recorded shows that were on the drive when I got it, but I could delete them. Any ideas?


----------



## richsadams

wb5yyq said:


> Ok, so I found an identical drive on eBay for my ailing Premiere. After restarting several times, getting the Tivo downloads, resetting my zipcode, etc. it almost looks normal. Unfortunately, nothing will record (except the 30 min LiveTV). If I try to record the current channel, it goes thru the motions as if it is recording, but no record light, and no recordings. Scheduled recordings show in my To Do list, but don't record. I did notice that although the Tivo shows the correct time, in the system info the daylight savings is inactive. Could this be the problem? I could not play any of the recorded shows that were on the drive when I got it, but I could delete them. Any ideas?


If the drive came came from another identical TiVo model (say a Premiere as opposed to a Premiere XL) it should work. However you'll need to run Clear and Delete Everything from the menu. (Tivo Central > Messages and Settings > Restart or Reset System > Clear and Delete Everything.) That will reset your TiVo to factory specs.

Give that a try and see if it doesn't work.


----------



## PotentiallyCoherent

What SATA to USB adapters are you guys using?


----------



## minimeh

PotentiallyCoherent said:


> What SATA to USB adapters are you guys using?


I used a pair of Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Stations. I had an older one and picked a new one. Recommended.


----------



## richsadams

minimeh said:


> I used a pair of Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Stations. I had an older one and picked a new one. Recommended.


I have one of the Thermaltake BlackX docks and a Newertech Voyager Firewire 800 Docking Station. I also have one of the older USB/SATA adapters. The adapters are certainly cheaper and if it's a one-time thing they work fine. However I like having the ability to use the docking stations to hot swap drives on my computers as well as upgrade TiVo drives.

Keep in mind that a dual drive docking station (like this one) will NOT work. Two separate docks or adapters (or a combination of the two) are required for TiVo upgrades.


----------



## PotentiallyCoherent

The http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Adapter...=UTF8&qid=1310686589&sr=8-2&tag=5336432779-20 looks fairly dangerous to use. I could use one docking station and remove the HD from the computer, right?


----------



## minimeh

PotentiallyCoherent said:


> I could use one docking station and remove the HD from the computer, right?


In theory that should work. In practice, the laptop that I used chokes on the larger drives and the BIOS reports no drive connected. You'll probably just have to try it and see, I'm guessing.


----------



## PotentiallyCoherent

minimeh said:


> In theory that should work. In practice, the laptop that I used chokes on the larger drives and the BIOS reports no drive connected. You'll probably just have to try it and see, I'm guessing.


I'm using a desktop, so that shouldn't be a problem. Which drive should I install internally?


----------



## richsadams

PotentiallyCoherent said:


> The http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Adapter...=UTF8&qid=1310686589&sr=8-2&tag=5336432779-20 looks fairly dangerous to use. I could use one docking station and remove the HD from the computer, right?


Those adapters are not "dangerous" at all...they work perfectly fine. I've used the same thing for several TiVo upgrades over the years. Yes to your question, as long as your BIOS doesn't have any issues, you could use your PC's SATA connection (currently used by your OS drive) and a separate USB/SATA dock.



minimeh said:


> In theory that should work. In practice, the laptop that I used chokes on the larger drives and the BIOS reports no drive connected. You'll probably just have to try it and see, I'm guessing.


Laptops have always been "iffy" at best. I was glad to see that you got things worked out with your upgrade.

A desktop is always the best bet with TiVo upgrades.


----------



## richsadams

PotentiallyCoherent said:


> I'm using a desktop, so that shouldn't be a problem. Which drive should I install internally?


Shouldn't matter.


----------



## PotentiallyCoherent

I ordered two of the adapters that Rich recommended. They'll be here Monday, so wish me luck! Thanks for the help.


----------



## unitron

PotentiallyCoherent said:


> I'm using a desktop, so that shouldn't be a problem. Which drive should I install internally?


If that desktop has a GigaByte brand motherboard, none of them.

Google "gigabyte hpa"

Otherwise, it probably shouldn't matter, just be sure to always know which is the source and which is the target and which is /dev/sda and which is /dev/sdb or whatever they get called.

You can try them hooked up one at a time until you're sure the desktop board will properly recognize each on either position.


----------



## richsadams

PotentiallyCoherent said:


> I ordered two of the adapters that Rich recommended. They'll be here Monday, so wish me luck! Thanks for the help.


Just be sure that when you're handling the drives, particularly when they are powered up, to protect them from coming into contact with anything metal, etc. that could short them. Using static-free mats and such is always a good precaution. But then you probably knew that.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## P42

Seriously? Could you make it any easier??? 
Thanks Comer and to anyone else who worked on this - beer money sent.


----------



## richsadams

P42 said:


> Seriously? Could you make it any easier???
> Thanks Comer and to anyone else who worked on this - beer money sent.


Congrats and enjoy!


----------



## PedjaR

Successfully upgraded my XL. Thanks to Comer (beer money on the way) and everyone else who chimed in with advice. 
Details below; was slightly eventful, none of it due to JMFS, though. Most issues were probably because I have a Gigabyte motherboard and was afraid to connect drives internally. Got WD20EARS. I had one eSATA/USB enclosure and one dual USB enclosure. Connected this blank drive through eSATA, run wdidle and it worked fine (set it to 300). I was very happy about this, as I read somewhere wdidle does not work with USB, and I was not going to connect it internally, so this was my main reason for using eSATA. Tried Hitachi tools for acoustic management, did not work - said the drive does not support acoustic management. This is very strange as in the other computer, I have an older 250GB WD drive that it worked on just fine (I was playing with it just to see if it works). This did not concern me much as the drive is quiet anyway. Tried DOS version of WD Lifeguard &#8211; it refused to work, complaining something about the version (it worked on the 250GB WD drive just fine). Tried Windows version of WD Lifeguard. Ran Quick Test OK; Extended Test was running, but said it would take ~10 days to do it. I thought maybe that is not particularly accurate, so I left it overnight; in the morning it showed about 9 days left, and the number of sectors matched about 10% of total. That was not going to do, so I switched enclosure to USB mode and tried again. Hitachi and DOS Lifeguard still not working, but Windows Lifeguard extended test now estimated about 16 hours. That was acceptable, so I let it run. By the time I checked it later next day, the computer rebooted on its own (probably some kind of auto-update), and, of course, no test results. Before I restarted it, I tried &#8220;hdparm &#8211;N&#8221; to see if HPA was added. Much to my surprise, it showed that HPA status cannot be determined, as the total number of sectors was something ridiculously high (it even helpfully put that number in once more in parenthesis followed with a question mark, as in &#8220;are you sure, this is crazy&#8221. I tried both MFS and JMFS, the same result. The number of free sectors was OK, same as in WD Lifeguard. I restarted extended test, and it passed. I thought that may be good enough, so I took out the Tivo drive, popped in the JMFS CD and rebooted; then I connected the drive to USB enclosure and refreshed (that way no HPA for sure). The copy was averaging about ~15000Kb/s, so it lasted about as long as the extended test. Run expand and supersize, all nicely uneventful. Out of curiosity, I checked HPA status on both old Tivo drive and the new drive &#8211; both reported that the status cannot be determined, and that the total number of sectors is some ridiculously high number. That made me feel a bit better about the health of WD20EARS. Put it in Tivo, connected all cables, and it worked just fine; used space meter went down from 96% to 48%, and the capacity showed 317 HD hours as expected. The whole JMFS process is extremely easy and works great; my (minor) annoyances were all with other tools and hardware.


----------



## richsadams

PedjaR said:


> Successfully upgraded my XL. Thanks to Comer (beer money on the way) and everyone else who chimed in with advice. <snip>


Thanks very much for all of the details and congratulations!


----------



## minimeh

PedjaR said:


> ...Got WD20EARS...Tried Hitachi tools for acoustic management, did not work - said the drive does not support acoustic management. This is very strange as in the other computer, I have an older 250GB WD drive that it worked on just fine (I was playing with it just to see if it works)...


If I read that correctly, you too are seeing that AAM is not supported on the WD20EARS? I ran into the same thing.

Maybe it has to do with the BIOS of the motherboard? You get correct operation on a 250GB drive, but not the 2TB. On the laptop I made the upgrade with, it doesn't even recognize the 2TB at the BIOS level when connected via SATA. While I was successful using that laptop with 2 USB docking stations, AAM was reported as unsupported on the 2TB but supported on the 160GB internal HDD.

I ultimately took the WD20EARS to a desktop and connected via SATA to run wdidle3.exe successfully. I didn't try addressing AAM while connected to the desktop. Wish I had now, if only to see what the software reports on AAM support in the drive.


----------



## PedjaR

minimeh said:


> If I read that correctly, you too are seeing that AAM is not supported on the WD20EARS? I ran into the same thing.
> 
> Maybe it has to do with the BIOS of the motherboard? You get correct operation on a 250GB drive, but not the 2TB. On the laptop I made the upgrade with, it doesn't even recognize the 2TB at the BIOS level when connected via SATA. While I was successful using that laptop with 2 USB docking stations, AAM was reported as unsupported on the 2TB but supported on the 160GB internal HDD.
> 
> I ultimately took the WD20EARS to a desktop and connected via SATA to run wdidle3.exe successfully. I didn't try addressing AAM while connected to the desktop. Wish I had now, if only to see what the software reports on AAM support in the drive.


I don't know the reason. I initially chalked it up to external connection (250GB drive is internal). Both eSATA and USB showed the same message.


----------



## lessd

minimeh said:


> If I read that correctly, you too are seeing that AAM is not supported on the WD20EARS? I ran into the same thing.
> 
> Maybe it has to do with the BIOS of the motherboard? You get correct operation on a 250GB drive, but not the 2TB. On the laptop I made the upgrade with, it doesn't even recognize the 2TB at the BIOS level when connected via SATA. While I was successful using that laptop with 2 USB docking stations, AAM was reported as unsupported on the 2TB but supported on the 160GB internal HDD.
> 
> I ultimately took the WD20EARS to a desktop and connected via SATA to run wdidle3.exe successfully. I didn't try addressing AAM while connected to the desktop. Wish I had now, if only to see what the software reports on AAM support in the drive.


The newest WD20EARS do not support AAM but the drive is not noisy, the older ones did support AAM so something has changed and may change again in the future, I think WD is now promoting an AV drive (at $20 more) that most likely is WD20EARS with the AAM supported, that just a guess on my part.


----------



## minimeh

lessd said:


> The newest WD20EARS do not support AAM...


Ah ha! Good to know. Thanks.


----------



## richsadams

lessd said:


> The newest WD20EARS do not support AAM but the drive is not noisy, the older ones did support AAM so something has changed and may change again in the future, I think WD is now promoting an AV drive (at $20 more) that most likely is WD20EARS with the AAM supported, that just a guess on my part.


The WD20EURS has all of the dedicated A/V features including having the AAM set to 128. TiVo can't or doesn't take advantage of the other A/V "features" but if you need a quiet drive, it's a great option.


----------



## scandia101

Wow, 2TB/317 HD hours, that was the easiest Tivo upgrade I've ever done.
Thank you, Comer.

The hardest part was waiting for two days after realizing that I didn't have a spare sata data cable after I had everything taken apart.


----------



## ducker

scandia101 said:


> Wow, 2TB/317 HD hours, that was the easiest Tivo upgrade I've ever done.
> Thank you, Comer.
> 
> The hardest part was waiting for two days after realizing that I didn't have a spare sata data cable after I had everything taken apart.


So that's what you used for the extra drive?? I'm trying to figure out which way I want to do an upgrade. a USB external drive, or a cable. have a link to the cable you used Scandia?


----------



## richsadams

ducker said:


> So that's what you used for the extra drive?? I'm trying to figure out which way I want to do an upgrade. a USB external drive, or a cable. have a link to the cable you used Scandia?


SATA cables are a couple of bucks (available at most any electronics or computer supply store) and the upgrade time is about 25% that of USB. Seems like a no-brainer. Just sayin'.


----------



## richsadams

Wondering if anyone else has run into this...

Periodically I'll switch from live TV to TiVo Central only to be met by the THX and then the TiVo "on stage" videos as if it was just rebooted...and _then_ to TiVo Central.

This happened once in a long while since upgrading our Premiere XL to 2TB using jmfs back in November or so. More recently I'm beginning to see this every other day now.

Now this only happens after turning on our system, TiVo connected to Samsung Plasma via HDMI, watching a bit of live TV, might be for a few seconds or after a half-hour. Sometimes TiVo is idle, other times it's recording on one or both tuners. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason otherwise. After that initial unusual behavior it doesn't happen again...only the first time we turn things on.

It happened a few minutes ago and I decided to have a look at the DVR Diagnostics screens...moved through the menus to DVR Diagnostics and got the "One moment please" and that was it...hung there. Pulled the plug, went back in and found nothing unusual on the diagnostics.

I've also noticed some other odd behaviors such as losing the TiVo backgrounds (we're on the SD menus)...black background after deleting a recording, etc.

In any case, just wondering if anyone else was seeing anything unusual. I've got a WD20EARS on the way from Newegg ($69.99) just in case. Think I'll copy everything over to the new drive to be safe. I'll test the existing EARS to see what comes back. If there aren't any issues I'll put it into backup service.

TIA for any feedback!


----------



## L David Matheny

richsadams said:


> Wondering if anyone else has run into this...
> 
> Periodically I'll switch from live TV to TiVo Central only to be met by the THX and then the TiVo "on stage" videos as if it was just rebooted...and _then_ to TiVo Central.
> 
> This happened once in a long while since upgrading our Premiere XL to 2TB using jmfs back in November or so. More recently I'm beginning to see this every other day now.


I've been following this thread and this one (which has wandered off topic).



richsadams said:


> Now this only happens after turning on our system, TiVo connected to Samsung Plasma via HDMI, watching a bit of live TV, might be for a few seconds or after a half-hour. Sometimes TiVo is idle, other times it's recording on one or both tuners. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason otherwise. After that initial unusual behavior it doesn't happen again...only the first time we turn things on.


Since you don't turn a TiVo on, you must be referring to the TV. The only way the TiVo can know that you turn the TV on is through the HDMI cable, so it could be some sort of HDMI anomaly. But I don't know how it could be delayed.



richsadams said:


> It happened a few minutes ago and I decided to have a look at the DVR Diagnostics screens...moved through the menus to DVR Diagnostics and got the "One moment please" and that was it...hung there. Pulled the plug, went back in and found nothing unusual on the diagnostics.


I had this bit of strangeness with the DVR Diagnostics screen, but it doesn't sound quite the same.



richsadams said:


> I've also noticed some other odd behaviors such as losing the TiVo backgrounds (we're on the SD menus)...black background after deleting a recording, etc.


And I've had this strangeness with menu backgrounds.



richsadams said:


> In any case, just wondering if anyone else was seeing anything unusual. I've got a WD20EARS on the way from Newegg ($69.99) just in case. Think I'll copy everything over to the new drive to be safe. I'll test the existing EARS to see what comes back. If there aren't any issues I'll put it into backup service.
> 
> TIA for any feedback!


----------



## richsadams

Thanks for the link David. :up: It would appear that what I'm seeing is exactly what a lot of others are experiencing with their TiVo Premier's and that it has nothing to do with the 2TB upgrade or my hard drive. Phew! I went ahead and posted my two cents on "TiVo Intro Animation Clip" thread:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8622234#post8622234

The other oddities I've seen before over the years, not just with the Premiere. I chalk it up to TiVo basically being a computer and that these things happen. A hard reboot usually takes care of things when needed.

Thanks again!


----------



## caroth

So did anyone ever figure out how Weeknees is doing their 4TB (2TB internal/2TB external)? 

P.S. I know a lot of people on this forum have strong opinions about using external drives, so I just want to clarify that I'm looking for the technical details/replication instructions for Weeknees solution above, not anyone's opinion on external drives. 

Thanks!


----------



## dwit

caroth said:


> So did anyone ever figure out how Weeknees is doing their 4TB (2TB internal/2TB external)?
> 
> P.S. I know a lot of people on this forum have strong opinions about using external drives, so I just want to clarify that I'm looking for the technical details/replication instructions for Weeknees solution above, not anyone's opinion on external drives.
> 
> Thanks!


No, weaknees method of achieving such is not known. End of story.

Sorry.


----------



## unitron

dwit said:


> No, weaknees method of achieving such is not known. End of story.
> 
> Sorry.


The method has not been discovered yet. To be continued.

There, fixed that for you.

(what, you think it's going to remain a secret forever?)


----------



## Ipaqjoe

First order of business (*Thanks Comer!*) Donation $ent

With the price of 2TB drives dropping under $70 I figured it was time to upgrade my two Tivo premieres (1-XL and 1-base model) to 317 hrs each.

I ordered two, 2TB WD20EARS drives from Newegg. $10 off With Promo code EMCKCJA22 (*expires 7/25/11*)

Excellent packaging, combination of bubble wrap, foam peanuts and double boxed with plastic drive carriers (perfect for storing the factory drives in the closet after an upgrade)

Drive boxes (photo)

I ran an extended test using the Windows Data LifeGuard Diagnostics using two USB docks in two separate Windows 7 virtual machines (On my iMac) at the same time. Took about 22 hours - for both drives (no errors)

Both new WD drives were 08JAN2011, Malaysia drives, 3 serial numbers apart.
Both had AAM set to 254 and Intellipark/Idle timer set to 8 seconds.

I set AAM to 128 on both drives using HDDSCAN and disabled Intellipark ("widle3 /d") using the WD idle mode update utility dropped into a FDOEMCD.builder.zip to make an ISO for a bootable CDROM.

I saw some people were setting the idle time to 300 (5 minutes), some were leaving it alone. I figured since it is an always on DVR (always recording whatever channel it is tuned to - to the buffer, it should never be parked) Any clarification or reasons why having disabled is bad or (worse than 8, 300, or?? would be appreciated)

For everything other than the original Extended fitness test I dusted off an old Shuttle PC so the drives were directly connected via SATA cables for speed. The XL (1TB) took a bit over 9hrs and the base (320GB) took 3hrs.

One final note: (Original drives)
XL - 1TB - WD10EVVS, 08JAN2010 Thailand (*Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds*) 
Base - 320GB - WD3200AVVS, 02SEP2010 Thailand (*Idle3 timer disabled*)

Ok, two final notes:
Case screws (4) and (4) screws that hold drive rails to case Torx-10, (4) screws that hold drive rails to drive (Torx-15) - Both units.


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## PedjaR

Ipaqjoe said:


> ...
> I saw some people were setting the idle time to 300 (5 minutes), some were leaving it alone. I figured since it is an always on DVR (always recording whatever channel it is tuned to - to the buffer, it should never be parked) Any clarification or reasons why having disabled is bad or (worse than 8, 300, or?? would be appreciated)
> ...


Tivo is continuously writing, but I don't know how much of that is cached somewhere, and if the setting of 8 would cause heads to park at all, but it is known that this setting used to cause issues with soft reboots, and if there would be constain parking because of caching, that would be bad, so I was not going to leave it at 8. 
I read somewhere (sorry, can't remember where) that setting it to disabled may have caused premature failure for some people (not necessarily in Tivos). I don't know the technical details, so I figured that, in Tivo case, 300 would work OK (i.e. no way caching would last that long), so no particular reason to set it to disabled vs 300.


----------



## richsadams

Ipaqjoe said:


> First order of business (*Thanks Comer!*) Donation $ent
> 
> With the price of 2TB drives dropping under $70 I figured it was time to upgrade my two Tivo premieres (1-XL and 1-base model) to 317 hrs each.<snip>


Nice work! Thanks for the details as well. :up: With regard to the Intellipark setting, 300 seconds Vs disabled, there were discussions on other forums a while back regarding one or the other possibly having an impact on the drive's longevity. Since the 2TB drives are still fairly new, there's no empirical evidence positive or negative either way. As you point out, TiVo is recording 24/7 and the only time the heads will park is during a reboot, so for our purposes it probably won't make any difference. We have ours set to 300 seconds (five minutes) and things have been working fine for almost a year now.

Congrats and enjoy your "new" TiVo's!


----------



## Larry.A

Larry.A said:


> I want to thank everyone that has put these scripts/apps together. I recently switched to FIOS from DirecTV and could not stand the user interface of the FIOS boxes. I used to have 2 fully hacked direcTV Tivos several years ago and I loved them so I decided to buy a couple of premiers and upgrade them with WD20EARS. I can not believe how simple this is now. widdle, automated 3 step proccess and bam I have 2TB of capacity each. My only problem is on one I can see the other Tivo on the "My Shows" list but when I select it it says there is nothin to display (wich of course there is) and on the second Tivo I can not see the other one at all. I have tested all the network diag and everything checks out. I have rebooted each several times with no luck. I can also stream netflix on both so I am pretty sure it is not a network issue. I did a search but I guess I did not use the right keywords because nothing came up. Any help would be apreciated.


Just wanted to post what the issue really was on this just in case it saves someone else the days of troubleshooting/testing I went through. The problem was that I was not using a Tivo wireless adapter for my second Tivo. I had a PC and PS3 there also so I bought a another wireless router and configured it in bridge mode. I then just used the 5 ports to plug a cat5 cable in the each. I fugured all would just see it as a cable connection instead of wireless. All worked great except for the Tivo seeing the other Tivo. Anyway I finally broke down and bought another Tivo adapter for this Tivo ($90) and as soon as I configuered and plugged in everything started instantly working. So atleast in my case it apears the only way for home networking to work is to use the Tivo brand wireless adapters.


----------



## lpwcomp

I can't speak from experience as I have never tried to use wireless connections on a TiVo, but the setup you had before should have worked. I have seen similar, inexplicable problems even in a wired setup but am having no problems with my current configuration where I have 2 TiVos connected to one switch and the other one on another switch. Both of these switches are connected to the switch on the router.

I am a bit confused though. The switch on most routers with which I am familiar only have 4 ports. Your router actually has 6 RJ-45 jacks, 5 on the switch part and one normally used to connect to the modem?


----------



## Larry.A

lpwcomp said:


> I am a bit confused though. The switch on most routers with which I am familiar only have 4 ports. Your router actually has 6 RJ-45 jacks, 5 on the switch part and one normally used to connect to the modem?


Sorry I was just using general terms when I said router, I was actualy using a WAP (Wireless Access Point) to create a bridge connection to my router/switch. It does not have a WAN or Modem port. I am pretty sure it has 5 ports on the back (I am not at home to verify) but it could be 4. I just needed the 3 to connect my equipment. The Tivo worked for steaming netflix and guide updates so I am sure that I had it configured properly though the WAP. The thing that lead me to try the Tivo adapter was that I was able to see this Tivo from my Family room Tivo that did have a Tivo adapter already. It would not show anything in the "My Shows" list though. But with the one connected to the WAP I could not even see the other Tivo. Anyway this might have just been a one off circumstance but it is working for me now just cost me an extra $90.


----------



## lpwcomp

Sounds like the WAP wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. Were both TiVos showing up in your router's DHCP table? Also, there are cheaper alternatives than buying a wireless adapter from TiVo, but if your mind is at ease...


----------



## Ipaqjoe

My current house is wired gigabit ethernet but at a previous (rental) house I ran 3 Apple airport extremes for more than 2 years without an issue. One in the office where the cable modem was and the other two in the master bedroom and living room in bridge mode with all the ethernet devices plugged in.

Worked great, my Series 2, Series 3 and Premiere saw a wired network connection and I could transfer shows just fine (only much slower than an actual wired connection)

Also had a Wii (USB ethernet adapter), PS3, XBOX360, a macmini, appleTV and a bluray player connected with the use of a gigabit switch.


----------



## Larry.A

Looks like others have had success with what I was trying to accomplish but I tried for over a week and could not get it to work. I am by no means an expert but I have setup several home and small business networks so I feel that I covered the basic configuration options. Yes they both showed up in the DHCP table. I did not try setting up a static IP for either maybe that would have worked. I am curios know to now if anyone was able to get this working with my exact situation (one Premiere using Tivo wireless N adapter other using a Buffalo Technology N150 configured in bridge mode). I am now thinking that maybe using the first Tivo wireless adatper caused me to have to use the second. Maybe I could have bought another Buffalo and it would have worked that way also.


----------



## caroth

Larry.A said:


> Looks like others have had success with what I was trying to accomplish but I tried for over a week and could not get it to work. I am by no means an expert but I have setup several home and small business networks so I feel that I covered the basic configuration options. Yes they both showed up in the DHCP table. I did not try setting up a static IP for either maybe that would have worked. I am curios know to now if anyone was able to get this working with my exact situation (one Premiere using Tivo wireless N adapter other using a Buffalo Technology N150 configured in bridge mode). I am now thinking that maybe using the first Tivo wireless adatper caused me to have to use the second. Maybe I could have bought another Buffalo and it would have worked that way also.


I never had your particular brand of network card, but when I switched wireless network cards (from Netgear to Tivo G and again when I upgraded to Tivo N), I had to remove the old adapter and reboot the Tivo before plugging in the new adapter (not sure if I had to reboot it again after that to make it work).

I would definitely recommend using a static IP over DHCP.

Even though it is way more expensive (the best deals seem to be on Ebay), I think the Tivo N adapter is well worth it for three reasons:

1) You have to use it (or the old Tivo G) if you want to use WPA2 only encryption on the wireless network (the latest and greatest) and I like my wireless network to be secure
2) If you have a router that supports it, the Tivo N adapter support the less crowded 5 Ghz band, which made a lot of difference with Netflix streaming issues I had (I had tried all the channels on the 2.4 Ghz band with my old Tivo G network card)
3) The biggest thing that I didn't know when I originally bought a non-Tivo network adapter (Netgear) is that the Tivo network adapter is specifically designed to do all the networking and offloading it from the Tivo (not sure if this would be the equivalent of TOE in servers), so it doesn't slow the Tivo down. Thus you get better network communication and don't affect your Tivo performance.

Just my thoughts that might help someone with their Tivo vs. non-Tivo wireless network adapter purchasing decision.


----------



## Ipaqjoe

I didn't use a true static IP address but I did reserve a specific IP address in my DHCP router table based on the devices MAC. This way I always knew what IP each device would have on my network with much less configuration.


----------



## dianebrat

I hate it when a seemingly solid idea doesn't work!
I have had nothing but trouble since 14.8U2 went on my upgraded Premiere XL with a WDC 2TB Green drive, I've posted in other threads that I can not get kickstart codes to work, so I did what any decent techie would do, tested out some additional drives.

I had a spare Seagate 1.5TB LP drive sitting around, used JMFS to update from the original 1TB, and tested, the drive and the Premiere work ok, but since it wasn't full I couldn't tell if my reboots were resolved, and 1.5TB isn't enough space, so I had 2x 2TB Seagate ST2000DL003 5900RPM drives in the house (don't ask) and I thought that could resolve my question as to if it's 14.8U2 or the drive.

So I first copied the WDC 2TB to the Seagate with JMFS, that didn't work, the drive just hung, I thought I remembered something about supposedly not copying expanded drives, and it's no big loss and I formatted the drive and then went back and wiped it in a Windows 7 box without thinking, and I think it wrote a drive signature, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Then I copied the OEM 1TB drive to the now blank Seagate 2TB and I just have a reboot loop. Even though the JMFS process formats the drive, did that windows signature cause my reboot issues? and is there a good way with the JMFS CD to nuke the drive completely to be sure I do it right when I try again tomorrow?


----------



## dianebrat

dianebrat said:


> Even though the JMFS process formats the drive, did that windows signature cause my reboot issues?


Answering my own question, nuked the drive, erased track 0, and then did a copy of the OEM drive and didn't supersize (because I can do it later) and it's running now, it'll need a few days burn in.
Spoke too soon, got it running, did a service update, now it's stuck in a reboot loop


----------



## richsadams

dianebrat said:


> Answering my own question, nuked the drive, erased track 0, and then did a copy of the OEM drive and didn't supersize (because I can do it later) and it's running now, it'll need a few days burn in.
> Spoke too soon, got it running, did a service update, now it's stuck in a reboot loop


You mentioned a service update? The "donor" (in this case the OEM) drive needs to have the current TiVo OS prior to upgrading with jmfs or it won't work. If that wasn't the case I'd pop the OEM drive back into TiVo, force a network connection (may take a few tries) and let it update. Then use it to image the new drive again and you should be good to go. Or did I misunderstand?


----------



## dwit

richsadams said:


> You mentioned a service update? The "donor" (in this case the OEM) drive needs to have the current TiVo OS prior to upgrading with jmfs or it won't work. If that wasn't the case I'd pop the OEM drive back into TiVo, force a network connection (may take a few tries) and let it update. Then use it to image the new drive again and you should be good to go. Or did I misunderstand?


How does it(the Tivo) know what the "current OS" is? Or is it that it needs something other than the virgin image? But in that case, how did the first upgrade ever take(in this particular case here)?

I think the poster is under the (misguided?) notion that all issues are caused by updates, so it's somehow better to always have the "virgin" image on hand. That's what I've been gathering from reading previous posts, anyway.


----------



## dianebrat

richsadams said:


> You mentioned a service update? The "donor" (in this case the OEM) drive needs to have the current TiVo OS prior to upgrading with jmfs or it won't work. If that wasn't the case I'd pop the OEM drive back into TiVo, force a network connection (may take a few tries) and let it update. Then use it to image the new drive again and you should be good to go. Or did I misunderstand?





dwit said:


> How does it(the Tivo) know what the "current OS" is? Or is it that it needs something other than the virgin image? But in that case, how did the first upgrade ever take(in this particular case here)?
> 
> I think the poster is under the (misguided?) notion that all issues are caused by updates, so it's somehow better to always have the "virgin" image on hand. That's what I've been gathering from reading previous posts, anyway.


I'm just troubleshooting since I started having a ton of issues with 14.8U2, but there's always the possibility that the drive isn't 100% right, so I decided to eliminate it and do some additional testing with a spare HD, first a 1.5TB then a 2.TB Seagate I have in the house.

I have always been taught that you want to keep a virgin OEM image for using a master, then you let the donor OS update the new drive. This is what I did for the 1TB to 2TB update in February, and what I did for testing the 1.5TB drive.

The Seagate 2TB donor drive has been nothing but trouble and I have only had it boot up successfully once, and that was with the OEM virgin image, it updated, rebooted, then never came back. I tried copying the existing 2TB WDC 14.8U2 drive to the Seagate 2TB, it never worked, also stuck in a reboot loop. The 1.5TB Seagate took the service update just fine, I just don't want to leave it in since it's too small.

Does that help lay it out? I'm not against leaving the WDC 2TB that has reboot issues with playback (detailed in another thread) until 14.8B is out.


----------



## richsadams

dwit said:


> How does it(the Tivo) know what the "current OS" is? Or is it that it needs something other than the virgin image? But in that case, how did the first upgrade ever take(in this particular case here)?
> 
> I think the poster is under the (misguided?) notion that all issues are caused by updates, so it's somehow better to always have the "virgin" image on hand. That's what I've been gathering from reading previous posts, anyway.


Every time TiVo connects to the "mother ship" it communicates a long list of data including the current OS. If the OS is older than what's current it automatically updates the box.

You'd have to ask the author of jmfs (Comer) why, but it requires the latest TiVo OS (or at least the latest as of the jmfs 104 release back in November 2010) to work. The instructions assume an OEM disc is being pulled from an active box.

Attempts to upgrade using an OEM drive that had an older OS on it failed so my WAG is that Comer just wrote the program based on the newest OS at the time.

The remedy is to simply reinstall the OEM drive, force a network connection and let it update to the current OS prior to using it to image a new drive. It's not a bad idea to take the OEM drive off of the shelf and let it update periodically anyway.

Make sense?


----------



## richsadams

dianebrat said:


> I have always been taught that you want to keep a virgin OEM image for using a master, then you let the donor OS update the new drive.


That worked for winMFS (or MFSTools), but it doesn't work with jmfs. As noted in the post above, the OEM drive needs to have the current TiVo OS for jmfs to work.

AFAIK there's no reason to keep an OEM drive "virgin". Slipping it back into TiVo and letting it update to the current OS reduces the housekeeping a newly imaged drive is required to do (and likely any issues it might have otherwise) anyway.


----------



## dianebrat

richsadams said:


> That worked for winMFS (or MFSTools), but it doesn't work with jmfs. As noted in the post above, the OEM drive needs to have the current TiVo OS for jmfs to work.
> 
> AFAIK there's no reason to keep an OEM drive "virgin". Slipping it back into TiVo and letting it update to the current OS reduces the housekeeping a newly imaged drive is required to do (and likely any issues it might have otherwise) anyway.


FWIW the "virgin drive" is 14.7, so I doubt that's the issue. I used it to upgrade to the currently out WDC 2TB Green that ran great until 14.8U2. 
That same "virgin" drive did a perfect jmfs upgrade to the 1.5TB Seagate drive I've been using to test which is why the poor results on the 2.0TB Seagate are so frustrating.

My gut tells me 14.8U2 on the WDC is my issue and when I fill up the 1.5TB with 14.8U2 I'll get some of the problems back, which is why the swap to the spare Seagate 2.0TB was supposed to be the easy way out, if it worked and resolved stability, great it stays in, if it didn't work and instability was still there, 14.8U2 was the issue.


----------



## ed08724

Here is my situation. I have a TivoHD with a 1.5Tb drive that I replaced as soon as I got the Tivo. I ordered the drive off eBay but not sure of from who or how it was made. After being away for 2 months I got home to find it stuttering and sometimes rebooting while playing back shows. Ran a kickstart 54 SMART test and it fails all tests except Initial state. Some shows play after getting through the stuttering but it takes a long time to get through the few minutes of bad spots. The shows are important to me and the Tivo is almost full. I thought I could buy a new 2gb drive and copy and expand but after reading the fist 10 or so pages here it sounds like it won't work. Plan B then if possible. Can I buy a new 2Tb drive and just copy, not expand. Watch as many shows as I can, then somehow start over and copy only the Tivo info and not the programs and expand and supersize. I no longer have the original drive with the factory Tivo image. Will this work with a 2tB drive or should I just buy the exact drive I already have. Will the copy routine be able to copy through the bad spots or will it just abort when it finds a bad spot. If so is there so other way to copy through the bad spots and is this likely to result in playable files. I don't care about small amounts of missing shows but the stuttering and reboots are extremely annoying. Thank you for any help anyone has.


----------



## richsadams

dianebrat said:


> FWIW the "virgin drive" is 14.7, so I doubt that's the issue. I used it to upgrade to the currently out WDC 2TB Green that ran great until 14.8U2.
> That same "virgin" drive did a perfect jmfs upgrade to the 1.5TB Seagate drive I've been using to test which is why the poor results on the 2.0TB Seagate are so frustrating.
> 
> My gut tells me 14.8U2 on the WDC is my issue and when I fill up the 1.5TB with 14.8U2 I'll get some of the problems back, which is why the swap to the spare Seagate 2.0TB was supposed to be the easy way out, if it worked and resolved stability, great it stays in, if it didn't work and instability was still there, 14.8U2 was the issue.


FWIW our Premiere XL w/WD GP 2TB drive hasn't had any issues (outside of that annoying THX/TiVo animation those of us using the SD menus are experiencing) since the v14.8U update (or ever). Almost everyone that's upgraded used the WD GP drives as well and AFAIK no one else here, on other threads or forums has reported any issues since the update either. Just sayin'. My gut tells me that you either have a flaky WD drive or that upgrading using an older OS is the key.

That said, best of luck with whatever you end up happy with!


----------



## richsadams

ed08724 said:


> Here is my situation. I have a TivoHD with a 1.5Tb drive that I replaced as soon as I got the Tivo. I ordered the drive off eBay but not sure of from who or how it was made. After being away for 2 months I got home to find it stuttering and sometimes rebooting while playing back shows. Ran a kickstart 54 SMART test and it fails all tests except Initial state. Some shows play after getting through the stuttering but it takes a long time to get through the few minutes of bad spots. The shows are important to me and the Tivo is almost full. I thought I could buy a new 2gb drive and copy and expand but after reading the fist 10 or so pages here it sounds like it won't work. Plan B then if possible. Can I buy a new 2Tb drive and just copy, not expand. Watch as many shows as I can, then somehow start over and copy only the Tivo info and not the programs and expand and supersize. I no longer have the original drive with the factory Tivo image. Will this work with a 2tB drive or should I just buy the exact drive I already have. Will the copy routine be able to copy through the bad spots or will it just abort when it finds a bad spot. If so is there so other way to copy through the bad spots and is this likely to result in playable files. I don't care about small amounts of missing shows but the stuttering and reboots are extremely annoying. Thank you for any help anyone has.


You should be able to use your existing drive to upgrade to a 2TB drive with jmfs for the TiVo HD (not the one in the first post of this thread as the process is slightly different):

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462179

An exact copy (using dd or ddrescue) may or may not work as you point out, when it hits bad sectors it may hang. Hopefully your drive will last long enough for you to upgrade, but I wouldn't waste any time doing so.

Happy upgrading and let us know how it goes!


----------



## lpwcomp

richsadams said:


> Hopefully your drive will last long enough for you to upgrade, but I wouldn't waste any time doing so.


I assume that you actually meant that he shouldn't *delay* doing the upgrade. The way you phrased it could be misconstrued as saying he shouldn't bother.


----------



## richsadams

lpwcomp said:


> I assume that you actually meant that he shouldn't *delay* doing the upgrade. The way you phrased it could be misconstrued as saying he shouldn't bother.


Ah, yes...do it _now_ is what I meant.


----------



## unitron

richsadams said:


> Ah, yes...do it _now_ is what I meant.


As Mammy Yokum would have said, "time's a wastin'!"


----------



## lpwcomp

unitron said:


> As Mammy Yokum would have said, "time's a wastin'!"


Just be sure and stay away from the Kickapoo Joy Juice until you're done. And don't let Joe Btfsplk anywhere near.


----------



## ed08724

Thanks for the help. I tried your suggestion from the other thread but jmfs said it didin't see any Tivo drives. I then ran WD Diags so I could get an advanced RMA on the drive. I ran the quick test which failed. It then asked if I wanted to do a full media scan which I thought was just a read test but it ran for 20 hours and said it repaired the drive. Quick test still fails and when put back into my TivoHD it get stuck in a reboot loop which it didn't before. So I would assume the drive is totally trashed now so I need to start from scratch. I tried to located the popular Broflovski TivoHD 2gb image that but I see he is no longer offering it. How can I get either that image or any image that I can expand on a non XL TivoHD to get 2gb. Thanks



richsadams said:


> You should be able to use your existing drive to upgrade to a 2TB drive with jmfs for the TiVo HD (not the one in the first post of this thread as the process is slightly different):
> 
> An exact copy (using dd or ddrescue) may or may not work as you point out, when it hits bad sectors it may hang. Hopefully your drive will last long enough for you to upgrade, but I wouldn't waste any time doing so.
> 
> Happy upgrading and let us know how it goes!


----------



## DocNo

ed08724 said:


> I then ran WD Diags so I could get an advanced RMA on the drive. I ran the quick test which failed. It then asked if I wanted to do a full media scan which I thought was just a read test but it ran for 20 hours and said it repaired the drive. *Quick test still fails*


I'd RMA the drive to WD. No need messing with it if the basic hardware is flaky.


----------



## richsadams

ed08724 said:


> Thanks for the help. I tried your suggestion from the other thread but jmfs said it didin't see any Tivo drives. I then ran WD Diags so I could get an advanced RMA on the drive. I ran the quick test which failed. It then asked if I wanted to do a full media scan which I thought was just a read test but it ran for 20 hours and said it repaired the drive. Quick test still fails and when put back into my TivoHD it get stuck in a reboot loop which it didn't before. So I would assume the drive is totally trashed now so I need to start from scratch. I tried to located the popular Broflovski TivoHD 2gb image that but I see he is no longer offering it. How can I get either that image or any image that I can expand on a non XL TivoHD to get 2gb. Thanks


How are you connecting your TiVo drive to your computer? There's no reason jmfs shouldn't/wouldn't see it if it's connected unless there's a BIOS setting issue (allowing some or all of your SATA ports to be read...if that's how it's connected). The old Broflovski image is a pain compared to jmfs. I think it's just a matter of ensuring that your drive(s) are connected properly.

As you found out, WD's "quick test" is non-destructive, unlike the extended test(s).

Keep us posted!


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## dianebrat

richsadams said:


> As you found out, WD's "quick test" is non-destructive, unlike the extended test(s).
> 
> Keep us posted!


The WDC DLG for Windows also has a non-destructive extended option, I'm running it on my 2TB WDC green right now.


----------



## unitron

ed08724 said:


> Thanks for the help. I tried your suggestion from the other thread but jmfs said it didin't see any Tivo drives. I then ran WD Diags so I could get an advanced RMA on the drive. I ran the quick test which failed. It then asked if I wanted to do a full media scan which I thought was just a read test but it ran for 20 hours and said it repaired the drive. Quick test still fails and when put back into my TivoHD it get stuck in a reboot loop which it didn't before. So I would assume the drive is totally trashed now so I need to start from scratch. I tried to located the popular Broflovski TivoHD 2gb image that but I see he is no longer offering it. How can I get either that image or any image that I can expand on a non XL TivoHD to get 2gb. Thanks


If a brand new WD drive failed WD's own quick test, well, that's what warranties are for. Don't waste any time trying to heal it.


----------



## richsadams

unitron said:


> If a brand new WD drive failed WD's own quick test, well, that's what warranties are for. Don't waste any time trying to heal it.


+1 :up: Although a drive can pass a quick test but fail an extended test.


----------



## ed08724

DocNo said:


> I'd RMA the drive to WD. No need messing with it if the basic hardware is flaky.


Yes that was the whole point of this. I did an advance RMA where they ship the replacement drive first so I still have so time with the old drive.


----------



## ed08724

unitron said:


> If a brand new WD drive failed WD's own quick test, well, that's what warranties are for. Don't waste any time trying to heal it.


It is not a brand new drive it is about 2 years old. I am having it replaced by an advanced RMA, they ship the replacement drive first. I am trying to save the 200+ hours of programs and cable card setup. Comcast typically doesn't show up for weeks here.


----------



## ed08724

richsadams said:


> How are you connecting your TiVo drive to your computer? There's no reason jmfs shouldn't/wouldn't see it if it's connected unless there's a BIOS setting issue (allowing some or all of your SATA ports to be read...if that's how it's connected). The old Broflovski image is a pain compared to jmfs. I think it's just a matter of ensuring that your drive(s) are connected properly.
> 
> As you found out, WD's "quick test" is non-destructive, unlike the extended test(s).
> 
> Keep us posted!


After leaving it on the Tivo for a few hours I turned the TV back on and it had started up and at least some of the programs are viewable. I then shut down the Tivo and put the drive back into a computer and it still doesn't see the drive as a Tivo drive. I do not have a drive to copy to yet. I ordered a new 2tB and also will get the 1.5tB replaced from WD. I was just making sure I had all the right connections to do the job which I do. The drive is connected directly to the motherboard and another drive connected to the same connection boots into Windows 7 w/o the jmfs CD in. I am downloading a KNOPPIX DVD image now with dd restore and will try that if I can figure it out. It sounded complicated from the googles I looked at.


----------



## lpwcomp

ed08724 said:


> I am trying to save the 200+ hours of programs and cable card setup. Comcast typically doesn't show up for weeks here.


While this won't help with the lost programming, you should be able to self-install your CableCARD. They have to allow this now, inform you of that option, and provide an m-card, no more single stream cards.


----------



## ed08724

lpwcomp said:


> While this won't help with the lost programming, you should be able to self-install your CableCARD. They have to allow this now, inform you of that option, and provide an m-card, no more single stream cards.


I called yesterday and after holding for over 30 minutes to talk to anyone was told they would have to come out and I scheduled it for 9/1/2011 but hoping I will have to cancel it by then.


----------



## unitron

ed08724 said:


> It is not a brand new drive it is about 2 years old. I am having it replaced by an advanced RMA, they ship the replacement drive first. I am trying to save the 200+ hours of programs and cable card setup. Comcast typically doesn't show up for weeks here.


If the drives are the same size you can use dd+rescue, set -b to 512 and -B to 1 to get it to copy more slowly and with fewer errors (and maybe use -r to get it to start at the end of the drives and work backwards. Sometimes it's better to let it sneak up on the problems at the front of the drive.).

If after doing that the new drive doesn't work out, restore an image to it.

That'll likely wipe out your cable card settings and other stuff, but might leave your recordings intact.

Or you could image restore it, and then use dd_rescue to overwrite your new MFS partitions with the old ones on the problem drive.


----------



## L David Matheny

ed08724 said:


> After leaving it on the Tivo for a few hours I turned the TV back on and it had started up and at least some of the programs are viewable. I then shut down the Tivo and put the drive back into a computer and it still doesn't see the drive as a Tivo drive. I do not have a drive to copy to yet. I ordered a new 2tB and also will get the 1.5tB replaced from WD. I was just making sure I had all the right connections to do the job which I do. The drive is connected directly to the motherboard and another drive connected to the same connection boots into Windows 7 w/o the jmfs CD in. I am downloading a KNOPPIX DVD image now with dd restore and will try that if I can figure it out. It sounded complicated from the googles I looked at.


This may already have been covered, but I think sometimes drives may be seen or not seen depending on whether the disk controller is set to IDE or AHCI in the BIOS. If there's a setting for that, you might try changing it to see if that lets your computer see the drive. The required setting might be different depending on which OS you're trying to boot.

Also, if you think the drive is failing, it might be wise to avoid keeping it powered up too much until you have another drive to copy your data onto. Good luck.


----------



## unitron

ed08724 said:


> After leaving it on the Tivo for a few hours I turned the TV back on and it had started up and at least some of the programs are viewable. I then shut down the Tivo and put the drive back into a computer and it still doesn't see the drive as a Tivo drive. I do not have a drive to copy to yet. I ordered a new 2tB and also will get the 1.5tB replaced from WD. I was just making sure I had all the right connections to do the job which I do. The drive is connected directly to the motherboard and another drive connected to the same connection boots into Windows 7 w/o the jmfs CD in. I am downloading a KNOPPIX DVD image now with dd restore and will try that if I can figure it out. It sounded complicated from the googles I looked at.


The MFS Live v1.4 cd has dd_rescue and some other handy stuff, like hdparm, pdisk, fdisk, and the MFS tools including mfsinfo. I use it for all kinds of stuff, not just TiVo stuff.


----------



## ed08724

unitron said:


> The MFS Live v1.4 cd has dd_rescue and some other handy stuff, like hdparm, pdisk, fdisk, and the MFS tools including mfsinfo. I use it for all kinds of stuff, not just TiVo stuff.


OK Thanks I will give it a try. I have zero linux experience. I downloaded the MFS Live 1.4 and burned a CD and booted off it. The drives are not the same. The source is the 1.5tb WD with errors and the dest is a 2tb WD. I don't care if I can only see 1.5tb of it for now. I will watch the shows and then wipe it if I have to. Can you give me an exact dd_rescue command to use. Thanks.


----------



## richsadams

ed08724 said:


> After leaving it on the Tivo for a few hours I turned the TV back on and it had started up and at least some of the programs are viewable. I then shut down the Tivo and put the drive back into a computer and it still doesn't see the drive as a Tivo drive. I do not have a drive to copy to yet. I ordered a new 2tB and also will get the 1.5tB replaced from WD. I was just making sure I had all the right connections to do the job which I do. The drive is connected directly to the motherboard and another drive connected to the same connection boots into Windows 7 w/o the jmfs CD in. I am downloading a KNOPPIX DVD image now with dd restore and will try that if I can figure it out. It sounded complicated from the googles I looked at.


Okay, I understand a little better now. However I'm still not sure about what you mean by your computer doesn't "recognize" the TiVo drive. If you mean your computer doesn't recognize your TiVo drive when you boot into Windows that's exactly as it should be, it won't (and you should absolutely not do anything to get it to).

If you mean you're booting into jmfs and it's not recognizing the TiVo drive then that's a different story. Try doing this...put the jmfs CD into your optical drive and shut down your computer. Disconnect your Windows hard drive and use that SATA and power connection to connect your TiVo drive. Boot up your computer (into jmfs) and see if it doesn't recognize the TiVo drive.

Also, as David mentions, it could easily be a BIOS issue. What kind of computer do you have? Do you know what kind of motherboard it has? (Sorry if you've already posted that info...too many to keep up with sometimes.)

Or maybe I've misunderstood completely...wouldn't be the first time.


----------



## ed08724

richsadams said:


> Okay, I understand a little better now. However I'm still not sure about what you mean by your computer doesn't "recognize" the TiVo drive. If you mean your computer doesn't recognize your TiVo drive when you boot into Windows that's exactly as it should be, it won't (and you should absolutely not do anything to get it to).
> 
> If you mean you're booting into jmfs and it's not recognizing the TiVo drive then that's a different story. Try doing this...put the jmfs CD into your optical drive and shut down your computer. Disconnect your Windows hard drive and use that SATA and power connection to connect your TiVo drive. Boot up your computer (into jmfs) and see if it doesn't recognize the TiVo drive.
> 
> Also, as David mentions, it could easily be a BIOS issue. What kind of computer do you have? Do you know what kind of motherboard it has? (Sorry if you've already posted that info...too many to keep up with sometimes.)
> 
> Or maybe I've misunderstood completely...wouldn't be the first time.


jmfs says it does not see a Tivo drive. I bought the drive pre imaged for TivoHD off ebay years a go so have no idea how it got to that size. Maybe an totally different format. The computer is a Gateway with a Gateway motherboard. MFS Live seems to display some info using hdparm /dev/sda. There is no setting in the BIOS for that. I put the drive into a Dell GX620 and tried both the normal and combination modes for SATA and jmfs gave the same no Tivo drive error message. As soon as the 2tb drive arrives Monday I will try to dd_rescue copy the drive. I still need 2 things. The exact dd_rescue command syntax and a TivoHD image to go back to if the copied drive does not work. I no longer have the original TivoHD drive.


----------



## unitron

ed08724 said:


> jmfs says it does not see a Tivo drive. I bought the drive pre imaged for TivoHD off ebay years a go so have no idea how it got to that size. Maybe an totally different format. The computer is a Gateway with a Gateway motherboard. MFS Live seems to display some info using hdparm /dev/sda. There is no setting in the BIOS for that. I put the drive into a Dell GX620 and tried both the normal and combination modes for SATA and jmfs gave the same no Tivo drive error message. As soon as the 2tb drive arrives Monday I will try to dd_rescue copy the drive. I still need 2 things. The exact dd_rescue command syntax and a TivoHD image to go back to if the copied drive does not work. I no longer have the original TivoHD drive.


Okay so you have a WD 1.5 that's failing.

WD is sending you a replacement in advance, and later you'll send them the failing drive.

Is the replacement they are sending also going to be a 1.5?

Are you separately buying a 2TB?


----------



## ed08724

unitron said:


> Okay so you have a WD 1.5 that's failing.
> 
> WD is sending you a replacement in advance, and later you'll send them the failing drive.
> 
> Is the replacement they are sending also going to be a 1.5?
> 
> Are you separately buying a 2TB?


I would assume the drive they are sending will also be a 1.5. I had already ordered a 2tb drive before I found out the 1.5 was still in warranty. I will stick the 1.5 in my premiere. The 2tb will be here Monday. No idea on the 1.5 replacement.


----------



## unitron

ed08724 said:


> I would assume the drive they are sending will also be a 1.5. I had already ordered a 2tb drive before I found out the 1.5 was still in warranty. I will stick the 1.5 in my premiere. The 2tb will be here Monday. No idea on the 1.5 replacement.


Disconnect the Windows drive.

Hook up the 1.5 and the 2.

Boot from the MFS Live cd.

fdisk -l (that's a lowercase L, not a 1)

will show you which drive is /dev/sda and which is /dev/sdb (it won't report the presence of partitions on the 1.5, because TiVo drives don't use a DOS-type partition map)

SHIFT + PAGE UP will take you back up through all that stuff that gets thrown on the screen before the command prompt loads, and you can see which drive is which there as well.

This is assuming that your optical drive (dvd/cd) shows up as /dev/sdc or /dev/sdd. If it's in the a or b position, no problem, just adjust my advice accordingly.

Assuming for the purposes of illustration that the 1.5 is sda and the 2 is sdb:

mfsinfo /dev/sda

to see if there's anything wrong with the MFS partitions.

(If so, you might want to run, on the TiVo, with the 1.5 in the TiVo, Kickstart 58 or 57)

pdisk -l

to see if the 1.5 is laid out properly

(remember, on Series 2 and above, one of the MFS partitions is put near the front of the drive, but the partition numbering system of the Series 1s is retained)

dd_rescue -b 512 -B 1 -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb

will copy the source (/dev/sda) to the target (/dev/sdb)

The syntax for dd_rescue is

command options source target

dd_rescue -?

will show you all (as far as I know) of the available options, most of which you want to avoid in this instance.

The soft block size (-b) default is 65536, and the hard block size to which it falls back and tries again in case of errors (-B) is 512

In this instance we're setting the soft size to a single sector (512 bytes) and the hard size to only a single byte.

That means it'll take forever (like at least overnight), but it gives you a better chance at a good copy.

What is the model number of the 1.5 and what is the brand and model number of the 2?

I ask because I'm not sure if the whole 512 byte sector versus the new "advanced format" 4096 (4K) byte sector situation will be a factor in any of this or not, and I'm seeking to acquire anecdotal "evidence".

Chances are good that the replacement for the 1.5 from WD will be one of their new 4K drives.

As far as I know dd_rescue automatically makes the source drive read-only, so if the copy operation leaves you with a 2TB drive that doesn't work in the TiVo, the 1.5 will be just like it was before and you can erase the 2 TB with

dd_rescue -v /dev/zero /dev/sda

WHERE THE 2TB DRIVE IS THE ONLY ONE HOOKED UP, AND THEREFORE IS /dev/sda !!!!!

Although

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024k count=1024

will wipe out any partition table, and that's usually good enough to let you re-use the drive for whatever. It should run and be finished in about a minute or so with the block size and count I put in.

The -v option for dd_rescue makes it a blabbermouth and lets you see what's going on.

dd, on the other hand, works in deadly silence, and tells you nothing until it's finished.

hdparm -i /dev/sd"whatever"

will give you information on the hard drive at "whatever", including brand, model number, and serial number, which can come in handy if one were to have 2 or more of the same size drives hooked up at the same time.


----------



## ed08724

unitron said:


> Disconnect the Windows drive.
> 
> Hook up the 1.5 and the 2.
> 
> Boot from the MFS Live cd.
> 
> fdisk -l (that's a lowercase L, not a 1)
> 
> will show you which drive is /dev/sda and which is /dev/sdb (it won't report the presence of partitions on the 1.5, because TiVo drives don't use a DOS-type partition map)
> 
> SHIFT + PAGE UP will take you back up through all that stuff that gets thrown on the screen before the command prompt loads, and you can see which drive is which there as well.
> 
> This is assuming that your optical drive (dvd/cd) shows up as /dev/sdc or /dev/sdd. If it's in the a or b position, no problem, just adjust my advice accordingly.
> 
> Assuming for the purposes of illustration that the 1.5 is sda and the 2 is sdb:
> 
> mfsinfo /dev/sda
> 
> to see if there's anything wrong with the MFS partitions.
> 
> (If so, you might want to run, on the TiVo, with the 1.5 in the TiVo, Kickstart 58 or 57)
> 
> pdisk -l
> 
> to see if the 1.5 is laid out properly
> 
> (remember, on Series 2 and above, one of the MFS partitions is put near the front of the drive, but the partition numbering system of the Series 1s is retained)
> 
> dd_rescue -b 512 -B 1 -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb
> 
> will copy the source (/dev/sda) to the target (/dev/sdb)
> 
> The syntax for dd_rescue is
> 
> command options source target
> 
> dd_rescue -?
> 
> will show you all (as far as I know) of the available options, most of which you want to avoid in this instance.
> 
> The soft block size (-b) default is 65536, and the hard block size to which it falls back and tries again in case of errors (-B) is 512
> 
> In this instance we're setting the soft size to a single sector (512 bytes) and the hard size to only a single byte.
> 
> That means it'll take forever (like at least overnight), but it gives you a better chance at a good copy.
> 
> What is the model number of the 1.5 and what is the brand and model number of the 2?
> 
> I ask because I'm not sure if the whole 512 byte sector versus the new "advanced format" 4096 (4K) byte sector situation will be a factor in any of this or not, and I'm seeking to acquire anecdotal "evidence".
> 
> Chances are good that the replacement for the 1.5 from WD will be one of their new 4K drives.
> 
> As far as I know dd_rescue automatically makes the source drive read-only, so if the copy operation leaves you with a 2TB drive that doesn't work in the TiVo, the 1.5 will be just like it was before and you can erase the 2 TB with
> 
> dd_rescue -v /dev/zero /dev/sda
> 
> WHERE THE 2TB DRIVE IS THE ONLY ONE HOOKED UP, AND THEREFORE IS /dev/sda !!!!!
> 
> Although
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024k count=1024
> 
> will wipe out any partition table, and that's usually good enough to let you re-use the drive for whatever. It should run and be finished in about a minute or so with the block size and count I put in.
> 
> The -v option for dd_rescue makes it a blabbermouth and lets you see what's going on.
> 
> dd, on the other hand, works in deadly silence, and tells you nothing until it's finished.
> 
> hdparm -i /dev/sd"whatever"
> 
> will give you information on the hard drive at "whatever", including brand, model number, and serial number, which can come in handy if one were to have 2 or more of the same size drives hooked up at the same time.


Wow! Lots of great info. My current drive is a WD15EADS and the new drive from Newegg is WD20EURS. I will give it a try Monday when the new drive gets here and post the results. Any idea where I can get a TivoHD image so if it fails I can start from scratch?
Thanks


----------



## unitron

ed08724 said:


> Wow! Lots of great info. My current drive is a WD15EADS and the new drive from Newegg is WD20EURS. I will give it a try Monday when the new drive gets here and post the results. Any idea where I can get a TivoHD image so if it fails I can start from scratch?
> Thanks


Can't help you with an image, don't own anything newer than the S2 dual tuner yet, but I've seen several people selling your model on Craigslist for $50.

If you got one of those you'd have a drive with an image and a spare power supply.

The EADS is a regular 512 byte sector drive, the EURS, like the 2TB EACS* and EARS, is an "advanced format" 4K sector drive, but I don't know if it makes difference to TiVo or not, or if it does, in which instances it would.

*I've got an older WD10EACS 1TB model, and it's not 4K, but the 2TB WD20EACS is.


----------



## lpwcomp

ed08724 said:


> I called yesterday and after holding for over 30 minutes to talk to anyone was told they would have to come out and I scheduled it for 9/1/2011 but hoping I will have to cancel it by then.


Call them back or chat with them and tell them that if they continue to insist on a professional installation of a CableCARD, you will be filing a complaint with the FCC. If you do it by chat, save the transcript.

As of August 8, delayed from August 1, the following rules apply:

1. If a cable operator allows self-install of any equipment, they must allow self-install of CableCARDs.

2. They must inform customers of this option.

3. All newly provided CableCARDs must be m-cards.

BTW, I have sent feedback to Comcast asking them why some of their locales and their website still insist that CableCARDs require a professional installation.


----------



## chalooch101

is there a way to make a truncated backup of the tivo premiere in case the hard drive dies?


----------



## dwit

chalooch101 said:


> is there a way to make a truncated backup of the tivo premiere in case the hard drive dies?


No. WinMfs truncated backup does not work on the Premiere. As of now, only doing the full copy with JMFS is the only thing that works on the Premiere.


----------



## richsadams

ed08724 said:


> You can use WinMfs to make a truncated backup. If you are suggesting this for my problem, not sure I would feel comfortable using a truncated backup from my bad drive.
> http://www.mfslive.org/winmfs/


dwit is correct, unfortunately winMfS does _not_ work with TiVo Series4 (Premiere/Premiere XL) for truncated backups or anything else.


----------



## NickCat

After owning many TiVos over the years, since my first gen Phillips model, that was by far the easiest upgrade yet. Thank you comer, the six pack of Molson Ice is on me!

My XL is now rocking a WD20EURS.


----------



## JoeTaxpayer

comer said:


> From all I know, 1T gives 145, 1.5T - 218, 2T - >250 hours of HD


for what it's worth, I just did this with a 1.5TB WD drive. It now shows 237 hrs HD or (wow) 2073 hrs SD.

The process took about 2-1/2 hrs to copy the original 320GB drive over, and seconds to expand/supersize. This is every bit as good as instant cake and better as it preserves shows, season pass, etc onto the new drive. 
Beautiful work, thanks.


----------



## ed08724

Drive had been copying since Monday night and just finished now. 200K error bytes which I didn't think was bad. I installed the 2tB drive back in the Tivo and got the Welcome, powering up then after about 10 seconds a blank screen which doesn't go away. Tried booting a few times with same result. I did not run the msinfo or kickstart stuff as I didn't want to write to the defective drive. Since I started this the replacement and exact same 1.5tB WD15EADS drive arrived from WD. I have restarted the copy using this drive and I guess it will take another 3 days. I will report the results after that.



unitron said:


> Disconnect the Windows drive.
> 
> Hook up the 1.5 and the 2.
> 
> Boot from the MFS Live cd.
> 
> fdisk -l (that's a lowercase L, not a 1)
> 
> will show you which drive is /dev/sda and which is /dev/sdb (it won't report the presence of partitions on the 1.5, because TiVo drives don't use a DOS-type partition map)
> 
> SHIFT + PAGE UP will take you back up through all that stuff that gets thrown on the screen before the command prompt loads, and you can see which drive is which there as well.
> 
> This is assuming that your optical drive (dvd/cd) shows up as /dev/sdc or /dev/sdd. If it's in the a or b position, no problem, just adjust my advice accordingly.
> 
> Assuming for the purposes of illustration that the 1.5 is sda and the 2 is sdb:
> 
> mfsinfo /dev/sda
> 
> to see if there's anything wrong with the MFS partitions.
> 
> (If so, you might want to run, on the TiVo, with the 1.5 in the TiVo, Kickstart 58 or 57)
> 
> pdisk -l
> 
> to see if the 1.5 is laid out properly
> 
> (remember, on Series 2 and above, one of the MFS partitions is put near the front of the drive, but the partition numbering system of the Series 1s is retained)
> 
> dd_rescue -b 512 -B 1 -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb
> 
> will copy the source (/dev/sda) to the target (/dev/sdb)
> 
> The syntax for dd_rescue is
> 
> command options source target
> 
> dd_rescue -?
> 
> will show you all (as far as I know) of the available options, most of which you want to avoid in this instance.
> 
> The soft block size (-b) default is 65536, and the hard block size to which it falls back and tries again in case of errors (-B) is 512
> 
> In this instance we're setting the soft size to a single sector (512 bytes) and the hard size to only a single byte.
> 
> That means it'll take forever (like at least overnight), but it gives you a better chance at a good copy.
> 
> What is the model number of the 1.5 and what is the brand and model number of the 2?
> 
> I ask because I'm not sure if the whole 512 byte sector versus the new "advanced format" 4096 (4K) byte sector situation will be a factor in any of this or not, and I'm seeking to acquire anecdotal "evidence".
> 
> Chances are good that the replacement for the 1.5 from WD will be one of their new 4K drives.
> 
> As far as I know dd_rescue automatically makes the source drive read-only, so if the copy operation leaves you with a 2TB drive that doesn't work in the TiVo, the 1.5 will be just like it was before and you can erase the 2 TB with
> 
> dd_rescue -v /dev/zero /dev/sda
> 
> WHERE THE 2TB DRIVE IS THE ONLY ONE HOOKED UP, AND THEREFORE IS /dev/sda !!!!!
> 
> Although
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024k count=1024
> 
> will wipe out any partition table, and that's usually good enough to let you re-use the drive for whatever. It should run and be finished in about a minute or so with the block size and count I put in.
> 
> The -v option for dd_rescue makes it a blabbermouth and lets you see what's going on.
> 
> dd, on the other hand, works in deadly silence, and tells you nothing until it's finished.
> 
> hdparm -i /dev/sd"whatever"
> 
> will give you information on the hard drive at "whatever", including brand, model number, and serial number, which can come in handy if one were to have 2 or more of the same size drives hooked up at the same time.


----------



## scandia101

scandia101 said:


> Wow, 2TB/317 HD hours, that was the easiest Tivo upgrade I've ever done.
> Thank you, Comer.
> 
> The hardest part was waiting for two days after realizing that I didn't have a spare sata data cable after I had everything taken apart.





ducker said:


> So that's what you used for the extra drive?? I'm trying to figure out which way I want to do an upgrade. a USB external drive, or a cable. have a link to the cable you used Scandia?


I didn't add a second drive, I replaced the OEM drive with a 2TB drive. I needed a second sata data cable in order to connect both drives to my pc.


----------



## CoxInPHX

After my 90 days I plan to upgrade the HDD, here are the drives I am considering, any particular one I should go with or is there a better model. Price is not really a major factor, I just want the best most compatible HDD, and don't really want the Caviar Green series. I'd prefer the Caviar Black but am afraid it would get to hot, they run about 110-140F without a heat-sink.

Western Digital AV-GP WD10EVDS 1TB 32MB Cache 
Western Digital AV-GP WD10EURS 1TB 64MB Cache 

Western Digital AV-GP WD15EVDS 1.5TB 32MB Cache 
Western Digital AV-GP WD15EURS 1.5TB 64MB Cache 

Western Digital AV-GP WD20EURS 2TB 64MB Cache 

Any other manufactures/models I should consider besides WD?


----------



## lpwcomp

Well, I'm quite happy with my WD10EARS, but price was a definite consideration in my case. I had to go with the least expensive option that I considered quiet enough, cool enough, and robust enough to be a viable option for a TiVo.


----------



## richsadams

CoxInPHX said:


> After my 90 days I plan to upgrade the HDD, here are the drives I am considering, any particular one I should go with or is there a better model. Price is not really a major factor, I just want the best most compatible HDD, and don't really want the Caviar Green series. I'd prefer the Caviar Black but am afraid it would get to hot, they run about 110-140F without a heat-sink.
> 
> Western Digital AV-GP WD10EVDS 1TB 32MB Cache
> Western Digital AV-GP WD10EURS 1TB 64MB Cache
> 
> Western Digital AV-GP WD15EVDS 1.5TB 32MB Cache
> Western Digital AV-GP WD15EURS 1.5TB 64MB Cache
> 
> Western Digital AV-GP WD20EURS 2TB 64MB Cache
> 
> Any other manufactures/models I should consider besides WD?


Any of those drives should work fine. TiVo comes with a WD GP ("green") hard drive and can't take advantage of faster drives or drives with more cache and as you pointed out, heat is always a consideration.

There's really no reason to go with anything less than 2TB's if you have a TiVo HD, HDXL, Premiere or Premiere XL as the price difference isn't that great.

As lpwcomp mentions, you could also consider WD's EARS series of drives. The only difference between the EARS and the A/V series drives you've listed (as far as TiVo is concerned) is that the A/V drive's AAM is set to the quietest setting (128 Vs 254). Although it's quiet out of the box you should be able to use hdparm (included on the jmfs program) to adjust the AAM on an EARS drive to 128.

Those are the drives a majority of folks are using. However a few have successfully installed Samsung and Hitachi "green" drives but they haven't been in service (or even on the market) long enough to warrant a recommendation. Might be something to considered if you didn't want to use a WD drive for some reason.

Happy upgrading!


----------



## ed08724

This seems to have worked fine copying to the same size 1.5tb drive. Old previously unplayable shows are now playable. As mentioned previously it did not work copying to a 2tb drive.
Thanks!



unitron said:


> Disconnect the Windows drive.
> 
> Hook up the 1.5 and the 2.
> 
> Boot from the MFS Live cd.
> 
> fdisk -l (that's a lowercase L, not a 1)
> 
> will show you which drive is /dev/sda and which is /dev/sdb (it won't report the presence of partitions on the 1.5, because TiVo drives don't use a DOS-type partition map)
> 
> SHIFT + PAGE UP will take you back up through all that stuff that gets thrown on the screen before the command prompt loads, and you can see which drive is which there as well.
> 
> This is assuming that your optical drive (dvd/cd) shows up as /dev/sdc or /dev/sdd. If it's in the a or b position, no problem, just adjust my advice accordingly.
> 
> Assuming for the purposes of illustration that the 1.5 is sda and the 2 is sdb:
> 
> mfsinfo /dev/sda
> 
> to see if there's anything wrong with the MFS partitions.
> 
> (If so, you might want to run, on the TiVo, with the 1.5 in the TiVo, Kickstart 58 or 57)
> 
> pdisk -l
> 
> to see if the 1.5 is laid out properly
> 
> (remember, on Series 2 and above, one of the MFS partitions is put near the front of the drive, but the partition numbering system of the Series 1s is retained)
> 
> dd_rescue -b 512 -B 1 -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb
> 
> will copy the source (/dev/sda) to the target (/dev/sdb)
> 
> The syntax for dd_rescue is
> 
> command options source target
> 
> dd_rescue -?
> 
> will show you all (as far as I know) of the available options, most of which you want to avoid in this instance.
> 
> The soft block size (-b) default is 65536, and the hard block size to which it falls back and tries again in case of errors (-B) is 512
> 
> In this instance we're setting the soft size to a single sector (512 bytes) and the hard size to only a single byte.
> 
> That means it'll take forever (like at least overnight), but it gives you a better chance at a good copy.
> 
> What is the model number of the 1.5 and what is the brand and model number of the 2?
> 
> I ask because I'm not sure if the whole 512 byte sector versus the new "advanced format" 4096 (4K) byte sector situation will be a factor in any of this or not, and I'm seeking to acquire anecdotal "evidence".
> 
> Chances are good that the replacement for the 1.5 from WD will be one of their new 4K drives.
> 
> As far as I know dd_rescue automatically makes the source drive read-only, so if the copy operation leaves you with a 2TB drive that doesn't work in the TiVo, the 1.5 will be just like it was before and you can erase the 2 TB with
> 
> dd_rescue -v /dev/zero /dev/sda
> 
> WHERE THE 2TB DRIVE IS THE ONLY ONE HOOKED UP, AND THEREFORE IS /dev/sda !!!!!
> 
> Although
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024k count=1024
> 
> will wipe out any partition table, and that's usually good enough to let you re-use the drive for whatever. It should run and be finished in about a minute or so with the block size and count I put in.
> 
> The -v option for dd_rescue makes it a blabbermouth and lets you see what's going on.
> 
> dd, on the other hand, works in deadly silence, and tells you nothing until it's finished.
> 
> hdparm -i /dev/sd"whatever"
> 
> will give you information on the hard drive at "whatever", including brand, model number, and serial number, which can come in handy if one were to have 2 or more of the same size drives hooked up at the same time.


----------



## richsadams

ed08724 said:


> This seems to have worked fine copying to the same size 1.5tb drive. Old previously unplayable shows are now playable. As mentioned previously it did not work copying to a 2tb drive.
> Thanks!


Good news! So do you think there was an issue with that specific 2TB drive? Otherwise it doesn't make sense that it wouldn't work. 

In any case...enjoy your "new" TiVo!


----------



## unitron

ed08724 said:


> This seems to have worked fine copying to the same size 1.5tb drive. Old previously unplayable shows are now playable. As mentioned previously it did not work copying to a 2tb drive.
> Thanks!


If I'd known you were going to wind up going another drive of the same size, I'd have suggested dd_rescue's -r option as well.

That's where it starts at the end, and works toward the front, which obviously only works on drives of the same size.


----------



## yoheidiho

Any thoughts on the new WD EARX drives?


----------



## richsadams

yoheidiho said:


> Any thoughts on the new WD EARX drives?


http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8672565#post8672565


----------



## PocoDiablo

Ok, so what am I doing wrong here?

I have two of the WD WD10EVDS drives. I unplug my Windows HDD and plug in my Tivo Premiere original drive and the WD10EVDS into the 1st and 2nd SATA ports. I am using the software indicated at the start of this thread. I boot up, select copy, and it presents me with TWO drives (one with a serial number label, one that does NOT have a label, but they are BOTH the same 1TB drive ...) and I select one. The software does its thing. After 15-60 minutes it stops copying and tells me it has an error. Right now it says there is an error of 1001k. Should I just wait?

I've tried both the first version of the drive (/dev/sda) and the second version of the drive (/dev/sdc) and they both have errors. 

I have tried this with both drives. Same deal.

What's up?


----------



## PocoDiablo

Update, it seems to be done, but now it has 242GB of bad data which is says it is trimming. I'll update if I really lost that capacity.


----------



## lpwcomp

You don't by any chance have some kind of RAID setting enabled?


----------



## PocoDiablo

lpwcomp said:


> You don't by any chance have some kind of RAID setting enabled?


Nope. I'm an IT guy and this computer is 100% plain vanilla setup. Now it says it's splitting blocks. For the past few hours.

Sucks to be me, oh well.


----------



## PocoDiablo

I let it run overnight, and it still says "splitting failed blocks" with 242GB of errors. I guess it's stuck.

Any suggestions?


----------



## dwit

PocoDiablo said:


> I let it run overnight, and it still says "splitting failed blocks" with 242GB of errors. I guess it's stuck.
> 
> Any suggestions?


Do you have another computer you could try? I am not an "IT" type at all but have done the procedure 3 times using 2 different computers(both pretty ancient). And although it's been a few months since doing them, each time there was no confusion in identifying either of the drives(that I recall). When connected to the motherboard, JMFS clearly recognized and identified the source Tivo drive, and any available "targets".

Of the 3 target drives I used, 2 were used and one was new. No errors were reported on either drive by prior manufacturer's diagnostics, and confirmed by JMFS. The copy/expand/supersizing processes were all uneventful and completed without complications.

Your prior posts on the "confusion" experienced when the drives were connected and the ensuing problems may indicate something was not quite right. Maybe you need to tweak some settings in the bios, or try switching sata ports, or again, try another computer, if available.

Also, have you run manufacturers diagnostics on your target drives? I always do this, even on brand new drives, so as to know the drives are (supposedly) not defective going in to the process. Same for the source Tivo drive(I'm beginning to think this may ultimately prove to be the problem).

Lastly, make sure you are using the most recent version of JMFS(rev 104 as I recall).

Good luck.


----------



## PocoDiablo

Thanks for the comments dwit. I have just put my PC back to normal and put one of the new drives in as a second drive and Windows 7 is recognizing it as TWO drives as well. I've never seen anything like this.

I'm going to look for some WD tools, this has to be a setup issue with the drives.


----------



## PocoDiablo

Okay, dwit thank you. I found some diagnostic tools from WD and ran it on one of the drives. The second "ghost" drive suddenly disappeared from the Windows Drive Management tool and now I am formatting it NTFS. Once that is done I'll try the process again with the other drive, and then try my upgrade.

I've never seen this before, so weird.

Link to the tool:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=610&sid=3&lang=en


----------



## richsadams

PocoDiablo said:


> Okay, dwit thank you. I found some diagnostic tools from WD and ran it on one of the drives. The second "ghost" drive suddenly disappeared from the Windows Drive Management tool and now I am formatting it NTFS. Once that is done I'll try the process again with the other drive, and then try my upgrade.
> 
> I've never seen this before, so weird.
> 
> Link to the tool:
> 
> http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=610&sid=3&lang=en


There's no need to format the new drive (to NTFS or anything else) as jmfs will handle that. Did you connect the new drive (or the TiVo drive) to your computer and use Windows management to recognize it in the first place?

I'm with dwit, I've never heard of anything like what you're experiencing in about a decade of performing upgrades. It could have something to do with your computer's BIOS settings. In any case, keep both drives away from Windows completely (particularly the TiVo drive) it will cause you nothing but grief. As you did, I always disconnect my Windows OS drive when performing an upgrade (unless I'm using winMFS). The jmfs program is dead simple and you shouldn't have any issues. I know that's not helpful, but if you're doing anything at all outside of the instructions/faq you won't get the desired outcome.

Best of luck and keep us posted!


----------



## PocoDiablo

Rich, you're spot on, I've never seen anything like this in about 25 years of messing with computers, and when I upgraded my Series 3 HD Tivo it went smoothly. No BIOS settings were changed. So here is the update.

The WD software seemed to fix the "double drive" issue. After formatting it to NTFS I put the original Tivo drive and the new WD drive back in the PC, ran jmfs and it worked properly this time. It saw only ONE new drive and proceeded to perform the upgrade quickly and without error. I then expanded it, then supersized it, then did the quiet parms, and then ran wdidle3 on it.

I then put the new drive back into my Premiere and started it up, and Tivo showed me the nice "Welcome starting up" and then "Just a few minutes" screens.

And now it's on with just a black screen and is not responding to the remote. I have the bluetooth slide remote, and the regular remote, and neither seem to be responding. 

Le sigh. I'm sure there's a topic about this somewhere, but it's Friday night so I am going to have a few drinks and tackle this tomorrow. If anyone is kind enough to point me in the new right direction, I'd be very thankful!


----------



## richsadams

Well...that's progress. Try disconnecting everything except your TV, plugging TiVo directly into the wall (if you're using a UPS - recommended - or a surge protector - not recommended) and try rebooting it again a few times. There are quite a few reports of having to try the initial boot several times before it takes for some reason.

Tuning adapters, even TiVo WiFi adapters and Ethernet connections sometimes have an impact on the initial boot up so removing them from the mix and having a clean power source has helped on occasion. 

As far as the drive issues...just weird. 

Have a drink on me...you deserve it!

P.S. Nice Pepe LePew reference.


----------



## PocoDiablo

Update - I pulled the power cord and restarted and now Tivo is working. Success! Thanks to all who helped.


----------



## richsadams

PocoDiablo said:


> Update - I pulled the power cord and restarted and now Tivo is working. Success! Thanks to all who helped.


Phew! Sweet! :up: Enjoy your "new" TiVo!


----------



## PocoDiablo

richsadams said:


> Phew! Sweet! :up: Enjoy your "new" TiVo!


I am enjoying it with a Long Island Ice Tea (special recipe, ala me.  ) and thanks again!


----------



## lpwcomp

PocoDiablo said:


> I am enjoying it with a Long Island Ice Tea (special recipe, ala me.  ) and thanks again!


The only thing I can figure is that the partition map on the destination drive was bollixed up in such a way that it was seen as two logical drives and that running the WD tools fixed it.


----------



## True Colors

Help needed please.

I have a Dell Optiplex 760. It is 2 years old. 3.0 Ghz, dual core. 

I removed the hard drive from my computer. I took the power cable and SATA cable that were connected to that drive and I connected them to the hard drive that I pulled out of my Tivo premiere.

I left my computer case open. There are a couple of open SATA ports on the mother board. I used a SATA cable to connect an open port to a new, blank hard drive(2 TB). I also connect a power cable to this new 2 TB drive.

For some reason, Comer's application does not recognize my new blank drive. What am I doing wrong? Do I need to adjust my BIOS, or something else?

Many thanks,

TC


----------



## ed08724

I wouldn't consider it a "new" tivo just a repaired old one. I copied a defective 1.5tb drive to a new 1.5tb drive so have no more capacity then I did before. Both jmfs and WinMFS do not think either the original or copied drive are tivo drives so that somewhat concerns me even though it does seem to work fine in the tivoHD. The 2tb drive was installed into a premiere and I used jmfs to copy, expand, supersize and it seems to be working fine.



richsadams said:


> Good news! So do you think there was an issue with that specific 2TB drive? Otherwise it doesn't make sense that it wouldn't work.
> 
> In any case...enjoy your "new" TiVo!


----------



## ed08724

What is the benefit of copying backwards. I remember reading a post about this previously but have been unable to find it.
Thanks for your help and glad to have my programs back.



unitron said:


> If I'd known you were going to wind up going another drive of the same size, I'd have suggested dd_rescue's -r option as well.
> 
> That's where it starts at the end, and works toward the front, which obviously only works on drives of the same size.


----------



## dwit

True Colors said:


> Help needed please.
> 
> I have a Dell Optiplex 760. It is 2 years old. 3.0 Ghz, dual core.
> 
> I removed the hard drive from my computer. I took the power cable and SATA cable that were connected to that drive and I connected them to the hard drive that I pulled out of my Tivo premiere.
> 
> I left my computer case open. There are a couple of open SATA ports on the mother board. I used a SATA cable to connect an open port to a new, blank hard drive(2 TB). I also connect a power cable to this new 2 TB drive.
> 
> For some reason, Comer's application does not recognize my new blank drive. What am I doing wrong? Do I need to adjust my BIOS, or something else?
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> TC


Probably the best thing to do now is to see if your computer's bios recognizes the drive. Go into the bios. One of the first options should say something like "CMOS Options". Check ther to see if the drive is recognized and identified correctly(as to capacity, etc).


----------



## PocoDiablo

dwit said:


> Probably the best thing to do now is to see if your computer's bios recognizes the drive. Go into the bios. One of the first options should say something like "CMOS Options". Check ther to see if the drive is recognized and identified correctly(as to capacity, etc).


I agree with this as well.

If that does not work, see my most recent posts. I had to load my Western Digital drive into Windows, then run the Western Digital drive check software, and only then was it properly recognized.


----------



## richsadams

PocoDiablo said:


> I agree with this as well.
> 
> If that does not work, see my most recent posts. I had to load my Western Digital drive into Windows, then run the Western Digital drive check software, and only then was it properly recognized.


Keep in mind that AFAIK yours is the first time anyone has had to do that so it's more of an anomaly than anything.

Again, I'd caution against having a TiVo drive connected to any PC while using Windows drive management under any circumstance.

It does sound like a BIOS setting issue for the OP. The only additional thing I'd recommend is to try swapping drives on the SATA port that's "working" to ensure both drives are actually recognized as well as trying a different SATA port to see if the drive can be recognized.


----------



## jfh3

Notes on upgrading a Premiere 320 using WD20EARS drive (Mfg date March 2011):

- took out 320GB drive from Tivo
- Used WD DLG Diagnostics to run both Quick and Extended tests on new drive
- Used comer tool to Copy, Expand and Supersize (don't forget to go up a menu)
- put new drive into Tivo. Remember that the label side goes down. Otherwise, the cover just doesn't fit. 
- Put the original drive in an electrostatic bag and boxed it.
- Reconnected the Tivo, booted it, verified 317HD. Did a soft boot too.
- Yelled at myself for wasting 15-20 minutes trying to get the Tivo cover on with the hard drive mounted upside down. 

I tried to run Hitachi Feature tool (both 2.05 and 2.12) to set AAM to 128, but neither version recognized the WD20EARS drive, so AAM is at the default.

I was going to set WDIDLE3 to 300 seconds, but I had a bad boot disk, so I left that alone.

Tivo booted up in 5-10 minutes (wasn't really paying attention) and all is well.

I'm not too worried about WDIDLE3, as my drive was manufactured this March and since this Tivo is about 12 feet from where I sit, I doubt I'll hear the difference on AAM.
I couldn't tell too much difference when they were attached to the PC.

I've upgraded many Tivos over the years and this was about as simple as it gets. Terrific tool! - a beer money contribution on its' way soon!


----------



## lpwcomp

Did you do a soft boot? Just to be sure.


----------



## jfh3

lpwcomp said:


> Did you do a soft boot? Just to be sure.


Yes, just edited my post to note that. I always do a connection to Tivo and then a soft reboot after an upgrade - just didn't think to comment on it above.

In this case, it took a little longer, as 14.8c got loaded/installed.


----------



## richsadams

jfh3 said:


> Yes, just edited my post to note that. I always do a connection to Tivo and then a soft reboot after an upgrade - just didn't think to comment on it above.
> 
> In this case, it took a little longer, as 14.8c got loaded/installed.


Many thanks for the info! :up: Did you happen to notice what the manufacture date was for your WD20EARS?

Also, FWIW while in jmfs you can exit to the prompt and run "hdparm -M <device> to set the AAM, but as you mention, those drives are very quiet out of the box.

"TIA and enjoy!


----------



## unitron

ed08724 said:


> What is the benefit of copying backwards. I remember reading a post about this previously but have been unable to find it.
> Thanks for your help and glad to have my programs back.


I don't really know why running it backwards sometimes works better, but I've had success sticking the problem drive in the freezer overnight and then running dd_rescue with the -r switch and getting the contents over to a new drive when doing it forwards didn't seem to work out.

If I have a choice between understanding fully why something doesn't work, and having it work even though I couldn't tell you why to save my life, I'll settle for confusion and success.

Search my previous posts for how to use other switches to make dd_rescue do smaller than default chunks at a time to increase success rates with problem drives. Just don't expect me to be able to explain why it works.


----------



## jfh3

richsadams said:


> Many thanks for the info! :up: Did you happen to notice what the manufacture date was for your WD20EARS?


March 2011



> Also, FWIW while in jmfs you can exit to the prompt and run "hdparm -M <device> to set the AAM, but as you mention, those drives are very quiet out of the box.


Thanks. I had remembered this a few minutes after the Tivo and PC were put back together ... 

I upgraded another box at the same time using an AV drive in that one. I'm not really going to worry about AAM unless I upgrade the box in the master bed room and even then it probably won't matter, as my wife says my hearing is pretty bad anyway


----------



## richsadams

jfh3 said:


> ...it probably won't matter, as my wife says my hearing is pretty bad anyway


I don't think women mean that _literally_.


----------



## Tivogre

Just used this to install a 2TB WD EARS drive in my new Premier. 

Reports 317 hours HD. 

THANKS ALL!!!


----------



## richsadams

Tivogre said:


> Just used this to install a 2TB WD EARS drive in my new Premier.
> 
> Reports 317 hours HD.
> 
> THANKS ALL!!!


Nice. Enjoy!


----------



## PedjaR

WD20EARS is on sale for $69.99 at newegg, with promo code EMCKAKH22. That drive seems to be one of the recommended ones. Worked great for me, and, apparently, a lot of others as well.


----------



## richsadams

PedjaR said:


> WD20EARS is on sale for $69.99 at newegg, with promo code EMCKAKH22. That drive seems to be one of the recommended ones. Worked great for me, and, apparently, a lot of others as well.


That's a good price, thanks for posting. :up: I suspect we'll see more discounts on the EARS series as it looks like the EARX will be replacing it.


----------



## unitron

PedjaR said:


> WD20EARS is on sale for $69.99 at newegg, with promo code EMCKAKH22. That drive seems to be one of the recommended ones. Worked great for me, and, apparently, a lot of others as well.


Check the reviews on this drive at NewEgg and note how many more negative ones there are lately.

Apparently WD's quality control on this model isn't what it used to be.


----------



## richsadams

I won't rehash the stats again, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy another WD20EARS. The WD20EARS drives that I'm using have been fine...one over a year old the other about a month old now. YMMV of course.


----------



## unitron

richsadams said:


> I won't rehash the stats again, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy another WD20EARS. The WD20EARS drives that I'm using have been fine...one over a year old the other about a month old now. YMMV of course.


My email shows a 9 minutes older reply of yours that seems to have evaporated.


> ---Quote (Originally by unitron)---
> Check the reviews on this drive at NewEgg and note how many more negative ones there are lately.
> 
> Apparently WD's quality control on this model isn't what it used to be.
> ---End Quote---
> I still don't see it that way based on reviews on Newegg and elsewhere. Overall they're no better and no worse than the rest of the line IMO. I bought one a month or so ago and it's working fine. YMMV of course, but I wouldn't hesitate to by another one.


I'm not trying to pick on you, but if you check the reviews on NewEgg, you can filter them for "All reviews", "Last 6 months", and "Last 2 weeks". Comparing those shows a sharp shift to the negative in the "egg" ratings in more recent days.


----------



## richsadams

unitron said:


> My email shows a 9 minutes older reply of yours that seems to have evaporated.
> 
> I'm not trying to pick on you, but if you check the reviews on NewEgg, you can filter them for "All reviews", "Last 6 months", and "Last 2 weeks". Comparing those shows a sharp shift to the negative in the "egg" ratings in more recent days.


I updated my original post thinking it was a bit too argumentative. I get what you're saying but I still stand by what I said in my last and earlier posts. I'm confident that folks are capable of making up their own minds.


----------



## unitron

richsadams said:


> I updated my original post thinking it was a bit too argumentative. I get what you're saying but I still stand by what I said in my last and earlier posts. I'm confident that folks are capable of making up their own minds.


I ain't tellin' 'em what to do, I'm mentioning what they might want to take into consideration when they decide for themselves what to do.


----------



## vinylb

I just bought a Premiere and after much struggle got Comcast to pair up my cablecard. After that I ordered a Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 and followed procedures outlined in 1st post by Comer to copy the original drive. 

Plugged in Tivo after assembly and noticed that i had about 467 hours of "best quality recording". I thought a 2tb after supersize could only get you about 312 hours. Am I missing something? Why is mine showing much more? Dont get me wrong, I love the extra space but cannot help but be suspicious. 

btw thanks to ALL who have contributed and especially to Comer for such an easy process !!!!!


extra info : from all research I have done ANY new sata drive will work whether its 5400rpm, 5900rp, or 7200rpm. I chose this model due to heat factor. I know a lot has also been said about drives and failure of drives - if you look at newegg, there are a lot of DOA reviews, i believe these are associated with their older shipping methods of throwing into a box with brown paper. Last few drives I have received have all been boxed within another box and held in place by "cups" to hold the sides of the drive in place so its well protected. I only got the Seagate because i missed a deal on the WD drives everybody seems to use here and got this seagate for $69 with free shipping - I dont regret this purchase.


----------



## dwit

vinylb said:


> I just bought a Premiere and after much struggle got Comcast to pair up my cablecard. After that I ordered a Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 and followed procedures outlined in 1st post by Comer to copy the original drive.
> 
> Plugged in Tivo after assembly and noticed that i had about 467 hours of "best quality recording". I thought a 2tb after supersize could only get you about 312 hours. Am I missing something? Why is mine showing much more? Dont get me wrong, I love the extra space but cannot help but be suspicious.
> 
> btw thanks to ALL who have contributed and especially to Comer for such an easy process !!!!!
> 
> extra info : from all research I have done ANY new sata drive will work whether its 5400rpm, 5900rp, or 7200rpm. I chose this model due to heat factor. I know a lot has also been said about drives and failure of drives - if you look at newegg, there are a lot of DOA reviews, i believe these are associated with their older shipping methods of throwing into a box with brown paper. Last few drives I have received have all been boxed within another box and held in place by "cups" to hold the sides of the drive in place so its well protected. I only got the Seagate because i missed a deal on the WD drives everybody seems to use here and got this seagate for $69 with free shipping - I dont regret this purchase.


Check the drive recording capacity in the "*System Information*" from the "Messages and Settings" on the Tivo Central Menu.


----------



## jfh3

unitron said:


> Check the reviews on this drive at NewEgg and note how many more negative ones there are lately.
> 
> Apparently WD's quality control on this model isn't what it used to be.


That's why I always do an extended test before using a new drive.


----------



## lpwcomp

vinylb said:


> I just bought a Premiere and after much struggle got Comcast to pair up my cablecard. After that I ordered a Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 and followed procedures outlined in 1st post by Comer to copy the original drive.
> 
> Plugged in Tivo after assembly and noticed that i had about 467 hours of "best quality recording". I thought a 2tb after supersize could only get you about 312 hours. Am I missing something? Why is mine showing much more? Dont get me wrong, I love the extra space but cannot help but be suspicious.
> 
> btw thanks to ALL who have contributed and especially to Comer for such an easy process !!!!!
> 
> extra info : from all research I have done ANY new sata drive will work whether its 5400rpm, 5900rp, or 7200rpm. I chose this model due to heat factor. I know a lot has also been said about drives and failure of drives - if you look at newegg, there are a lot of DOA reviews, i believe these are associated with their older shipping methods of throwing into a box with brown paper. Last few drives I have received have all been boxed within another box and held in place by "cups" to hold the sides of the drive in place so its well protected. I only got the Seagate because i missed a deal on the WD drives everybody seems to use here and got this seagate for $69 with free shipping - I dont regret this purchase.


The "quality" setting only applies to recordings made from analog channels, where the TiVo is converting to digital and compressing. "Best quality" has the least amount pf compression. A 2TB drive gives @318 hours of HD capacity. Since HD is digital, there is no conversion and the compression is done before the TiVo gets it. This is the case for all digital cable channels, not just the HD ones.


----------



## vinylb

dwit said:


> Check the drive recording capacity in the "*System Information*" from the "Messages and Settings" on the Tivo Central Menu.


Checking that screen does show 316 hours - thanks!


----------



## kreskin

Hello,

I purchased a Tivo Premiere earlier in the year an upgraded it to a 2TB WD 20EARS a few months later. The Tivo stopped working a few weeks later - apparently a power supply issue. I now have a replacement Tivo Premiere and want to upgrade to the WD hard drive. Has anyone had to do that before? Will I need to delete the prior information off of the hard drive and if so, how do I do that? I don't think I want to delete any of the power management features off of the hard drive. Also, are there any other steps I need to follow to make sure my upgrade is successful?

Thanks,

Jim


----------



## unitron

kreskin said:


> Hello,
> 
> I purchased a Tivo Premiere earlier in the year an upgraded it to a 2TB WD 20EARS a few months later. The Tivo stopped working a few weeks later - apparently a power supply issue. I now have a replacement Tivo Premiere and want to upgrade to the WD hard drive. Has anyone had to do that before? Will I need to delete the prior information off of the hard drive and if so, how do I do that? I don't think I want to delete any of the power management features off of the hard drive. Also, are there any other steps I need to follow to make sure my upgrade is successful?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jim


Are you sure the first Premiere's problem was power supply and not the hard drive going flaky?

If you still have both units have you tried swapping power supplies to see if the problem follows it?


----------



## kreskin

> Are you sure the first Premiere's problem was power supply and not the hard drive going flaky?
> 
> If you still have both units have you tried swapping power supplies to see if the problem follows it?


I'm not 100% certain it's not a hard drive issue, but when I put the OEM drive back in the malfunctioning Tivo, it would not get past the initial screen and then power down just like it did with the upgraded hard drive.

Thanks,

Jim


----------



## ThreeSoFar

kreskin said:


> Hello,
> 
> I purchased a Tivo Premiere earlier in the year an upgraded it to a 2TB WD 20EARS a few months later. The Tivo stopped working a few weeks later - apparently a power supply issue. I now have a replacement Tivo Premiere and want to upgrade to the WD hard drive. Has anyone had to do that before? Will I need to delete the prior information off of the hard drive and if so, how do I do that? I don't think I want to delete any of the power management features off of the hard drive. Also, are there any other steps I need to follow to make sure my upgrade is successful?
> Jim


The following answers the original question, though unitron's post may be right about the power supply.

The 2TB WD drive should be tested with diagnostics software to make sure that is fully functional (I believe how to do so is in the FAQ)--this can take hours. If it passes fine, you can use it as the destination drive and the new Premier's hard drive as the source (just in case the problem was in the original Premiere drive somehow). There's no need to wipe what's on there now, it gets overwritten via the backup/restore process that JMFS uses.

There's no way to preserve the recordings or season passes from your current WD, you'll be starting from scratch with Guided Setup. However, you should allow your Premier to boot up with its original drive, get upgraded from TiVo (if any are available) and have the cable company successfully pair your CableCARD--you can even add your Season Passes and such. That way both your new 2TB drive and your backup original drive (keep that on a shelf) will already have the card paired and such. Any shows it records on the original drive will also get copied over to the new one.

You won't have to mess with the wdidle or AAM settings at all--those are saved on flash on the drive, not on the drive platters and will retain your previous settings.


----------



## BartonC

I've been watching WD drives die early deaths since as long as I can remember. Their use of WD drives is my only tick against TiVo.

I assume that "other" brands of drives will work for my plans to upgrade my Premier, is that so? Any recommendations there?

Thanks.



unitron said:


> Check the reviews on this drive at NewEgg and note how many more negative ones there are lately.
> 
> Apparently WD's quality control on this model isn't what it used to be.


----------



## BartonC

Love the Seagate Barracuda. The originals were amazingly quiet. Look at the reviews on the Green model, though, and you may find lots of complaints regarding sound levels.



vinylb said:


> ... I ordered a Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 ...
> 
> extra info : from all research I have done ANY new sata drive will work whether its 5400rpm, 5900rp, or 7200rpm. I chose this model due to heat factor. I know a lot has also been said about drives and failure of drives - if you look at newegg, there are a lot of DOA reviews, i believe these are associated with their older shipping methods of throwing into a box with brown paper. Last few drives I have received have all been boxed within another box and held in place by "cups" to hold the sides of the drive in place so its well protected. I only got the Seagate because i missed a deal on the WD drives everybody seems to use here and got this seagate for $69 with free shipping - I dont regret this purchase.


----------



## bd3521

I ended up purchasing the 1TB WD10EVDS as it was only $60 on Amazon and was already DVR optimized.

I am having a big issue with WINMFS (Windows 7). I went to backup my existing tivo drive and it does correctly shows the tivo label when i select the drive. But when I goto to perform a truncated backup or click msinfo it says "not a tivo drive". So I cannot backup my current drive to my new WD10EVDS.

I wanted to make sure my stock tivo drive still works. Now when I put the original (was previously working fine) tivo drive back it constantly reboots after 10 seconds or so and all lights on the premiere blink. Reboot loop.

So I tried "option 1" and then "option 2" of the bootpage fix with no luck. What should I do to at least get my original drive operational again?

Thank you
-Bryan


----------



## dwit

bd3521 said:


> I ended up purchasing the 1TB WD10EVDS as it was only $60 on Amazon and was already DVR optimized.
> 
> I am having a big issue with WINMFS (Windows 7). I went to backup my existing tivo drive and it does correctly shows the tivo label when i select the drive. But when I goto to perform a truncated backup or click msinfo it says "not a tivo drive". So I cannot backup my current drive to my new WD10EVDS.
> 
> I wanted to make sure my stock tivo drive still works. Now when I put the original (was previously working fine) tivo drive back it constantly reboots after 10 seconds or so and all lights on the premiere blink. Reboot loop.
> 
> So I tried "option 1" and then "option 2" of the bootpage fix with no luck. What should I do to at least get my original drive operational again?
> 
> Thank you
> -Bryan


Unfortunately, I think you chose the wrong method to upgrade your Premiere. AFAIK(as far as I know), Winmfs does not work on the Premiere. I think that may be why winmfs does not recognize the drive as a Tivo drive.

So far, the "image" of the Premiere drive cannot be extracted out as a truncated image like for the s2 and s3. Premiere drives are essentially cloned, and expanded to a larger drive, if that is the case.

I also think that is why the winmfs "fix boot page" is not working(if indeed the boot sector was corrupted).

I don't know for sure if your Premiere drive is corrupted and/or if it is, what precisely did it. I do know pretty much the exact thing happened to another poster; maybe this thread, or possibly in another. The only solution that worked there was to find another working Premiere drive to copy using the correct method, namely the JMFS program.


----------



## bd3521

dwit said:


> Unfortunately, I think you chose the wrong method to upgrade your Premiere. AFAIK(as far as I know), Winmfs does not work on the Premiere. I think that may be why winmfs does not recognize the drive as a Tivo drive.
> 
> So far, the "image" of the Premiere drive cannot be extracted out as a truncated image like for the s2 and s3. Premiere drives are essentially cloned, and expanded to a larger drive, if that is the case.
> 
> I also think that is why the winmfs "fix boot page" is not working(if indeed the boot sector was corrupted).
> 
> I don't know for sure if your Premiere drive is corrupted and/or if it is, what precisely did it. I do know pretty much the exact thing happened to another poster; maybe this thread, or possibly in another. The only solution that worked there was to find another working Premiere drive to copy using the correct method, namely the JMFS program.


Is there any way for me to restore the boot page using JMFS or importing someone else's bootpage? I assume thats the only thing that was mucked with with WinMFS. I don't know what to do besides buying a drive through DVR Dude?


----------



## dwit

bd3521 said:


> Is there any way for me to restore the boot page using JMFS or importing someone else's bootpage? I assume thats the only thing that was mucked with with WinMFS. I don't know what to do besides buying a drive through DVR Dude?


AFAIK, there is no repair if the drive is too corrupted, for whatever reason. You might try the built in Tivo "kickstart" diagnostics. It can often repair errors encountered during the course of "normal" Tivo operation. You will have to search here, or at tivo.com support for the procedure, as I am not versed in how to initiate. Maybe someone will chime in.

How long have you had the Tivo? There is free warranty support if less than 90 days. I think it's only $50 if longer than 90days but less than 1 year.

Again, if you know someone with a Premiere, maybe they will be generous enough to let you try cloning.

Good luck.


----------



## lpwcomp

dwit said:


> How long have you had the Tivo? There is free warranty support if less than 90 days. I think it's only $50 if longer than 90days but less than 1 year.


You mean the warranty that was voided when the case was opened?


----------



## bd3521

lpwcomp said:


> You mean the warranty that was voided when the case was opened?


Its a year and two months anyway. I guess, I'll order another drive.


----------



## richsadams

bd3521 said:


> Its a year and two months anyway. I guess, I'll order another drive.


Sorry to hear about the error in trying to upgrade your TiVo Premiere. As dwit suggests you may want to try running TiVo's built-in diagnostic and repair programs called "Kickstarts"...particularly KS57 and KS58. No guarantee that things will get better, but it's worth a try.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showpost.php?p=5643823&postcount=2

Note that specific instructions for running the Kickstarts on the Premiere are located near the bottom of the post.


----------



## dwit

bd3521 said:


> Its a year and two months anyway. I guess, I'll order another drive.


http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270810257768+


----------



## richsadams

dwit said:


> http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270810257768+


That's a pretty good deal! :up:


----------



## bd3521

dwit said:


> http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270810257768+


Thank you sir. I just grabbed this one a little while ago...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/330604697737#ht_739wt_1139

So my plan is to use JMFS and not WinFS! If all works well, I can copy the ebay drive to my new WD10EVDS and then to my old OEM drive thats grumpy. So I will have two backups.


----------



## drhankz

bd3521 said:


> Thank you sir. I just grabbed this one a little while ago...
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/330604697737#ht_739wt_1139
> 
> So my plan is to use JMFS and not WinFS! If all works well, I can copy the ebay drive to my new WD10EVDS and then to my old OEM drive thats grumpy. So I will have two backups.


JUST REMEMBER - you need to *BOOT* from JMFS. 
If you let Windows Access the drive it will be CRAP :down:


----------



## dwit

bd3521 said:


> Thank you sir. I just grabbed this one a little while ago...
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/330604697737#ht_739wt_1139
> 
> So my plan is to use JMFS and not WinFS! If all works well, I can copy the ebay drive to my new WD10EVDS and then to my old OEM drive thats grumpy. So I will have two backups.


Yep. Or sell one of them.


----------



## dwit

drhankz said:


> JUST REMEMBER - you need to *BOOT* from JMFS.
> If you let Windows Access the drive it will be CRAP :down:


Yep. Disconnect the windows drive.


----------



## drhankz

dwit said:


> Yep. Disconnect the windows drive.


That is *NOT* what I said


----------



## richsadams

bd3521 said:


> Thank you sir. I just grabbed this one a little while ago...
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/330604697737#ht_739wt_1139
> 
> So my plan is to use JMFS and not WinFS! If all works well, I can copy the ebay drive to my new WD10EVDS and then to my old OEM drive thats grumpy. So I will have two backups.


Here is what I would do (and this will save you some problems short and long-term):

1. Install the ebay drive into your existing TiVo. 
2. Run Clear and Delete Everything. 
3. Let it update to the latest OS. 
4. Get it set up completely (pairing cable cards, etc.). 
5. Use it to upgrade.
6. Put it on the shelf for safe keeping.

You can mess around with trying to copy the data to your old drive if you'd like but I wouldn't waste my time. Put the "new" OEM drive on the shelf and you're golden.


----------



## bobman0330

vinylb said:


> I just bought a Premiere and after much struggle got Comcast to pair up my cablecard. After that I ordered a Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 and followed procedures outlined in 1st post by Comer to copy the original drive.
> 
> Plugged in Tivo after assembly and noticed that i had about 467 hours of "best quality recording". I thought a 2tb after supersize could only get you about 312 hours. Am I missing something? Why is mine showing much more? Dont get me wrong, I love the extra space but cannot help but be suspicious.
> 
> btw thanks to ALL who have contributed and especially to Comer for such an easy process !!!!!
> 
> extra info : from all research I have done ANY new sata drive will work whether its 5400rpm, 5900rp, or 7200rpm. I chose this model due to heat factor. I know a lot has also been said about drives and failure of drives - if you look at newegg, there are a lot of DOA reviews, i believe these are associated with their older shipping methods of throwing into a box with brown paper. Last few drives I have received have all been boxed within another box and held in place by "cups" to hold the sides of the drive in place so its well protected. I only got the Seagate because i missed a deal on the WD drives everybody seems to use here and got this seagate for $69 with free shipping - I dont regret this purchase.


Just as another data point, I got the same drive (from Amazon, also for $69) and my upgrade did not work. I got random stuttering escalating into freezes even after trying the upgrade repeatedly, on different computers, etc. I returned the drive and got the WD20EARS, and (cross your fingers) everything seems to have gone perfectly. I noticed that Amazon has stopped listing the Seagate drive due to customer complaints, so it's possible that there are some reliability problems (or Amazon shipping problems).


----------



## CoxInPHX

FYI: The price of the Western Digital AV-GP WD20EURS 2TB has dropped from $99.99 to $79.99 on both Amazon and Newegg.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-AV-GP-Intellipower-Internal/dp/B0042AG9V8/

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136783

I upgraded my OEM 320GB to the WD20EURS over the weekend, simplest upgrade ever, copy took about 2 hours.

I paid $89.99 last week, wish I had waited a week, I was expecting the price to go back up, not down.

One minor issue though, with the OEM 320GB HDD, I never had a single "Green Circle" wait issue using the HDUI. Since the upgrade, I have had to wait several times for the menu to become responsive again. Adding and modifying Season Passes also takes a bit longer to get passed the Please Wait.


----------



## bd3521

richsadams said:


> Here is what I would do (and this will save you some problems short and long-term):
> 
> 1. Install the ebay drive into your existing TiVo.
> 2. Run Clear and Delete Everything.
> 3. Let it update to the latest OS.
> 4. Get it set up completely (pairing cable cards, etc.).
> 5. Use it to upgrade.
> 6. Put it on the shelf for safe keeping.
> 
> You can mess around with trying to copy the data to your old drive if you'd like but I wouldn't waste my time. Put the "new" OEM drive on the shelf and you're golden.


Everything works great now - 1TB! Thanks very much guys.


----------



## jfh3

For those looking to upgrade - both Newegg and Amazon have the WD20EURS drive now for $79.99. (The EURS drive is an AV drive that has the AAM setting to the quietest level).

Usually the AV drives are $10-$20 more (and if you follow the instructions here, there is no advantage to using an AV drive over the regular green ones).


----------



## M.N.M

Has anyone tried adding an expander/external drive to a 2TB TP yet? (Like the weakness model 2TB internal + 2TB external)

I couldn't find any post mentioning attempts to get this working.


----------



## dwit

M.N.M said:


> Has anyone tried adding an expander/external drive to a 2TB TP yet? (Like the weakness model 2TB internal + 2TB external)
> 
> I couldn't find any post mentioning attempts to get this working.


Weaknees methods of achieving this are "trade secrets" right now.

Outside of the weaknees models, maximum capacity is a *total* of 2 TB.


----------



## Big Deficit

HELP!!! I've tried upgrading my premier using jmfs. The copy went fine. I used wdidle3 and that (after a few computer sata issues) went fine too and reports disabled (62 min). When I try to boot, I get the wait screen for maybe a minute then it flashes black, all the lights on the tivo flash and the process restarts. I've now tried both a wd20ears and a wd20eurs with the same result (well, the ears boot loops faster than the eurs). What the heck am I doing wrong? I've added drives to every tivo I've owned all the way back to 2000 and have never had a problem.


----------



## dwit

Big Deficit said:


> HELP!!! I've tried upgrading my premier using jmfs. The copy went fine. I used wdidle3 and that (after a few computer sata issues) went fine too and reports disabled (62 min). When I try to boot, I get the wait screen for maybe a minute then it flashes black, all the lights on the tivo flash and the process restarts. I've now tried both a wd20ears and a wd20eurs with the same result (well, the ears boot loops faster than the eurs). What the heck am I doing wrong? I've added drives to every tivo I've owned all the way back to 2000 and have never had a problem.


Have you tried *reinstalling the original* Tivo drive to see if it starts up and operates properly?

Were any errors(source,destination) reported on screen during the copy?


----------



## Big Deficit

dwit said:


> Have you tried *reinstalling the original* Tivo drive to see if it starts up and operates properly?
> 
> Were any errors(source,destination) reported on screen during the copy?


Thanks for the reply. I solved the problem. Just in case anyone else has this issue though unlikely-

My ancient and probably last desktop pc (Asus a7n8x-e deluxe mb) has onboard sata but can't handle large 1T+ drives. It hangs on post if one is connected. That's why I got a pci sata card, which has worked fine including upgrading my TivoHD several years ago. I had trouble applying wdidle3 with the pci card, which says it doesn't support pci-x. I eventually solved that problem by activating the on board sata but not plugging in the drive till after post. Just before bed last night, I thought the sata card could also be messing with the copy but jmfs is not reporting the error. I did the same "hot plug" with the drives and noticed the copy went ~30% faster. When I awoke this morning, I did the expand/super size, installed the drive and had a working 317hr premier.


----------



## unitron

Big Deficit said:


> Thanks for the reply. I solved the problem. Just in case anyone else has this issue though unlikely-
> 
> My ancient and probably last desktop pc (Asus a7n8x-e deluxe mb) has onboard sata but can't handle large 1T+ drives. It hangs on post if one is connected. That's why I got a pci sata card, which has worked fine including upgrading my TivoHD several years ago. I had trouble applying wdidle3 with the pci card, which says it doesn't support pci-x. I eventually solved that problem by activating the on board sata but not plugging in the drive till after post. Just before bed last night, I thought the sata card could also be messing with the copy but jmfs is not reporting the error. I did the same "hot plug" with the drives and noticed the copy went ~30% faster. When I awoke this morning, I did the expand/super size, installed the drive and had a working 317hr premier.


I've got that same motherboard, and you're right, a 1TB SATA drive chokes it.

However, that same drive with a JMicron or Marvell chipset based SATA/IDE adapter, will boot just fine, manufacturers' diagnostic disks work and aren't bothered by finding a SATA drive on the IDE controller, and I ran wdidle3 on a WD10EACS that way, no problem.

I even connected 2TB drives, the WD20EADS, that way to format NTFS with the Parted Magic cd.

So, if they'd kept making bigger and bigger IDE drives, that motherboard could have handled them.

Too bad the SATA controller wasn't made by whoever made the IDE controller.

I'll remember that hot plug technique for when all my adapters are tied up elsewhere though.


----------



## Hilltopper06

I have a Premiere in my living room that I don't want to mess with and an extra Premiere in my closet that I planned to use when my Tivo HD subscription expired but Tivo offered the $99 lifetime so I took it and now I have this 'extra' Premiere. 

Here's my question: is it possible to try to do an upgrade before I activate a subscription on this Premiere or would it have to be fully functional with a subscription to upgrade? I'm asking because if I can get this Premiere to work with a large hard drive then I would pay the $399 for lifetime on it but I don't want to do that unless I know it would work.


----------



## lillevig

Just ordered a new Premiere so I was checking out this thread. Been using WINMFS in the past for Series 1, 2DT, and 3HD but I understand that does not work for Premieres. My questions:

1. Will JMFS work if both drives are connected using external SATA to USB adapters?
2. Can I make a backup copy of my virgin Tivo drive without voiding the Tivo warranty?


----------



## lpwcomp

lillevig said:


> 1. Will JMFS work if both drives are connected using external SATA to USB adapters?


Should work as long as you use two separate adapters rather than one multi-drive adapters.


lillevig said:


> 2. Can I make a backup copy of my virgin Tivo drive without voiding the Tivo warranty?


Since you have to open the TiVo to do this, the answer would be no.


----------



## lillevig

lpwcomp said:


> Since you have to open the TiVo to do this, the answer would be no.


I didn't know if the Premiere had a warranty sticker or some other anti-tampering indicator. Since JMFS copies the whole drive I guess I can wait the 90 days before popping the top off. As a retired engineer it's hard to keep my hands out of stuff.


----------



## dwit

Hilltopper06 said:


> I have a Premiere in my living room that I don't want to mess with and an extra Premiere in my closet that I planned to use when my Tivo HD subscription expired but Tivo offered the $99 lifetime so I took it and now I have this 'extra' Premiere.
> 
> Here's my question: is it possible to try to do an upgrade before I activate a subscription on this Premiere or would it have to be fully functional with a subscription to upgrade? I'm asking because if I can get this Premiere to work with a large hard drive then I would pay the $399 for lifetime on it but I don't want to do that unless I know it would work.


Yes. You can upgrade the Premiere hard drive before activating a subscription. I have done so(decided not to subscribe).


----------



## lpwcomp

lillevig said:


> I didn't know if the Premiere had a warranty sticker or some other anti-tampering indicator. Since JMFS copies the whole drive I guess I can wait the 90 days before popping the top off. As a retired engineer it's hard to keep my hands out of stuff.


I don't believe there is any kind of anti-tampering device. I didn't say you would get caught if all you did was back it up and put it back in. However, on further consideration, I don't think there _is_ any way to backup a Premiere. When you do the upgrade, be sure and store the stock drive in safe place.


----------



## lillevig

lpwcomp said:


> I don't believe there is any kind of anti-tampering device. I didn't say you would get caught if all you did was back it up and put it back in. However, on further consideration, I don't think there _is_ any way to backup a Premiere. When you do the upgrade, be sure and store the stock drive in safe place.


When I said Backup, what I really meant was to just duplicate the stock drive and store it away to make future drives if the stock one fails. As Buffalo Springfield once said "Paranoia strikes deep".


----------



## lpwcomp

I'm not paranoid but I know everyone thinks I am.


----------



## unitron

lillevig said:


> When I said Backup, what I really meant was to just duplicate the stock drive and store it away to make future drives if the stock one fails. As Buffalo Springfield once said "Paranoia strikes deep".


That's not paranoia, that's just a deep and proper appreciation of the full effects and ramifications of Murphy's Law.

And as we all know, Murphy was an optimist.


----------



## ~kyle

I have a problem (maybe). I just bought a WD20EARS to upgrade my premiere. I've run the WD lifeguard and it passed both the quick and extended tests. But it says that AAM is not supported. So I tried checking with the Hitachi Feature Tool v.2.11 CD and it also said that that feature is not supported. Is this something I should worry about? Has WD changed the drive features for the WD20EARS? Mine has a manufacture date of "03 AUG 2011". I did set the idle time to 300 with no problems.

Thanks in advance for any help.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

~kyle said:


> I have a problem (maybe). I just bought a WD20EARS to upgrade my premiere. I've run the WD lifeguard and it passed both the quick and extended tests. But it says that AAM is not supported. So I tried checking with the Hitachi Feature Tool v.2.11 CD and it also said that that feature is not supported. Is this something I should worry about? Has WD changed the drive features for the WD20EARS? Mine has a manufacture date of "03 AUG 2011". I did set the idle time to 300 with no problems.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.


There's also the hdparm utility on the Linux mfs-live CD you could try.

But even if that fails, the EARS is a green drive, regardless, you're probably fine with the sound as is. Fire it up and see how noisy it is.


----------



## ~kyle

ThreeSoFar said:


> There's also the hdparm utility on the Linux mfs-live CD you could try.
> 
> But even if that fails, the EARS is a green drive, regardless, you're probably fine with the sound as is. Fire it up and see how noisy it is.


Thanks, I may just do that and fire it up anyway. It's in an enclosed cabinet so I'm probably not going to hear it anyway.


----------



## Stuxnet

~kyle said:


> It's in an enclosed cabinet so I'm probably not going to hear it anyway.


Not to go far OT, but you do have the cabinet well-ventilated... yes?


----------



## ~kyle

Stuxnet said:


> Not to go far OT, but you do have the cabinet well-ventilated... yes?


Abslolutely, it's a well ventilated BDI cabinet that I've been using for several years and never had any heat issues at all.


----------



## roberte94066

Comer, it appears I do not have enough posts to pm yet. I am trying to add a VVS,(believe that is proper i.d.), drive previously formatted for a THD in a 3rd party case to my Premiere. It sees it, reboots, and then nothing. I was hoping you could send your upgrade instructions to my email address, ([email protected]). Many thanks, Robert E.


----------



## 1idjack

I just upgraded my Premiere XL with a Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB. I chose the Samsung because it has more favorable reviews on Newegg than the WD drives, and the power usage is even lower than WD drives. Copying took just under seven hours hooked to the motherboard of my ancient Dell (I think it has SATA I). While copying, I had the drive vertical, and it was silent. Installed in my Tivo it is horizontal, of course, and now, really loud! I pulled it to reset AAM, which is set to "disabled" as delivered. When set to "quiet" by Samsung's ES Tools, it is very close to the WD drives I have.
One thing is a little odd: my Tivo shows 301 hours of hd capacity. I don't know how I managed that(I think most people are getting about 317 with 2 Tb).
Just a note: although Samsung doesn't make a big deal of it, the reviews I read say this is "advanced format" like the new WD drives.
P.S.: Many thanks to Comer.


----------



## dwit

1idjack said:


> I just upgraded my Premiere XL with a Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB. I chose the Samsung because it has more favorable reviews on Newegg than the WD drives, and the power usage is even lower than WD drives. Copying took just under seven hours hooked to the motherboard of my ancient Dell (I think it has SATA I). While copying, I had the drive vertical, and it was silent. Installed in my Tivo it is horizontal, of course, and now, really loud! I pulled it to reset AAM, which is set to "disabled" as delivered. When set to "quiet" by Samsung's ES Tools, it is very close to the WD drives I have.
> One thing is a little odd: my Tivo shows 301 hours of hd capacity. I don't know how I managed that(I think most people are getting about 317 with 2 Tb).
> Just a note: although Samsung doesn't make a big deal of it, the reviews I read say this is "advanced format" like the new WD drives.
> P.S.: Many thanks to Comer.


Did you do the "Supersize" step?

Or maybe it's(capacity) is related to the "advanced format".


----------



## ~kyle

I never could set AAM with any of the suggested utilities on my WD20EARS. Everything I used said AAM was "not supported". So I went ahead and set the idle to 300 and upgraded my premiere anyway after making a bootable usb flash drive with jmfs Sunday night. Took just a few hours and everything went without a hitch and now I've got 317 hours. 

Thanks comer, I just sent you a donation...not enough for a hard drive but maybe enough for a few beers. 

...and thanks to everyone else on here whose suggestions and experience came in handy.

Cheers!


----------



## roberte94066

Ok, time to pick the collective brain again! I just replaced the 320gb drive on my Premiere with a 1.5tb drive. The operation went smoothly and all was well until I tried to add a Mybook AV expander. Tivo sees the expander and goes through the power cycle to add it, but nothing happens. When it fully reboots, it shows a message that it sees the expander and offers options. I used a different esata cable with it, btw. Where do I go from here???


----------



## unitron

roberte94066 said:


> Ok, time to pick the collective brain again! I just replaced the 320gb drive on my Premiere with a 1.5tb drive. The operation went smoothly and all was well until I tried to add a Mybook AV expander. Tivo sees the expander and goes through the power cycle to add it, but nothing happens. When it fully reboots, it shows a message that it sees the expander and offers options. I used a different esata cable with it, btw. Where do I go from here???


The 1TB you're allowed to use from an external drive you already used internally with the 1.5TB.

You get the original 320GB plus up to 1TB additional grand total and that's it, whether the 1TB is an external drive or part of the internal.


----------



## roberte94066

I'm sorry, but doesn't the machine support up to 2.25gb total??


----------



## unitron

roberte94066 said:


> I'm sorry, but doesn't the machine support up to 2.25gb total??


Perhaps I'm confusing it with the constraints reported for the S3 platform machines.

You could go back and read this thread and a few others from the beginning and probably find out.


----------



## ducker

lillevig said:


> I didn't know if the Premiere had a warranty sticker or some other anti-tampering indicator. Since JMFS copies the whole drive I guess I can wait the 90 days before popping the top off. As a retired engineer it's hard to keep my hands out of stuff.


This is harder to do then you may think - at least in my experience. I'm at about 30 days, and I'm dieing to pull the trigger. Due to the limited capacity I'm watching shows faster then I typically do - often I wait for the weekend to watch a number of the shows, because the weekdays are just too busy.

But with all these new shows up and coming, combine with children's programming - I'm already up to 60% or so.

I don't think I'll be able to wait anther 60 days


----------



## ducker

lillevig said:


> When I said Backup, what I really meant was to just duplicate the stock drive and store it away to make future drives if the stock one fails. As Buffalo Springfield once said "Paranoia strikes deep".


Duplicate the stock drive, and put the non-stock drive back in. Put away the stock drive and keep that one safe. That's what most people do.

If you're going to go in there to pull the drive and back it up, I would suggest finding a drive a bit larger (why not!) and then not replace the stock drive in the unit, and instead use your new copy.

Use the copy, versus the original.


----------



## roberte94066

So I guess my question still stands-can anyone think of a reason why a mybook av expander would fail to mate with a tivo premiere which has a freshly installed 1.5tb drive? The installed drive is working nicely, btw.


----------



## lpwcomp

roberte94066 said:


> So I guess my question still stands-can anyone think of a reason why a mybook av expander would fail to mate with a tivo premiere which has a freshly installed 1.5tb drive? The installed drive is working nicely, btw.


Just thrwing these out as possibilities. I don't know for sure but:

You're trying to exceed the 2.2 TB limit and it can't use just part of the expander? The expander has to be as large as or larger than the internal?


----------



## dwit

roberte94066 said:


> So I guess my question still stands-can anyone think of a reason why a mybook av expander would fail to mate with a tivo premiere which has a freshly installed 1.5tb drive? The installed drive is working nicely, btw.


The "mating" capability is only functional with a *stock* Tivo hard drive. So the capability is typically lost if the drive has been upgraded.

Edited for more accurate info: See link below:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8226583#post8226583


----------



## lillevig

dwit said:


> The "mating" capability is only functional with a *stock* Tivo hard drive. So the capability is typically lost if the drive has been upgraded.


I've heard that upgrading the drive causes you to lose the expander drive function on Series3/3HD boxes but I assumed that was because WINMFS or MFSLive only make truncated images. Is that still the case with JMFS which supposedly clones the drive? Or maybe the expander function would still work if the new drive was the same size as the original but not if it is larger. Anyone have first hand experience in this area?


----------



## lillevig

ducker said:


> Duplicate the stock drive, and put the non-stock drive back in. Put away the stock drive and keep that one safe. That's what most people do.
> 
> If you're going to go in there to pull the drive and back it up, I would suggest finding a drive a bit larger (why not!) and then not replace the stock drive in the unit, and instead use your new copy.
> 
> Use the copy, versus the original.


Yeah, that's what I've done with my other Tivos. I like WINMFS so that is what I've used on the older boxes but I still have the original drives stashed away in case of emergency. Anyone in the market for an original Series 1 Philips 14 GB drive?


----------



## dwit

lillevig said:


> I've heard that upgrading the drive causes you to lose the expander drive function on Series3/3HD boxes but I assumed that was because WINMFS or MFSLive only make truncated images. Is that still the case with JMFS which supposedly clones the drive? Or maybe the expander function would still work if the new drive was the same size as the original but not if it is larger. Anyone have first hand experience in this area?


Okay, here is what jmfs developer, Comer, says:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8226583#post8226583

"You can do it with the current set of tools. However, if your total storage will be *greater than 2Tb then you will experience a glitch of unknown consequences*. So you better off just using 2tb drive."


----------



## roberte94066

And yet Weaknees has a 4tb internal/external system working-this begs the question of the problem being one of formatting only, that is to say, it should be possible to extend the partition out to its' 2.2tb limit via partitions on the external drive. True, it would not use all the external drive capacity, but that would be ok with me.


----------



## dwit

roberte94066 said:


> And yet Weaknees has a 4tb internal/external system working-this begs the question of the problem being one of formatting only, that is to say, it should be possible to extend the partition out to its' 2.2tb limit via partitions on the external drive. True, it would not use all the external drive capacity, but that would be ok with me.


When you figure out how to do it, or how weaknees does it, let us know.


----------



## roberte94066

OK, so I guess my question would be addressed to Comer. How did you add the 320gb external (original) drive to the 2tb internal drive ?


----------



## lpwcomp

roberte94066 said:


> OK, so I guess my question would be addressed to Comer. How did you add the 320gb external (original) drive to the 2tb internal drive ?


Where do you see that he did this?


----------



## roberte94066

I believe I followed the string from the previous post which also quoted him as follows:
Okay, here is what jmfs developer, Comer, says:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb...83#post8226583

"You can do it with the current set of tools. However, if your total storage will be greater than 2Tb then you will experience a glitch of unknown consequences. So you better off just using 2tb drive."


----------



## lpwcomp

I still see no evidence that he added a 320GB external to a 2TB internal.


----------



## lillevig

dwit said:


> Okay, here is what jmfs developer, Comer, says:
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8226583#post8226583
> 
> "You can do it with the current set of tools. However, if your total storage will be *greater than 2Tb then you will experience a glitch of unknown consequences*. So you better off just using 2tb drive."


Thanks. I can handle glitches of known consequences but not so sure about those of unknown consequences. The worst are unknown glitches of unknown consequences.  Seriously, though, I doubt that I'd ever have need for more than a single 1TB drive anyway. I was just curious.


----------



## roberte94066

Well, can't give up yet. It wants to work, I just need to find a way to help it. I was wondering if there is a specific program that will allow me to see the partitions on a tiro hard drive?


----------



## unitron

roberte94066 said:


> Well, can't give up yet. It wants to work, I just need to find a way to help it. I was wondering if there is a specific program that will allow me to see the partitions on a tiro hard drive?


pdisk (with the list option) will show you the partition map. It's included on most of the "live" cds.

WinMFS will also show you the map.

Is a list of the partitions which shows which number they've been assigned, their start and end points (they aren't necessarily on the disk in the order of the numbers), and what file system they use sufficient?

Because beyond that you'll need a hex editor.


----------



## roberte94066

unfortunately, winmfs doesn't see my original drive.


----------



## unitron

roberte94066 said:


> unfortunately, winmfs doesn't see my original drive.


Are you logged on as administrator or do you otherwise have administrator privileges? Which version of Windows?


----------



## steve614

roberte94066 said:


> unfortunately, winmfs doesn't see my original drive.


If you're using Windows 7, right click on the winmfs.exe and select "Run as Administrator".


----------



## Soapm

How slow is this supposed to go? After 3 hours I've transferred about 2.5 Gigs. Or maybe it's 25 gigs but since the drive is 160 gigs this will take a while...

Edited to add... After 12 hours I've transferred 82GB. I am using IDE with SATA adapters and both drives are on the same channel. I guess I never knew how much faster SATA was but my rule is if it ain't broke then don't replace it...


----------



## unitron

Soapm said:


> How slow is this supposed to go? After 3 hours I've transferred about 2.5 Gigs. Or maybe it's 25 gigs but since the drive is 160 gigs this will take a while...
> 
> Edited to add... After 12 hours I've transferred 82GB. I am using IDE with SATA adapters and both drives are on the same channel. I guess I never knew how much faster SATA was but my rule is if it ain't broke then don't replace it...


It's that both drives on the same IDE cable that's killing you, although if managed to boot without DMA enabled that would make a big difference as well.


----------



## Soapm

I guess I should have put one on the IDe channel with the CDROM. Didn't think to do that. Oh well, we learn as we live. I hope it will be done when I get home from work cuz that will be 24 hours.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Soapm said:


> I guess I should have put one on the IDe channel with the CDROM. Didn't think to do that. Oh well, we learn as we live. I hope it will be done when I get home from work cuz that will be 24 hours.


This PCI SATA adapter is what I use, but mine's on a crappy old Pentium III, so it still is way slow. It's only $15 shipped, plus cables (cheap at monoprice.com).


----------



## Soapm

You guys won't believe this, after waiting all that time for the image to move to my 2TB drive SApper which I'm using to hack the drive doesn't recognize it as a Tivo drive and can't seem to mount it. However, out of desperation I was able to run SApper on the factory drive.

Man this sucks, so now that I have a hacked image on my factory drive I guess I'll have to copy it on to the 2TB drive which means waiting another 24 hours on pins and needles hoping the power doesn't fail or that no one messes with the computer while I'm gone. I can't believe my luck on this...


----------



## Soapm

Now that I've hacked my factory drive with SApper and got it all working with hacks jmfs no longer recognizes it as a Tivo drive. The only one it's recognizing is my 2TB drive. This means I can't copy the hacked image over to my 2TB drive.

Is there other software that can copy my 160gm drive to my 2TB then expend it? This is really getting frustrating. It is fighting me all the way...


----------



## roberte94066

I am running winmfs as an admin on W7. It plays nice with everything up to my original 320gb Tivo Premiere drive. It sees it as a Tivo drive, but mfinfo does not- Without diving too deep and cramming a basic education in Tivo disk structure, it seems to me that the problem with adding an additional drive to my already expanded Premiere hinges on either a check bit somewhere that is changed when you copy/expand your original drive, or a problem with the expanded drive seeing the expanded portion as an external drive.


----------



## unitron

roberte94066 said:


> I am running winmfs as an admin on W7. It plays nice with everything up to my original 320gb Tivo Premiere drive. It sees it as a Tivo drive, but mfinfo does not- Without diving too deep and cramming a basic education in Tivo disk structure, it seems to me that the problem with adding an additional drive to my already expanded Premiere hinges on either a check bit somewhere that is changed when you copy/expand your original drive, or a problem with the expanded drive seeing the expanded portion as an external drive.


I'm pretty sure that just like the Series 3 platform (orig, HD, HD XL), you can add an external to the stock internal, but you can't replace the stock internal with a bigger one and then add the external. No doubt it has something to do with the "spreading the recordings over 2 drives if you add an external" bug, I mean feature.


----------



## Soapm

roberte94066 said:


> I am running winmfs as an admin on W7. It plays nice with everything up to my original 320gb Tivo Premiere drive. It sees it as a Tivo drive, but mfinfo does not- Without diving too deep and cramming a basic education in Tivo disk structure, it seems to me that the problem with adding an additional drive to my already expanded Premiere hinges on either a check bit somewhere that is changed when you copy/expand your original drive, or a problem with the expanded drive seeing the expanded portion as an external drive.


I think it has to do with the extra partition. When you expand a drive you add an additional partition. I guess the external drive is viewed as that additional partition.

Now I know nothing about what I'm talking about so accept my comment as pure conjecture...


----------



## Resist

jfh3 said:


> For those looking to upgrade - both Newegg and Amazon have the WD20EURS drive now for $79.99. (The EURS drive is an AV drive that has the AAM setting to the quietest level).


The price is now $95 for this drive. It's normal for Amazon prices fluctuate up and down, sometimes even daily.


----------



## unitron

Resist said:


> The price is now $95 for this drive. It's normal for Amazon prices fluctuate up and down, sometimes even daily.


It's also normal for who the actual seller is on Amazon to fluctuate, which can affect the price being asked.


----------



## Resist

unitron said:


> It's also normal for who the actual seller is on Amazon to fluctuate, which can affect the price being asked.


I was referring to Amazon sold items and not Amazon 3rd party items.


----------



## unitron

Resist said:


> I was referring to Amazon sold items and not Amazon 3rd party items.


And you have to be sure to check to see which is which, 'cause 99% of the ad looks the same.


----------



## roberte94066

Just ran across a program named "iBored" that supposedly is a hex editor that will work with Tivo drives.


----------



## unitron

roberte94066 said:


> Just ran across a program named "iBored" that supposedly is a hex editor that will work with Tivo drives.


Provided you know what to edit.


----------



## P42

camelcamelcamel.com is great for tracking and alerting on Amazon price changes, and it racks 3rd parties that sell through Amazon

eg this is the 2TB WD20EARS I put in my Premiere:
http://camelcamelcamel.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Intellipower-Desktop/product/B002ZCXK0I


----------



## jfh3

I am in the process of copying a Elite drive (WD20EURS) with the Comer tool.

Can anyone who knows more about the Tivo file structure comment as to whether or not there could be reasons why they copy wouldn't book/run normally in an Elite? Is getting to the Tivo Central enough to verify the copied drive works (or should work) OK?


----------



## generaltso

jfh3 said:


> I am in the process of copying a Elite drive (WD20EURS) with the Comer tool.
> 
> Can anyone who knows more about the Tivo file structure comment as to whether or not there could be reasons why they copy wouldn't book/run normally in an Elite? Is getting to the Tivo Central enough to verify the copied drive works (or should work) OK?


It's just doing a dd copy, so there's no reason the cloned drive shouldn't work. The real question is whether you'll be able to expand the copy, or whether a drive bigger than 2TB will work in an Elite at all. What size drive are you using?


----------



## jfh3

generaltso said:


> It's just doing a dd copy, so there's no reason the cloned drive shouldn't work. The real question is whether you'll be able to expand the copy, or whether a drive bigger than 2TB will work in an Elite at all. What size drive are you using?


That's what I thought - thanks.

I'm using a WD20EARS drive (2TB); don't have a 3TB internal drive (though I may get one to try).


----------



## generaltso

jfh3 said:


> I'm using a WD20EARS drive (2TB), don't have a 3TB internal drive (though I may go out and get one to try).


I've got a 3TB WD30EURS drive ready to test, but my Elite won't arrive from Weaknees until 10/17.


----------



## unitron

jfh3 said:


> I am in the process of copying a Elite drive (WD20EURS) with the Comer tool.
> 
> Can anyone who knows more about the Tivo file structure comment as to whether or not there could be reasons why they copy wouldn't book/run normally in an Elite? Is getting to the Tivo Central enough to verify the copied drive works (or should work) OK?


If you get as far as TiVo Central then the drive works okay as far as booting and loading the operating system.

As to whether it'll run into any problem actually recording shows to the MFS partitions, that's a separate question on which I can't offer any guarantees.

You may have to experiment and report back for the benefit of others.


----------



## resildoc

Hi-Plz forgive being neophyte, but...quick and perhaps a stupid question. Using a windows 7 computer, in advance of using jmfs, does the new virgin wd-ears drive need to be initialized/formatted or does booting from jmfs take care of this? Thanks, Joel:


----------



## L David Matheny

resildoc said:


> Hi-Plz forgive being neophyte, but...quick and perhaps a stupid question. Using a windows 7 computer, in advance of using jmfs, does the new virgin wd-ears drive need to be initialized/formatted or does booting from jmfs take care of this? Thanks, Joel:


JMFS takes care of formatting.


----------



## lpwcomp

Do not, under any circumstances, make either the existing or the new drive available to windows. If this is a Premiere that you are upgrading, do not even boot up windows with the drives attached.

Also, in case you are unaware, you will probably need to run wdidle3 on the new drive.


----------



## resildoc

Thanks so much!


----------



## resildoc

Hi Folks-You have recently been so helpful, another quick question:

If jmfs clones the drive, and (a) my old drive with all "to-dos" etc. seems to not 

be the problem for replacement; (b) and I am receiving a new tivo, in your 

expert opinions, better to use jmfs with new tivo hard drive-->new 2 tb drive or 

old tivo hard drive-->new 2 tb drive to maintain previous info? 

Thanks, Joel.


----------



## lpwcomp

resildoc said:


> Hi Folks-You have recently been so helpful, another quick question:
> 
> If jmfs clones the drive, and (a) my old drive with all "to-dos" etc. seems to not
> 
> be the problem for replacement; (b) and I am receiving a new tivo, in your
> 
> expert opinions, better to use jmfs with new tivo hard drive-->new 2 tb drive or
> 
> old tivo hard drive-->new 2 tb drive to maintain previous info?
> 
> Thanks, Joel.


Use the existing drive from whatever TiVo the new drive is going into. When you install a drive created from a different TiVo, one of the first things it does is a clear & delete everything. What you should do is set up the new TiVo, including CableCARD pairing (if required). Then do the upgrade using that drive. If your old TiVo is still working, you may be able to copy at least the Season Passes off and put them on the new TiVo using TiVos web site (if either ot both are TiVo 3s) or kmttg if they are both Premieres.


----------



## resildoc

lpwcomp said:


> Use the existing drive from whatever TiVo the new drive is going into. When you install a drive created from a different TiVo, one of the first things it does is a clear & delete everything. What you should do is set up the new TiVo, including CableCARD pairing (if required). Then do the upgrade using that drive. If your old TiVo is still working, you may be able to copy at least the Season Passes off and put them on the new TiVo using TiVos web site (if either ot both are TiVo 3s) or kmttg if they are both Premieres.


Thanks again, and will follow this lead. The new one should be a premiere, and what is "kmttg"? Can you direct me to a thread that has the info on how to pull the season passes?

Also, one more question. I have the external wd external drive containing the old shows--and understanding that many say you cannot grab shows from these--since I will no longer be using an external drive is there a way to capture these shows? BTW, the TIVO that is being replaced will not boot with this drive plugged in, thus the replacement. I think that the external drive may be ok, and that it is the tivo receptacle that causes the continuous looping bootup...Any ideas? THANKS AGAIN. Joel.


----------



## lpwcomp

resildoc said:


> Thanks again, and will follow this lead. The new one should be a premiere, and what is "kmttg"? Can you direct me to a thread that has the info on how to pull the season passes?


kmttg is a free, third party application that is capable of a lot of things. If the old TiVo is a Premiere, you can use it to backup your SPs and restore them to the new TiVo. Otherwise, you will have to use the online Season Pass Manager.



resildoc said:


> Also, one more question. I have the external wd external drive containing the old shows--and understanding that many say you cannot grab shows from these--since I will no longer be using an external drive is there a way to capture these shows? BTW, the TIVO that is being replaced will not boot with this drive plugged in, thus the replacement. I think that the external drive may be ok, and that it is the tivo receptacle that causes the continuous looping bootup...Any ideas? THANKS AGAIN. Joel.


You can't recover the data from the external drive. It is tied not only to the TiVo to which it was connected but also to the internal drive in that TiVo.

Does the TiVo boot with the external drive disconnected? If so, while it could be the connection to the drive that is bad, those external drives are notorious for going bad.


----------



## resildoc

regarding kmm....

This is great for the tivo on the computer! Two very quick questions. 

First, will this program allow you to work on your computer with HBO shows?

Second, once jmfs and associated programs are used, can you plz recommend a similar free high quality program that will enhance tv experience, such as zapping commercials and other features?

Again, many thanks!!


----------



## lpwcomp

resildoc said:


> regarding kmm....
> 
> This is great for the tivo on the computer! Two very quick questions.
> 
> First, will this program allow you to work on your computer with HBO shows?


If you are talking about recordings on your TiVo that are marked as copy protected, then no.



resildoc said:


> Second, once jmfs and associated programs are used, can you plz recommend a similar free high quality program that will enhance tv experience, such as zapping commercials and other features?


There is a free "commercial zapper" included with the kmttg package, but the one time I tried to use it, it didn't work. Most people around here seem to use VideoReDo, which isn't free.


----------



## resildoc

I think after jm...on the tivo and km on the computer, we are interested not only in 
commercial zappers, but also any freeware that people use to enhance the overall "on tv" tivo experience with extended features. I have searched and not found a majority opinion. Any help with this is appreciated.


----------



## lpwcomp

Well, I'm not sure I can be much help in that area. I use pyTivo, kmttg, MetaGenerator, and PyTivoMetaThis. I would like to use streambaby or something similar so I could view 1080P content via my TiVo, but can't seem to get it to function properly on Win2K.

There's probably no real consensus because, in spite of what some people would like to believe, there is no "right" way to use a TiVo. Since there's all of this free stuff available, there's no real cost to you, except your time and perhaps some aggravation, in trying a lot of different things until you find the combination right for you.


----------



## resildoc

No prob...Thanks again for the input. Warmly, Joel.


----------



## Soapm

How does jmfs know or how does it recognize a Tivo drive? Is it looking at the kernal, partitions etc...???


----------



## unitron

Soapm said:


> How does jmfs know or how does it recognize a Tivo drive? Is it looking at the kernal, partitions etc...???


 Premiere Drive Upgrade Instructions - with all-in-one jmfs Live CD

from the first post

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8143047#post8143047

"Sources (jmfs-src*.zip) are also in the folder for those who want to build themselves. "

Have fun wading through the code.


----------



## Soapm

unitron said:


> Premiere Drive Upgrade Instructions - with all-in-one jmfs Live CD
> 
> from the first post
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8143047#post8143047
> 
> "Sources (jmfs-src*.zip) are also in the folder for those who want to build themselves. "
> 
> Have fun wading through the code.


Me wading through code is like asking Jeffrey Dahmer to bring th meat loaf or asking Stevie Wonder if your fly is open. It's just one of those things you don't want to do.

I was just wondering if the developer knew???


----------



## Stuxnet

lpwcomp said:


> Do not, under any circumstances, make either the existing or the new drive available to windows. If this is a Premiere that you are upgrading, do not even boot up windows with the drives attached.


There's no problem mounting the new target drive. In fact, I'd recommend that you run the full WD diagnostic tool against the target BEFORE the jmfs process. That's also a good time to set AAM using HDDScan.


----------



## Soapm

I fund a tool in the first post called mfslayout.sh that works on the drive jmfs recognizes but doesn't work on the drive it doesn't recognize so I have no way to compare the two.


----------



## unitron

Soapm said:


> I fund a tool in the first post ...


Glad to see someone's picking up the tab!


----------



## jfh3

For anyone interested in expanding an Elite - copy works, expand fails to a target 3TB drive. Not a big surprise.


----------



## generaltso

jfh3 said:


> For anyone interested in expanding an Elite - copy works, expand fails to a target 3TB drive. Not a big surprise.


Did you try booting the Elite from the 3TB target after the copy but before the expand?


----------



## jfh3

generaltso said:


> Did you try booting the Elite from the 3TB target after the copy but before the expand?


No. Didn't even think of trying that - went right from the copy to expand.

I may try a copy again before I re-purpose the 3TB, but not really sure what it buys at this point. Not any value to being able to boot a 3TB if I can only use it as a 2TB drive.


----------



## unitron

jfh3 said:


> No. Didn't even think of trying that - went right from the copy to expand.
> 
> I may try a copy again before I re-purpose the 3TB, but not really sure what it buys at this point. Not any value to being able to boot a 3TB if I can only use it as a 2TB drive.


If you copy via dd (or one of its descendents), so that the drive has a 2TB partition map, and it works, but copying via one of the TiVo specific utilities and winding up with an humongous Apple_Free "partition" doesn't work, then we will have learned something, and eventually might even figure out what it means.


----------



## generaltso

jfh3 said:


> No. Didn't even think of trying that - went right from the copy to expand.
> 
> I may try a copy again before I re-purpose the 3TB, but not really sure what it buys at this point. Not any value to being able to boot a 3TB if I can only use it as a 2TB drive.


It would be very useful to know whether or not the Elite will boot from a 3TB drive, even with a 2TB image on it. The Premiere won't recognize a 3TB drive at all, so we know there's nothing we an do to make one work. But if the Elite can recognize and boot from a 3TB drive, we just have to figure out how to properly expand the image. That's a big difference.


----------



## Soapm

unitron said:


> Glad to see someone's picking up the tab!


You must have stole my O. It was there when I hit post.


----------



## Resist

Anyone use something like this instead of their computer to copy a Tivo drive?

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isSsWB2c5Rg[/media]


----------



## steffen707

lpwcomp said:


> Do not, under any circumstances, make either the existing or the new drive available to windows. If this is a Premiere that you are upgrading, do not even boot up windows with the drives attached.
> 
> Also, in case you are unaware, you will probably need to run wdidle3 on the new drive.


Why can't you boot to windows with either of the drives? I thought this issue was fixed with vista/7 because those OS don't mount the drive automatically?
If you say you can't boot to windows then why does winmfs run in windows for TIVO HD?


----------



## unitron

steffen707 said:


> Why can't you boot to windows with either of the drives? I thought this issue was fixed with vista/7 because those OS don't mount the drive automatically?
> If you say you can't boot to windows then why does winmfs run in windows for TIVO HD?


We aren't talking about Windows or WinMFS screwing up an S3 HD drive, we're talking about the Premiere (Series 4).

We don't know yet why it screws it up, but it does.

You've been warned.

If you don't have another drive from the same model S4 to do a byte for byte overwrite of the screwed up drive with, there's no cure.


----------



## Soapm

unitron said:


> We aren't talking about Windows or WinMFS screwing up an S3 HD drive, we're talking about the Premiere (Series 4).
> 
> We don't know yet why it screws it up, but it does.
> 
> You've been warned.
> 
> If you don't have another drive from the same model S4 to do a byte for byte overwrite of the screwed up drive with, there's no cure.


I had trouble with a TivoHD drive that I believe was linked to WinMFS. I can report for sure once my new format gets over 300 gigs since the WinMFS ran fine until it started to fill up...


----------



## lpwcomp

steffen707 said:


> Why can't you boot to windows with either of the drives? I thought this issue was fixed with vista/7 because those OS don't mount the drive automatically?
> If you say you can't boot to windows then why does winmfs run in windows for TIVO HD?


I did not say "don't boot to windows", I said don't make the drive _*available*_ to Windows, i.e. don't mount it. _*I*_ can't boot my machine with a TiVo drive attached since I am still using Win2k.


----------



## lpwcomp

Soapm said:


> I had trouble with a TivoHD drive that I believe was linked to WinMFS. I can report for sure once my new format gets over 300 gigs since the WinMFS ran fine until it started to fill up...


That statement is a bit misleading, don't you think?


----------



## Soapm

lpwcomp said:


> That statement is a bit misleading, don't you think?


Just depends on how you read it. I call it honest.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8760071#post8760071


----------



## lpwcomp

Soapm said:


> Just depends on how you read it. I call it honest.
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8760071#post8760071


Since you used WinMFS to do something that the documentation _*explicitly*_ says it cannot do and never claimed it could do and, surprise, surprise, had a problem, I call it disingenuous.


----------



## unitron

lpwcomp said:


> That statement is a bit misleading, don't you think?


Don't you have to be able to figure out what it says before you can be misled by it?


----------



## steffen707

unitron said:


> We aren't talking about Windows or WinMFS screwing up an S3 HD drive, we're talking about the Premiere (Series 4).
> 
> We don't know yet why it screws it up, but it does.
> 
> You've been warned.
> 
> If you don't have another drive from the same model S4 to do a byte for byte overwrite of the screwed up drive with, there's no cure.


Gotcha, thanks for the warning. I have an S3 HD but when I upgrade to Premiere I'll remember this.


----------



## Soapm

lpwcomp said:


> Since you used WinMFS to do something that the documentation _*explicitly*_ says it cannot do and never claimed it could do and, surprise, surprise, had a problem, I call it disingenuous.


Correct, hence my honest point about heading warnings...

I was just giving you an AMEN...


----------



## Soapm

unitron said:


> Don't you have to be able to figure out what it says before you can be misled by it?


OUCH!!! Now that's hitting below the belt...


----------



## cherry99

I use Tivo for OTA only.

I remember when I started using my brand new Tivo it gave me 14 days of full functionality including Program Guide even though it was unsubscribed. After 14 days the Program Guide was no longer available.

The question: will I get another 14 days with program guide if I load a virgin Hard Drive image taken from the same unit before it was even turned on?

Will it behave as brand new or the unit is marked/flagged somewhere in the firmware or on Tivo servers?


----------



## dwit

cherry99 said:


> I use Tivo for OTA only.
> 
> I remember when I started using my brand new Tivo it gave me 14 days of full functionality including Program Guide even though it was unsubscribed. After 14 days the Program Guide was no longer available.
> 
> The question: will I get another 14 days with program guide if I load a virgin Hard Drive image taken from the same unit before it was even turned on?
> 
> Will it behave as brand new or the unit is marked/flagged somewhere in the firmware or on Tivo servers?


No. Whenever your Premiere connects to the Tivo servers, before any programming is downloaded, the subscription status is checked against the info the server has on your units TSN(id #). No subscription, no programming download.

All brand new Tivos get a free trial, 7 day period of (almost)full functionality, including full guide programming. If paid service is not activated by the 7th day, the full functionality is shut off.

Only one free trial per Tivo, *regardless* what you do to it. The servers know that your TSN# has used it's free trial period.


----------



## cherry99

dwit said:


> No. Whenever your Premiere connects to the Tivo servers, before any programming is downloaded, the subscription status is checked against the info the server has on your units TSN(id #). No subscription, no programming download.
> 
> All brand new Tivos get a free trial, 7 day period of (almost)full functionality, including full guide programming. If paid service is not activated by the 7th day, the full functionality is shut off.
> 
> Only one free trial per Tivo, *regardless* what you do to it. The servers know that your TSN# has used it's free trial period.


Thanks for clarifying this.


----------



## lessd

dwit said:


> No. Whenever your Premiere connects to the Tivo servers, before any programming is downloaded, the subscription status is checked against the info the server has on your units TSN(id #). No subscription, no programming download.
> 
> All brand new Tivos get a free trial, 7 day period of (almost)full functionality, including full guide programming. If paid service is not activated by the 7th day, the full functionality is shut off.
> 
> Only one free trial per Tivo, *regardless* what you do to it. The servers know that your TSN# has used it's free trial period.


You one free trial statement is not 100% true, on an older TiVo if you xfer the Lifetime Service off one TiVo to another, the now unactivated TiVo will get another free 7 days, but few people outside of Weeknee know about this as it has little practical use.


----------



## roberte94066

On another note, I find it interesting that a Premiere with an expanded drive will still try to install an external drive and will show "no external drive attached" in status reports. I only mention this because my understanding from postings here was that the expanded partitions where viewed as an external section by Tivo.


----------



## lillevig

Ok, I'm a seasoned WINMFS user but haven't tried JMFS yet. I do have a new Premiere so guess I need to bite the bullet sometime and give it a try. I usually use USB to SATA adapters instead of cracking open the PC but I've read here that WDIdle3, as a DOS program, won't recognize a USB adapter. My question: Has anyone tried using any of the DOS/USB Driver methods on the web to get around this issue? For instance, check out this website:

www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm


----------



## lpwcomp

I hope anyone planning on doing a drive upgrade/replacement has already purchased the new drive. Due to the floods in Thailand, prices have more than doubled recently.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

lillevig said:


> Ok, I'm a seasoned WINMFS user but haven't tried JMFS yet. I do have a new Premiere so guess I need to bite the bullet sometime and give it a try. I usually use USB to SATA adapters instead of cracking open the PC but I've read here that WDIdle3, as a DOS program, won't recognize a USB adapter. My question: Has anyone tried using any of the DOS/USB Driver methods on the web to get around this issue? For instance, check out this website:
> 
> www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm


JMFS is trivially easy to use. I'd say ignore the wdidle3 issue at first, proceed with your dupe and give it a shot in your Premiere. Try a soft reboot a few times to see if it fails, if it does then you need to go down the WDIdle3 route, if not you don't. Even if the soft boot fails, you'll have full use of your TiVo if you hard boot until the next update/soft boot.


----------



## rcliff

I've been doing upgrading my tivos since I made some crude custom bracket for my Series 1 Sony and added 2x 120GB drives and ran some cryptic linux tools. That was a pain. When I first saw this thread, I thought JMFS might be a hassle but this was the easiest upgrade yet. Very clear guided setup with confirmations all along the way makes this pretty much idiot proof. Only downside is that it takes a couple of hours vs the truncated backup/restore with Winmfs for Series 3 tivos. Much thanks to Comer and anyone else involved in this project


----------



## gardavis

The links to the jmfs software at the beginning of this thread do not work. The MediaFire link seems not to find it and the mirror link goes to a web site that no longer exists.

Someome reported this to me since my tutorial and youtube reference this post. I'd like to update the links to keep them fresh.

Thanks,
Gary Davis
---
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_KZsJ4vaQ[/media] - Part I
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO0QGhO30rE[/media] - Part II
http://diyclinic.webguild.com/ProjectTivoUpgrade.aspx - Tutorial


----------



## steve614

FWIW, the "previous" link in the OP still seems to work...

http://www.mediafire.com/?znr8p1h4uyn1v

ETA: Didn't realize that just has the older version.


----------



## unitron

gardavis said:


> The links to the jmfs software at the beginning of this thread do not work. The MediaFire link seems not to find it and the mirror link goes to a web site that no longer exists.
> 
> Someome reported this to me since my tutorial and youtube reference this post. I'd like to update the links to keep them fresh.
> 
> Thanks,
> Gary Davis
> ---
> [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_KZsJ4vaQ[/media] - Part I
> [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO0QGhO30rE[/media] - Part II
> http://diyclinic.webguild.com/ProjectTivoUpgrade.aspx - Tutorial


I just noticed this myself.

The mediafire link for rev68 still works, but not the mirror, and the mediafire link and the mirror for rev104 both do not work.

Anybody know anywhere else rev104 is downloadable from?


----------



## Stuxnet

Here's jmfs104 (link good for 30 days)


----------



## unitron

Stuxnet said:


> Here's jmfs104 (link good for 30 days)


Much grass!

For those wondering what a .7z file is, go here

http://www.7-zip.org/

and get the thing to unzip it with.


----------



## jonapt

You can download copies of JMFS 10.4 from:

http://cnunix.com/ftp/TiVo/jmfs-rev104.iso.zip

http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/tivo_upgrade/premiere_linux_inc_supersize_jmfs-rev104.iso


----------



## lillevig

Found this site when I was hunting around. Looks like he provides not only the utility but the Linux source code as well. Unfortunately, I'm not a Linux guy. Anyone willing to incorporate this into JMFS?

http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/


----------



## Stuxnet

Hiren's BootCD has WDIDLE3 built-in. Have you tried that?


----------



## lillevig

Stuxnet said:


> Hiren's BootCD has WDIDLE3 built-in. Have you tried that?


No I haven't, but I'm assuming that it still boots into DOS and would not recognize a USB to IDE/SATA cable. Technically, what I need is to have a version of WDIDLE that I can use with a laptop. Even when I use my desktop I never crack open the PC case. I always use a USB to IDE/SATA cable and have successfully done so with the laptop as well. To be honest, I haven't used JMFS yet but have used WINMFS and MFSTools to image S1, S2, and S3HD drives. If I ever use JMFS I will do the copy using two USB cables even though it will take much longer. I'm assuming that it will work that way because I've used them to do a disk-to-disk copy with WINMFS before.


----------



## Stuxnet

lillevig said:


> No I haven't, but I'm assuming that it still boots into DOS and would not recognize a USB to IDE/SATA cable. Technically, what I need is to have a version of WDIDLE that I can use with a laptop. Even when I use my desktop I never crack open the PC case. I always use a USB to IDE/SATA cable and have successfully done so with the laptop as well. To be honest, I haven't used JMFS yet but have used WINMFS and MFSTools to image S1, S2, and S3HD drives. If I ever use JMFS I will do the copy using two USB cables even though it will take much longer. I'm assuming that it will work that way because I've used them to do a disk-to-disk copy with WINMFS before.


There's a chance you might not need WDIDLE3. But you won't know for sure until you install the new drive.

I had a similar problem with USB/SATA adaptors... JMFS couldn't see my TiVo drive, so I had to open up a desktop and "borrow" the CD/DVD and HDD SATA cables, and run JMFS from a thumb drive.

BTW... you tag line dates you a bit, lol.
_______
if you want to be a bird...


----------



## unitron

Stuxnet said:


> ...
> BTW... you tag line dates you a bit, lol.
> _______
> if you want to be a bird...


Like the lady said about the future, either live it, or live with it!


----------



## lillevig

Stuxnet said:


> BTW... you tag line dates you a bit, lol.
> _______
> if you want to be a bird...


Hey, I'm old, and I don't care who knows about it. Young whippersnappers....


----------



## lpwcomp

lillevig said:


> Hey, I'm old, and I don't care who knows about it. Young whippersnappers....


Did you at least learn 3 mew words in Turkish today?


----------



## lillevig

lpwcomp said:


> Did you at least learn 3 mew words in Turkish today?


Ben bizim tüm bu otobüsteki Bozos olduğumuzu sanırım.


----------



## weinberk

kturcotte said:


> All right, I must have screwed something up. Everything's hooked up to the computer correctly. Both hard drives spin up, and the BIOS sees them. With the disc in, it does boot, and I do get the top row of Penguins. But then I get this message:
> 
> Fatal Error occurred-JAVAMFS Data not found. You are maybe using an unsupported boot device (eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA). Workaround: Copy the directory JAVAMFS from your boot device to an IDE/SATA disk, eg. to /mnt/hda1/javamfs or c:\javamfs. Then try to boot again.
> 
> Everything is SATA. Nothing is SCSI. No RAID or anything. What am I doing wrong?


Hmm, I'm getting the JavaMFS Data not found error too. I've burned the iso to cd, also put it on a bootable USB drive. I've tried in 2 different PC's too. I even tried using the "previous" version, no luck there, same error.

I'm really just trying to copy an existing 750gb drive from my Premier to another. I'm not planning on expanding or anything like that.

I've searched everywhere, but all I've found is reference to this thread. Any ideas? Thanks.


----------



## roberte94066

bath, towel, passport. May I see your passport, please?


----------



## BH9244

Greetings All,
In process of attempting to upgrade my stock Premier using a WD10EVDS. Running Ult Boot CD w/WDIDLE3 v1.05 my WD10EVDS is in a external dock directly connected to a motherboard SATA port.

When I run WDIDLE it reports the three Seagate system drives as non WD drives then lists the WD drive in the dock as follows

Model: WDC WD10EVDS-63U8B0
Serial: WD- Blah , blah blah

VSC Enable CMD Error 51 04 00 01 44 57 A0

Any idea what this means/ what I might try next ?

Thanks


----------



## bobade

My 5 month old WD20EARS has started making a lot of noise. While it still works, I'd like to replace it, as it is filled with unwatched shows. Unfortunately, I need to have the TV working by Thanksgiving to entertain our 30 guests, so my choices of locally available 2TB drives is very limited. Here are the choices:

WD20000LSRTL (Caviar Black) - $220
WDBAAY0020HNC-NRSN (Caviar Green) - $130

Do you think either of these drives, if properly installed, will work?

Thanks!


----------



## richsadams

bobade said:


> My 5 month old WD20EARS has started making a lot of noise. While it still works, I'd like to replace it, as it is filled with unwatched shows. Unfortunately, I need to have the TV working by Thanksgiving to entertain our 30 guests, so my choices of locally available 2TB drives is very limited. Here are the choices:
> 
> WD20000LSRTL (Caviar Black) - $220
> WDBAAY0020HNC-NRSN (Caviar Green) - $130
> 
> Do you think either of these drives, if properly installed, will work?
> 
> Thanks!


The WDBAAY0020HNC-NRSN is actually a WD20EADS hard drive and will work fine.


----------



## unitron

bobade said:


> My 5 month old WD20EARS has started making a lot of noise. While it still works, I'd like to replace it, as it is filled with unwatched shows. Unfortunately, I need to have the TV working by Thanksgiving to entertain our 30 guests, so my choices of locally available 2TB drives is very limited. Here are the choices:
> 
> WD20000LSRTL (Caviar Black) - $220
> WDBAAY0020HNC-NRSN (Caviar Green) - $130
> 
> Do you think either of these drives, if properly installed, will work?
> 
> Thanks!


Allow me to echo much-missed rich,

Go for the Green.

Although it will cost you what the Black would have 2 months ago (ouch!), it'll use less power, generate less heat, and probably run a bit more quietly than the Black.

Now comes the part where I have to be in less than total agreement with him (and we just got him back, too ).

WDBAAY0020HNC-NRSN is the number on the box.

The drive inside will be a WD Caviar Green, and it will be 2TB, but the actual model might be a WD20EADS, or another WD20EARS, or a WD20EACS, or maybe something newer like an EARX or something.

But it should be fine, just run wdidle3 on it to disable intellipark, then the long test from the WD diagnostic software, then hook up it and your current EARS (both should have the same LBA number), boot with the MFS Live cd v1.4 from mfslive.org, and Xerox the old one to the new one with dd_rescue.

Are you sure it's the drive that's making noise and not the fan?


----------



## BH9244

BH9244 said:


> Greetings All,
> In process of attempting to upgrade my stock Premier using a WD10EVDS. Running Ult Boot CD w/WDIDLE3 v1.05 my WD10EVDS is in a external dock directly connected to a motherboard SATA port.
> 
> When I run WDIDLE it reports the three Seagate system drives as non WD drives then lists the WD drive in the dock as follows
> 
> Model: WDC WD10EVDS-63U8B0
> Serial: WD- Blah , blah blah
> 
> VSC Enable CMD Error 51 04 00 01 44 57 A0
> 
> Any idea what this means/ what I might try next ?
> 
> Thanks


This may be an newbie question but this is a raw drive to which I have done nothing out of the box, is there any prep I should have done prior to running wdidle3 ?..


----------



## unitron

BH9244 said:


> Greetings All,
> In process of attempting to upgrade my stock Premier using a WD10EVDS. Running Ult Boot CD w/WDIDLE3 v1.05 my WD10EVDS is in a external dock directly connected to a motherboard SATA port.
> 
> When I run WDIDLE it reports the three Seagate system drives as non WD drives then lists the WD drive in the dock as follows
> 
> Model: WDC WD10EVDS-63U8B0
> Serial: WD- Blah , blah blah
> 
> VSC Enable CMD Error 51 04 00 01 44 57 A0
> 
> Any idea what this means/ what I might try next ?
> 
> Thanks


What it means is that for wdidle3 to work the drive has to be connected directly to a SATA port on the computer's motherboard or to an IDE port via a SATA to IDE adapter, or IDE to SATA adapter, depending on which way you look at it.

Do it without the dock.

Of course it could be that intellipark can't be defeated/'have its wait time extended enough to do practically the same thing' on that particular version of that particular model drive.


----------



## BH9244

unitron said:


> What it means is that for wdidle3 to work the drive has to be connected directly to a SATA port on the computer's motherboard or to an IDE port via a SATA to IDE adapter, or IDE to SATA adapter, depending on which way you look at it.
> 
> Do it without the dock.
> 
> Of course it could be that intellipark can't be defeated/'have its wait time extended enough to do practically the same thing' on that particular version of that particular model drive.


Thanks Unitron, that was the problem worked without incident after bypassing the dock, I had thought (evidently incorrectly) that since the dock was connected to a esata port it esssentially was the same as connected direct to MB. Thanks for clearing that up, hope the rest goes as well..


----------



## richsadams

unitron said:


> Allow me to echo much-missed rich,
> 
> Go for the Green.
> 
> Although it will cost you what the Black would have 2 months ago (ouch!), it'll use less power, generate less heat, and probably run a bit more quietly than the Black.
> 
> Now comes the part where I have to be in less than total agreement with him (and we just got him back, too ).
> 
> WDBAAY0020HNC-NRSN is the number on the box.
> 
> The drive inside will be a WD Caviar Green, and it will be 2TB, but the actual model might be a WD20EADS, or another WD20EARS, or a WD20EACS, or maybe something newer like an EARX or something.
> 
> But it should be fine, just run wdidle3 on it to disable intellipark, then the long test from the WD diagnostic software, then hook up it and your current EARS (both should have the same LBA number), boot with the MFS Live cd v1.4 from mfslive.org, and Xerox the old one to the new one with dd_rescue.
> 
> Are you sure it's the drive that's making noise and not the fan?


I happened to have that retail box number documented as a WD20EADS, but you're right, it might be another/newer model. All the same it should work fine.


----------



## bobade

Rich - thanks so much for the advice.

Unitron - thanks to you, too. You're right. In my box is actually a WD20EARX. Considering the sudden price increase and lack of availability (OfficeMax is limiting drive sales to 1 per customer!), I feel lucky to have found one in town. You made a good point about the noise coming from the fan, but ran the TIVO with the cover off, just to be sure that the fan was not the source.


----------



## unitron

BH9244 said:


> Thanks Unitron, that was the problem worked without incident after bypassing the dock, I had thought (evidently incorrectly) that since the dock was connected to a esata port it esssentially was the same as connected direct to MB. Thanks for clearing that up, hope the rest goes as well..


I assume you're going to use the jmfs cd. It can probably see that drive over the dock, but it's only looking to write to the drive, wdidle3 is looking to write to the drive's firmware (the little integrated circuits on the bottom of the drive), and apparently any extra electronics in between get in the way somehow.


----------



## bobade

Unitron, I'm reading your reply more closely, where you say: "...just run wdidle3 on it to disable intellipark, then the long test from the WD diagnostic software, then hook up it and your current EARS (both should have the same LBA number), boot with the MFS Live cd v1.4 from mfslive.org, and Xerox the old one to the new one with dd_rescue." Actually, I am a few hours into using jmfs to copy my WD20EARS to the new WD20EARX. Why are you recommending a different method?


----------



## unitron

richsadams said:


> I happened to have that retail box number documented as a WD20EADS, but you're right, it might be another/newer model. All the same it should work fine.


Good to see you back!

As it happens I took several rides on the "trying to buy a WD20EADS in a retail box" merry-go-round (wishing to avoid "advanced format" models), and learned about the "this is our model number for whatever we're putting in the box this week for the big chain outfits to sell" game the hard way.

I knew there was a "retail kit" number on the boxes, and that it wasn't the exact same as the number on the drives themselves, but didn't know going in that there's no guarantee of a one to one relationship between the two numbers.

Found out recently Seagate does the same thing.

But, yeah, as long as it'll let him disable intellipark, any of the Greens should do fine.

Once again, nice to see you back here on the front lines in the never ending struggle of man versus TiVo, where every day is a reaffirmation of Murphy's Law.


----------



## unitron

bobade said:


> Unitron, I'm reading your reply more closely, where you say: "...just run wdidle3 on it to disable intellipark, then the long test from the WD diagnostic software, then hook up it and your current EARS (both should have the same LBA number), boot with the MFS Live cd v1.4 from mfslive.org, and Xerox the old one to the new one with dd_rescue." Actually, I am a few hours into using jmfs to copy my WD20EARS to the new WD20EARX. Why are you recommending a different method?


Disable intellipark, because otherwise when the TiVo goes to reboot itself (soft boot), the drive, sensing an entire 8 seconds of not being called upon, will put itself to sleep and the TiVo isn't designed to send it a wake up signal and then wait for it to wake up and respond, the TiVo expects it to be spun up and ready to go when it calls on it, so the TiVo interprets that as not having a drive there at all, or having a dead one.

Run the long test to make sure it isn't bad out of the box, or just about to be. Even if it was fine when it left the factory, there's no telling what happened to it during shipping.

Go read some of the drive reviews at newegg and Amazon. Obviously the people who had bad experiences are more likely to want to vent than those busy enjoying their new product, but a lot of the people having to RMA a brand new drive pointed out the pitiful protection employed when it was shipped to them.

In your case I assumed you'd already fully expanded that EARS, so all you needed to do was "Xerox" it to the new one, which is a job for dd, or dd_rescue, or ddrescue.

jmfs apparently uses either dd_rescue or ddrescue, so it's pretty much the same thing, but in my limited experience with it so far it seems to take a lot longer (that's a subjective observation on my part), and it seems like I can go from pushing the power switch with the MFS Live cd in the optical to

dd_rescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb

faster than getting to that point with the jmfs cd, and can see what's going on a bit better.


----------



## Soapm

MFS Live may not recognize the premier disc. That was the problem I had trying to run SApper on my TivoHD drive.


----------



## unitron

Soapm said:


> MFS Live may not recognize the premier disc. That was the problem I had trying to run SApper on my TivoHD drive.


If you truly mean that

fdisk -l

didn't come up with it as /dev/sd?, whether it found what it recognized as partition information or not, then it's likely that your motherboard couldn't see the drive, either.

If you mean that something like mfsinfo didn't recognize it as a TiVo drive, that's not the same as the version of Linux on the Live cd not being able to find the raw drive.

But if you're just copying a drive of size "X" to another drive of size "X" (same LBA number), i.e., Xerox'ing it, the MFS-specific tools and utilities are not needed.

dd and dd_rescue just copy blocks of bytes without taking notice of what's written to them if you don't tell them to do so.


----------



## Soapm

unitron said:


> If you truly mean that
> 
> fdisk -l
> 
> didn't come up with it as /dev/sd?, whether it found what it recognized as partition information or not, then it's likely that your motherboard couldn't see the drive, either.
> 
> If you mean that something like mfsinfo didn't recognize it as a TiVo drive, that's not the same as the version of Linux on the Live cd not being able to find the raw drive.
> 
> But if you're just copying a drive of size "X" to another drive of size "X" (same LBA number), i.e., Xerox'ing it, the MFS-specific tools and utilities are not needed.
> 
> dd and dd_rescue just copy blocks of bytes without taking notice of what's written to them if you don't tell them to do so.


I meant the partition information so it could install the hacks but I guess you're right, that isn't necessary for dd to work.

Edited to add... there is a post in the other forum (I think under series 4 development but it seems to be down at the time) with 4 updated mfs utilities that can be substituted into the mfs live CD that should make it work on a premier drive. I didn't try it and as usual, YMMV... I instead made me a Linux machine which was the best two weeks I ever invested toward hacking my Tivo.


----------



## unitron

Soapm said:


> ... I instead made me a Linux machine...


Something I've been meaning to do for years, and if I can ever get enough hardware working reliably at one time, I still hope to.


----------



## BH9244

Ok, I'm delighted to report another successfull upgrade. In my case I went from a stock 320 GB Premier to a 1TB using a WD10EVDS & the JMFS 1.04 utility. Only hitch was while trying to disable intellipark with WDIDLE3 in that I was attempting to do it via a ESATA external dock, thanks Unitron for your accurate advice hooked up direct and the rest went without any problem. Did the copy,expand,Supersize with two USB connected external docks took approx 6 hours, next time I'd try ESATA.. Thanks Comer for your efforts.. This was painless as it gets..


----------



## Soapm

unitron said:


> Something I've been meaning to do for years, and if I can ever get enough hardware working reliably at one time, I still hope to.


You should... I tell you, I used an old PC that was out in the garage that luckily had a 80gig drive. Being able to mount the Tivo drive in a point and click gui has advantages you can't imagine. You can even edit the files in place with the equivalent of notepad on Linux.

My update from 9.2 to 11.0k went bad because the script I used to update made all my new directories with a ? mark (busybox?). It was first of all nice to be able to mount the drive and see what went wrong. Then I just right click and deleted those directors and drug the files from the old to the new partition and presto. I was back in business in a matter of minutes.

I can't believe all the effort I've been putting into hacking my Tivo's and it could have been this simple. Now I'm addicted to the Linux box (am using it now) and can't seem to stop playing with it... I may go buy me a Tivo so I have something to hack (not)... But I do have an XBOX that is trying to avoid direct eye contact...


----------



## unitron

Soapm said:


> ... But I do have an XBOX that is trying to avoid direct eye contact...


What, you have a potential whole house media center just sitting there unmodified?


----------



## beeswax

Soapm said:


> there is a post in the other forum (I think under series 4 development but it seems to be down at the time) with 4 updated mfs utilities that can be substituted into the mfs live CD that should make it work on a premier drive. I didn't try it and as usual, YMMV... I instead made me a Linux machine which was the best two weeks I ever invested toward hacking my Tivo.


I've got a UK Virgin Media TiVo (pretty much a Premiere). I already used the LiveCD when I first got it to upgrade from a 500GB drive to a 2TB - worked fine. The software on the box has now been upgraded.

The update initially failed and left the box in a cycle of constant reboots. Putting the 500GB back in and allowing the update to retry worked OK though. So I'm now trying to repeat the original process of cloning the 500GB drive with the new software onto the 2TB drive. LiveCD is giving me "No TiVo drives detected" though.

FDisk /l shows both drives OK but both say invalid partition table. I found the link to the 4 MFS patched files but can't see a way to put them on the CD. I have popped open the ISO and there are no .s4.x86 files to replace 

Any help? I'm kind of desperate here...


----------



## unitron

beeswax said:


> I've got a UK Virgin Media TiVo (pretty much a Premiere). I already used the LiveCD when I first got it to upgrade from a 500GB drive to a 2TB - worked fine. The software on the box has now been upgraded.
> 
> The update initially failed and left the box in a cycle of constant reboots. Putting the 500GB back in and allowing the update to retry worked OK though. So I'm now trying to repeat the original process of cloning the 500GB drive with the new software onto the 2TB drive. LiveCD is giving me "No TiVo drives detected" though.
> 
> FDisk /l shows both drives OK but both say invalid partition table. I found the link to the 4 MFS patched files but can't see a way to put them on the CD. I have popped open the ISO and there are no .s4.x86 files to replace
> 
> Any help? I'm kind of desperate here...


You might have more luck asking that over where spike can see it on the mfslive.org forums or on "the other site" which may not be named here. They're more into the "rewrite your TiVo software" scene.


----------



## beeswax

Thanks unitron, I'm not sure what I did but I _think_ it's resolved. I tried using GParted on the 2TB disk out of desperation more than anything. On the first attempt, I nuked the drive and set the partition table to bsd - didn't work. On the next try I tried a 'gpt' partition table. After an unusually long "Just a few more minutes" screen, I got the main menu back!

So it seems if you wipe the drive and create a new partition table, the box will download the software from Virgin Media. I just have to hope now that my box doesn't suffer the "random reboots" issue.


----------



## unitron

beeswax said:


> Thanks unitron, I'm not sure what I did but I _think_ it's resolved. I tried using GParted on the 2TB disk out of desperation more than anything. On the first attempt, I nuked the drive and set the partition table to bsd - didn't work. On the next try I tried a 'gpt' partition table. After an unusually long "Just a few more minutes" screen, I got the main menu back!
> 
> So it seems if you wipe the drive and create a new partition table, the box will download the software from Virgin Media. I just have to hope now that my box doesn't suffer the "random reboots" issue.


I'm just wildly guessing here, but it sounds like TiVo finally moved on from the Apple Partition Map, and where they moved to is where, it would seem, everyone is going, the GPT, and what happened is GParted found where the actual TiVo partitions are/were and used that info to re-create the GPT style partition table.


----------



## Soapm

beeswax said:


> IThe update initially failed and left the box in a cycle of constant reboots. Putting the 500GB back in and allowing the update to retry worked OK though. So I'm now trying to repeat the original process of cloning the 500GB drive with the new software onto the 2TB drive. LiveCD is giving me "No TiVo drives detected" though.


Something I learned experimenting, the 9.xx kernel will not work on a 2TB drive. When I had 9.xx on my Tivo I had to use Jamies custom kernel to get it to boot. However, once it upgraded to 11.xx I was able to stay with the neutered stock kernel. I believe that was what you were seeing...



> FDisk /l shows both drives OK but both say invalid partition table. I found the link to the 4 MFS patched files but can't see a way to put them on the CD. I have popped open the ISO and there are no .s4.x86 files to replace


You want to remove the .s4.x86 part from the file name. I think he put that there so you could identify his modified files from the originals. Just remove those extensions and put them into the ISO. I haven't tried it so let us know how/if they work...


----------



## ducker

Completed my upgrade to a 2TB drive on Friday night - took only about 4-5hours start to finish. The last time I did an upgrade was back with my S2 single tuner unit, and that was having to type out the whole command line. The new guide/menu system makes it an incredibly easy thing to do.

The trickiest part for me was getting my usb thumb drive to be executable with the .iso on it. when using the Universal USB installer - I had to manually paste in the image name, as the browse window didn't recognize the file name (using Slax6). Once I did that, the data went on the thumb with out an issue.

My setup was - 
disconnect DVD and Hard Drive in my PC.
Connect the Tivo hard drive to one SATA cable.
Connect new Hard drive to the other SATA cable.
Boot on USB thumb drive.
Follow the menus, (was seeing a very nice/fast transfer rate!)
and then done!!!

Thanks all for this thread and any/all of the contributions people have posted!


----------



## Stuxnet

ducker said:


> My setup was -
> disconnect DVD and Hard Drive in my PC.
> Connect the Tivo hard drive to one SATA cable.
> Connect new Hard drive to the other SATA cable.
> Boot on USB thumb drive.
> Follow the menus, (was seeing a very nice/fast transfer rate!)
> and then done!!!
> 
> Thanks all for this thread and any/all of the contributions people have posted!


Congrats! That's exactly what I had to do as my USB/SATA docks weren't seen by jmfs... I stumbled my way through getting a bootable thumb drive...


----------



## Soapm

retiredqwest said:


> It all depends on how it was copied and by whom. Tivos will only operate with 16 partitions or less.
> 
> Look for this on your screen:
> 
> 1 : start= 1, size= 63 ( 31.50K), type='Apple_partition_map', name='Apple'
> 13: start= 64, size= 343828320 (163.95G), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region 2'
> 2 : start= 343828384, size= 1 (512.00b), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 1'
> 3 : start= 343828385, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 1'
> 4 : start= 343844769, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 1'
> 5 : start= 344369057, size= 1 (512.00b), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 2'
> 6 : start= 344369058, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 2'
> 7 : start= 344385442, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 2'
> 8 : start= 344909730, size= 262144 (128.00M), type='Swap' , name='Linux swap'
> 9 : start= 345171874, size= 1048576 (512.00M), type='Ext2' , name='/var'
> 14: start= 346220450, size= 6291456 ( 3.00G), type='Ext2' , name='SQLite'
> 10: start= 352511906, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region'
> 12: start= 354150306, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region 2'
> 11: start= 355788706, size= 269353742 (128.44G), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region'
> 
> This is from my stock drive and it shows 14 partitions.
> 
> I'm guessing the 1TB has all 16 partitions in use. Hence, you will not be able to copy and expand that drive. You're stuck using the stock drive.
> 
> *BUT, if the 1TB only has 15 partitions you should be able to copy and expand it since JMFS only writes 1 new partition. *
> 
> I'd be curious if you try this and see what the results are.


So I am sure what I am reading Comer, there is no change jfms will try to expand the 15th partition? It will always create a 16th partition in this example?


----------



## guruuno

OK, need some help.
Read all I could all night, today, overwhelming.
Looking for a summary overview.
TiVo HD (TCD652160), HD making noise, time to replace, sporadic reboots, lockups, etc.

Purchased InstantCake, does NOT support anything over 1Tb HD, WANT 2Tb HD, got jmfs-rev104, put both HD's in PC, booted CD, now doing it's thing.

However, at start I was warned that because I had an external expansion HD connected to my TiVo, something would not work (about drive being 'married' to the internal HD), I said OK anyway.

Am I supposed to do something different now? How do I complete the upgrade, forget about the external expansion drive (un-marry) and finish?

Appreciate any fast replies, as my workshop is a mess with crap all over the place.

As a secondary concern, this "InstantCake" stuff, OK I assume when you want a 1Gb HD, but it suers seems a little fishy to me about all of the unknowns, and caveats, and no support except for forums and no REAL advice on what can and cannot be expected, etc (i.e., 2007/2008 software???), Paypal issues,(gee.....I wonder why?), and so on. Maybe I was misguided to choose that 1st or was it non-disclosure on their part? Easy no-brainer in my book, look, see, read, buy, if nothing says you cannot (NOWHERE on the basic landing or informational paged did anyone say anything about HD size limits, hoops to jump through, etc.)

Sure, we can do a billion things a billion ways, but I'm just a little concerned that I wasted $40 for nothing.


----------



## unitron

guruuno said:


> OK, need some help.
> Read all I could all night, today, overwhelming.
> Looking for a summary overview.
> TiVo HD (TCD652160), HD making noise, time to replace, sporadic reboots, lockups, etc.
> 
> Purchased InstantCake, does NOT support anything over 1Tb HD, WANT 2Tb HD, got jmfs-rev104, put both HD's in PC, booted CD, now doing it's thing.
> 
> However, at start I was warned that because I had an external expansion HD connected to my TiVo, something would not work (about drive being 'married' to the internal HD), I said OK anyway.
> 
> Am I supposed to do something different now? How do I complete the upgrade, forget about the external expansion drive (un-marry) and finish?
> 
> Appreciate any fast replies, as my workshop is a mess with crap all over the place.
> 
> As a secondary concern, this "InstantCake" stuff, OK I assume when you want a 1Gb HD, but it suers seems a little fishy to me about all of the unknowns, and caveats, and no support except for forums and no REAL advice on what can and cannot be expected, etc (i.e., 2007/2008 software???), Paypal issues,(gee.....I wonder why?), and so on. Maybe I was misguided to choose that 1st or was it non-disclosure on their part? Easy no-brainer in my book, look, see, read, buy, if nothing says you cannot (NOWHERE on the basic landing or informational paged did anyone say anything about HD size limits, hoops to jump through, etc.)
> 
> Sure, we can do a billion things a billion ways, but I'm just a little concerned that I wasted $40 for nothing.


Well, if it's any consolation the Instant Cake people help keep this site going by buying advertising, so at least some of your $40 went for a good cause.

When you add an external drive every show recorded after that gets part of it put on the internal drive and part put on the external, which means if either drive fails you've lost at least everything recorded since you added the external.

Since expanding the internal means copying it to another, bigger drive and then adding more partitions, that probably will screw up how the TiVo keeps track of what part of which recording is where.

I assume you have jmfs copying the original 160GB internal drive to a 2TB?

When it finishes copying, instead of telling it to expand, exit and try the 2TB in the TiVo WITH THE EXTERNAL ATTACHED AND POWERED UP.

Maybe that'll work and your recordings will still be accessable so that you can use TiVo Desktop to copy off any that aren't anti-copy flagged.

Once you've done that we can explore using the drive in the external enclosure as a middleman on your way to using all of the 2TB drive.

(I've just gotten through putting a 2TB in that same model TiVo, been recording stuff non-stop on both tuners for the past few days to test it, seems to be holding up.)

Just for future reference, links to an image that can be restored with the MFS Live cd and to an image that can be restored with WinMFS can be found in this post:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8831301#post8831301

but we may be able to use your original drive after we divorce the external and save all of your settings and such.

By the way, are you sure it's the internal going bad and not the external?

You should download the WD diagnostic software bootable cd iso for future reference.

You should also go to mfslive.org and download the MFS Live cd v1.4 iso (I'd tell you to do that even if you didn't own a TiVo) and download the WinMFS program for future reference as well.

When you tried Instant Cake, did it offer any chance to increase the size of your swap partition?


----------



## guruuno

I'm not concerned 1 bit about ANY of the recording, so it is not important to preserve anything.

I'm also reading that I cannot have the 1Tb external expansion with a 2Tb internal, so that too is a moot point (unless you have information that will state otherwise).

Regarding your answers:
=====================
I assume you have jmfs copying the original 160GB internal drive to a 2TB?
YES

When it finishes copying, instead of telling it to expand, exit and try the 2TB in the TiVo WITH THE EXTERNAL ATTACHED AND POWERED UP.
So even after the error message after "married" do this?

Maybe that'll work and your recordings will still be accessible so that you can use TiVo Desktop to copy off any that aren't anti-copy flagged.
DO NOT CARE about any recordings. Also, TiVo Desktop on Mac says I cannot copy anything without a "Premier" box. (not available) All I have is the ability to publish content from my iMac to a TiVo as I see.

Once you've done that we can explore using the drive in the external enclosure as a middleman on your way to using all of the 2TB drive.
Not sure what you are saying here????


Just for future reference, links to an image that can be restored with the MFS Live cd and to an image that can be restored with WinMFS can be found in this post: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb...01#post8831301
Again, not sure what you mean here????

but we may be able to use your original drive after we divorce the external and save all of your settings and such.
THIS IS MY ORIGINAL QUESTION, HOW DO I "DIVORCE" THE EXPANSION DRIVE?

By the way, are you sure it's the internal going bad and not the external?
Good point, will test!

You should download the WD diagnostic software bootable cd iso for future reference.

You should also go to mfslive.org and download the MFS Live cd v1.4 iso (I'd tell you to do that even if you didn't own a TiVo) and download the WinMFS program for future reference as well.
Will do!

When you tried Instant Cake, did it offer any chance to increase the size of your swap partition?
None whatsoever, failed with message:
Not enough extra space to expand on A drive.
Partition table on drive A is revalidated!
Go to http://www.mfslive.org for support.


----------



## unitron

guruuno said:


> I'm not concerned 1 bit about ANY of the recording, so it is not important to preserve anything.
> 
> I'm also reading that I cannot have the 1Tb external expansion with a 2Tb internal, so that too is a moot point (unless you have information that will state otherwise).
> 
> Regarding your answers:
> =====================
> I assume you have jmfs copying the original 160GB internal drive to a 2TB?
> YES
> 
> When it finishes copying, instead of telling it to expand, exit and try the 2TB in the TiVo WITH THE EXTERNAL ATTACHED AND POWERED UP.
> So even after the error message after "married" do this?
> 
> Maybe that'll work and your recordings will still be accessible so that you can use TiVo Desktop to copy off any that aren't anti-copy flagged.
> DO NOT CARE about any recordings. Also, TiVo Desktop on Mac says I cannot copy anything without a "Premier" box. (not available) All I have is the ability to publish content from my iMac to a TiVo as I see.
> 
> Once you've done that we can explore using the drive in the external enclosure as a middleman on your way to using all of the 2TB drive.
> Not sure what you are saying here????
> 
> 
> Just for future reference, links to an image that can be restored with the MFS Live cd and to an image that can be restored with WinMFS can be found in this post: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb...01#post8831301
> Again, not sure what you mean here????
> 
> but we may be able to use your original drive after we divorce the external and save all of your settings and such.
> THIS IS MY ORIGINAL QUESTION, HOW DO I "DIVORCE" THE EXPANSION DRIVE?
> 
> By the way, are you sure it's the internal going bad and not the external?
> Good point, will test!
> 
> You should download the WD diagnostic software bootable cd iso for future reference.
> 
> You should also go to mfslive.org and download the MFS Live cd v1.4 iso (I'd tell you to do that even if you didn't own a TiVo) and download the WinMFS program for future reference as well.
> Will do!
> 
> When you tried Instant Cake, did it offer any chance to increase the size of your swap partition?
> None whatsoever, failed with message:
> Not enough extra space to expand on A drive.
> Partition table on drive A is revalidated!
> Go to http://www.mfslive.org for support.


Instant Cake referred you to mfslive for support and not to ptvupgrade.com or dvrupgrade.com? Curious, unless they used spike's MFS Live software and forgot to edit that part.

Forgive me if I'm an idiot who can't read, but was it Instant Cake that warned you about problems because of the external or was it jmfs?

When the copying finishes and you put the drive back in the TiVo, if you do not have the external attached it will, if that doesn't keep it from booting, announce that the external is missing and give you the option to divorce it.

If you boot up with the external attached and already powered up, it might work with no problem and your reco_r_dings will still be accessable. If so, there should be something buried somewhere in the menus that'll let you divorce the external, after warning you that it'll bring about the end of civilization as we know it.

So either way you should be able to divorce the external.

At that point the external is just a drive in an enclosure that can be erased and re-used as an external TiVo drive on some other TiVo or reformated to the file system of your choice and used on something other than a TiVo.

What I had in mind (and still do if you have a Windows computer) is to take it out of the enclosure so that you can hook it directly to a SATA port on a motherboard and use it as a middleman (although perhaps after running the WD diagnostics long test to make sure there's nothing wrong with the drive itself.

Then you use either the MFS Live cd or WinMFS to copy the 160GB to it (or the 160GB that's been copied to the 2TB and divorced), but use the option to increase the swap partition size (can't hurt, might help down the line) to 999 MB.

Then you use WinMFS to expand that 1TB drive with the TiVo image and the bigger swap partition.

It'll do this by adding two more MFS partitions, which gets your total up to 15.

For some reason, WinMFS will do this without leaving any extra space at the end of the drive (which would be seen by jmfs as an "Apple Free Partition", which it will consider to be the 16th partition, which means it'll add a single MFS partition after that one when copying the 1TB to the 2TB, and that'll be the 17th partition on one drive, which is against the TiVo limitation of only 16 partitions per drive, which means the TiVo will interpret it as a faulty external and insist that you divorce it, which means it'll only use 1TB of that 2TB), but MFS Live will expand into the rest of that 1TB by adding 2 partitions but the last one won't quite use up all the space, so you'll get that 16th "Apple Free" partition which will screw up jmfs. I've tried doing it with all sorts of different size swap partitions (including not making the swap partition any bigger than the 128MB it is on the original 160GB drive), and it still leaves some unpartitioned space at the end that jmfs sees as a 16th partition.

Of course to use WinMFS, you have to have a Windows computer.

The MFS Live cd and the WinMFS program both offer the option to make truncated backup images (no shows saved) of TiVo drives (which is sort of what's on an Instant Cake cd, along with the software to install it).

The advantage of using one of them instead of Instant Cake is that you can get your TiVo set up the way you want it, including cable card pairings, and then make a backup image that'll contain all of that, and you can save that image on a computer for future reference or emergencies, and you can also use either of those programs to copy to a larger drive and expand (up to about 1.1TB).

Even though spike wrote both (building on the work of others who came before), you can't restore an image made by one of them with the other of them, which is why I did it with both and put links to both in that post I linked to.

By the way, while you've got the cover off of the TiVo, you need to give the power supply capacitors a good close visual inspection.

See this thread:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=479176

for a really good picture of how subtle the difference between a good one and a bad one can be, and read the wikipedia article on "capacitor plague" to understand what's going on. badcaps.net is a good source of education on the topic as well.

I bring this up because of the not extremely remote possibility that your power supply has or is developing this problem. If it does or is, that can cause all sorts of strange symptoms.


----------



## guruuno

OK, I used JMFS Rev 1.04, cloned the internal drive to a 2Tb Hitachi HD, reconnected the WD Expansion 1Tb HD, everything works, (a tad vibrate noise I assume from the 7200RPM HD), snappy feel and response, no immediate issues, however, what SHOULD be the total hours available, and if I unmark the expansion, what should be the total hours available?

I know I cannot have a 2Tb internal and a 1Tb external, but if I knew what the capacity was for each as above, I'd know if the new Tb is correct or if it need to be "expanded"?????

IF indeed this internal 2Tb HD needs to be expanded, all I do is unplug the expansion, tell the Tivo I don't care, then it is "unmarried" or what?

After unmarried, I have to pull it out of the Tivo again (the HD), and per for more surgery?


----------



## unitron

guruuno said:


> OK, I used JMFS Rev 1.04, cloned the internal drive to a 2Tb Hitachi HD, reconnected the WD Expansion 1Tb HD, everything works, (a tad vibrate noise I assume from the 7200RPM HD), snappy feel and response, no immediate issues, however, what SHOULD be the total hours available, and if I unmark the expansion, what should be the total hours available?
> 
> I know I cannot have a 2Tb internal and a 1Tb external, but if I knew what the capacity was for each as above, I'd know if the new Tb is correct or if it need to be "expanded"?????
> 
> IF indeed this internal 2Tb HD needs to be expanded, all I do is unplug the expansion, tell the Tivo I don't care, then it is "unmarried" or what?
> 
> After unmarried, I have to pull it out of the Tivo again (the HD), and per for more surgery?


First of all, I erred by not originally telling you to move your initial question from the Premiere/jmfs thread to the HD/jmfs thread, which is really where we should have been having this conversation. Guess we're stuck here, though. My apologies to the community.

What you have right now should be 160GB sitting on the 2TB, with (2TB minus 160GB) of free space left over (and I'm assuming there are only 13 partitions, 4 of which are MFS type, on there, not counting the free space).

I'm not sure what jmfs did with the partition table/map on that 2TB, whether it just copied the one from the 160GB byte for byte, or whether it re-wrote it to reflect the actual size of the 2TB drive, so I don't know if the unused space is "invisible" to some utilities or if it's already marked "Apple Free", and whether this will interfere with further use of jmfs.

Forgive me if I ask the same question more than once, I'm talking to a number of people in several different threads.

Is your ultimate goal to have a 2TB internal and no external? If so, see if there isn't something buried a few levels down in the menus (maybe the same place as clear and delete) where you can tell it to divorce the external.

If not, and you still want to discontinue the external, turn everything off, disconnect the external from the TiVo, start the TiVo back up, and it should complain about the missing external and give you the opportunity for divorce.

Once you do that, you should be able to hook the 2TB back to the computer and run jmfs to expand.

Doing it that way will probably mean a partition larger than 1TB or 1.1TB or 1TiB or whatever the bleep the one-time "limit" was supposed to be. I don't know if that will cause problems or not.

If it works, great.

If, as I suspect, it appears to work but freezes or reboots about once a day, meet me over in the HD/jmfs thread.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Well, after upgrading my premiere about a year ago I'm getting stutters and non-responsive to remote inputs. Looks like this HDD is going. I am running SMART tests now, but I figure I should probably go ahead and clone another. Luckily I keep a spare 2GB in the house for my Drobo. Thanks for all your work. 

Am I clear that I need to boot from WD boot disk to run WDidle, then use JMFS?


----------



## unitron

DavidTigerFan said:


> Well, after upgrading my premiere about a year ago I'm getting stutters and non-responsive to remote inputs. Looks like this HDD is going. I am running SMART tests now, but I figure I should probably go ahead and clone another. Luckily I keep a spare 2GB in the house for my Drobo. Thanks for all your work.
> 
> Am I clear that I need to boot from WD boot disk to run WDidle, then use JMFS?


First thing you do is put the original drive back in and make sure the problem isn't actually something else.

While you're doing that you can be running the manufacturer's long test on the upgrade drive you just removed.

Only if you're going to be using a WD Green should you need to run wdidle3 to disable Intellipark.

HOWEVER, maybe what's wrong is corruption of the software and/or data on a still perfectly good upgrade drive, so maybe you should run KS 57 or 58 first.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

unitron said:


> First thing you do is put the original drive back in and make sure the problem isn't actually something else.
> 
> While you're doing that you can be running the manufacturer's long test on the upgrade drive you just removed.
> 
> Only if you're going to be using a WD Green should you need to run wdidle3 to disable Intellipark.
> 
> HOWEVER, maybe what's wrong is corruption of the software and/or data on a still perfectly good upgrade drive, so maybe you should run KS 57 or 58 first.


I wonder...all this started to happen after it upgraded to 14.9.2.2....maybe the software did get hosed somehow. Will 57 and 58 reinitiate the internal software?


----------



## unitron

DavidTigerFan said:


> I wonder...all this started to happen after it upgraded to 14.9.2.2....maybe the software did get hosed somehow. Will 57 and 58 reinitiate the internal software?


If it were not a Premiere I'd tell you to use WinMFS to rewrite the bootpage to use the alternate pair, where the previous version should still reside, but apparently just trying to look at a Premiere drive with WinMFS is enough to bork it.

If the info here

http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-kickstart-codes.php

can be trusted, then perhaps KS 52 will do the same thing.

57 and 58 are more about trying to straighten out the MFS partitions, not the OS ones.

I'd try them first, to eliminate MFS partition problems as the culprit, and only then try reverting it back to the previous OS version.

Of course if you do that it's going to try to download and install the newest version all over again.

Bear in mind the newest thing I've actually had my hands on is an S3 HD.

Everything else is from lots of reading.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

unitron said:


> If it were not a Premiere I'd tell you to use WinMFS to rewrite the bootpage to use the alternate pair, where the previous version should still reside, but apparently just trying to look at a Premiere drive with WinMFS is enough to bork it.
> 
> If the info here
> 
> http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-kickstart-codes.php
> 
> can be trusted, then perhaps KS 52 will do the same thing.
> 
> 57 and 58 are more about trying to straighten out the MFS partitions, not the OS ones.
> 
> I'd try them first, to eliminate MFS partition problems as the culprit, and only then try reverting it back to the previous OS version.
> 
> Of course if you do that it's going to try to download and install the newest version all over again.
> 
> Bear in mind the newest thing I've actually had my hands on is an S3 HD.
> 
> Everything else is from lots of reading.


Thanks. I've got the smart tests running now so I figure i'll let those run and copy my original drive to the new drive in the meantime. Then I'll run the kickstarts. If those don't work, I'll slap the original back in and see what that does.


----------



## unitron

DavidTigerFan said:


> Thanks. I've got the smart tests running now so I figure i'll let those run and copy my original drive to the new drive in the meantime. Then I'll run the kickstarts. If those don't work, I'll slap the original back in and see what that does.


Okay, 1st drive is the original, 2nd drive is the one you put into the TiVo in place of the 1st, 3rd drive is, I assume, what you're calling the new drive.

Don't run the 1st drive in the TiVo if the TiVo is connected to your home network or it'll find a way to get on the internet and download the new OS software.

Copy the 1st to the 3rd ( a straight dd or dd_rescue should be sufficient for testing purposes) and put the 3rd in the TiVo, keeping it off the network for the time being, and see how it does. You can overwrite the 3rd time and time again, as long as you keep the 1st safe.

That's after you've tried the KS'es on the 2nd drive.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

unitron said:


> Okay, 1st drive is the original, 2nd drive is the one you put into the TiVo in place of the 1st, 3rd drive is, I assume, what you're calling the new drive.
> 
> Don't run the 1st drive in the TiVo if the TiVo is connected to your home network or it'll find a way to get on the internet and download the new OS software.
> 
> Copy the 1st to the 3rd ( a straight dd or dd_rescue should be sufficient for testing purposes) and put the 3rd in the TiVo, keeping it off the network for the time being, and see how it does. You can overwrite the 3rd time and time again, as long as you keep the 1st safe.
> 
> That's after you've tried the KS'es on the 2nd drive.


Yeah, that's what I plan to do. I always keep the 1st as my "master" it never even saw setup I believe.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

So far I've done a KS 56 and 57 with no results. Still heavy pixelation and freezing when I change channels. My copy from 1 to 3 is done, but I'm going to call it a night. I've got KS 52 running right now.


----------



## DavidTigerFan

Well I installed drive 3 into the premiere and left it all night plugged in...it's still at 14.5 weirdly enough. Everything is running smooth though except for some reason I lost HBO. Lets hope stupid Comcast can fix that. We'll see what happens when I get upgraded. I am currently running a deep diag of drive 2 using WD's software. So far it passed the short test.

I wonder if I just go bit by some upgrade bug.


----------



## Soapm

DavidTigerFan said:


> Well I installed drive 3 into the premiere and left it all night plugged in...it's still at 14.5 weirdly enough. Everything is running smooth though except for some reason I lost HBO. Lets hope stupid Comcast can fix that. We'll see what happens when I get upgraded. I am currently running a deep diag of drive 2 using WD's software. So far it passed the short test.
> 
> I wonder if I just go bit by some upgrade bug.


You'll have to force 3 connects to the Tivo mothership to get a software update. Just go in network settings and tell it to connect.

HBO is expected, you'll have to get the cable care reactivated to get premium channels...


----------



## rambler

If I upgrade hard drive, will it play nice with the cablecard, or do i have to involve cable company to pair up the cablecard with the new HD?


----------



## lpwcomp

If you create the new drive from your existing drive, it should have all of your settings, including CableCARD pairing information. No need to get the cable co involved.


----------



## vsaltv

Is there a way to make a backup of my original HDD without only cloning it to a new drive? I would like to reuse the original HDD for something else. Also, how does the premiere handle 5400RPM WD EARS drives?


----------



## unitron

vsaltv said:


> Is there a way to make a backup of my original HDD without only cloning it to a new drive? I would like to reuse the original HDD for something else. Also, how does the premiere handle 5400RPM WD EARS drives?


Do not be penny wise and pound foolish.

Keep the original as a backup.

As far as I know there's no way to make a truncated backup of a Premiere drive.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

rambler said:


> If I upgrade hard drive, will it play nice with the cablecard, or do i have to involve cable company to pair up the cablecard with the new HD?


Yes, you'll be fine.

Read the FAQ, it's quite useful and says so (or ought to).


----------



## b13

I upgraded my TIVO about 1-Year ago.

From 320GB to 1TB.
******************************
I am getting stuttering/lagging now.
******************************

I am already at 90% full on drive. Can I take the 1TB drive that is installed now and do an upgrade to a 2TB Drive?

*(I no longer have the original drive e.g. 320GB)*


----------



## yoheidiho

b13 said:


> Can I take the 1TB drive that is installed now and do an upgrade to a 2TB Drive?
> 
> *(I no longer have the original drive e.g. 320GB)*


You can.


----------



## afamousguy

HELP, PLEASE!

I tried wading though all 40+ pages of this thread but didn't see anyone with the problem I have been experiencing while trying to upgrade to a 1 TB Western Digital drive. When I boot to the TiVO Premiere JMFS CD (rev 104) it seems to load normally but always says that no TiVo drives are connected. The original and target drives show up in the BIOS normally. I've tried this on 3 different computers on all SATA setup modes available (native, legacy, etc) and get the same message.

Anyone seen this problem before or have any advice on how to get it to see my drive?


----------



## unitron

afamousguy said:


> HELP, PLEASE!
> 
> I tried wading though all 40+ pages of this thread but didn't see anyone with the problem I have been experiencing while trying to upgrade to a 1 TB Western Digital drive. When I boot to the TiVO Premiere JMFS CD (rev 104) it seems to load normally but always says that no TiVo drives are connected. The original and target drives show up in the BIOS normally. I've tried this on 3 different computers on all SATA setup modes available (native, legacy, etc) and get the same message.
> 
> Anyone seen this problem before or have any advice on how to get it to see my drive?


Are you using SHIFT+PAGE UP to go back up the boot messages to see if it says anything about what drives it does detect?

What kind of motherboard are you using?

Have you put the original drive back in the TiVo to see if it still works?


----------



## Soapm

afamousguy said:


> Anyone seen this problem before or have any advice on how to get it to see my drive?


I find jmfs to be very picky as to what it calls a "Tivo" drive. I once asked what it was looking for and someone told me to read the code.

I do know if I have my stock drive jmfs will see it just fine. Once the drive or image is hacked or otherwise altered it will no longer be validated in jfms.

Is your WD drive stock? What kind of image? What kind of tivo do you have? jmfs will only recognize premier and HD/XL drives...


----------



## CoxInPHX

Is there any reason this upgrade would not work on the new 20.2 SW? Has anyone used it yet?


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

CoxInPHX said:


> Is there any reason this upgrade would not work on the new 20.2 SW? Has anyone used it yet?


I'm wondering too. I have a Premiere XL with the new software that's bumping into its 1TB storage limit, and I very much want to upgrade to a 2 TB drive.


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

CoxInPHX said:


> Is there any reason this upgrade would not work on the new 20.2 SW? Has anyone used it yet?


I'm guessing the deafening silence for the past 6 days means the upgrade probably doesn't work with the new SW?

Don't want to waste a $160 drive plus a PayPal donation for an upgrade that might not work...


----------



## generaltso

ShinySteelRobot said:


> I'm guessing the deafening silence for the past 6 days means the upgrade probably doesn't work with the new SW?


I wouldn't assume that at all. If somebody tried it and it didn't work, they probably would have posted that. Since there's been no word, I would guess that nobody here has tried it.


----------



## JulienPDX77

I bought a 1TB WD "MyBook" 2 years ago to keep all my movies/music on, etc. Well, not that long ago, I'd finally bought a 2TB drive for my PC and no longer needed to use the MyBook. 

Decided to try using the drive in the "MyBook" to upgrade the existing drive in my TiVo Premier (currently has the stock 320GB drive). Last night, I took this extrenal drive apart and discovered it was WD Caviar Green 8MB cache 1TB WD10EAVS drive that had a simple adapter that converted SATA to USB and A/C Power. Will this drive work as a target upgrade drive? Thanks guys!


----------



## unitron

JulienPDX77 said:


> I bought a 1TB WD "MyBook" 2 years ago to keep all my movies/music on, etc. Well, not that long ago, I'd finally bought a 2TB drive for my PC and no longer needed to use the MyBook.
> 
> Decided to try using the drive in the "MyBook" to upgrade the existing drive in my TiVo Premier (currently has the stock 320GB drive). Last night, I took this extrenal drive apart and discovered it was WD Caviar Green 8MB cache 1TB WD10EAVS drive that had a simple adapter that converted SATA to USB and A/C Power. Will this drive work as a target upgrade drive? Thanks guys!


Run wdidle3 to make sure Intellipark is disabled on it, then get jmfs 1.04 and go to town, and put the 320 on the shelf for safekeeping.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

generaltso said:


> I wouldn't assume that at all. If somebody tried it and it didn't work, they probably would have posted that. Since there's been no word, I would guess that nobody here has tried it.


This.

I figured before you didn't want a guess but here's mine: It will work fine.


----------



## JulienPDX77

unitron said:


> Run wdidle3 to make sure Intellipark is disabled on it, then get jmfs 1.04 and go to town, and put the 320 on the shelf for safekeeping.


Thank you thank you! Namely, I was just fishing to see if a WD10EAVS is "good enough" to run as my TiVo drive.

I know the process now, JMFS, clone, AAM and Wdiddle and we're golden.

****************
Now for the 64K question..

If Linux is the primary OS on my PC, couldn't i just do a clone from within the working environment? I ask because I'd rather not be without BOTH my TV and my PC at the same time. Though I guess I could just go outside for 3 hours lol


----------



## unitron

JulienPDX77 said:


> Thank you thank you! Namely, I was just fishing to see if a WD10EAVS is "good enough" to run as my TiVo drive.
> 
> I know the process now, JMFS, clone, AAM and Wdiddle and we're golden.
> 
> ****************
> Now for the 64K question..
> 
> If Linux is the primary OS on my PC, couldn't i just do a clone from within the working environment? I ask because I'd rather not be without BOTH my TV and my PC at the same time. Though I guess I could just go outside for 3 hours lol


jmfs comes on a bootable cd iso, as does wdidle3, and WD's AAM utility probably does as well, as does the WD diagnostic software.

Us that to run the long test on that drive first, then run wdidle3 and the AAM thingie, then run jmfs.

You'll have to venture into the unfamiliarity of watching TV live for a while.


----------



## Soapm

JulienPDX77 said:


> Now for the 64K question..
> 
> If Linux is the primary OS on my PC, couldn't i just do a clone from within the working environment? I ask because I'd rather not be without BOTH my TV and my PC at the same time. Though I guess I could just go outside for 3 hours lol


You can make the mfs tools work in your Linux environment yes. So then you'd be running each command manually (mfscopy, mfs add etc...). You also need tivopart so that your linux kernel will recognition the partition table.


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

ThreeSoFar said:


> generaltso said:
> 
> 
> 
> I wouldn't assume that at all. If somebody tried it and it didn't work, they probably would have posted that. Since there's been no word, I would guess that nobody here has tried it.
> 
> 
> 
> This.
> 
> I figured before you didn't want a guess but here's mine: It will work fine.
Click to expand...

Thanks guys, I'll roll the dice and report back once I have attempted the upgrade. BTW I'll probably use a WD20EARX since that's currently the cheapest 2TB WD Caviar Green drive AFAICT.


----------



## porkenstein

Thanks so much for the procedure. I have done several series 2 a few years ago but this is so simple even my kids could do it. Great job


----------



## JulienPDX77

thank you comer and everyone else in here; I did this procedure last night (I'm not yet on 20.2; still on 14.9) and it worked flawlessly. I was able to cannibalize a 1TB "MyBook" from WD I bought last year and just never used because of how slow it was (USB, blech) and turn it into my primary TiVo drive and now i have ~ 180 hours of HD recording.

I'd like to donate to the guy who created JMFS but the donate link doesn't work; does someone have updated info for him?

Thanks everyone!

Oh Also, I followed the guide on the pyTiVo wiki and I now can view all of the 1080p BD rips I have on my Hackintosh in another room (The "holy grail" for me; as I've been looking for a way to finally rid my condo of all physical media) I now have a truly digital house; no more books, no more magazines, no more CD's and now no more DVDs and BluRays.


----------



## ronsch

JulienPDX77 said:


> Oh Also, I followed the guide on the pyTiVo wiki and I now can view all of the 1080p BD rips I have on my Hackintosh in another room (The "holy grail" for me; as I've been looking for a way to finally rid my condo of all physical media) I now have a truly digital house; no more books, no more magazines, no more CD's and now no more DVDs and BluRays.


What do you do when the power goes out?


----------



## rcobourn

ronsch said:


> What do you do when the power goes out?


You know how there is always a surge in childbirth 9 months after a power outage...


----------



## Soapm

rcobourn said:


> You know how there is always a surge in childbirth 9 months after a power outage...


You saying he plants cabbage? I'll have to check into this digital cabbage patch that works when the powers out???


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

ShinySteelRobot said:


> Thanks guys, I'll roll the dice and report back once I have attempted the upgrade. BTW I'll probably use a WD20EARX since that's currently the cheapest 2TB WD Caviar Green drive AFAICT.


Quick update... The UPS guy dropped off my *WD20EARX* and I got started upgrading my TiVo Premiere XL (which is 100% full). The original drive already has the 20.2 software on it.

On the label it says the drive was manufactured on June 26, 2011.

The _wdidle3_ command reported a *default idle setting of 8 seconds*, which I reset to 300 seconds.

These new EARX drives *do not support AAM* according to HDDScan 3.3. Even so, I tried the IBM/Hitachi tool and was unable to change its acoustic management setting.

I'm using SATA connectors to copy the original 1TB Premiere XL drive over to the new drive. The copy process has been running for 7 hours and is just under half finished. Looks like it'll take roughly 14.5 total hours.

Hopefully the drive won't be too loud when I put it into the TiVo. It sucks that AAM is no longer supported, that seems like a retrograde step on WD's part.

EDIT: 
_RESULTS / FOLLOW-UP: Ok the copy finished this morning while I was sleeping. After a quick expand and supersize I installed the EARX into the TiVo Premiere XL. It appears everything works correctly, all my programs transferred, and performance is great! The Premiere XL now reports 318 hours (currently 49% full). Soft restart works fine. Thankfully the drive is actually surprisingly quiet, about the same as the OEM drive, AFAICT.

Overall I'm super happy with this upgrade... Donation forthcoming to Comer later today!_


----------



## unitron

ShinySteelRobot said:


> Quick update... The UPS guy dropped off my *WD20EARX* and I got started upgrading my TiVo Premiere XL (which is 100% full).
> 
> On the label it says the drive was manufactured on June 26, 2011.
> 
> The _wdidle3_ command reported a *default idle setting of 8 seconds*, which I reset to 300 seconds.
> 
> These new EARX drives *do not support AAM* according to HDDScan 3.3. Even so, I tried the IBM/Hitachi tool and was unable to change its acoustic management setting.
> 
> I'm using SATA connectors to copy the original 1GB Premiere XL drive over to the new drive. The original drive already has the 20.2 software on it. The copy process has been running for 7 hours and is just under half finished. Looks like it'll take roughly 14.5 total hours.
> 
> Hopefully the drive won't be too loud when I put it into the TiVo. It sucks that AAM is no longer supported, that seems like a retrograde step on WD's part.


How bad did that EARX set you back before shipping and where'd you buy it?

How well packed for shipping was it?


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

unitron said:


> How bad did that EARX set you back before shipping and where'd you buy it?
> 
> How well packed for shipping was it?


It was about $130 from Amazon and was double-boxed (box in a box) with both boxes having some packing material to cushion the drive.

BTW the Amazon price fell about $5-10 in the past week or so, let's hope that trend continues.


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

I edited my post above with the results of the TiVo Premiere XL upgrade. In a word: Awesome! 

Thanks to everyone in the forum who helped out!

EDIT:
Donation sent to Comer via PayPal. Well deserved; the upgrade was totally painless.


----------



## CoxInPHX

Is Comer still around? Last Activity: 08-25-2011 08:11 AM

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/member.php?u=53006


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

CoxInPHX said:


> Is Comer still around? Last Activity: 08-25-2011 08:11 AM


I got a thank-you note via email when I sent a PayPal donation, so he may not be active in the forums but he's definitely around _somewhere_.


----------



## yessirrom

I just purchased a new premier. I have two HDs that I upgraded a few years ago using a dock. I want to use one of the 1TB drives from the old HD and put it in the Premier. What steps should I take to prepare the old HD drive for use in the Premier?

Does this upgrade require a new drive?


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

yessirrom said:


> I just purchased a new premier. I have two HDs that I upgraded a few years ago using a dock. I want to use one of the 1TB drives from the old HD and put it in the Premier. What steps should I take to prepare the old HD drive for use in the Premier?
> 
> Does this upgrade require a new drive?


It doesn't require a new drive. Also, the 1TB drive will be completely overwritten by the JMFS tools (it does a byte-by-byte transfer using a Unix tool called *dd* I believe). You shouldn't need to do anything special. If your 1TB drive is a WD Green drive, then you may want to check its idle time with wdidle3, and reset it to 300 sec if it's currently 8 sec.


----------



## unitron

yessirrom said:


> I just purchased a new premier. I have two HDs that I upgraded a few years ago using a dock. I want to use one of the 1TB drives from the old HD and put it in the Premier. What steps should I take to prepare the old HD drive for use in the Premier?
> 
> Does this upgrade require a new drive?


Do not boot into Windows or try WinMFS with the Premiere drive attached to the computer.

If it's not a GigaByte brand motherboard, you should be alright booting from the jmfs cd. Once you copy the original Premiere drive to the 1TB, put the original Premiere drive somewhere safe, as the only backup for a Premiere drive is a Premiere drive.

What are you going to do with the now drive-less HD?


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

unitron said:


> If it's not a GigaByte brand motherboard, you should be alright booting from the jmfs cd.


Last week I upgraded my Premiere XL to 2 TB with a computer I built myself with a Gigabyte brand motherboard (GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3 Rev 1.0 Bios F12). It had no problem booting the JMFS cd, and the upgrade worked fine. Out of curiosity, what's the problem with Gigabyte motherboards? Thanks


----------



## lpwcomp

ShinySteelRobot said:


> Last week I upgraded my Premiere XL to 2 TB with a computer I built myself with a Gigabyte brand motherboard (GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3 Rev 1.0 Bios F12). It had no problem booting the JMFS cd, and the upgrade worked fine. Out of curiosity, what's the problem with Gigabyte motherboards? Thanks


At least some of the Gigabyte motherboards have the annoying habit creating a Host Protected Area on any connected drive, thus rendering the drive unusable in a TiVo.


----------



## unitron

lpwcomp said:


> At least some of the Gigabyte motherboards have the annoying habit creating a Host Protected Area on any connected drive, thus rendering the drive unusable in a TiVo.


I've found that if I put a drive on the Primary IDE as master (the one I'm going to use for Windows anyway), it gets HPA'ed, and then the rest are safe.

Of course I learned that the hard way through trial and error.

ShinySteelRobot's board doesn't seem to have any IDE ports so maybe it grabs the one attached to the lowest number SATA port. Maybe they've even wised up by now and provided a way to disable it in the BIOS settings.


----------



## CoxInPHX

I successfully upgraded my Premiere HDD using an older (2005) Gigabyte GA-8I915G Pro (Rev 1.x) motherboard in Aug or Sept 2011.

I disconnected all the computers SATA HDDs and connected the Original TiVo drive to SATA1 and the upgrade drive to SATA2, and booted from the jmfs Live CD.

I left the optical drives connected to the IDE connector.


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

unitron said:


> ShinySteelRobot's board doesn't seem to have any IDE ports so maybe it grabs the one attached to the lowest number SATA port. Maybe they've even wised up by now and provided a way to disable it in the BIOS settings.


Hmm, I didn't disable anything in BIOS. Before attaching the TiVo disks I simply reset the BIOS to "optimized defaults" and then set the SATA Mode to AHCI. Then I shut down, hooked up the drives and rebooted. On POST I hit F12 to tell it to boot from the CD in the DVD-ROM drive. That was it, JMFS was up and running, no fuss no muss.

BTW I haven't come across anything in the BIOS settings related to HPA or even suspiciously similar. I've only been using Gigabyte motherboards for about two years now since I started building, uh, my own "Macs".  The motherboard I used was about six months old.


----------



## JimR1998

I picked up a 1.5TB WDC external USB drive on closeout hoping to find a green drive of some sort inside. I ended up with an RE4-GP WD1502FYPS. It has a black label with an "Enterprise Storage" sticker.

The upgrade process with JMFS was simple and flawless. It's the wdidle thing that's giving me problems.

First, I only have a laptop and for the life of me I cannot get wdidle to detect the drive if it's hooked up via USB or eSATA. I spent a few hours on then just gave up.

Tivo booted up fine and all seems to be working well-- except, there is a constant clicking noise coming from the unit. Every 2-3 seconds it sounds like a pair of clicks. It's not even waiting for the 8 second timeout if that's the issue.

Does anyone have experience with this model? I don't mind the noise so much I just don't want to kill the drive.

Thanks!


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

JimR1998 said:


> except, there is a constant clicking noise coming from the unit. Every 2-3 seconds it sounds like a pair of clicks. It's not even waiting for the 8 second timeout if that's the issue.


Unfortunately I've had a hard drive do this too.  There's even a term for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Hard_disk_drives


----------



## unitron

CoxInPHX said:


> I successfully upgraded my Premiere HDD using an older (2005) Gigabyte GA-8I915G Pro (Rev 1.x) motherboard in Aug or Sept 2011.
> 
> I disconnected all the computers SATA HDDs and connected the Original TiVo drive to SATA1 and the upgrade drive to SATA2, and booted from the jmfs Live CD.
> 
> I left the optical drives connected to the IDE connector.


Does your motherboard manual say anything about Xpress Recovery or Xpress Recovery2?


----------



## CoxInPHX

unitron said:


> Does your motherboard manual say anything about Xpress Recovery or Xpress Recovery2?


Yes it did, as a matter of fact. It was listed as an option on boot-up. But the Xpress Recovery never worked, it always said not supported, I tried it a few times over the years.

That motherboard died a month later, and had to rebuild, used an ASUS P8H67-V (REV 3.0) and Core i3-2105.


----------



## L David Matheny

JimR1998 said:


> Tivo booted up fine and all seems to be working well-- except, there is a constant clicking noise coming from the unit. Every 2-3 seconds it sounds like a pair of clicks. It's not even waiting for the 8 second timeout if that's the issue.





ShinySteelRobot said:


> Unfortunately I've had a hard drive do this too.  There's even a term for it:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Hard_disk_drives


Fairly loud clicks in pairs could very well be reseeks done by a drive repeatedly trying to read the same failing block of data. But do note that some drives make a soft click every few seconds when idle as they move the heads around to keep heat due to air friction from building up in any one area. OTOH, that idle behavior might not occur in a TiVo since something is always being written and read back due to buffering of live TV.


----------



## unitron

JimR1998 said:


> I picked up a 1.5TB WDC external USB drive on closeout hoping to find a green drive of some sort inside. I ended up with an RE4-GP WD1502FYPS. It has a black label with an "Enterprise Storage" sticker.
> 
> The upgrade process with JMFS was simple and flawless. It's the wdidle thing that's giving me problems.
> 
> First, I only have a laptop and for the life of me I cannot get wdidle to detect the drive if it's hooked up via USB or eSATA. I spent a few hours on then just gave up.
> 
> Tivo booted up fine and all seems to be working well-- except, there is a constant clicking noise coming from the unit. Every 2-3 seconds it sounds like a pair of clicks. It's not even waiting for the 8 second timeout if that's the issue.
> 
> Does anyone have experience with this model? I don't mind the noise so much I just don't want to kill the drive.
> 
> Thanks!


Are you using it as an internal or external drive?

Stick a plastic soda straw or skinny paintbrush handle in the fan grill on the back to stop the blades turning momentarily and see if you still get the ticking.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

afamousguy said:


> HELP, PLEASE!
> 
> I tried wading though all 40+ pages of this thread but didn't see anyone with the problem I have been experiencing while trying to upgrade to a 1 TB Western Digital drive. When I boot to the TiVO Premiere JMFS CD (rev 104) it seems to load normally but always says that no TiVo drives are connected. The original and target drives show up in the BIOS normally. I've tried this on 3 different computers on all SATA setup modes available (native, legacy, etc) and get the same message.
> 
> Anyone seen this problem before or have any advice on how to get it to see my drive?


Have to start simple here....do you have the drive properly connected, both data AND power?

PS: What famous guy are you? (Feel free to just PM me the answer once you get a few posts...I won't tell anyone, I promise.)


----------



## Gregor

Lost the 1 TB external Tivo drive on my Premiere,  so I'm upgrading the internal drive to 2 TB to get the storage back.

Strange thing is the Live CD does not work on my Mac Mini but works fine on my MacBook Pro.


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

Gregor said:


> Strange thing is the Live CD does not work on my Mac Mini but works fine on my MacBook Pro.


Is it a PowerPC based G5 Mac Mini? The boot disc will only work on Intel.


----------



## Gregor

ShinySteelRobot said:


> Is it a PowerPC based G5 Mac Mini? The boot disc will only work on Intel.


No, Intel based Mini. I'll post the error message when I get done with the CD - it's running the upgrade in my MBP.

It looks it will take about 36 hours to complete the copy - about 30% done after running for 10 hours.


----------



## aaronwt

ShinySteelRobot said:


> It was about $130 from Amazon and was double-boxed (box in a box) with both boxes having some packing material to cushion the drive.
> 
> BTW the Amazon price fell about $5-10 in the past week or so, let's hope that trend continues.


I didnt realize the EARX drives were good for the TiVos I recently sold five new ones on eBay for $115 to $119. I would have tried to sell them here otherwise and saved the 9% fee. I sold around fifty hard drives in the span of a week getting rid of all my old S3 and TiVoHD stock hard drives as well as other new and old drives I had sitting around while the prices are still relatively high.


----------



## Gregor

OK here's what's on screen:

picture of 2 penguins
pci 0000:00:03.4: BAR 0: can't allocate resource
i804Z.c: No controller found
Running Linux Live scripts <http://www.linux-live.org> [*** Fatal error occurred - Java MFS not found.
You are maybe using an unsuppported boot device(eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA).
Workaround: Copy the directory JavaMFS from your boot device to an IDE/SATA
disk, eg. /mnt/hda1/JavaMFS or c:\JavaMFS. Then try to boot again.


----------



## unitron

Gregor said:


> OK here's what's on screen:
> 
> picture of 2 penguins
> pci 0000:00:03.4: BAR 0: can't allocate resource
> i804Z.c: No controller found
> Running Linux Live scripts <http://www.linux-live.org> [*** Fatal error occurred - Java MFS not found.
> You are maybe using an unsuppported boot device(eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA).
> Workaround: Copy the directory JavaMFS from your boot device to an IDE/SATA
> disk, eg. /mnt/hda1/JavaMFS or c:\JavaMFS. Then try to boot again.


I think you get one penguin if you've got a single core CPU and 2 if a dual core, although I might be confusing it with the Parted Magic Live cd.


----------



## Gregor

Could be dual core, it's a 2010 vintage Mac Mini.

I tried copying the JavaMFS directory to the root of the HD as it suggested and it still throws the error.

I'll have to check, but I believe there's a java development environment installed on the MBP, that may be the difference.


----------



## Phasers

I just purchased one of these on eBay. Emailed the seller, they said they use a WD20EARX with intellipark disabled and settings tuned for quiet operations.

Figured at $169.90 shipped for one preconfigured/preimaged vs $129.99 at amazon/newegg for a new WD20EARX, it was worth the $40 not to deal with it myself (new Premiere, no recordings to transfer).

Will update on how it is working when I recieve it later this week.


----------



## JulienPDX77

I upgraded my own drive using this process a while ago; but the drive i moved to was WD10EADS; I disabled intellipark but did not use wdiddle to "quiet" it...if it is noisy; i dont even notice


----------



## unitron

Phasers said:


> I just purchased one of these on eBay. Emailed the seller, they said they use a WD20EARX with intellipark disabled and settings tuned for quiet operations.
> 
> Figured at $169.90 shipped for one preconfigured/preimaged vs $129.99 at amazon/newegg for a new WD20EARX, it was worth the $40 not to deal with it myself (new Premiere, no recordings to transfer).
> 
> Will update on how it is working when I recieve it later this week.


Looks like DVR_Dude has some more (besides weaknees) competition.


----------



## Phasers

unitron said:


> Looks like DVR_Dude has some more (besides weaknees) competition.


Yeah, guess so.

Got drive today in mail, installed straight out of box, and Premiere is showing 317 hrs of HD capacity. Was indeed the EARX green drive, as promised.

Only thing is (and maybe it is my imagination), it seems to boot up slower than the factory drive in premiere and my premiere XL. Also, it is much quiter (again, maybe my imagination) than the factory drive.

I'm gonna wait and see if it speeds up any after the 20.2 update. I am currently on 14.4. I'll let it sit overnight to try and update, as I forced the connection 3 times and restarted it once already, and it is still on 14.4.


----------



## Phasers

Phasers said:


> Yeah, guess so.
> 
> Got drive today in mail, installed straight out of box, and Premiere is showing 317 hrs of HD capacity. Was indeed the EARX green drive, as promised.
> 
> Only thing is (and maybe it is my imagination), it seems to boot up slower than the factory drive in premiere and my premiere XL. Also, it is much quiter (again, maybe my imagination) than the factory drive.
> 
> I'm gonna wait and see if it speeds up any after the 20.2 update. I am currently on 14.4. I'll let it sit overnight to try and update, as I forced the connection 3 times and restarted it once already, and it is still on 14.4.


20.2 installed overnight. Surprisingly I have 318 hrs (+1 hr) of HD capacity now 

Haven't rebooted the box, but I am very happy with the upgrade. I have been transferring a bunch of shows from my full premiere XL, and it has been taking about ~15 min for each hr of recorded show I have been transferring (~6GB/1 hr HD show).

If you guys feel the $40 is worth not having to mess with the upgrade yourself on a new TiVo, then I highly recommend you go my route.


----------



## jwcatlanta

I have a Premiere which was upgraded from 320GB to 2TB WD EARS. 
6 months ago I backed down to 500Gb for troubleshooting reasons. That upgrade was done from the 320 drive and the few programs were moved off and then back on after the downgrade. Now the drive is 67% full and having problems with new recording requests because of "not enough room". All rebooting problems seem to be gone.

I want to upgrade to the 2TB again and tried using JMFS from the 500GB to the 2TB. The copy and expand go fine but when the drive is put back in the unit it boots up to the message that the external drive is not attached. Telling it to remove the external results in the drive going back to the 500GB. I found one reference to this problem. He had a 1TB going bad. He solved it by using OS X to rewrite the partition tables (something about the original upgrade adding the 17th partition). I do not want to attempt such a thing. 

I have the original 320Gb and know I can upgrade from it to the 2TB by transferring all the programs off and then back after the upgrade to maintain them. A time consuming job.

Is there any way to upgrade from the already upgraded drive and copy over the programs like the first upgrade does? Am I missing something or are we stuck with only one upgrade per Premiere while maintaining the already recorded programs? Thanks for any help. Jerry


----------



## unitron

jwcatlanta said:


> I have a Premiere which was upgraded from 320GB to 2TB WD EARS.
> 6 months ago I backed down to 500Gb for troubleshooting reasons. That upgrade was done from the 320 drive and the few programs were moved off and then back on after the downgrade. Now the drive is 67% full and having problems with new recording requests because of "not enough room". All rebooting problems seem to be gone.
> 
> I want to upgrade to the 2TB again and tried using JMFS from the 500GB to the 2TB. The copy and expand go fine but when the drive is put back in the unit it boots up to the message that the external drive is not attached. Telling it to remove the external results in the drive going back to the 500GB. I found one reference to this problem. He had a 1TB going bad. He solved it by using OS X to rewrite the partition tables (something about the original upgrade adding the 17th partition). I do not want to attempt such a thing.
> 
> I have the original 320Gb and know I can upgrade from it to the 2TB by transferring all the programs off and then back after the upgrade to maintain them. A time consuming job.
> 
> Is there any way to upgrade from the already upgraded drive and copy over the programs like the first upgrade does? Am I missing something or are we stuck with only one upgrade per Premiere while maintaining the already recorded programs? Thanks for any help. Jerry


Upgrading a TiVo drive usually means copying the first 13 partitions (including the 2 MFS pairs, partitions 10 and 11, and 12 and 13) to the larger drive and then expanding by adding another MFS pair. If you do this with say the original 320 and a 500, and the software that does it leaves a little bit of unused space at the end of the drive after adding the 3rd MFS pair, that space gets interpreted by the Apple Partition Map, and stuff that can read APMs, as an Apple Free partition. That's right, unpartitioned space is a partition. Now you know why Apple's slogan is "think different"

If you then go to use, say, comer's jmfs to upgrade that 500 to a 2TB, it'll first copy everything on the 500, but it's not smart enough to realise that an Apple Free partition is not a partition that needs to be preserved, but should be considered the beginning of the space into which to expand, so you wind up with the Apple Free partition on the 2TB as the 16th partition (the MFS pair that were added back on the 500 were the 14th and 15th), so when jmfs adds the single MFS media partition which it is designed to add, that partition becomes the 17th partition.

TiVos seem to have a 16 partition per drive limit, so when you boot up the 2TB in the TiVo, it thinks the 17th partition is a screwed up external drive, and wants to divorce it, and when that's done, you're back to a 500GB image on the 2TB drive.

If you originally upgraded from the 320 straight to the 2TB, which program or programs did you use?

When you went from the 320 to the 500, which program or programs did you use?

There may be a sneaky way out of this that involves a larger swap partition size and using dd_rescue to overwrite partitions with partitions, but I've got to find out more about the difference between the S4 partition layout and the S2-S3 layout first, and I've got to try an experiment with jmfs.


----------



## jwcatlanta

unitron said:


> Upgrading a TiVo drive usually means copying the first 13 partitions (including the 2 MFS pairs, partitions 10 and 11, and 12 and 13) to the larger drive and then expanding by adding another MFS pair. If you do this with say the original 320 and a 500, and the software that does it leaves a little bit of unused space at the end of the drive after adding the 3rd MFS pair, that space gets interpreted by the Apple Partition Map, and stuff that can read APMs, as an Apple Free partition. That's right, unpartitioned space is a partition. Now you know why Apple's slogan is "think different"
> 
> If you then go to use, say, comer's jmfs to upgrade that 500 to a 2TB, it'll first copy everything on the 500, but it's not smart enough to realise that an Apple Free partition is not a partition that needs to be preserved, but should be considered the beginning of the space into which to expand, so you wind up with the Apple Free partition on the 2TB as the 16th partition (the MFS pair that were added back on the 500 were the 14th and 15th), so when jmfs adds the single MFS media partition which it is designed to add, that partition becomes the 17th partition.
> 
> TiVos seem to have a 16 partition per drive limit, so when you boot up the 2TB in the TiVo, it thinks the 17th partition is a screwed up external drive, and wants to divorce it, and when that's done, you're back to a 500GB image on the 2TB drive.
> 
> If you originally upgraded from the 320 straight to the 2TB, which program or programs did you use?
> 
> When you went from the 320 to the 500, which program or programs did you use?
> 
> There may be a sneaky way out of this that involves a larger swap partition size and using dd_rescue to overwrite partitions with partitions, but I've got to find out more about the difference between the S4 partition layout and the S2-S3 layout first, and I've got to try an experiment with jmfs.


I used JMFS Rev 104 in each case. It works great. I saw references to the 17th sector problem but no fixes except re-writing the partition table using OS X. Hasn't there been more people with the problem?


----------



## arrarrgee

Could someone tell me where i can find an image for Tivo Premiere pls..


----------



## unitron

arrarrgee said:


> Could someone tell me where i can find an image for Tivo Premiere pls..


At this time the only image for a Premiere drive is another Premiere drive.

Exactly what's wrong with your Premiere?


----------



## arrarrgee

unitron said:


> At this time the only image for a Premiere drive is another Premiere drive.
> 
> Exactly what's wrong with your Premiere?


Thx for the reply..My Premiere went in to a relentless reboot mode...Took a freinds premiere drive and copied on to mine...works fine now...but thought of keeping an image just as a backup.


----------



## unitron

arrarrgee said:


> Thx for the reply..My Premiere went in to a relentless reboot mode...Took a freinds premiere drive and copied on to mine...works fine now...but thought of keeping an image just as a backup.


You could get a second 320GB drive and dd, or ddrescue, or dd_rescue onto that, but you could probably get a 1TB for not much more and use jmfs to copy and expand onto the rest of it, and put the 320 on the shelf for safekeeping.


----------



## arrarrgee

unitron said:


> You could get a second 320GB drive and dd, or ddrescue, or dd_rescue onto that, but you could probably get a 1TB for not much more and use jmfs to copy and expand onto the rest of it, and put the 320 on the shelf for safekeeping.


Yah probably will do that...Thx a lot


----------



## unitron

arrarrgee said:


> Yah probably will do that...Thx a lot


Or if you really want to throw money around, you could put a 2TB in that Premiere as long as you're going to open it up anyway.


----------



## arrarrgee

unitron said:


> Or if you really want to throw money around, you could put a 2TB in that Premiere as long as you're going to open it up anyway.


yah...thats the plan..but just cudnt bring myself to pay 120+ USD for the 2 TB drive that was 60+ a few months ago.:=)..waiting for the hard drive prices to come down a bit before i pull the trigger..


----------



## JimR1998

The nightmare being the wife and kids asking "is it fixed yet?" all weekend long!!

I'll detail my experiences here as they may be helpful to someone else. Fast forward to lessons learned at the bottom if you're in a hurry.

First, I'm using a Thinkpad T410 laptop and a USB to IDE/SATA cable kit to do the upgrade. I'm sure it would have been an easy 2-4 hour process if I had a desktop. But instead it took me 3 days and lots of hair pulling!

Two weeks ago I upgraded one Tivo with a WD GP-RE4 1.5TB "enterprise" drive that was inside a WD external USB enclosure. It's a NOISY drive and there are no bad sectors. This process was easy, although at the time I was unable to run the wdidle program (I'm not even sure it's necessary on that model). I attached the Tivo drive to the USB->SATA kit and used the WD USB external drive as the target. I let it copy overnight, but I think 320GB took about 5 hours.

I tried _everything_ but couldn't figure out a way to run wdidle since the DOS program does not detect the drive when it's hooked up via USB.

I ordered two HP SimpleSave 2TB drives from Staples which were rumored (correctly) to have WD20EARS drives inside. $92 each delivered to my door, I didn't want to pass it up. While those were on the way I knew I needed to figure out something for the wdidle issue.

My laptop has an ESATA port, so... easy enough... I would get an esata-to-sata cable. Tried that on the GP-RE4 and it didn't even spin up. Turns out my ESATA port is NON-POWERED. Returned that cable and bought a $3 esata-to-sata data only cable and got power from the USB->SATA kit. It spun up but even windows would not detect the drive. Ugh! Turns out I had to upgrade my T410 BIOS and change the SATA setting to ACPI. But ACPI was incompatible (or so it appears) with the main SSD drive inside, so I had to take that out. Luckily it's a 2-minute removal. Finally wdidle detected 
the drive!

Wait, it gets worse. HP SimpleSave drives arrive and I do the same process: Tivo as source drive on the USB->SATA kit, SimpleSave USB as the target. jfms worked fine, did the above hookup for wdidle and that went fine, put the drive in the Tivo and... flashing lights, no boot! !!!

Now I'm thinking advanced format is the culprit, but I research that and Premiere is fine with it. So I format the drive, but got suspicious when some Virtual CD / HP Launcher thing kept popping up in Windows. No problem, I think, I'll just use the USB controller board from the WD enclosure (which came with the GP-RE4). I fooled around with that for a while but couldn't get the drive detected. Turns out that controller is not compatible with advanced format (maybe I could have aligned it but did something else instead).

Ultimately, I ended up with my 320GB original Tivo as the source on ESATA which jmfs detected fine. But I was at a loss since I only had one power cable from the USB->SATA kit which was needed on the ESATA side. I wound up using the Tivo for power-- unplugged the main board connector which leaves the drive powered. Then I just plugged in the red data cable from the Tivo board into the USB->SATA kit. This was my option of last resort at 10pm! I had a really good feeling about it and sure enough it worked!!!

*LESSONS LEARNED*

Laptop users must have an ESATA port and a recent BIOS to get wdidle to work. It will NOT work through USB, no way no how, even if the USB "looks like" SATA and even if the USB drive is detected in DOS. Also, try to disconnect your main drive when you do this. If not, it probably needs to be 
non-Western Digital.

The HP SimpleSave USB enclosure cannot be the target when doing the upgrade. WD Essentials USB drive worked fine for me as the target. jmfs may not be able to get the drive name of the original Tivo drive, but it should be able to get the drive name of the new drive (WD20EARS). Also, watch out if the bytes reported are different from what you expect. The SimpleSave thing consumed about 700MB so I had fewer than 200000000000 bytes which was odd to me.

Here are the parts I used:

Sabrent USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Cable for 2.5-Inch/ 3.5-Inch / 5.25-Inch Drive with Power Adapter (tigerdirect, got it for $10 a few years ago)

SATA Serial ATA to eSATA External Shielded Cable 20" ($3 shipped on ebay)

With those two parts, the upgrade is easy and proven successful on a Thinkpad T400 series laptop.


----------



## jwcatlanta

Has anyone found a way to upgrade the drive size on Premiere the second time, because of running out of space again or a failing drive? I upgraded from 320GB to 500GB using JMFS rev 104 the first time and would like to upgrade again from the 500GB to a 2TB while keeping the recorded programs. I tried to use JMFS again but it did not work because of the extra partition as explained in other posts. Has anyone figured out a way to get around this problem short of modifying the partition tables with a hex editor. My wife's Premiere is running out of space so she isn't happy and we all know what that means. Thanks. Jerry


----------



## unitron

jwcatlanta said:


> Has anyone found a way to upgrade the drive size on Premiere the second time, because of running out of space again or a failing drive? I upgraded from 320GB to 500GB using JMFS rev 104 the first time and would like to upgrade again from the 500GB to a 2TB while keeping the recorded programs. I tried to use JMFS again but it did not work because of the extra partition as explained in other posts. Has anyone figured out a way to get around this problem short of modifying the partition tables with a hex editor. My wife's Premiere is running out of space so she isn't happy and we all know what that means. Thanks. Jerry


Can you use

pdisk -l

(that's a lowercase L)

on the MFS Live cd v1.4 to provide us with a partition map of the expanded 500GB drive?


----------



## porkenstein

The below text was mentioned in a previous post. Can someone explain what that means?

The _wdidle3_ command reported a *default idle setting of 8 seconds*, which I reset to 300 seconds.


----------



## unitron

porkenstein said:


> The below text was mentioned in a previous post. Can someone explain what that means?
> 
> The _wdidle3_ command reported a *default idle setting of 8 seconds*, which I reset to 300 seconds.


How detailed an explanation do you need?

the command

wdidle3/D

should disable Intellipark or set it really high, like 300 seconds, which it long enough for keeping it from screwing up a soft re-boot of the TiVo, which is what this is all about.

Or do you need Intellipark and why it's a problem explained?


----------



## unitron

JimR1998 said:


> ...
> Also, watch out if the bytes reported are different from what you expect. The SimpleSave thing consumed about 700MB so I had fewer than 200000000000 bytes which was odd to me.
> ...


Booting from the MFS Live cd v1.4, you can check for the presence of stuff like that with

hdparm -N /dev/sd?

where sd? is the drive you want to check on, it should show up as sda or sdb or sdc, etc., just use SHIFT+PAGE UP to go back up through the boot messages to see which name got assigned to the drive and use that one with the command.

It should show you a number followed by a slash followed by another number and then something about HPA (host protected area).

If the numbers don't match, you've got one.


----------



## porkenstein

unitron said:


> How detailed an explanation do you need?
> 
> the command
> 
> wdidle3/D
> 
> should disable Intellipark or set it really high, like 300 seconds, which it long enough for keeping it from screwing up a soft re-boot of the TiVo, which is what this is all about.
> 
> Or do you need Intellipark and why it's a problem explained?


I think I understand. I just needed to know as I will be installing a 2gb western digital drive tomorrow in my premiere. I guess I need to do that but still a little confused on what benifit. Can you explain further.


----------



## jwcatlanta

unitron said:


> Can you use
> 
> pdisk -l
> 
> (that's a lowercase L)
> 
> on the MFS Live cd v1.4 to provide us with a partition map of the expanded 500GB drive?


Do you want the 500 from the Premiere or the 2TB now at 500 after the TIVO took out what it thought was the external, or both?

Do I have to type it into a post or is there some other way to print it in Linux with an attached printer and send?


----------



## Soapm

jwcatlanta said:


> Do you want the 500 from the Premiere or the 2TB now at 500 after the TIVO took out what it thought was the external, or both?
> 
> Do I have to type it into a post or is there some other way to print it in Linux with an attached printer and send?


Both if possible but we only need the partitions after 10. What's strange is my experience with jmfs it only adds one partition as opposed to mfslive and winmfs which adds pairs. If you don't mind losing your recordings then you can always upgrade using the original disk since it will be like the first expansion onto the 2TB.


----------



## unitron

porkenstein said:


> I think I understand. I just needed to know as I will be installing a 2gb western digital drive tomorrow in my premiere. I guess I need to do that but still a little confused on what benifit. Can you explain further.


Intellipark notices a lack of drive activity, i.e., no data being read from or written to the drive, and after enough of it, parks the heads, and I guess maybe it lowers the rotation speed as well.

They really were thinking of applications other than TiVos when they developed that.

A TiVo's hard drive is always working, because at a minimum the 30 minute buffer is being filled all the time.

The 2 exceptions to that are when the AC power has been disconnected from the TiVo, obviously, and when the TiVo is doing a soft re-boot.

That's when it's rebooting itself without anyone having to pull the cord from the wall socket and plug it back in.

It's kind of like CTRL-ALT-DLT on a PC.

When it does a soft re-boot, power to the drive is not removed, but it quits sending data to the drive and quits requesting data from the drive. When this lack of activity goes on long enough, the drive goes to sleep.

The default setting of 8 seconds is short enough that the drive has time to go to sleep before the TiVo gets far enough in the re-boot sequence to call on the drive again. When it does, the drive is asleep, and doesn't respond right away, and the TiVo interprets that as something wrong and starts the re-boot process over again, which means the drive wakes up, doesn't see any more requests of it from the controller, goes back to sleep, and is asleep when the TiVo calls on it again, lather, rinse, repeat.

By setting the drive inactivity time period high enough, the drive doesn't get around to going to sleep before the TiVo has gotten far enough along in the re-boot proceess to call on the drive again, so the drive can respond instantly and the boot process continues the way it's supposed to.

So setting the inactivity period high enough (300 seconds, or 5 minutes) is effectively the same as disabling Intellipark where the TiVo soft reboot process is concerned.

If wdidle3/D doesn't work on a particular model drive, wdidle3/300 will do what amounts to the same thing.


----------



## unitron

jwcatlanta said:


> Do you want the 500 from the Premiere or the 2TB now at 500 after the TIVO took out what it thought was the external, or both?
> 
> Do I have to type it into a post or is there some other way to print it in Linux with an attached printer and send?


What I want is to see the partition map of the 500 on which you used jmfs to copy the 320 and expand.

I want to see what it did to expand.

Exactly what jmfs does in which circumstances is less well known, at least to me, than what MFS Live and WinMFS do.

The mfsinfo command in WinMFS would easily let you copy and paste the partition map, but apparently just booting into Windows with a Premiere drive attached screws it (the TiVo drive) up somehow (don't have any Premieres of my own with which to practice and experiment), so the only safe way to get a look at it is to boot with the MFS Live cd.

When the MFS Live cd boots you into a Linux/Unix-like command line environment, and you type in a command, you then hit the ENTER button to make it carry out that command.

Also, everything's case-sensitive, so if the example is a lowercase letter, don't type in an uppercase letter, and the other way around.

If it's not capitalized already, it's not supposed to be.

(sometimes the options for a command, which are typed after a command with a hyphen in front of them to indicate that they are options, will use the lowercase version of a letter to indicate one option, and the uppercase version to indicate a different option)

pdisk -l /dev/sda

will put the partition map of TiVo disk connected as sda on the screen

pdisk -l /dev/sda > pmap.txt

will re-direct the output of the command to a text file which, in this case, will be named pmap.txt, unless there's already a file by that name, in which case it will overwrite it.

The catch here is where exactly is this file "pmap.txt" being written to, where is it stored?

With MFS Live, where the Linux-based OS is basically loaded into memory from the cd and not from a hard drive, it may, for all I know, be written to a root directory that only exists in RAM somewhere.

What you need is a hard drive partition or USB stick partition which you can mount as a directory and re-direct the pdisk output to that directory.

For instance, let's say you have a USB stick formatted FAT32.

If you boot from the MFS Live cd, perhaps your main hard drive, the one with Windows on it, will be detected as

/dev/sda

and the attached TiVo drive will be

/dev/sdb

and the cd-rom or dvd drive from which you're booting is

/dev/sdc

(After it's finished booting you can use SHIFT+PAGE UP to go back up through the boot messages to see which drive got called what.)

and after it boots and settles down you plug in the USB stick, and it gets detected as /dev/sdd

(after a few moments and some stuff about it on the screen, you may have to hit ENTER one time to get back to the command prompt)

Then you can mount the only partition on the USB stick to one of the directories the boot cd created in memory.

A mount point is a place to attach stuff in the Linux/Unix organizational chart, so it knows where to find it.

If you give the "list" command

ls

it should show you what's in the directory in which you are currently in, which should be the root directory.

(previous sentence grammatically incorrect for purposes of clarity)

To see the same thing with a little more detail

ls -l

There should be a directory called

dos

and another called

tivo

There's nothing in them. Yet.

To mount that stick's only partition

mount -t vfat /dev/sdd1 /dos

This mounts, as a filesystem of type vfat (which I guess means virtual file allocation table), the what of the first (and only) partition on the stick (device scsi or sata disk "d", partition 1--/dev/sdd1) to the where of the directory /dos (the / indicates it's a directory subordinate to the root directory, I think)

You can then do

ls -l /dos

and if you already have any files on that stick, you should see them listed.

As long as none of them are already named pmap.txt, there shouldn't be a problem, but for educational purposes let's pretend there is one with that name.

Okay, we've got the 500GB drive from the Premiere assigned the "name"

/dev/sdb

and we've got

/dev/sdd1

mounted as

/dos

so

pdisk -l /dev/sdb

will show the partition map for the drive currently known as sdb, if it has an Apple Partition Map type partition map

and

pdisk -l /dev/sdb > /dos/pmap500.txt

will list the partition map on sdb and send it to "standard out", which usually gets sent to the screen, but we're using the "greater than" sign as an arrow to re-direct "standard out" to the textfile pmap500.txt which will be written in the dos directory which means the actual physical location where the text file gets written will be the sole partition on the USB stick.

Since we re-directed the outupt of the

pdisk

command with the "list" option

-l

to somewhere other than the screen, you won't see the output on the screen, it'll just write the file and return you to the command prompt.

But

ls /dos

will show you that

pmap500.txt

has been written to the

/dos

directory and therefore to the actual partition on the USB stick.

At that point you're done.

type

umount -a

(that's not un-mount, but u-mount, for some reason, even though the idea is to un-mount)

Then type

poweroff

Then detach the Premiere drive and the USB stick.

Then start the computer again and take out the MFS Live cd before the computer tries to boot from that so that it will boot from Windows instead.

Then hook up the USB stick and open up pmap500.txt in Notepad and copy and paste.

(submitting now, will edit for spacing later)


----------



## jwcatlanta

I am an experienced Windows and DOS guy. Have done a little of everything and would not really even be afraid to edit the partition table if I had it backed up and the proper instructions. No OS X capability though to do what kc8apf explained. 

I am impressed and appreciate unitron taking the time to do the writeup. If you only need the partition info 11 and up, it would be just as quick and do less damage to by old brain to type it in. 

Please confirm 11 and up and I will get the info from both drives later today. Thanks.


----------



## unitron

jwcatlanta said:


> I am an experienced Windows and DOS guy. Have done a little of everything and would not really even be afraid to edit the partition table if I had it backed up and the proper instructions. No OS X capability though to do what kc8apf explained.
> 
> I am impressed and appreciate unitron taking the time to do the writeup. If you only need the partition info 11 and up, it would be just as quick and do less damage to by old brain to type it in.
> 
> Please confirm 11 and up and I will get the info from both drives later today. Thanks.


The MFS partitions are supposed to start with partition 10, at least in Series 1s through 3s.

Partitions 1 through 9 should be the same on the stock drive and any "embiggened" drive, it's the differences between the two "above" that in which I'm interested.

Off to try to find where someone has already posted a copy of a stock Premiere partition map, and maybe to read through comer's posts on "the other site" about how he developed jmfs.


----------



## getgray

Excuse cross post from my own thread.

I am using JMFS to attempt to backup a failing 1TB Premiere drive. I am copying it to a new 2TB WD drive. I am trying to save the 88% full drive's programs I have recorded on it.

The failing drive may only have this one last read in it. I do not have a spare 1 or 2 TB drive to make a second backup from the copy. 

Question is, can I put the 2TB drive with the 1TB image, in my Tivo to test it without expanding it?

I'm worried about the 2TB drive having errors and I don't want to make it worse by expanding it. Should I suck it up and go get another 2TB to backup the image before proceeding? Just hate to end up with (2) extra 2 TB drives if the rescue was unsucessful.


----------



## unitron

getgray said:


> Excuse cross post from my own thread.
> 
> I am using JMFS to attempt to backup a failing 1TB Premiere drive. I am copying it to a new 2TB WD drive. I am trying to save the 88% full drive's programs I have recorded on it.
> 
> The failing drive may only have this one last read in it. I do not have a spare 1 or 2 TB drive to make a second backup from the copy.
> 
> Question is, can I put the 2TB drive with the 1TB image, in my Tivo to test it without expanding it?
> 
> I'm worried about the 2TB drive having errors and I don't want to make it worse by expanding it. Should I suck it up and go get another 2TB to backup the image before proceeding? Just hate to end up with (2) extra 2 TB drives if the rescue was unsucessful.


I address this elsewhere where you also posted, but just let me say that if the copy to the 2TB has errors, then expanding with jmfs probably won't make any difference in whether it is disabled by those errors or not.


----------



## getgray

getgray said:


> Excuse cross post from my own thread.
> 
> I am using JMFS to attempt to backup a failing 1TB Premiere drive. I am copying it to a new 2TB WD drive. I am trying to save the 88% full drive's programs I have recorded on it.
> 
> The failing drive may only have this one last read in it. I do not have a spare 1 or 2 TB drive to make a second backup from the copy.
> 
> Question is, can I put the 2TB drive with the 1TB image, in my Tivo to test it without expanding it?
> 
> I'm worried about the 2TB drive having errors and I don't want to make it worse by expanding it. Should I suck it up and go get another 2TB to backup the image before proceeding? Just hate to end up with (2) extra 2 TB drives if the rescue was unsucessful.


Issue resolved here. Thank you.


----------



## jwcatlanta

unitron said:


> The MFS partitions are supposed to start with partition 10, at least in Series 1s through 3s.
> 
> Partitions 1 through 9 should be the same on the stock drive and any "embiggened" drive, it's the differences between the two "above" that in which I'm interested.
> 
> Off to try to find where someone has already posted a copy of a stock Premiere partition map, and maybe to read through comer's posts on "the other site" about how he developed jmfs.


Here are the partition tables (partition 10 and up) requested.

First is the 500GB WD5000AACS which was copied, expanded and supersized from the original Premiere 320Gb using JMFS. It is working fine but running out of room and has no partition 16 showing in the table. It shows a capacity of 74 HD or 645 SD shows.

Par Type Name Length @ Base (size)

10: MFS MFS application region 1638400 @ 352511906 (800.0M)
11: MFS MFS media region 269353742 @ 355788706 (128.4G)
12: MFS MFS application region 2 1638400 @ 354150306 (800.0M)
13: MFS MFS media region 2 343828320 @ 64 (164.0G)
14: EXT2 SQLite 6291456 @ 346220450 (3.0G)
15: MFS MFS media region 3 351630720 @ 625142448 (167.7G)

Here is the 2TB WD20EARS table. I used it to copy from the 500GB above using JMFS. I tried both copy, expand and supersize as well as just copy and expand. This table is after just expand. In both cases the Premiere thought it had a bad external drive. I told it to remove the external and it now works and shows the same capacity as above.

Par Type Name Length @ Base (size)

10: MFS MFS application region 1638400 @ 352511906 (800.0M)
11: MFS MFS media region 269353742 @ 355788706 (128.4G)
12: MFS MFS application region 2 1638400 @ 354150306 (800.0M)
13: MFS MFS media region 2 343828320 @ 64 (164.0G)
14: EXT2 SQLite 6291456 @ 346220450 (3.0G)
15: MFS MFS media region 3 351630720 @ 625142448 (167.7G)
16: MFS MFS media region 4 2930256000 @ 976773168 (1.4T)

Please let me know if anyone has any ideas on how to copy 500GB to the full size 2TB and preserve the shows.


----------



## unitron

jwcatlanta said:


> Here are the partition tables (partition 10 and up) requested.
> 
> First is the 500GB WD5000AACS which was copied, expanded and supersized from the original Premiere 320Gb using JMFS. It is working fine but running out of room and has no partition 16 showing in the table. It shows a capacity of 74 HD or 645 SD shows.
> 
> Par Type Name Length @ Base (size)
> 
> 10: MFS MFS application region 1638400 @ 352511906 (800.0M)
> 11: MFS MFS media region 269353742 @ 355788706 (128.4G)
> 12: MFS MFS application region 2 1638400 @ 354150306 (800.0M)
> 13: MFS MFS media region 2 343828320 @ 64 (164.0G)
> 14: EXT2 SQLite 6291456 @ 346220450 (3.0G)
> 15: MFS MFS media region 3 351630720 @ 625142448 (167.7G)
> 
> Here is the 2TB WD20EARS table. I used it to copy from the 500GB above using JMFS. I tried both copy, expand and supersize as well as just copy and expand. This table is after just expand. In both cases the Premiere thought it had a bad external drive. I told it to remove the external and it now works and shows the same capacity as above.
> 
> Par Type Name Length @ Base (size)
> 
> 10: MFS MFS application region 1638400 @ 352511906 (800.0M)
> 11: MFS MFS media region 269353742 @ 355788706 (128.4G)
> 12: MFS MFS application region 2 1638400 @ 354150306 (800.0M)
> 13: MFS MFS media region 2 343828320 @ 64 (164.0G)
> 14: EXT2 SQLite 6291456 @ 346220450 (3.0G)
> 15: MFS MFS media region 3 351630720 @ 625142448 (167.7G)
> 16: MFS MFS media region 4 2930256000 @ 976773168 (1.4T)
> 
> Please let me know if anyone has any ideas on how to copy 500GB to the full size 2TB and preserve the shows.


That second one looks like it ought to work, but....

The discussion of Premiere drives and how to "embiggen" them that I thought I read over at "the site which must not be named" was actually over on the forums at mfslive.org

http://mfslive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1500

where you can see comer picking spike's brain as he works out what eventually becomes jmfs

Unfortunately a lot of it is still over my head.

I thought that it was exceeding the 16 partitions per drive rule that made the TiVo think that the added partition was a faulty external, but apparently there's more voodoo involved than that.

The part where he reports sucess, unfortunately, reminds me of the old cartoon of the professor with a blackboard filled with a long chain of math formulas and equations, and right in the middle there's a line that says "and then a miracle happens".

Unless we can get comer to weigh in on how jmfs gets away with adding a partition successfully without the TiVo thinking it's an external, I don't know how we're going to figure out how to do it a second time on the same drive.

Are there shows on the 500 that you can't copy off with TiVo Desktop?


----------



## jwcatlanta

unitron said:


> That second one looks like it ought to work, but....
> 
> The discussion of Premiere drives and how to "embiggen" them that I thought I read over at "the site which must not be named" was actually over on the forums at mfslive.org
> 
> http://mfslive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1500
> 
> where you can see comer picking spike's brain as he works out what eventually becomes jmfs
> 
> Unfortunately a lot of it is still over my head.
> 
> I thought that it was exceeding the 16 partitions per drive rule that made the TiVo think that the added partition was a faulty external, but apparently there's more voodoo involved than that.
> 
> The part where he reports sucess, unfortunately, reminds me of the old cartoon of the professor with a blackboard filled with a long chain of math formulas and equations, and right in the middle there's a line that says "and then a miracle happens".
> 
> Unless we can get comer to weigh in on how jmfs gets away with adding a partition successfully without the TiVo thinking it's an external, I don't know how we're going to figure out how to do it a second time on the same drive.
> 
> Are there shows on the 500 that you can't copy off with TiVo Desktop?


No. All shows can be copies off of the drive (I assume since I know that several do copy). That is the job I was trying to avoid. Looks like that is how I will have to proceed with the 2TB upgraded from the original 320GB. I will look at the tables at each step when I do that.

In the partition modification writeup by kc8apf he removed the 16th partition not the 17th. The 500GB upgraded from the 320 only has 15 partitions. It would seem that the 16th is what I need to remove to make it work, but--

I just loaded the original 320GB drive and it only has 14 partitions. They are identical to the first 14 on both of these drives.

What do you think of that?

P.S. Thanks for the link to MFSLive.org. I will take a look there.


----------



## unitron

jwcatlanta said:


> No. All shows can be copies off of the drive (I assume since I know that several do copy). That is the job I was trying to avoid. Looks like that is how I will have to proceed with the 2TB upgraded from the original 320GB. I will look at the tables at each step when I do that.
> 
> In the partition modification writeup by kc8apf he removed the 16th partition not the 17th. The 500GB upgraded from the 320 only has 15 partitions. It would seem that the 16th is what I need to remove to make it work, but--
> 
> I just loaded the original 320GB drive and it only has 14 partitions. They are identical to the first 14 on both of these drives.
> 
> What do you think of that?
> 
> P.S. Thanks for the link to MFSLive.org. I will take a look there.


"In the partition modification writeup by kc8apf..."

I'm too lazy to search, gotta link?

Never mind, I had to go look it up.

He's talking about an S3 drive, not a Premiere drive.

Apples and oranges, sorta.

On an S3, the stock drive has 13 partitions, that SQLite thing wasn't added until the S4 platform came out, and that's at least part of what breaks MFS Live and WinMFS where Premieres are concerned.

On an S3, you can expand by the MFS Tools/MFS Live/WinMFS technique of adding a third MFS pair, which become partitons 14 and 15.

Although not on the original S3, on the later S3 HD, and S3 HD XL, you can expand again by using jmfs, but only if there's no left over space on the drive onto which you first expanded.

If there's extra space, the Apple Partition Map scheme has labeled it an Apple Free partition (yes, unpartitioned space is labeled as a partition), and it's considered the 16th partition, at least by jmfs, so jmfs will copy everything, including the partition map that says there are 16 partitions, and it'll add the one partition it does add after the Apple Free partition, and it'll be the 17th partition on the disk. On an S3, this will violate the 16 partitions per disk rule, and the TiVo will interpret that 17th partition as a malfunctioning external drive, or an external drive that's on the wrong drive, and want to "divorce" it, which means it'll delete it from the partition map.

That's on the later S3's which were apparently changed from the original S3 in the direction they were going to go with the S4 enough that jmfs could work with them even though it was intended for the S4.

As to the S4:

jmfs took the original 14 partitions from your 320 and copied them to the 500, and then added the 15th (a third MFS media partition) and did something to make the TiVo like it. That's what it was designed to do.

But it was apparently only designed to do it once.

It's that "do something to make the TiVo like it" part where comer's explanation over on that mfslive link I gave either gets vague or goes over my head or both, so if comer doesn't pop back up, I don't know how to do what you want to do.

So my suggestion is to leave the 500 in the TiVo for now, put the 2TB in a computer, install TiVo Desktop and put its "My TiVo Recordings" folder on that 2TB drive (format the drive as one big NT partition), and store all of your recordings, including future ones, there for now and wait for drive prices to come back down and someone (like, say, comer or spike) to solve the problem.

I'll read over kc8apf's post a few times and see if I can figure out what he did with the hex editor, and see if I see any clue as to what might be done in your case, but don't hold your breath, 'cause if it happens at all, it won't happen quickly.


----------



## Soapm

jwcatlanta said:


> Par Type Name Length @ Base (size)
> 
> 10: MFS MFS application region 1638400 @ 352511906 (800.0M)
> 11: MFS MFS media region 269353742 @ 355788706 (128.4G)
> 12: MFS MFS application region 2 1638400 @ 354150306 (800.0M)
> 13: MFS MFS media region 2 343828320 @ 64 (164.0G)
> 14: EXT2 SQLite 6291456 @ 346220450 (3.0G)
> 15: MFS MFS media region 3 351630720 @ 625142448 (167.7G)
> 16: MFS MFS media region 4 2930256000 @ 976773168 (1.4T)
> 
> Please let me know if anyone has any ideas on how to copy 500GB to the full size 2TB and preserve the shows.


I don't know why this didn't work since you have only 16 partitions. This should have been ok but I can explain the usual problem. jmfs leave a little space at the end of the drive and Tivo see's that as a partition. Partition 17 to be exact and that's what it's thinking is your external drive. kc8apf fix was to eliminate the SQL partition (14) but that created another problem. Each partition knows how many partitions there are. Kind of like 1 of 16, 2 of 16, 3 of 16 etc... so just deleting the partition didn't fix it for him. That's where the hex editor came in. He edited each partition header to correct the number scheme so instead of 1 of 17 he made it 1 of 16 which satisfied Tivo from thinking there was an external drive attached.

There is a very unorthodox fix at the other form using the tools posted in the S4 forum by puffdaddy. You don't need to do all that stuff about copying the image without VAR then creating a 3.5 gig VAR that he later split into VAR and the SQL partition since you don't need the SQL partition. You can if you want try his mfsadd to see if it will expand your drive without leaving that bit of free space at the end.

@Unitron... if you recall I had this same problem with my 2TB back in this thread http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=477151 that's when you posted your partition map and it didn't have that partition 14. I am starting to wonder if that's what Tivo is objecting to since you and I both have 16 partitions created by JMFS and we're not getting that expanded drive error. I was getting it when I had that SQL partition but I think I used an image you gave me that didn't have it and my 2TB has been working for about 3 weeks now with no reboots... No hacks but also no reboots... 

Just a thought...


----------



## unitron

Soapm said:


> I don't know why this didn't work since you have only 16 partitions. This should have been ok but I can explain the usual problem. jmfs leave a little space at the end of the drive and Tivo see's that as a partition. Partition 17 to be exact and that's what it's thinking is your external drive. kc8apf fix was to eliminate the SQL partition (14) but that created another problem. Each partition knows how many partitions there are. Kind of like 1 of 16, 2 of 16, 3 of 16 etc... so just deleting the partition didn't fix it for him. That's where the hex editor came in. He edited each partition header to correct the number scheme so instead of 1 of 17 he made it 1 of 16 which satisfied Tivo from thinking there was an external drive attached.
> 
> There is a very unorthodox fix at the other form using the tools posted in the S4 forum by puffdaddy. You don't need to do all that stuff about copying the image without VAR then creating a 3.5 gig VAR that he later split into VAR and the SQL partition since you don't need the SQL partition. You can if you want try his mfsadd to see if it will expand your drive without leaving that bit of free space at the end.
> 
> @Unitron... if you recall I had this same problem with my 2TB back in this thread http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=477151 that's when you posted your partition map and it didn't have that partition 14. I am starting to wonder if that's what Tivo is objecting to since you and I both have 16 partitions created by JMFS and we're not getting that expanded drive error. I was getting it when I had that SQL partition but I think I used an image you gave me that didn't have it and my 2TB has been working for about 3 weeks now with no reboots... No hacks but also no reboots...
> 
> Just a thought...


You're comparing S3 HD and HD XL partition maps to Premiere maps.

I suspect doing so may utimately cause more misunderstanding and confusion than enlightenment.

The S3s came with the usual 13 partitions, including 2 MFS pairs, 10-11, and 12-13.

The Premiere added that SQLite partition as partition 14.

Unfortunately the management at TiVo, Inc, overlooked the need to contact me personally and explain what it is and why it's there, and what it changes where drive size upgrades are concerned.

Come to think of it, they've never really explained anything to me about why MFS partitions come in pairs either, and no one's bothered to let me in on why jmfs can create a single MFS Media partition and the TiVo likes it just fine, but doesn't like a second one, even when it doesn't break the only 16 partitions per drive rule.

kc8apf was working with a Series 3 HD, not a Series 4, so he(she?) never had an SQLite partition 14 to worry about in the first place.

What he had was the original 160GB drive copied to a 1TB drive and then expanded (with the additions of MFS pair partitions 14 and 15) with MFS Live, which left a little unpartioned space at the end of the 1TB drive.

This left him with Apple Free partition 16, because the Apple Partition Map scheme turns unpartitioned space into a special, expendable, kind of partition (only jmfs doesn't know that the rules for it are different, and so preserves it).

What he did was hex-edit the partition map and the beginning of each partiton (up through 15) to remove any references to partition 16, and then (and at this point I don't know if he looked at the drive again with pdisk or not, and if doing so would have changed anything or not) he used jmfs to copy the 15 partitions on that 1Tb which jmfs could see to a 2TB drive and then let it add a single MFS media partition as partition 16.

So he wound up with basically what I have on my S3 HD (I don't know if he has a bigger swap partition like I do or not), except I did it by going from the 160 to a 1TB and expanding with WinMFS instead of MFS Live, because where MFS Live leaves a little space at the end that trips up jmfs, WinMFS does not.

I do not know why one does it and the other doesn't.

Maybe it's because spike built MFS Live out of the old MFS Tools written by someone else (Jamie?), but (I think) created WinMFS from scratch, but that's just a guess.


----------



## jwcatlanta

Soapm said:


> There is a very unorthodox fix at the other form using the tools posted in the S4 forum by puffdaddy. You don't need to do all that stuff about copying the image without VAR then creating a 3.5 gig VAR that he later split into VAR and the SQL partition since you don't need the SQL partition. You can if you want try his mfsadd to see if it will expand your drive without leaving that bit of free space at the end.


SQLite is a powerfule database which also works under Linux. It would seem to me that the Premiere uses this for it's database. If so, it would not work if it's partition was removed. I don't know about S3, does it have a SQLite partition?

Please provide link to the above reference and is the mfsadd program part of MFS Live or other.

Another question, are there detailed instructions somewhere for MFS Live. I found them for WinMFS but not Live. Thanks.


----------



## Soapm

jwcatlanta said:


> SQLite is a powerfule database which also works under Linux. It would seem to me that the Premiere uses this for it's database. If so, it would not work if it's partition was removed. I don't know about S3, does it have a SQLite partition?
> 
> Please provide link to the above reference and is the mfsadd program part of MFS Live or other.
> 
> Another question, are there detailed instructions somewhere for MFS Live. I found them for WinMFS but not Live. Thanks.


I was talking about the partition map you posted. It has SQLite on partition 14. While doing some of my farting around I ended up with that same partition 14. I don't recall how I got it but I do know the final product that works doesn't have it. Unitron convinced me it wasn't needed.

I will have to link you to the other place via PM since it not allowed to be discussed openly here.


----------



## jwcatlanta

Soapm said:


> I was talking about the partition map you posted. It has SQLite on partition 14. While doing some of my farting around I ended up with that same partition 14. I don't recall how I got it but I do know the final product that works doesn't have it. Unitron convinced me it wasn't needed.
> 
> I will have to link you to the other place via PM since it not allowed to be discussed openly here.


Thanks for the PM. I will look that over.

FYI, SQLite is in par 14 of the original 320GB (which works), par 14 of the 500GB (which works) and par 14 of the 2TB (which works as a 500GB after I let the Premiere remove the bad "external" it thought was there).

I am out of time and unless the info causes me to try something else, I have decided to copy off the programs to a desktop and transfer back on the 2TB after I copy, expand and supersize from the original 320GB using JMFS. I plan to do a partition table after each step. That should give a complete set from them for everyone's info.

I have another Premiere which was upgraded with JMFS from 320GB to 2TB over a year ago and it is working fine. Capacity is 318HD & 2788SD.


----------



## Soapm

jwcatlanta said:


> I am out of time and unless the info causes me to try something else, I have decided to copy off the programs to a desktop and transfer back on the 2TB after I copy, expand and supersize from the original 320GB using JMFS. I plan to do a partition table after each step. That should give a complete set from them for everyone's info..


I think you have a good plan. If you use kmttg you can remove the commercials and reformat the shows while you make this transition.

Good luck...


----------



## unitron

jwcatlanta said:


> SQLite is a powerfule database which also works under Linux. It would seem to me that the Premiere uses this for it's database. If so, it would not work if it's partition was removed. I don't know about S3, does it have a SQLite partition?
> 
> Please provide link to the above reference and is the mfsadd program part of MFS Live or other.
> 
> Another question, are there detailed instructions somewhere for MFS Live. I found them for WinMFS but not Live. Thanks.


Use of the MFS Live cd is covered at mfslive.org

Click on the "Full Guide" link on the left.

If you're upsizing a Premiere, you'll need to use jmfs rather than MFS Live and WinMFS, but I think everyone should burn themselves a copy of the MFS Live cd anyway.

Both MFS Live and WinMFS were created before the Series 4 platform came out.

Consequently, neither are designed to know what to do or not do regarding the SQLite partition, which was introduced with the S4 and is not present on previous model S1s, 2s, and 3s.

mfsadd is a part of both MFS Live and WinMFS.

It expands a TiVo drive by adding an MFS partition pair, and up through the S3 models, that was the way to do it.

With the introduction of the S4 platform we are in uncharted territory and a lot of pioneers have gotten arrows in the back.

(No disrespect for the original inhabitants of this continent intended)


----------



## CoxInPHX

Has anyone here, upgraded using a WD Caviar Black series HDD? If so what are your reported temps from the TiVo System Info.

I what to upgrade my sisters Premiere drive, and have several WD Caviar Blacks, but I am concerned about the amount of heat they generate, and HDD prices are still too high for me to consider purchasing a new WD AV-GP or Caviar Green.


----------



## unitron

CoxInPHX said:


> Has anyone here, upgraded using a WD Caviar Black series HDD? If so what are your reported temps from the TiVo System Info.
> 
> I what to upgrade my sisters Premiere drive, and have several WD Caviar Blacks, but I am concerned about the amount of heat they generate, and HDD prices are still too high for me to consider purchasing a new WD AV-GP or Caviar Green.


I'm using 1TB Blacks in S2 DTs, but I'm running extra fans, cause they do get toasty.

Although I've never had my hands or Torx driver on one, apparently the Premiere mounts the drive "upside down", but without enough room between the "bottom" of the drive and the chassis lid to accomodate a hard drive fan, so if you're going to put an additional fan in there you'll have to be inventive about a mounting location. And since the SATA TiVos don't use the 4 pin Molex power connectors, you'll have a little more of a challenge powering the fan, but if you get that adventuresome, consider T-tap Scotchlock connectors from 3M.


----------



## jediMac

I used this tool on a late 2011 Macbook Pro. I was able to successfully burn the CD but I got the failure message referenced upthread. My solution was to use unetbootin to put create a USB stick with the contents of the ISO. I couldn't boot directly from the USB, but as long as I had the stick attached to the MBP at startup, it was able to read the stuff that it needed. Everything worked perfectly from there and I'm now enjoying a 2TB Tivo Premiere.


----------



## lillevig

Maybe this has been addressed somewhere before but I'll ask anyway. I know that you can't create a backup image of a Premiere like you can with older Tivo drives. Has anyone worked out a method for running JMFS to copy a Premiere drive to a virtual hard drive on your PC? I'm thinking if that was possible, then the file could be saved and reloaded on a virtual hard drive when you needed to copy to a new hard drive. Not real efficient but maybe better than having to keep a spare piece of hardware lying around.


----------



## unitron

lillevig said:


> Maybe this has been addressed somewhere before but I'll ask anyway. I know that you can't create a backup image of a Premiere like you can with older Tivo drives. Has anyone worked out a method for running JMFS to copy a Premiere drive to a virtual hard drive on your PC? I'm thinking if that was possible, then the file could be saved and reloaded on a virtual hard drive when you needed to copy to a new hard drive. Not real efficient but maybe better than having to keep a spare piece of hardware lying around.


Somebody responded to me a week or two ago and had done that, forget with which model, but I can't remember which user or which thread.

It was a concept of which I was previously unaware, but sounds like a pretty slick trick.

I think they were working around not having enough spare SATA ports or something like that.


----------



## sdnative1

Great info and great thread! Thanks! There's also a great video on youtube from "garyadavis" who has a similar method to clone/expand the internal Tivo hard drive. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_KZsJ4vaQ&feature=related[/media]


----------



## slowbiscuit

If anyone is looking for a cheaper way to upgrade than paying the inflated prices for internal drives now, I have a success story with jmfs and a drive pulled out of an external USB case posted here. External drives are routinely on sale for way less than the equivalent internals, but it can be a crapshoot as to what you get if you open it up.


----------



## TDuck

I've just successfully upgraded my Premiere from 320 GB to 2 TB with the easy instructions in the OP. 

Picked up a 2TB WD external off Newegg for just over US$100, hooked it up to my MacBook alongside the OEM drive, booted off the jmfs live CD and did a copy-expand-supersize without a hitch. Then, I just popped the external drive out and hooked it into the Premiere.

Thanks!


----------



## T_RJ

I just received a wd20earx as a rma replacement for a dead WD drive.
I have tried to use WDIDEL3 to set the idle park time but it will not work with this drive.
I have tried several different computers none will work.
I am able to copy my 1 TB drive to it without issue.
Anyone else have problems with WDIDEL3 with the wd20earx drive?


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> I just received a wd20earx as a rma replacement for a dead WD drive.
> I have tried to use WDIDEL3 to set the idle park time but it will not work with this drive.
> I have tried several different computers none will work.
> I am able to copy my 1 TB drive to it without issue.
> Anyone else have problems with WDIDEL3 with the wd20earx drive?


Do you have the drive connected directly to the motherboard?

As in, not through an adapter that plugs into a USB jack.


----------



## T_RJ

yes drive is connected to MB.
Three different pc's same results WDIDEL3 does not recognize the drive.
jmfs works fine. Just find it odd that WDIDEL does not see the drive. I wonder if WD has changed the drive firmware.
WDiags for dos does not recognize the drive either. MB bios sees the drive just fine.


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> yes drive is connected to MB.
> Three different pc's same results WDIDEL3 does not recognize the drive.
> jmfs works fine. Just find it odd that WDIDEL does not see the drive. I wonder if WD has changed the drive firmware.
> WDiags for dos does not recognize the drive either. MB bios sees the drive just fine.


Are you running that WD stuff off of bootable cd's?


----------



## T_RJ

yes


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> yes


Well, then, I've officially got the heebie jeebies about either that particular drive, or if they all are like that, that particular model.

Have you tried to see what hdparm has to say about it?


----------



## T_RJ

I will mess with it more tomorrow had enough for today


----------



## Tivoitis

T_RJ said:


> yes drive is connected to MB.
> Three different pc's same results WDIDEL3 does not recognize the drive.
> jmfs works fine. Just find it odd that WDIDEL does not see the drive. I wonder if WD has changed the drive firmware.
> WDiags for dos does not recognize the drive either. MB bios sees the drive just fine.


Just to be sure, since you've been typing it the same way ... you've really been typing WDIDLE3 and not WDIDEL3, right?


----------



## unitron

Tivoitis said:


> Just to be sure, since you've been typing it the same way ... you've really been typing WDIDLE3 and not WDIDEL3, right?


If he mistyped (and I think it's supposed to be lowercase anyway, but I haven't run it in a while), he should have gotten a "command not found"-type error message.

It's the failure of WD's own diagnostic software to be able to see the drive that I find the most concerning.


----------



## T_RJ

Made a typo in my posts "widle3" is what I have been typing.
It just does not work with this drive, wddiag boot disk doesn't work either.
It works with other drives just not this one.
The copied disk boots fine in my XL, soft reboots work as well no hung boots.
So I don't know what the deal is with this model drive maybe it has a different firmware then previous versions of the same drive. This drive has a date code 11/2011.


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> Made a typo in my posts "widle3" is what I have been typing.
> It just does not work with this drive, wddiag boot disk doesn't work either.
> It works with other drives just not this one.
> The copied disk boots fine in my XL, soft reboots work as well no hung boots.
> So I don't know what the deal is with this model drive maybe it has a different firmware then previous versions of the same drive. This drive has a date code 11/2011.


I hope that was another typo, you left out the first "d".

As in Western Digital Idle3, or wdidle3.

Took me a while to learn to spell it correctly myself.


----------



## T_RJ

Details, Details........

Just got my used premier ( Ebay $40.00 delivered ), seems to be in working order.
Doing a clear and delete and will make a backup of the disk, upgrade to 1TB.
Going to sell my unhacked HD 1TB.


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> Details, Details........
> 
> Just got my used premier ( Ebay $40.00 delivered ), seems to be in working order.
> Doing a clear and delete and will make a backup of the disk, upgrade to 1TB.
> Going to sell my unhacked HD 1TB.


Have you read the $99 lifetime thread yet?


----------



## T_RJ

I am on hold now, thanks for the info!
I am going to bite the bullit for the 399.00 LT on the elite.
And going to try and do both HD's for 99.00.
I might sell the hacked one on Ebay as well.


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> I am on hold now, thanks for the info!
> I am going to bite the bullit for the 399.00 LT on the elite.
> And going to try and do both HD's for 99.00.
> I might sell the hacked one on Ebay as well.


Just remember, you don't get the $99 rate for cancelling, you get it for threatening to cancel.


----------



## T_RJ

Yea, that is what I just told Brian.


----------



## T_RJ

Ok both Hd's and the Elite for $597.00.
It was costing me 456.00 per year for the month to month.
This is a bargain!


----------



## T_RJ

I wish Tivo would make a 2 Tivo glow remote.
Actually 3 tivo would be even better!
I may need to forgo the A B C D color keys and use my old 2 tivo remote.


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> I wish Tivo would make a 2 Tivo glow remote.
> Actually 3 tivo would be even better!
> I may need to forgo the A B C D color keys and use my old 2 tivo remote.


Yeah, the slide-switch more than one TiVo in the same room remote, and their "its own microprocessor on board" wireless G adapter are probably two of their best ideas in the history of the company.


----------



## T_RJ

I bought a Logitech and it works with all 3 tivo's but I just always liked the Peanut.


----------



## GoEagles

I have a early 2011 MacBook Pro. Could I use two USB SATA docking station to copy the original hard drive to a new WD green hard drive? I read earlier that the JMFS would not recognize a dual docking station. Could I boot the live CD, then copy and expand my system to a new 2TB drive?

Thanks!


----------



## unitron

GoEagles said:


> I have a early 2011 MacBook Pro. Could I use two USB SATA docking station to copy the original hard drive to a new WD green hard drive? I read earlier that the JMFS would not recognize a dual docking station. Could I boot the live CD, then copy and expand my system to a new 2TB drive?
> 
> Thanks!


Are you talking about one thing that plugs into one USB port but has slots for 2 drives?

If so, I'm pretty sure that won't work, as they aren't actually seen as drives.


----------



## GoEagles

unitron said:


> Are you talking about one thing that plugs into one USB port but has slots for 2 drives?
> 
> If so, I'm pretty sure that won't work, as they aren't actually seen as drives.


I ended up using an old IBM ThinkPad with two USB SATA docking stations. Took a while to copy. My only concern is that I told it expand the drive, but I *only* have 291 hours of HD recording, not 317 or 318. Anyone else experience this?


----------



## lpwcomp

GoEagles said:


> I ended up using an old IBM ThinkPad with two USB SATA docking stations. Took a while to copy. My only concern is that I told it expand the drive, but I *only* have 291 hours of HD recording, not 317 or 318. Anyone else experience this?


Did you Supersize it?


----------



## GoEagles

Yup, that is the last thing I did. Maybe I expanded it, but didn't supersize it? Hmmm..


----------



## T_RJ

Well I figured out what I was doing wrong with WDIDLE3.
I read somewhere you were supposed to leave ACHI on.
Wrong! It worked fine once I turned achi off.
AAM doesn't work on this wd20earx drive, it is not terribly loud so it will be ok.
I have a Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 that needs AAM (loud), I am looking for ver 28A firmware. That was the last ver that still had it. Anyone have a source for Hitachi firmware?


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> Well I figured out what I was doing wrong with WDIDLE3.
> I read somewhere you were supposed to leave ACHI on.
> Wrong! It worked fine once I turned achi off.
> AAM doesn't work on this wd20earx drive, it is not terribly loud so it will be ok.
> I have a Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 that needs AAM (loud), I am looking for ver 28A firmware. That was the last ver that still had it. Anyone have a source for Hitachi firmware?


With Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) off, can the WD diagnostic software bootable cd also see that drive?


----------



## T_RJ

No, it says that there is a drive but that this version is not compatible.
Same as before.


----------



## unitron

T_RJ said:


> No, it says that there is a drive but that this version is not compatible.
> Same as before.


Am I confusing you with someone else, or did you previously say that the diagnostic cd couldn't even see the drive?


----------



## T_RJ

I did not realize there was "small print" that said it wouldn't work with this drive. I have used it before and never seen that message. When I spoke with the WD tech he said it only works windows version of the software.


----------



## HockeyFan

I have 8GB on my original TiVo.
During the jmfs copying it goes to 70GB
Then the screen goes black and no activity
On either hard drive. No response to cursor.

Does this software go through 1TB even
Though there's only 8Gb on the source?
It displays "about to copy 1TBytes from
/dev/Sdc to /dev/sdb"U

Thanks. Looking forward to resolving the
Upgrade issues.


----------



## T_RJ

The screen goes black because the screen saver is on, just wiggle the mouse and the screen will reappear. The software does a byte for byte copy of the original drive than ask you if you would like to expand it. It takes a long time anywhere from 3 -12 hours depending on the size of the drive and the transfer rate.


----------



## unitron

HockeyFan said:


> I have 8GB on my original TiVo.
> During the jmfs copying it goes to 70GB
> Then the screen goes black and no activity
> On either hard drive. No response to cursor.
> 
> Does this software go through 1TB even
> Though there's only 8Gb on the source?
> It displays "about to copy 1TBytes from
> /dev/Sdc to /dev/sdb"U
> 
> Thanks. Looking forward to resolving the
> Upgrade issues.


If I can go by your previous posts you have a 1TB original drive and a 2TB replacement.

Try booting with the MFS Live cd v1.4 from mfslive.org and use

dd_rescue

to "Xerox" the 1TB to the 2TB. Then boot with jmfs and just the 2TB and let it handle the expansion.

But first, run Western Digital's own diagnostic software and do the long test on the 1TB. If it finds problems and offers to fix them, let it.

If the 2TB is a WD, run it on that as well. If it finds problems, return it under warranty.

Never assume parts are good just because they're new.


----------



## HockeyFan

T_RJ said:


> The screen goes black because the screen saver is on, just wiggle the mouse and the screen will reappear. The software does a byte for byte copy of the original drive than ask you if you would like to expand it. It takes a long time anywhere from 3 -12 hours depending on the size of the drive and the transfer rate.


Thanks for the response T_RJ!

I have moved the cursor and the screen
Does come back. Didn't come back when
Hard drive light inactive. 
Did receive overheat message at reboot,
So I opened the HD enclosure to keep drive
Out. This is probably cause of failure.

Thanks for info on byte-to-byte copy.
Stuck with USB. Let it run overnight.

Accidentally used wrong destination first.
Made it to 17gb. Anyone ever do this and
Recover their data using recovery software?

More concerned with upgrade than getting data back.
Would be nice though.


----------



## unitron

HockeyFan said:


> Thanks for the response T_RJ!
> 
> I have moved the cursor and the screen
> Does come back. Didn't come back when
> Hard drive light inactive.
> Did receive overheat message at reboot,
> So I opened the HD enclosure to keep drive
> Out. This is probably cause of failure.
> 
> Thanks for info on byte-to-byte copy.
> Stuck with USB. Let it run overnight.
> 
> Accidentally used wrong destination first.
> Made it to 17gb. Anyone ever do this and
> Recover their data using recovery software?
> 
> More concerned with upgrade than getting data back.
> Would be nice though.


What was that wrong destination?

If it was a DOS/Windows formatted drive you could try a command line utility called

testdisk

which can be found, among other places, on the Parted Magic cd.


----------



## HockeyFan

unitron said:


> What was that wrong destination?
> 
> If it was a DOS/Windows formatted drive you could try a command line utility called
> 
> testdisk
> 
> which can be found, among other places, on the Parted Magic cd.


I used the disk I backed up the TiVo shows
To  . Program stopped responding again.
Thinking of ordering a standalone drive duplicator.
Want the upgrade to work to make loosin the
700GB of shows worthwhile.


----------



## T_RJ

You need to attach both the source drive and the destination drive to sata ports on the motherbooard.


----------



## HockeyFan

HockeyFan said:


> I used the disk I backed up the TiVo shows
> To  . Program stopped responding again.
> Thinking of ordering a standalone drive duplicator.
> Want the upgrade to work to make loosin the
> 700GB of shows worthwhile.


Can I use mslive and dd_rescue command 
on a premiere XL incase the issue is with the source drive?
I have been getting the blue circle display
On TiVo lately. Wasn't sure if it was on tivos
end.


----------



## HockeyFan

T_RJ said:


> You need to attach both the source drive and the destination drive to sata ports on the motherbooard.


Using hp laptop. No longer have desktop computer.
Have one built in esata port and usb3 card.
Neither work. Possibly there's another addon
I can use. 
Just had open heart surgery and figured being
home I could use a larger hard drive.
Glad I got two blood pressure pills for this
excitement  . it's not that bad. Just wasting
Time which I have plenty of for next 12weeks.

Thanks for all the advice.


----------



## HockeyFan

HockeyFan said:


> Using hp laptop. No longer have desktop computer.
> Have one built in esata port and usb3 card.
> Neither work. Possibly there's another addon
> I can use.
> Just had open heart surgery and figured being
> home I could use a larger hard drive.
> Glad I got two blood pressure pills for this
> excitement  . it's not that bad. Just wasting
> Time which I have plenty of for next 12weeks.
> 
> Thanks for all the advice.


I found an old P4 desktop I had buried. missing all hard drives otherwise intact.
I ran the upgrade with the two drives connected to the internal sata cables
and the copy was competed by this morning.
The new 2TB hard drive is now in the tivo and its showing 318 HD hours capable.

Still not happy about loosing my 127 hours of tv shows . I spent 3 days downloading them to a hard drive because I read that the upgrade duration depends on the amount of data on the hard drive. Since the upgrade copies data byte by byte this is *not true*. Although it is my fault for leaving that hard drive in the destination enclosure when attempting the upgrade.

I found several data recovery programs that works with formatted, partitioned, and deleted drives. I'll See how that works.


----------



## SnakeEyes

I'm about to buy a TPE. I've waded through this thread as best as I can but I haven't noticed info on external drives greater than the official 1TB MyDVR expander. I see that weaknees offers a combo. Is how to do this not public knowledge yet?


----------



## lessd

SnakeEyes said:


> I'm about to buy a TPE. I've waded through this thread as best as I can but I haven't noticed info on external drives greater than the official 1TB MyDVR expander. I see that weaknees offers a combo. Is how to do this not public knowledge yet?


Given that most people don't need more than 300+ hours of HD storage nobody put the time into trying to expand the external drive, the internal JMFS is good enough for most people, and for the TPE you already get 300+ hours, and can add another 150H with A TiVo standard external drive.


----------



## SnakeEyes

Need and want are two different things and the latter hasn't stopped TiVo users in the past. Older TiVos were expanded to have 1000+ hours of recording space. Now with so much HD content out there I don't see things any different from then


----------



## lessd

SnakeEyes said:


> Need and want are two different things and the latter hasn't stopped TiVo users in the past. Older TiVos were expanded to have 1000+ hours of recording space. Now with so much HD content out there I don't see things any different from then


I don't disagree with you but without demand nobody is going to take the time to do this as you can purchase the 2TB external system from Weaknees. The JMFS system to expand the TP and TPXL has been used by many thousands I would guess, and I am sure a few people would like 600+ hours of HD storage on their TP but not that many.
And as to the 1000+ hours on the Series 2, that happen as large hard drives became less costly and available, it did not require and new software.
As of now the 2TB is the largest hard drive that a TiVo can handle, TiVo will not boot the 2.5TB or bigger drives.


----------



## SnakeEyes

You could purchase from Weaknees in the past too, also at their high when-compared-to-DIY prices. It doesn't affect demand nor hackers desire to find a way. Hackers do because they can.


----------



## unitron

SnakeEyes said:


> ... Hackers do because they can.


Or because nobody else has yet, or because someone told them they couldn't or someone told them they shouldn't.


----------



## lessd

SnakeEyes said:


> You could purchase from Weaknees in the past too, also at their high when-compared-to-DIY prices. It doesn't affect demand nor hackers desire to find a way. Hackers do because they can.


Well one can only hope, *hay Hackers, I bet you can't do the external TiVo drive at 2TB
*
Hope this works for your sake.


----------



## Lee III

Is it possible to repair the boot sectors using JMFS? I stupidly started trying to upgrade my Premiere using winmfs & borked the boot secctor. It just loads the first startup screen & reboots. I have a second premiere so source is no problem.
Thanks!
Lee


----------



## getgray

Lee III said:


> Is it possible to repair the boot sectors using JMFS? I stupidly started trying to upgrade my Premiere using winmfs & borked the boot secctor. It just loads the first startup screen & reboots. I have a second premiere so source is no problem.
> Thanks!
> Lee


As I started with a compelteld bare, new drive and it worked after copying with jmfs, it has to do the boot sector, too.


----------



## Soapm

Lee III said:


> Is it possible to repair the boot sectors using JMFS? I stupidly started trying to upgrade my Premiere using winmfs & borked the boot secctor. It just loads the first startup screen & reboots. I have a second premiere so source is no problem.
> Thanks!
> Lee


You can copy the image from your other premier to this drive as long as the drive is at least the same size. You ten want to do a clear and delete everything and you should be fine.


----------



## unitron

Lee III said:


> Is it possible to repair the boot sectors using JMFS? I stupidly started trying to upgrade my Premiere using winmfs & borked the boot secctor. It just loads the first startup screen & reboots. I have a second premiere so source is no problem.
> Thanks!
> Lee


Any recordings you had on the first TiVo are probably not going to be saveable

What you can do is "Xerox" (byte for byte copy) the drive from the second Premiere to the original drive of the first one by using a bootable cd (and not booting into Windows).

jmfs has a "copy" feature, which I think uses

ddrescue

and the MFS Live cd v1.4, a copy of which you should have anyway, includes

dd_rescue

which is the one with which I'm more familiar and comfortable.

Both do the same thing as

dd

but offer more options and on-screen information.

Once you copy the second drive to the first, put it in the second TiVo (it'll think that's where it belongs) and run Clear and Delete Everything.

When that finishes, put it back in the first TiVo and it should start off in Guided Setup.

Once you get that squared away, you can take it back out and use jmfs to copy it to a larger drive and expand it by adding an MFS media partition.


----------



## slowbiscuit

SnakeEyes said:


> I'm about to buy a TPE. I've waded through this thread as best as I can but I haven't noticed info on external drives greater than the official 1TB MyDVR expander. I see that weaknees offers a combo. Is how to do this not public knowledge yet?


And double your chances of a failure whacking all your recordings? Why not just offload shows to a PC? Given all the expander failures in the past, it boggles the mind why people continue to want to hoard a zillion hours on them.


----------



## Leon WIlkinson

Well, comer It took months for me to be ready to do an upgrade with your program put is about to happen maybe 2!

upgrade and a downgrade


----------



## GoEagles

I upgraded a TiVo Premiere from a 320GB to a 2TB WD20EARX. I believe this is an advanced format driver already, and maybe the jumpers were set to Windows XP compatibility already, but this didn't hang at all on me. One weird thing though, I had about 20 hours less of recording time, but that might have been me forgetting to supersize the drive.


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

T_RJ said:


> AAM doesn't work on this wd20earx drive, it is not terribly loud so it will be ok.


Ya, I was pretty impressed by how quiet the EARX drives are out of the box. Not dead silent, but virtually inaudible 12 feet from my sofa.


----------



## lessd

GoEagles said:


> I upgraded a TiVo Premiere from a 320GB to a 2TB WD20EARX. I believe this is an advanced format driver already, and maybe the jumpers were set to Windows XP compatibility already, but this didn't hang at all on me. One weird thing though, I had about 20 hours less of recording time, but that might have been me forgetting to supersize the drive.


The TP copy software will not care about any format that is on the drive before you do the copy, but if the drive is a 2.5TB or bigger the TP copy software will work (gives you no errors) but the TP will not boot.


----------



## Leon WIlkinson

well I'm at 122,000 MB copied and no errors 

drive is maybe 30% full should be close now?........


----------



## Hugo2160

I am using a Mac and cannot get the CD I burned the ISO on to boot. I am sorry if this is a duplicate post. I followed the instructions and downloaded the file onto my mac and then unzipped it into the same folder "downloads" again on my Mac. I then clicked "File" "burn jmfs-rev104.iso to Disc". I shutdown my Mac and then started back up holding down the Option key so that I could choose "Mac", "Windows" or the CD (however, the CD that I burned the ISO image to is not there). How do I get my Mac to recognize the CD when booting up? Or did I do something wrong before that point? Seems straight forward. Sorry for the Newb question.


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

Hugo2160 said:


> I am using a Mac and cannot get the CD I burned the ISO on to boot.


hi Hugo, please make sure you're using Disk Utility to burn your ISO. There are more instructions here:
http://osxdaily.com/2009/09/11/how-to-burn-an-iso-on-your-mac/


----------



## unitron

Hugo2160 said:


> I am using a Mac and cannot get the CD I burned the ISO on to boot. I am sorry if this is a duplicate post. I followed the instructions and downloaded the file onto my mac and then unzipped it into the same folder "downloads" again on my Mac. I then clicked "File" "burn jmfs-rev104.iso to Disc". I shutdown my Mac and then started back up holding down the Option key so that I could choose "Mac", "Windows" or the CD (however, the CD that I burned the ISO image to is not there). How do I get my Mac to recognize the CD when booting up? Or did I do something wrong before that point? Seems straight forward. Sorry for the Newb question.


You want, no matter what kind of computer or OS you're using, to be sure you burn the image AS AN IMAGE (you may have to examine all of the not immediately obvious and visible options which your cd burning software makes available), so that the correct structure with the right bytes in the right places is created, as opposed to just copying the image file to the cd.

I've made a few coasters, frisbees, reflectors, etc., that way by not paying attention. Also the version of Nero that comes with cd/dvd burners gets more complicated and harder to find stuff in with each iteration. Kinda like Windows.


----------



## Leon WIlkinson

unitron said:


> You want, no matter what kind of computer or OS you're using, to be sure you burn the image AS AN IMAGE (you may have to examine all of the not immediately obvious and visible options which your cd burning software makes available), so that the correct structure with the right bytes in the right places is created, as opposed to just copying the image file to the cd.
> 
> I've made a few coasters, frisbees, reflectors, etc., that way by not paying attention. Also the version of Nero that comes with cd/dvd burners gets more complicated and harder to find stuff in with each iteration. Kinda like Windows.


Is that when I use the Windows burn and it asked me if I wanted to make it bootable. (with it's booter or with my own source) it failed?


----------



## unitron

Leon WIlkinson said:


> Is that when I use the Windows burn and it asked me if I wanted to make it bootable. (with it's booter or with my own source) it failed?


I'm not, as far as I know, using a new enough version of Windows to have that feature (and therefore don't really know how it works or what words they use to mean things for which everybody else uses different words) and have always used the burning software bundled with the drive.

I will venture this:

When you burn an image as an image, you don't want the image file changed or added to in any way, and Windows idea of how to make it bootable might very well involve adding something.

Think of an image file as a snapshot.

When you print it to another piece of photo paper, everything in the original has to be in exactly the same location relative to each other and relative to the edges of the paper. Anything that changes that in any way makes it useless as an exact duplicate.


----------



## L David Matheny

unitron said:


> When you burn an image as an image, you don't want the image file changed or added to in any way, and Windows idea of how to make it bootable might very well involve adding something.


Yes. If Windows is doing something to "make it bootable" then it's probably not burning the .ISO image. You want the image burned exactly as-is. That's why it was saved as an .ISO image. If it's supposed to be bootable, that functionality is already a part of the saved image. And (to give a specific example) if a big part of the content on the CD you burned is a file ending in .ISO, then it wasn't burned as an image.


----------



## ncfoster

Is there a prevailing wisdom as to the best drive(s) for use in upgrading a Premiere these days? I believe that I read somewhere a while back that things didn't always work quite as intended when using a 2TB drive, etc. So, is 1TB the way to go, or has this been resolved, and/or maybe it was overblown? Thanks.


----------



## CoxInPHX

2TB is the best value, and no issues upgrading from a stock TiVo 320GB HDD.

1st Choice
WD20EURS, 2TB WD AV-GP same model in the Elite/XL4 - "Designed to last in always-on, streaming digital audio/video environments such as PVRs, DVRs and surveillance video recorders."
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-AV-GP-Intellipower-Internal/dp/B0042AG9V8

2nd Choice
WD20EARX, 2TB Caviar Green Desktop Drive
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Desktop-WD20EARX/dp/B004VFJ9MK


----------



## ncfoster

CoxInPHX said:


> 2TB is the best value, and no issues upgrading from a stock TiVo 320GB HDD.
> 
> 1st Choice
> WD20EURS, 2TB WD AV-GP same model in the Elite/XL4 - "Designed to last in always-on, streaming digital audio/video environments such as PVRs, DVRs and surveillance video recorders."
> http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-AV-GP-Intellipower-Internal/dp/B0042AG9V8
> 
> 2nd Choice
> WD20EARX, 2TB Caviar Green Desktop Drive
> http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Desktop-WD20EARX/dp/B004VFJ9MK


Thank you so much for the concise and useful response. Finger is on the trigger.


----------



## robo456

CoxInPHX said:


> 2TB is the best value, and no issues upgrading from a stock TiVo 320GB HDD.
> 1st Choice
> WD20EURS, 2TB WD AV-GP same model in the Elite/XL4 - "Designed to last in always-on, streaming digital audio/video environments such as PVRs, DVRs and surveillance video recorders."
> http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digita.../dp/B0042AG9V8


I picked up the EURS and was curious if you guys know if you still have to run the wdidle3 utility to disable the intellipark still?

Thanks for any info!

--rob


----------



## CoxInPHX

robo456 said:


> I picked up the EURS and was curious if you guys know if you still have to run the wdidle3 utility to disable the intellipark still?
> 
> Thanks for any info!
> 
> --rob


No, I did not. I do not think it is required.


----------



## unitron

robo456 said:


> I picked up the EURS and was curious if you guys know if you still have to run the wdidle3 utility to disable the intellipark still?
> 
> Thanks for any info!
> 
> --rob


Just download the image and burn the cd and boot with it and run wdidle3. If it doesn't need it it won't let it do anything, no harm done.


----------



## robo456

unitron said:


> Just download the image and burn the cd and boot with it and run wdidle3. If it doesn't need it it won't let it do anything, no harm done.


Thanks much!

--rob


----------



## ncfoster

My WD20EURS came today. I am surprised that I do not see more talk elsewhere about preparing drives. Is that not something that people bother with anymore? I was under the impression that large modern drives were actually more prone to bad sectors, etc. which one might want to map out before installing a new drive. I also wondered whether one needed to do anything differently with these AV-specific drives than a normal one, since I understand that they deliberately do less error-correction. Anyone have any thoughts?


----------



## unitron

ncfoster said:


> My WD20EURS came today. I am surprised that I do not see more talk elsewhere about preparing drives. Is that not something that people bother with anymore? I was under the impression that large modern drives were actually more prone to bad sectors, etc. which one might want to map out before installing a new drive. I also wondered whether one needed to do anything differently with these AV-specific drives than a normal one, since I understand that they deliberately do less error-correction. Anyone have any thoughts?


Download the image for the bootable cd with the WD diagnostic software on it and burn yourself a copy (burn as image). Search wd20eurs on the wd web site, look to left of results page for link or button that says "downloads" to get to page with images.

Run the long test on the drive.

Go here:

http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-critical-design-flaw-found-in-wd-caviar-green-hdds.html

find link for *WDIDLE3 ISO image*

download and burn as image and use it to disable Intellipark.

If that's a 4K drive, I don't know if you have to do anything special or not.


----------



## ncfoster

Thanks to everyone. I have the new drive up and running. I did neglect to look into the AAM setting, but I have seen at least some suggestion that the A/V drives, such as the WD20EURS that I used, do not need to be tuned, as they are already setup ideally for this purpose.

I don't recall what the old drive sounded like, but I am the sort to limit noise whenever possible, even if the difference is minimal. Should I leave well-enough alone, or is there benefit to be gained even on this drive?

Thank you all again.


----------



## unitron

ncfoster said:


> Thanks to everyone. I have the new drive up and running. I did neglect to look into the AAM setting, but I have seen at least some suggestion that the A/V drives, such as the WD20EURS that I used, do not need to be tuned, as they are already setup ideally for this purpose.
> 
> I don't recall what the old drive sounded like, but I am the sort to limit noise whenever possible, even if the difference is minimal. Should I leave well-enough alone, or is there benefit to be gained even on this drive?
> 
> Thank you all again.


Just so you know that AAM and Intellipark/wdidle3 are two different, unrelated things.


----------



## ncfoster

unitron said:


> Just so you know that AAM and Intellipark/wdidle3 are two different, unrelated things.


Yes, I am aware of that. I ran the Intellipark tool. I found that the drive already had it off, as expected. I am wondering about the AAM issue.


----------



## unitron

ncfoster said:


> Yes, I am aware of that. I ran the Intellipark tool. I found that the drive already had it off, as expected. I am wondering about the AAM issue.


Okay, some people get them confused.

I never paid any attention to the noise thing as long as the drive sounded "normal", there's usually something else running that would drown it out, so fear I'm no help on the finer points of fine tuning that.


----------



## ncfoster

One note I'd like to add for folks, especially those who watched the video mentioned in the thread, is that there isn't a lot of space to unscrew the drive rails from the case, at least the two further from the edge of the case. The video depicts using a small power drill with a torx bit. While my drill is admittedly bigger, I found it awkward to unscrew the two interior screws, given the relatively short length of the torx bit and the girth of the drill. So, if you have the opportunity to get a longer torx bit, I'd recommend it.

Side question: Am I the only one who had one of the metal standoffs come out of the motherboard when performing this operation? I found the design and construction largely very good, but I was surprised at this.


----------



## lessd

ncfoster said:


> One note I'd like to add for folks, especially those who watched the video mentioned in the thread, is that there isn't a lot of space to unscrew the drive rails from the case, at least the two further from the edge of the case. The video depicts using a small power drill with a torx bit. While my drill is admittedly bigger, I found it awkward to unscrew the two interior screws, given the relatively short length of the torx bit and the girth of the drill. So, if you have the opportunity to get a longer torx bit, I'd recommend it.
> 
> Side question: Am I the only one who had one of the metal standoffs come out of the motherboard when performing this operation? I found the design and construction largely very good, but I was surprised at this.


Yes the standoffs can come off, so one must not use a power driver to remove the drive or replace the drive unless you driver has a low torque setting.


----------



## ncfoster

lessd said:


> Yes the standoffs can come off, so one must not use a power driver to remove the drive or replace the drive unless you driver has a low torque setting.


It does have a variable torque. I think it was below half, but probably not low enough. Thanks...for future reference.


----------



## CoxInPHX

Here is what I used, light hand power only.
http://www.homedepot.com/buy/tools-hardware/hand-tools/husky/6-piece-hex-screwdriver-set-114546.html


----------



## nrnoble

Thanks to the OP from takiing the time to put this together.

A suggestion, and highly recommended, is to move the files off MediaFire and put the files on a virus free virtual drive from MS, Google, PogoPlug, Apple, Dropbox, etc. Medifire is a mine field of dangerous links and popups, such as the fake virus scans that install malware. Having TiVo users go there is just asking them to download files from unsafe location. Given that there are safe virtual drives with free space, its recommended to use those instead of mediafire.

Thanks


----------



## nrnoble

What is not clear to me is the difference between "copying and "expanding".

If I am going from a stock Tivo HDD to a 2TB drive. Do I need to expand the HDD after copy?

Thanks


----------



## lpwcomp

nrnoble said:


> What is not clear to me is the difference between "copying and "expanding".
> 
> If I am going from a stock Tivo HDD to a 2TB drive. Do I need to expand the HDD after copy?
> 
> Thanks


Yes.


----------



## nrnoble

Thanks

I successfully followed the instructions (or errors reported). Put the new 2TB into the Premiere and booted the TiVo.

For over 20 minutes the Tivo was on the screen that says "_Almost there, just a few more minutes_" I hope that is just a one time initialization because of the new 2TB drive; 20-25 minutes to boot up is a long time. My Series S3 Tivos have 2TB HDD, and only take 1-2 minutes to boot up.


----------



## lpwcomp

nrnoble said:


> Thanks
> 
> I successfully followed the instructions (or errors reported). Put the new 2TB into the Premiere and booted the TiVo.
> 
> For over 20 minutes the Tivo was on the screen that says "_Almost there, just a few more minutes_" I hope that is just a one time initialization because of the new 2TB drive; 20-25 minutes to boot up is a long time. My Series S3 Tivos have 2TB HDD, and only take 1-2 minutes to boot up.


I assume that:
1. you used JMFS to do the copy, expand, and optionally, supersize.
2. you don't have a Gigabyte motherboard or you connected the drives via USB.
3. the stock drive wasn't totally dead.
4. you didn't boot windows with the drives attached (not a problem in and of itself, just potentially.

What were the reported errors? After you did the expand, did it report the size? What model Premiere?

The laws of physics must work differently in your house if your TiVo 3s are booting up in 1-2 minutes.


----------



## nrnoble

lpwcomp said:


> I assume that:
> 1. you used JMFS to do the copy, expand, and optionally, supersize.
> 2. you don't have a Gigabyte motherboard or you connected the drives via USB.
> 3. the stock drive wasn't totally dead.
> 4. you didn't boot windows with the drives attached (not a problem in and of itself, just potentially.
> 
> What were the reported errors? After you did the expand, did it report the size? What model Premiere?
> 
> The laws of physics must work differently in your house if your TiVo 3s are booting up in 1-2 minutes.


I did things as listed (copy, expand), but didn't "supersize" because I didn't have the option. Once finished, it reported I had 1.71TB free space. No errors were reported at any time.

the orginal HDD was brand new, only used to record 2-3 recordings to verify the TiVo worked before upgrading the HDD.

Model is the basic Premiere with 320GB HDD.

I've not timed the booting of the S3 down to the second, so maybe it takes 3 minutes, but I think your smart enough to understand the point I was trying to make even if I have not timed the S3 boot time with a stopwatch. Feel free to tell me exactly how many total seconds it takes for S3 to boot, so I won't make such errors in the future.


----------



## lpwcomp

nrnoble said:


> I did things as listed (copy, expand), but didn't "supersize" because I didn't have the option.


That makes no sense.



nrnoble said:


> Once finished, it reported I had 1.71TB free space.


I thought JMFS reported # of hours capacity but I'll take your word for it.



nrnoble said:


> the orginal HDD was brand new, only used to record 2-3 recordings to verify the TiVo worked before upgrading the HDD.
> 
> Model is the basic Premiere with 320GB HDD


Check all of the internal connections. If they seem OK, try to bring it up again. If it is still stuck after 10 minutes ( shouldn't take that long but just to be sure), put the original drive back in and see if it works.

Your previous post said "(or errors reported)". Should that have been "(_*no*_ errors reported)"? If the former, what were they? If not or they were write errors, then hook the new drive up to the computer and run the manufacturers diagnostics.


----------



## nrnoble

Well it does appear that booting the first time with the new 2TB needed to go through a longer init phase (20-25 minutes), after it was booted & running successully, I rebooted the TiVo and it only took a couple of minutes to get to the TiVo Central screen. Thx


----------



## lpwcomp

nrnoble said:


> Well it does appear that booting the first time with the new 2TB needed to go through a longer init phase (20-25 minutes), after it was booted & running successully, I rebooted the TiVo and it only took a couple of minutes to get to the TiVo Central screen. Thx


Glad it is working now but it shouldn't have taken any extra time when you first started it. I'm also still confused about the Supersize thing. What does System Info report as capacity?


----------



## nrnoble

The Tivo's system information menu reports I have the capacity of 291 hours, which seems about right because my S3 TiVos report having the capacity of 237 hours. Seems to be working fine now.

When it was when I ran the jmfs tools that is I do not recall any option to "supersize". After booting from the Lived CD, it gave me the options to Copy, Expand, Exit, Shutdown. I copied the from orginal to new 2TB HDD (recordings transfered), then I selected to "Expand" new HDD, which reported a free space change from 320GB, to 1.71TB. that is what I recall happening. I may have over looked something, but I proceeded slowly so not to make any mistakes. I mostly was concerned about wiping out existing data on my PC's System drive (also 2TB HDD) by selecting the wrong target, so I tripled checked everything before proceeding.

What function does "supersizing" perform?

Thanks


----------



## unitron

nrnoble said:


> The Tivo's system information menu reports I have the capacity of 291 hours, which seems about right because my S3 TiVos report having the capacity of 237 hours. Seems to be working fine now.
> 
> When it was when I ran the jmfs tools that is I do not recall any option to "supersize". After booting from the Lived CD, it gave me the options to Copy, Expand, Exit, Shutdown. I copied the from orginal to new 2TB HDD (recordings transfered), then I selected to "Expand" new HDD, which reported a free space change from 320GB, to 1.71TB. that is what I recall happening. I may have over looked something, but I proceeded slowly so not to make any mistakes. I mostly was concerned about wiping out existing data on my PC's System drive (also 2TB HDD) by selecting the wrong target, so I tripled checked everything before proceeding.
> 
> What function does "supersizing" perform?
> 
> Thanks


There is some space somewhere on the original drive's MFS partitions that TiVo has reserved for recording advertising on, like when it records 30 minutes of paid tv to get the movie trailers and junk for which it puts a link at the bottom of every menu page. I think that stuff is called showcases.

Supersizing "unreserves" that space. Doesn't mean it won't record that stuff if that space is still available, just that it can no longer count on the space not having already been filled with something you wanted to record.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

nrnoble said:


> What is not clear to me is the difference between "copying and "expanding".
> 
> If I am going from a stock Tivo HDD to a 2TB drive. Do I need to expand the HDD after copy?
> 
> Thanks


Yes--the copy remains the same size as your original drive, not utilizing the empty space after that. After the copy, the expand adjusts the file system tables to utilize the new space for data.


----------



## lpwcomp

unitron said:


> There is some space somewhere on the original drive's MFS partitions that TiVo has reserved for recording advertising on, like when it records 30 minutes of paid tv to get the movie trailers and junk for which it puts a link at the bottom of every menu page. I think that stuff is called showcases.
> 
> Supersizing "unreserves" that space. Doesn't mean it won't record that stuff if that space is still available, just that it can no longer count on the space not having already been filled with something you wanted to record.


I'm pretty sure that what it does is reduce the amount of reserved space rather than eliminate it. By default, the TiVo reserves @10% which would be 200GB for a 2TB drive. Way more than it needs.


----------



## unitron

lpwcomp said:


> I'm pretty sure that what it does is reduce the amount of reserved space rather than eliminate it. By default, the TiVo reserves @10% which would be 200GB for a 2TB drive. Way more than it needs.


I bow to your greater wisdom.


----------



## unitron

ThreeSoFar said:


> Yes--the copy remains the same size as your original drive, not utilizing the empty space after that. After the copy, the expand adjusts the file system tables to utilize the new space for data.


To be a tad more specific, expand creates extra MFS partitions in the extra space, provided you don't already have the maximum number of partitions allowed by a TiVo.

If you're starting with the original drive, you still can add partitions.

If you've upgraded once already, maybe not.


----------



## rhoelzer

I admit I haven't read every page of this thread but I've done some searches and haven't found anything to help.

I'm trying to upgrade to a 2TB drive from the stock 320 and can't get either of 2 computers to recognize the original drive with MFSLive.

I've got a fairly new Dell desktop using internal SATA and I've tried a WD external USB enclosure. I've tried the boot CD, booting to flash drive, and WinMFS. I've also tried with the USB on my laptop.

Can anything think of something I might be missing?

I've upgraded S1 and S2 drives back in the day when everything was manual commands so I don't have a problem doing that if I have to. Is there a quick guide for doing it manually? And I'd assume the first thing I need to do is run a command to make sure the drives are there as far as the software is concerned.

Any help and minimal flaming would be much appreciated..


----------



## ThreeSoFar

rhoelzer said:


> I admit I haven't read every page of this thread but I've done some searches and haven't found anything to help.
> 
> I'm trying to upgrade to a 2TB drive from the stock 320 and can't get either of 2 computers to recognize the original drive with MFSLive.
> 
> I've got a fairly new Dell desktop using internal SATA and I've tried a WD external USB enclosure. I've tried the boot CD, booting to flash drive, and WinMFS. I've also tried with the USB on my laptop.
> 
> Can anything think of something I might be missing?
> 
> I've upgraded S1 and S2 drives back in the day when everything was manual commands so I don't have a problem doing that if I have to. Is there a quick guide for doing it manually? And I'd assume the first thing I need to do is run a command to make sure the drives are there as far as the software is concerned.
> 
> Any help and minimal flaming would be much appreciated..


For starters, what TiVo do you have that you want to upgrade?

For Premiere, the method of choice is the jmfs, so you're in the right thread. Hard to tell what you're maybe missing with so little detail, though. The jmfs boot CD (different from the MFSLive one you mention) is pretty idiot-proof. It tells you what drives it recognized, and it essentially defaults to "dupe the only TiVo drive attached to the only non-formatted drive attached". Hard to go wrong there.


----------



## unitron

rhoelzer said:


> I admit I haven't read every page of this thread but I've done some searches and haven't found anything to help.
> 
> I'm trying to upgrade to a 2TB drive from the stock 320 and can't get either of 2 computers to recognize the original drive with MFSLive.
> 
> I've got a fairly new Dell desktop using internal SATA and I've tried a WD external USB enclosure. I've tried the boot CD, booting to flash drive, and WinMFS. I've also tried with the USB on my laptop.
> 
> Can anything think of something I might be missing?
> 
> I've upgraded S1 and S2 drives back in the day when everything was manual commands so I don't have a problem doing that if I have to. Is there a quick guide for doing it manually? And I'd assume the first thing I need to do is run a command to make sure the drives are there as far as the software is concerned.
> 
> Any help and minimal flaming would be much appreciated..


Are you talking about a Premiere?

Do you also have an external attached to that TiVo?

The only thing you can use to upgrade a Premiere (at least for now) is jmfs.

The MFS Live cd will show you the partition map

pdisk -l /dev/sd"whicheverletterthedriveis"

but

mfsinfo /dev/sd"whicheverletterthedriveis"

will choke on the S4 structure because it differs from the S1 through S3 structure somewhat, and the original MFS Tools and their successor, MFS Live, were written before the S4 came out, as was WinMFS, with which you should never touch an S4 drive.

Also, there is currently no way, as there is for S1-S3, to make a backup image of an S4 drive.

The only thing you can do is use another drive of equal or greater size and something like

dd_rescue

to "Xerox" it.

Which is what jmfs does (except I think it uses

ddrescue

or some other

dd

variant), and then it adds another MFS partition in the extra space and rewrites the partition map and all the partition headers to properly incorporate it so the TiVo can and will use it.

You really should go back and read the first several posts of this thread at least before you do something irreversible that will make you an unhappy camper.


----------



## rhoelzer

Yep, it's a Premiere.

It is the jmfs, this image. premiere_linux_inc_supersize_jmfs-rev104

When it boots it just tells me it doesn't see a Tivo drive and gives me the options to retry, shut down, or exit.

Mostly wondering if it's just the computer and the enclosure I happen to have aren't working..

The desktop is a Dell Inspiron 620 and BIOS is current.



ThreeSoFar said:


> For starters, what TiVo do you have that you want to upgrade?
> 
> For Premiere, the method of choice is the jmfs, so you're in the right thread. Hard to tell what you're maybe missing with so little detail, though. The jmfs boot CD (different from the MFSLive one you mention) is pretty idiot-proof. It tells you what drives it recognized, and it essentially defaults to "dupe the only TiVo drive attached to the only non-formatted drive attached". Hard to go wrong there.


----------



## unitron

rhoelzer said:


> Yep, it's a Premiere.
> 
> It is the jmfs, this image. premiere_linux_inc_supersize_jmfs-rev104
> 
> When it boots it just tells me it doesn't see a Tivo drive and gives me the options to retry, shut down, or exit.
> 
> Mostly wondering if it's just the computer and the enclosure I happen to have aren't working..
> 
> The desktop is a Dell Inspiron 620 and BIOS is current.


Does the 320 still work just fine in the Premiere?

When you boot the computer with it attached, hit the delete key or what ever is necessary to go into the BIOS/CMOS settings and see if the computer itself is recognizing the drive.

I think the jmfs cd will allow you to do

fdisk -l

or

pdisk -l

which should show you if the jmfs is finding the drive at all.


----------



## rhoelzer

That's what I was looking for.

fdisk -l doesn't show either drive. They are there in the BIOS.

Looks like jmfs doesn't like the Dell. And no real options in the BIOS that look like they could be causing a problem.

I've gotten rid of all of the older computers I used to have sitting around so don't have anything else to try.

Seems like I remember seeing something about manually loading a driver or being able to get it added to jmfs. 

Or my other option would be to go find a couple cheap enclosures, is there a list of compatible enclosures that are available at the major retailers?

Or will I run into the same problem that the USB isn't supported either? I checked the WD enclosure I have and it doesn't see it either.


----------



## unitron

rhoelzer said:


> That's what I was looking for.
> 
> fdisk -l doesn't show either drive. They are there in the BIOS.
> 
> Looks like jmfs doesn't like the Dell. And no real options in the BIOS that look like they could be causing a problem.
> 
> I've gotten rid of all of the older computers I used to have sitting around so don't have anything else to try.
> 
> Seems like I remember seeing something about manually loading a driver or being able to get it added to jmfs.
> 
> Or my other option would be to go find a couple cheap enclosures, is there a list of compatible enclosures that are available at the major retailers?
> 
> Or will I run into the same problem that the USB isn't supported either? I checked the WD enclosure I have and it doesn't see it either.


Are you trying to upgrade a Premiere?

Are you already using an external drive with it?

Do you have a bootable copy of the MFS Live cd?

If the answer to that last question is yes, see if

fdisk -l

finds the drive when you boot with it.


----------



## rhoelzer

Yes it's a Premiere.

No external drive.

Using bootable flash, CD doesn't seem to boot right, adds to thought that the motherboard/drive controller isn't supported.

See my last post about fdisk not showing the drives.

And the drive is still good in the Premiere.



unitron said:


> Are you trying to upgrade a Premiere?
> 
> Are you already using an external drive with it?
> 
> Do you have a bootable copy of the MFS Live cd?
> 
> If the answer to that last question is yes, see if
> 
> fdisk -l
> 
> finds the drive when you boot with it.


----------



## copwriter

I'm having a similar problem. I have a brand new Premiere that has the cable card installed and programmed, and the box itself is activated with TiVo. 

I downloaded, burned to a CD, and ran the jmfs v.1.04 files by booting to the CD.
The TiVo drive and a brand-new, out-0f-the-box WD 20EURS drive are in side-by-side slots in a Kingwin dual SATA drive dock, connected to the computer by USB.
When the guide script loads, it reports no TiVo drives found. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the dock several times and rebooting. Same result.
fdisk shows the internal HD in the computer and both the TiVO and the WD20EURS drives (as /rev/sdb and /rev/sdc, respectively), with the appropriate drive capacities, so the computer is seeing the two drives. 
When I couldn't get the guide script to recognize the TiVo drive, I tried using the ddrescue command to copy the TiVo drive to the WD20EURS. The command took several hours and completed with 300 GB showing as transferred.
I didn't know how to run the EXPAND command from the command line (Linux noob), so that didn't happen.
Putting the WD20EURS in the Premiere causes it to flash lights and loop. I don't think there's anything on the drive the TiVo can read.
Replacing the original TiVo drive in the Premiere causes the Premiere to boot normally, with everything there that was there before.
 I'm basically back at Square One. Since the computer and the Linux setup can see the drives, why can't jmfs see that one of them is a TiVo drive? If anyone has any suggestions, please be explicit with regard to Linux commands, as I am close to flying blind here.


----------



## unitron

copwriter said:


> I'm having a similar problem. I have a brand new Premiere that has the cable card installed and programmed, and the box itself is activated with TiVo.
> 
> I downloaded, burned to a CD, and ran the jmfs v.1.04 files by booting to the CD.
> The TiVo drive and a brand-new, out-0f-the-box WD 20EURS drive are in side-by-side slots in a Kingwin dual SATA drive dock, connected to the computer by USB.
> When the guide script loads, it reports no TiVo drives found. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the dock several times and rebooting. Same result.
> fdisk shows the internal HD in the computer and both the TiVO and the WD20EURS drives (as /rev/sdb and /rev/sdc, respectively), with the appropriate drive capacities, so the computer is seeing the two drives.
> When I couldn't get the guide script to recognize the TiVo drive, I tried using the ddrescue command to copy the TiVo drive to the WD20EURS. The command took several hours and completed with 300 GB showing as transferred.
> I didn't know how to run the EXPAND command from the command line (Linux noob), so that didn't happen.
> Putting the WD20EURS in the Premiere causes it to flash lights and loop. I don't think there's anything on the drive the TiVo can read.
> Replacing the original TiVo drive in the Premiere causes the Premiere to boot normally, with everything there that was there before.
> I'm basically back at Square One. Since the computer and the Linux setup can see the drives, why can't jmfs see that one of them is a TiVo drive? If anyone has any suggestions, please be explicit with regard to Linux commands, as I am close to flying blind here.


"[*]The TiVo drive and a brand-new, out-0f-the-box WD 20EURS drive are in side-by-side slots in a Kingwin dual SATA drive dock, connected to the computer by USB."

There's your problem. jmfs has to see the drives connected directly to SATA ports.

You could try booting with the MFS Live cd v1.4 (get zip of .iso image at mfslive.org) and "Xerox"-ing the original drive to the 2TB by

dd_rescue -v /dev/sd"x" /dev/sd"y"

where "x" is the drive letter assigned to the original drive and "y" is the letter assigned to the 2TB.

Do not get them reversed or you will overwrite the original drive with the 2TB's zero-y emptiness.

Since the data has to travel out the USB of the dock into the computer and be turned around and sent back the way it came, expect it to take a while. Quite a while.

After that finishes, type in

poweroff

without doing any looking at either drive with any of the other utilities on the MFS Live cd v1.4

Then disconnect the original drive and connect the 2TB directly to a SATA controller, boot with jmfs, and tell it to expand.

That might work.

If you have any other hard drives attached to that motherboard, like say the one with Windows on it, or any other data you value, better to disconnect them while all of this is going on.


----------



## lpwcomp

copwriter said:


> [*]The TiVo drive and a brand-new, out-0f-the-box WD 20EURS drive are in side-by-side slots in a Kingwin dual SATA drive dock, connected to the computer by USB.


There's your problem. While it should work if the drives are in separate docks, even if connected by USB, JMFS will not work with a dual dock. Actually, I'm not sure that any of the TiVo upgrade tools will work with a dual dock.


----------



## Merle Corey

rhoelzer said:


> See my last post about fdisk not showing the drives.
> 
> And the drive is still good in the Premiere.


Is your PC in AHCI mode? It's a BIOS setting for how to handle the disks, and AHCI is standard on newer systems as it delivers better performance.

If that's the case, you'll need to turn off AHCI to get this done. The other option should be "IDE" or "ATA" or possibly even "Legacy" or similar.


----------



## copwriter

lpwcomp said:


> There's your problem. While it should work if the drives are in separate docks, even if connected by USB, JMFS will not work with a dual dock. Actually, I'm not sure that any of the TiVo upgrade tools will work with a dual dock.


You nailed it. I took the cover off a PC, disconnected the SATA cables to the internal HDs and re-attached them to the new and old TiVo drives, and re-ran JMFS. Worked the first time, in the computer and in the TiVo. Many thanks for your help. Comer, appreciation fee for your work is enroute.


----------



## mosborne

Hi:
Is there a new link to download the image? It appears the link is broke to mediafire. If it is still working, please let me know and I'll work the problem on my end.
Thanks


----------



## ThreeSoFar

mosborne said:


> Hi:
> Is there a new link to download the image? It appears the link is broke to mediafire. If it is still working, please let me know and I'll work the problem on my end.
> Thanks


http://mfslive.org always has the links (ETA _for theirs_. Hold on, I'm seeing if I can find jmfs one.

They are:

WINMFS: http://www.mfslive.org/winmfs

Linux Boot CD: http://www.mfslive.org/download.htm


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Here, haven't tried it yet, maybe give this a shot:

http://www.general-files.com/files-r/rev104/


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

CoxInPHX said:


> 2TB is the best value, and no issues upgrading from a stock TiVo 320GB HDD.
> 
> 1st Choice
> WD20EURS, 2TB WD AV-GP same model in the Elite/XL4 - "Designed to last in always-on, streaming digital audio/video environments such as PVRs, DVRs and surveillance video recorders."
> http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-AV-GP-Intellipower-Internal/dp/B0042AG9V8
> 
> 2nd Choice
> WD20EARX, 2TB Caviar Green Desktop Drive
> http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Desktop-WD20EARX/dp/B004VFJ9MK


Earlier this year I upgraded with a 2TB EARX drive, but it started becoming glitchy (pixelization, spontaneous reboots, etc). The SMART test kickstart reported a failing drive.

After I copied everything over to a EURS, it's been smooth sailing. I definitely recommend the EURS over the EARX if at all possible. The price premium over the EARX is only about 10% online.


----------



## lessd

ShinySteelRobot said:


> Earlier this year I upgraded with a 2TB EARX drive, but it started becoming glitchy (pixelization, spontaneous reboots, etc). The SMART test kickstart reported a failing drive.
> 
> After I copied everything over to a EURS, it's been smooth sailing. I definitely recommend the EURS over the EARX if at all possible. The price premium over the EARX is only about 10% online.


I don't think one bad drive makes a case that the EARX are NG, I have been using them for a few years now and never had a problem, I am sure others have also.


----------



## lpwcomp

lessd said:


> I don't think one bad drive makes a case that the EARX are NG, I have been using them for a few years now and never had a problem, I am sure others have also.


I thought the EARX has only been available for a little over 1 year.


----------



## mosborne

Thanks, it is downloading now.


----------



## lessd

lpwcomp said:


> I thought the EARX has only been available for a little over 1 year.


Yes, your correct as i upgraded some of my TiVos I got at the end of 2010 sometime in early 2011, so my use of years was incorrect.


----------



## Slother93

Thanks comer!


----------



## JoeTaxpayer

I used this to upgrade a Premiere to 1.5TB and it's been great.

I have a 2TB Premiere Elite (or whatever they call it) on order. Will this SW work on the Elite as well?
Given that the drive is the weak link in my life, I was thinking to just back up the fresh drive and lock it away. Then, when the day of failure occurs, I can be up again in minutes, stress free.


----------



## b13

So the last TIVO upgrade I did was from a Stock 320GB Western Digital to a 1TB Western Digital.

I did this roughly 3+ years ago...yeah the good old days. Let's put it this way I did it before this tool was out and everything was command line  No "fast gui" or Multiple Choice Interface.

Anyways, 1st let me give props to the coder/script writer. The interface is fast easy and user friendly

****************************************************
Ok now on to my problem. I copied the data from my WD 1TB to my new 2TB Drive.After 6-10 hours of data copying it asked me "do you want to expand" I selected yes.

Once the Tivo booted it complained about not having an expanded drive.... ?

To my suprise the COPY worked/the tivo works/all my shows copied. *However, the remaining other terrabyte is not being used*
*
My Tivo shows roughly 150HD Hours and I am still @ 89% Full (which is what I was on with the 1TB Drive)*

*Did I miss a step?*


----------



## unitron

JoeTaxpayer said:


> I used this to upgrade a Premiere to 1.5TB and it's been great.
> 
> I have a 2TB Premiere Elite (or whatever they call it) on order. Will this SW work on the Elite as well?
> Given that the drive is the weak link in my life, I was thinking to just back up the fresh drive and lock it away. Then, when the day of failure occurs, I can be up again in minutes, stress free.


As far as I know the only thing you can do with an Elite drive is "Xerox" it byte by byte to another drive with the

dd

utility or one of the newer utilities that do the same thing a little less cryptically, like

dd_rescue

which, in addition to dd, is on the very handy to have MFS Live cd (free image available at mfslive.org), or with what I think jmfs uses,

ddrescue

Booting into Windows and trying to take a look at the drive with WinMFS is apparently risky for S4 models, and leaves you with a TiVo that won't boot.

As far as I know, 2TB is the upper limit per drive for not just the later S3 models but the S4 platform as well, so you'll have to get another 2TB, and not a 2.5 or 3

And then there's the question of which implementation of "advanced format" by which drive maker might be used on the drive you buy and whether the TiVo can get along with it.

So "dd" the Elite drive to the new drive and try the new drive in the Elite and if it works leave it there and put the original drive in a very safe place for future reference after clearly labeling it and putting a big "Do not use for anything else" on it.

Any of the commercial, proprietary, closed source copying utilites, like Ghost, are possibly designed without TiVo drive structure strictly in mind, and I wouldn't think one could be sure they wouldn't screw something up.


----------



## unitron

b13 said:


> So the last TIVO upgrade I did was from a Stock 320GB Western Digital to a 1TB Western Digital.
> 
> I did this roughly 3+ years ago...yeah the good old days. Let's put it this way I did it before this tool was out and everything was command line  No "fast gui" or Multiple Choice Interface.
> 
> Anyways, 1st let me give props to the coder/script writer. The interface is fast easy and user friendly
> 
> ****************************************************
> Ok now on to my problem. I copied the data from my WD 1TB to my new 2TB Drive.After 6-10 hours of data copying it asked me "do you want to expand" I selected yes.
> 
> Once the Tivo booted it complained about not having an expanded drive.... ?
> 
> To my suprise the COPY worked/the tivo works/all my shows copied. *However, the remaining other terrabyte is not being used*
> *
> My Tivo shows roughly 150HD Hours and I am still @ 89% Full (which is what I was on with the 1TB Drive)*
> 
> *Did I miss a step?*


You upgraded a Premiere drive?

Or an S3 HD?

The Premiere's stock drive is a 320, but MFS Live and WinMFS do not work on it.

You can use either on an S3 HD (or HD XL), but the stock drive on the HD is only 160GB

Anyway, what happened is somehow you didn't completely fill that 1TB drive, and there's a little space at the end which shows up in the partition map as an Apple Free partition. (You can learn a lot more about this in the S3 jmfs thread).

jmfs works by adding a single 16th partition (that's the TiVo per drive limit, 16 partitons) instead of a pair the way MFS Live and WinMFS do.

If it sees that Apple Free partition it'll copy it along with the rest of the drive to a larger drive, and then expand by adding that single partition, but because of the Apple Free at 16, the new jmfs added partition is partition 17, and since the TiVo limit is 16 per drive, the TiVo thinks #17 is on a separate drive, and the only separate drive it knows about is an external.


----------



## b13

Ok, so where do I go from here? Do I need to recopy the image?

*Can i repair the current drive in my tivo with a few linux commands to get that partion showing in the tivo GUI?*

I have a Series 4 TIVO aka Tivo Premiere



unitron said:


> You upgraded a Premiere drive?
> 
> Or an S3 HD?
> 
> The Premiere's stock drive is a 320, but MFS Live and WinMFS do not work on it.
> 
> You can use either on an S3 HD (or HD XL), but the stock drive on the HD is only 160GB
> 
> Anyway, what happened is somehow you didn't completely fill that 1TB drive, and there's a little space at the end which shows up in the partition map as an Apple Free partition. (You can learn a lot more about this in the S3 jmfs thread).
> 
> jmfs works by adding a single 16th partition (that's the TiVo per drive limit, 16 partitons) instead of a pair the way MFS Live and WinMFS do.
> 
> If it sees that Apple Free partition it'll copy it along with the rest of the drive to a larger drive, and then expand by adding that single partition, but because of the Apple Free at 16, the new jmfs added partition is partition 17, and since the TiVo limit is 16 per drive, the TiVo thinks #17 is on a separate drive, and the only separate drive it knows about is an external.


----------



## unitron

b13 said:


> Ok, so where do I go from here? Do I need to recopy the image?
> 
> *Can i repair the current drive in my tivo with a few linux commands to get that partion showing in the tivo GUI?*
> 
> I have a Series 4 TIVO aka Tivo Premiere


It sounds like you know just enough to be dangerous.

Or else you're some sort of savant.

What software and procedures exactly did you use to copy the 320 to the 1TB and expand?


----------



## b13

*lol* 
Not quite sure if that's a compliment or insult 
I am fairly tech savy *systems security manager* so yeah I am "fairly dangerous at time" but only when I am required to be.

Oh man...whatever procedure was laying around on the web 3-4 years ago. I did the copy to a 1Tb drive years ago. It's worked fine! Until I was getting pixelation/macro blocking/rebooting.

So last night I took the drive that was in my tivo and i did the copy with JMFS to my new 2TB drive. As I have stated everything works just fine now. *It's just that "one step" the space is not being utilized fully.*



unitron said:


> It sounds like you know just enough to be dangerous.
> 
> Or else you're some sort of savant.
> 
> What software and procedures exactly did you use to copy the 320 to the 1TB and expand?


----------



## unitron

b13 said:


> *lol*
> Not quite sure if that's a compliment or insult
> I am fairly tech savy *systems security manager* so yeah I am "fairly dangerous at time" but only when I am required to be.
> 
> Oh man...whatever procedure was laying around on the web 3-4 years ago. I did the copy to a 1Tb drive years ago. It's worked fine! Until I was getting pixelation/macro blocking/rebooting.
> 
> So last night I took the drive that was in my tivo and i did the copy with JMFS to my new 2TB drive. As I have stated everything works just fine now. *It's just that "one step" the space is not being utilized fully.*


I am unaware of any way to copy a Premiere ot other S4 drive and expand it, except for jmfs.

That's what made it such a big deal.

Perhaps you used an earlier version of jmfs.

Anyway, I know of no other way (that doesn't invove rewriting partition headers with a hex editor) of dealing with your partition 16 problem than going back to the original 320GB drive and using jmfs to copy that straight to the 2TB and then expand.

Unfortunately, that'll cost you all of your recorded shows, cable card pairings, software updates, season passes, etc.

You can boot a PC (non-GigaByte brand motherboard) with the MFS Live cd v1.4 and use

pdisk -l

(that's a lowercase L, for list)

to look at the partition table on that 1TB, and I think you can redirect the output to a text file so that later you can open it with Windows and copy/paste it here, but do not use anything else on that cd to do anything to or try to look at in anyway an S4 drive, because nothing else has been confirmed to be safe.

(GigaByte brand boards have a nasty habit of putting a Host Protected Area on the end of drives, and that'll fubar a TiVo drive in a heartbeat.)


----------



## b13

s***Well luckily I have a "stock" 320 TIVO Image Drive. and a spare tivo. Maybe I'll just do that. I am sure over time I can get my shows back.


----------



## lpwcomp

b13 said:


> Oh man...whatever procedure was laying around on the web 3-4 years ago. I did the copy to a 1Tb drive years ago. It's worked fine! Until I was getting pixelation/macro blocking/rebooting. *It's just that "one step" the space is not being utilized fully.*


There's no way you upgraded a Premiere drive 3+ years ago. The Premiere didn't come out until 2010.


----------



## unitron

b13 said:


> s***Well luckily I have a "stock" 320 TIVO Image Drive. and a spare tivo. Maybe I'll just do that. I am sure over time I can get my shows back.


How would the spare TiVo come into this?

As a place to transfer shows to?


----------



## b13

Yeah possibly.



unitron said:


> How would the spare TiVo come into this?
> 
> As a place to transfer shows to?


----------



## lroscoe19

Hi
Am trying to upgrade my Premiere to a 2TB drive. Using a JMFS Live DVD, I'm getting a "loading/boot/vmilinuz"...then a "loading/boot/initrd.gz" message...before the computer reboots. This happens over & over again. Any ideas on what I can do? Thanks.


----------



## steve614

I take it that you have changed your BIOS settings to boot from the CD drive?

How do you have the hard drives connected?


----------



## unitron

lroscoe19 said:


> Hi
> Am trying to upgrade my Premiere to a 2TB drive. Using a JMFS Live DVD, I'm getting a "loading/boot/vmilinuz"...then a "loading/boot/initrd.gz" message...before the computer reboots. This happens over & over again. Any ideas on what I can do? Thanks.


jmfs fits on a CD-R just fine, no need to waste a blank DVD on it.

Disconnect all drives except the optical one from which you're attempting to boot and see if gets far enough to be able to tell you it can't find any hard drives.


----------



## lroscoe19

steve614 said:


> I take it that you have changed your BIOS settings to boot from the CD drive?
> 
> How do you have the hard drives connected?


I have...I can boot into JMFS just fine...it just keeps rebooting after about 5 seconds.

I have each drive connected to the motherboard with different SATA cables.


----------



## lroscoe19

unitron said:


> jmfs fits on a CD-R just fine, no need to waste a blank DVD on it.
> 
> Disconnect all drives except the optical one from which you're attempting to boot and see if gets far enough to be able to tell you it can't find any hard drives.


I didn't have spare CD-Rs laying around...so I had to use a DVD.

I disconnected all the drives & the same thing happens...continually reboots.


----------



## HomeUser

lroscoe19 said:


> Hi
> Am trying to upgrade my Premiere to a 2TB drive. Using a JMFS Live DVD, I'm getting a "loading/boot/vmilinuz"...then a "loading/boot/initrd.gz" message...before the computer reboots. This happens over & over again. Any ideas on what I can do? Thanks.


1.(Most likely) The Boot CD/DVD is corrupt verify the JMFS Live image then try re-burnning it at a lower speed
2. You have unstable RAM download and run Memtest86 memory diagnostics (The Free version is good)


----------



## lroscoe19

HomeUser said:


> 1.(Most likely) The Boot CD/DVD is corrupt verify the JMFS Live image then try re-burnning it at a lower speed
> 2. You have unstable RAM download and run (The Free version is good)


1. Burned to another DVD (using a different computer)...same result. Tried it with a bootable USB drive...same result.
2. Memory checked out fine using Memtest.


----------



## lroscoe19

JMFS seems to work fine when I boot up in my laptop...for some reason, my desktop can't boot into it.


----------



## L David Matheny

lroscoe19 said:


> 1. Burned to another DVD (using a different computer)...same result. Tried it with a bootable USB drive...same result.
> 2. Memory checked out fine using Memtest.


I've heard of situations where you _must_ use a CD and not a DVD. I can't remember whether that was only when burning firmware to be read by a DVD player (or whatever), or whether it could also apply to an .ISO image that is to be booted by a computer. If you can get your hands on a CD-R, try that.


----------



## Wiked

Hi,

Firstly I have read most of the pages in this thread so if this has been covered before and I missed it then I apologise in advance. 

I purchased a WD20EURS to replace my 1TB drive in one of our TiVo's.

I burned the ISO and ran JMFS. Copied the old drive to new drive in around 5 hours.
I then expanded the drive and it showed 1.82TB available.

I put it back into the TiVo and when it booted and came up with a grey screen and said that the TiVo couldn't detect the external drive that was associated with the TiVo and to dis-associate the external drive I was to press CLEAR.

I do not have an external HDD and have never had one.

I pressed clear and it rebooted. Now it shows the same 200 hrs in system information. So I assume that it's back to seeing at as the original 1TB drive. All of my recordings are 100% still there.

I don't want to waste 5 hrs again with the whole copy process without asking you guys if you know what happened?

I also ran wdidle3.exe and it said it wasn't activated so no need to to worry about that part.

I have 2 other TiVo's to upgrade in the house so I would love to know what went wrong. 

BTW I'm in Australia as we have the S2 (HD) version as far as I am aware.

thanks in advance for any help you can give me.


----------



## Guy Kuo

If the TiVo falsely detected an external drive association, then I suspect the original drive somehow has a small extra "apple free partition" 

JMFS dutifully added its new media partition after that "apple free partition" yielding something confusing to the TiVo.

Upon boot, TiVo "fixed" the problem by removing the extra partitions.

Fixing that situation (if that is indeed what is happening) is beyond me.


----------



## Wiked

Ok well I just upgraded another ouf our TiVo's (320GB installed) with a new WD20EURS as it didn't take as long to copy the data and it has worked perfectly.
Now has 400 HD recording hours showing.

I guess I will re-try the first TiVo again and the remaining one on the weekend when I get the time to do it and see what happens. Hopefully it's just a once off but I will report back to post what happens.


----------



## ~kyle

I didn't think you could expand a drive that's alreay been expanded. In other words you could go from 320GB>1TB or 320GB>2TB, etc. but you couldn't go from 320GB>1TB>2TB which is essentially what your trying to do, correct? I think you'd need to expand the original drive to 2TB.

Someone chime in if I'm wrong.


----------



## lpwcomp

Wiked said:


> Ok well I just upgraded another ouf our TiVo's (320GB installed) with a new WD20EURS as it didn't take as long to copy the data and it has worked perfectly.
> Now has 400 HD recording hours showing.
> 
> I guess I will re-try the first TiVo again and the remaining one on the weekend when I get the time to do it and see what happens. Hopefully it's just a once off but I will report back to post what happens.


You might look at this. You being in Australia and all so that everything is upside down, it may or may not be relevant but it is worth a shot.


----------



## unitron

Wiked said:


> Ok well I just upgraded another ouf our TiVo's (320GB installed) with a new WD20EURS as it didn't take as long to copy the data and it has worked perfectly.
> Now has 400 HD recording hours showing.
> 
> I guess I will re-try the first TiVo again and the remaining one on the weekend when I get the time to do it and see what happens. Hopefully it's just a once off but I will report back to post what happens.


What's the model number of the one that had the 320 and what was the model number of the one you tried before that had the 1TB?


----------



## Wiked

lpwcomp said:


> You might look at this. You being in Australia and all so that everything is upside down, it may or may not be relevant but it is worth a shot.


Thanks for the link. Looks like that could indeed be the problem. I will transfer my recordings to one of the other TiVo's and them use the original 320GB HDD to copy and expand on the new drive.



unitron said:


> What's the model number of the one that had the 320 and what was the model number of the one you tried before that had the 1TB?


All of the TiVo's are the same. According to system info they are S3's. All came originally with a 320GB HDD.


----------



## unitron

Wiked said:


> Thanks for the link. Looks like that could indeed be the problem. I will transfer my recordings to one of the other TiVo's and them use the original 320GB HDD to copy and expand on the new drive.
> 
> All of the TiVo's are the same. According to system info they are S3's. All came originally with a 320GB HDD.


There's a number on the sticker on the back. It starts with TCD.


----------



## lpwcomp

unitron said:


> There's a number on the sticker on the back. It starts with TCD.


Based on the location and drive size I would assume they are model TCD663320.


----------



## unitron

Wiked said:


> Hi,
> 
> Firstly I have read most of the pages in this thread so if this has been covered before and I missed it then I apologise in advance.
> 
> I purchased a WD20EURS to replace my 1TB drive in one of our TiVo's.
> 
> I burned the ISO and ran JMFS. Copied the old drive to new drive in around 5 hours.
> I then expanded the drive and it showed 1.82TB available.
> 
> I put it back into the TiVo and when it booted and came up with a grey screen and said that the TiVo couldn't detect the external drive that was associated with the TiVo and to dis-associate the external drive I was to press CLEAR.
> 
> I do not have an external HDD and have never had one.
> 
> I pressed clear and it rebooted. Now it shows the same 200 hrs in system information. So I assume that it's back to seeing at as the original 1TB drive. All of my recordings are 100% still there.
> 
> I don't want to waste 5 hrs again with the whole copy process without asking you guys if you know what happened?
> 
> I also ran wdidle3.exe and it said it wasn't activated so no need to to worry about that part.
> 
> I have 2 other TiVo's to upgrade in the house so I would love to know what went wrong.
> 
> BTW I'm in Australia as we have the S2 (HD) version as far as I am aware.
> 
> thanks in advance for any help you can give me.


If you have a PC with WinMFS on it, hook up the 1TB, then click on mfsinfo for that drive and copy and paste the partition map info part here.


----------



## Wiked

lpwcomp said:


> Based on the location and drive size I would assume they are model TCD663320.


Yes you are correct. All 3 are this model.



unitron said:


> If you have a PC with WinMFS on it, hook up the 1TB, then click on mfsinfo for that drive and copy and paste the partition map info part here.





> Partition Maps
> #: type name length base ( size )
> 1 Apple_partition_map Apple [email protected] ( 31.5K)
> 2 Image Bootstrap 1 [email protected] ( 512.0 )
> 3 Image Kernel 1 [email protected] ( 4.0M)
> 4 Ext2 Root 1 [email protected] ( 256.0M)
> 5 Image Bootstrap 2 [email protected] ( 512.0 )
> 6 Image Kernel 2 [email protected] ( 4.0M)
> 7 Ext2 Root 2 [email protected] ( 256.0M)
> 8 Swap Linux swap [email protected] ( 128.0M)
> 9 Ext2 /var [email protected] ( 256.0M)
> 10 MFS MFS application region [email protected] ( 288.0M)
> 11 MFS MFS media region [email protected] ( 65.6G)
> 12 MFS MFS application region 2 [email protected] ( 288.0M)
> 13 MFS MFS media region 2 [email protected] ( 82.0G)
> 14 MFS MFS App by Winmfs [email protected] ( 1.0M)
> 15 MFS MFS Media by Winmfs [email protected] ( 782.5G)
> 16 Apple_Free Extra [email protected]( 895.5K)
> 17 MFS MFS media region 3 [email protected]( 931.5G)
> 
> Total SA SD Hours: 1040	Total DTV SD Hours: 908 12 % Free
> Software: 11.3b5-01-2-663	Tivo Model: TCD663320


----------



## Wiked

Based on the above partition info I will copy off the original 320gb hdd and it should be ok and not add the extra partition.

Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.


----------



## unitron

Wiked said:


> Based on the above partition info I will copy off the original 320gb hdd and it should be ok and not add the extra partition.
> 
> Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.


Since you're going to transfer off the shows from the 1TB, you don't need to keep it unmolested, so use it as a middleman if what you have is the Australian version of the S3 HD.

Use WinMFS to copy the 320 to the 1TB, put 1000 in the box where you specify the swap partition size (that's only about 15 minutes of best quality analog video, cheap insurance), and then when it finishes and asks if you want to expand to use the rest of the 1TB, say yes.

When that's done, click on mfsinfo, check out the partition map, make sure you have no more than 15 partitions and that none of them are "Apple Free" partitions. (if there's a little space left at the end of the drive, the way the MFS Live cd tends to do, it'll make that an Apple Free partition, and we want to avoid that)

If you've got 15 (3 MFS sets, plus partitons 1-9), and nothing else, you're good to go.

Put it in the TiVo, make sure it boots, if the original 320 wasn't already set up the way you needed, do it now, then when that's all over, take it back out, hook it and the 2TB to a PC, boot with the jmfs cd v1.04, and let it copy the 1 to the 2 and expand the way it does by adding a single MFS Media partition, which will be the 16th and last allowable on a single drive partition.

That's the way I finally did it on my S3 HD, and it's been working fine since.


----------



## Guy Kuo

Yes, do as Unitron instructs. 

320GB ---> intermediate 1TB drive via winMFS with swap carefully adjusted to avoid creating an extraneous AppleFree partition. Let winMFS expand to fill the 1TB drive. 

You should end up with a 1TB that uses its entire capacity but does not have an AppleFree partition. If you do see an AppleFree partition on the 1TB, redo the 320GB ---> 1TB via winMFS but adjust the swap size to "use up" what would become the extraneous AppleFree partition.

Take the 1TB drive and copy / expand via JMFS to the 2 TB drive.


Unitron's 2 step process ensures that you keep all the created partitions below the 1TB limit in the TiVo disk drivers. This differs from the process in the first post of this thread which goes from 320 straight to 2GB. That creates a whopping 1.7 TB partition that may initially appear to work, but likely will become unstable once the system writes beyond 1TB in the big partition. Crashes, reboots, or possibly just overwriting of older shows despite them appearing to remain in My Shows listing.

Unitron's 2 step method might save a lot of grief. I think it is worth doing it his way unless you somehow have specific knowledge that TiVo has rewritten its disk drivers to properly address partitions greater than 1TB. Nobody on the web seems to be reporting such an updated was made by TiVo.


----------



## unitron

Guy Kuo said:


> Yes, do as Unitron instructs.
> 
> 320GB ---> intermediate 1TB drive via winMFS with swap carefully adjusted to avoid creating an extraneous AppleFree partition. Let winMFS expand to fill the 1TB drive.
> 
> You should end up with a 1TB that uses its entire capacity but does not have an AppleFree partition. If you do see an AppleFree partition on the 1TB, redo the 320GB ---> 1TB via winMFS but adjust the swap size to "use up" what would become the extraneous AppleFree partition.
> 
> Take the 1TB drive and copy / expand via JMFS to the 2 TB drive.
> 
> Unitron's 2 step process ensures that you keep all the created partitions below the 1TB limit in the TiVo disk drivers. This differs from the process in the first post of this thread which goes from 320 straight to 2GB. That creates a whopping 1.7 TB partition that may initially appear to work, but likely will become unstable once the system writes beyond 1TB in the big partition. Crashes, reboots, or possibly just overwriting of older shows despite them appearing to remain in My Shows listing.
> 
> Unitron's 2 step method might save a lot of grief. I think it is worth doing it his way unless you somehow have specific knowledge that TiVo has rewritten its disk drivers to properly address partitions greater than 1TB. Nobody on the web seems to be reporting such an updated was made by TiVo.


Thank you for the vote of confidence, but just for the record the big swap size is to get a big swap size.

(don't know for sure if it's necessary, but better to have it and not need it than the other way around. Like I say, cheap insurance)

I think that, unlike MFS Live, WinMFS will make sure not to leave any extra space when expanding, and it will do so even if you don't specify a swap size different from the one on the source drive.

I tried MFS Live with swap sizes in a number of different sizes slightly above or slightly below 1,000 MB and it stubbornly insisted on leaving a little-bitty Apple Free partion no matter what.


----------



## Guy Kuo

Thanks for clarifying that point.

BTW, my S3 --> 2TB via your method has now successfully filled its entire capacity AND the oldest recordings do not appear to be corrupted by the newest ones. That suggests the file system is happy.

I don't understand why we are not hearing reports of problems after more than 1TB is written on the non-XL Premieres. Those who went direct from 320GB to 2TB ended up with a 1.7 TB partition via JMFS. 

It just takes a long time to actually fill a 2TB drive with recordings and then go back and verify the oldest ones are actually intact.


----------



## Wiked

Ok well when I get time after all these shows transfer (will take days) then I will do the process.

This partition map was from the straight copy from a 320GB>>2TB and since it only has 14 partitions would it be ok?

If I have to do the process you outlined above with all 3 TiVo's then I will have to use the same 1TB HDD as the intermediary drive in the sequence which isn't a drama.

Thanks



> Partition Maps
> #: type name length base ( size )
> 1 Apple_partition_map Apple [email protected] ( 31.5K)
> 2 Image Bootstrap 1 [email protected] ( 512.0 )
> 3 Image Kernel 1 [email protected] ( 4.0M)
> 4 Ext2 Root 1 [email protected] ( 256.0M)
> 5 Image Bootstrap 2 [email protected] ( 512.0 )
> 6 Image Kernel 2 [email protected] ( 4.0M)
> 7 Ext2 Root 2 [email protected] ( 256.0M)
> 8 Swap Linux swap [email protected] ( 128.0M)
> 9  Ext2 /var [email protected] ( 256.0M)
> 10 MFS MFS application region [email protected] ( 288.0M)
> 11 MFS MFS media region [email protected] ( 65.6G)
> 12 MFS MFS application region 2 [email protected] ( 288.0M)
> 13 MFS MFS media region 2 [email protected] ( 82.0G)
> 14 MFS MFS media region 3 [email protected] ( 1.7T)


----------



## unitron

Wiked said:


> Ok well when I get time after all these shows transfer (will take days) then I will do the process.
> 
> This partition map was from the straight copy from a 320GB>>2TB and since it only has 14 partitions would it be ok?
> 
> If I have to do the process you outlined above with all 3 TiVo's then I will have to use the same 1TB HDD as the intermediary drive in the sequence which isn't a drama.
> 
> Thanks


There's a thread in the S3 forum on using jmfs on the S3 HD (and S3 HD XL), and since you've got Series 3 platform machines and not Series 4, you should probably be over there seeing if anyone has reported long term success with a partition larger than 1TB (or 1.2TB, depending on how you measure).


----------



## Tivoitis

I started the thread for Tivo HD's and haven't had any issues with a 1.7TB partition:



Code:


Partition Maps
 #:                  type name                            length base      ( size  )
  1   Apple_partition_map Apple                               [email protected]         (  31.5K)
  2                 Image Bootstrap 1                          [email protected] ( 512.0 )
  3                 Image Kernel 1                          [email protected] (   4.0M)
  4                  Ext2 Root 1                          [email protected] ( 256.0M)
  5                 Image Bootstrap 2                          [email protected] ( 512.0 )
  6                 Image Kernel 2                          [email protected] (   4.0M)
  7                  Ext2 Root 2                          [email protected] ( 256.0M)
  8                  Swap Linux swap                      [email protected] ( 128.0M)
  9                  Ext2 /var                            [email protected] ( 256.0M)
 10                   MFS MFS application region          [email protected]771448 ( 288.0M)
 11                   MFS MFS media region             [email protected] (  65.6G)
 12                   MFS MFS application region 2        [email protected] ( 288.0M)
 13                   MFS MFS media region 2           [email protected]        (  82.0G)
 14                   MFS MFS media region 3          [email protected] (   1.7T)

I made sure to fill up the drive during my first week, taping shows all day long, until I was convinced that there was no issue with any of my existing shows and that the deletes fell off properly. I've been running with 2TB drives in my Tivo HD's since 12/2010.


----------



## Guy Kuo

Interesting.... maybe TiVo silently updated their disk software drivers to handle the big partitions. Not a bad thing if they did.


----------



## Wiked

Tivoitis,
I am recording all the time on the first one I did to see how it goes. I will be nearly full within 24hrs as I transferred over many movies to it so I will see how it goes too and let you all know the outcome.


----------



## Wiked

Unitron,

Ok I did the TiVo your way yesterday so I will see how it goes.
The first TiVo I did was straight from 320GB>>2TB and I have filled it up with recordings and it's going great also.

If I have any issues with either way I will report them here for you guys.


----------



## unitron

Wiked said:


> Unitron,
> 
> Ok I did the TiVo your way yesterday so I will see how it goes.
> The first TiVo I did was straight from 320GB>>2TB and I have filled it up with recordings and it's going great also.
> 
> If I have any issues with either way I will report them here for you guys.


Thanks for the data points.


----------



## Cap'n Preshoot

kturcotte said:


> Any SATA hard drive will work. Western Digital seems to be the preferred brand though, especially those in the A/V DVR line.


Though a fairly old post, I think this maybe needs to be reiterated from time to time. For TIVO drive upgrades your best drive will be one rated for AV (video) usage. True that any drive will work, but the advantage of one designed for A/V is it will continue writing in spite of any errors encountered. I'd much rather have a momentary blip than a huge 30~45 second gap while a non-AV drive tries to perform error recovery.

Just my 2¢ worth.


----------



## BobCamp1

Cap'n Preshoot said:


> Though a fairly old post, I think this maybe needs to be reiterated from time to time. For TIVO drive upgrades your best drive will be one rated for AV (video) usage. True that any drive will work, but the advantage of one designed for A/V is it will continue writing in spite of any errors encountered. I'd much rather have a momentary blip than a huge 30~45 second gap while a non-AV drive tries to perform error recovery.
> 
> Just my 2¢ worth.


Then why doesn't Tivo use such a drive in their DVR?

You aren't going to have such a blip very often. If you're having one more than once every three months, your hard drive is circling the drain. Honestly though, you should never see such a blip in a healthy hard drive.

Besides, what if that sector was where the OS was? Wouldn't you want the hard drive to try really hard to boot so you can watch or transfer the shows?

The other tweaks in the A/V hard drive firmware are very minor in nature, and don't yield any benefits except looking good on a datasheet. All hard drives are rated for 24/7 use. You're just paying for the longer warranty for the A/V drive.


----------



## dwalke85

New to upgrade

I was able to boot up jmfs and did the whole copy thing but at about 39 gb the program stops and tells me that it did not copy. 

I tried to get the log.log but I did not have permission. 

I am going from original HD to 2 Tb wd ears

I did try on another computer with the same results.

Any ideas. 

Thanks


----------



## lessd

dwalke85 said:


> New to upgrade
> 
> I was able to boot up jmfs and did the whole copy thing but at about 39 gb the program stops and tells me that it did not copy.
> 
> I tried to get the log.log but I did not have permission.
> 
> I am going from original HD to 2 Tb wd ears
> 
> I did try on another computer with the same results.
> 
> Any ideas.
> 
> Thanks


I had a similar problem once, solves it by a program that did what was called a full low level format on the drive (I think the program is Max Blast ISO)


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> I had a similar problem once, solves it by a program that did what was called a full low level format on the drive (I think the program is Max Blast ISO)


Just be sure to do that to the target drive, and not to the source drive, since it writes zeros to the entire drive and you don't want to erase your source.

Also, since the stock drive in a Premiere is, if I'm not mistaken, a Western Digital, and the EARS is also WD, Maxtor software is probably not the thing to use on either.

You can download an image for a bootable cd from the WD site that has their diagnostic software on it, and run the long test on both drives, and run the "write zeros to the drive" utility only on the EARS.

Check the documentation on the jumper settings for the EARS, and see if there's one for turning on or off advanced format and if there's one to set whether the drive is 1.5Gb/s or 3 or 6 and see what the original drive is and match it.

Remember, do not boot into Windows with the original Premiere drive attached to the computer!!!


----------



## CoxInPHX

BobCamp1 said:


> Then why doesn't Tivo use such a drive in their DVR?


Every Premiere I have seen DOES have a WD AV/GP HDD installed as stock equipment.
TCD746320 Premiere - WD3200AVVS

TCD746500 Premiere - WD5000AVDS

TCD748000 Premiere XL - WD10EVDS or WD10EURS

TCD758250 Premiere Elite/XL4 - WD20EURS


----------



## lessd

unitron said:


> Just be sure to do that to the target drive, and not to the source drive, since it writes zeros to the entire drive and you don't want to erase your source.
> 
> Also, since the stock drive in a Premiere is, if I'm not mistaken, a Western Digital, and the EARS is also WD, Maxtor software is probably not the thing to use on either.
> 
> You can download an image for a bootable cd from the WD site that has their diagnostic software on it, and run the long test on both drives, and run the "write zeros to the drive" utility only on the EARS.
> 
> Check the documentation on the jumper settings for the EARS, and see if there's one for turning on or off advanced format and if there's one to set whether the drive is 1.5Gb/s or 3 or 6 and see what the original drive is and match it.
> 
> Remember, do not boot into Windows with the original Premiere drive attached to the computer!!!


The Max Blast works on any drive, but you sure don't want to zero out the original drive.
You can boot any TiVo drive into Windows XP or newer as long as you don't use the windows drive service, Windows just will not see the drive. WinMFT requires you to boot into Windows to run the software.


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> The Max Blast works on any drive, but you sure don't want to zero out the original drive.
> You can boot any TiVo drive into Windows XP or newer as long as you don't use the windows drive service, Windows just will not see the drive. WinMFT requires you to boot into Windows to run the software.


People have reported here that they booted into Windows to take a look at their Premiere drive with WinMFS, and when they put the drive back in the TiVo, it wouldn't TiVo no mo'.

Better safe than sorry.


----------



## lroscoe19

L David Matheny said:


> I've heard of situations where you _must_ use a CD and not a DVD. I can't remember whether that was only when burning firmware to be read by a DVD player (or whatever), or whether it could also apply to an .ISO image that is to be booted by a computer. If you can get your hands on a CD-R, try that.


I've tried using the CD-R & get the same results as with the DVD-R. Was wondering if someone could help with I'm having with trying to upgrade my Premiere to a 2TB drive. Using a JMFS Live DVD, I'm getting a "loading/boot/vmilinuz"...then a "loading/boot/initrd.gz" message...before the computer reboots. This happens over & over again. Any ideas on what I can do? Thanks.


----------



## lessd

unitron said:


> People have reported here that they booted into Windows to take a look at their Premiere drive with WinMFS, and when they put the drive back in the TiVo, it wouldn't TiVo no mo'.
> 
> Better safe than sorry.


Some of the older Windows installation would come up with a window asking you if you want to ready a new drive, answering yes to that question kill the drive for TiVo. Newer versions of windows (Vista and Win 7) will not have such a window, so you can't bonk the drive by just booting into Windows.


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> Some of the older Windows installation would come up with a window asking you if you want to ready a new drive, answering yes to that question kill the drive for TiVo. Newer versions of windows (Vista and Win 7) will not have such a window, so you can't bonk the drive by just booting into Windows.


I'm talking about looking at it with WinMFS, probably mfsinfo specifically.

Why this would cause problems I don't know, as you'd think it would be a read-only operation, but people have reported it happening to them right here on this website.

Spike isn't going to guarantee that WinMFS won't bork a Premiere drive.

TiVo isn't going to guarantee it.

Microsoft isn't going to guarantee it.

Considering that the only way currently known to fix the problem is get hold of another Premiere drive and overwrite it, my advice is better safe than sorry.

Apparently you can boot into Linux with the MFS Live cd, v1.4, and use

pdisk -l

to look at the Premiere's partition map safely, but since

mfsinfo

on that cd is going to return an error message on a Premiere drive, there's no point in risking even that.


----------



## BobCamp1

CoxInPHX said:


> Every Premiere I have seen DOES have a WD AV/GP HDD installed as stock equipment.
> TCD746320 Premiere - WD3200AVVS
> 
> TCD746500 Premiere - WD5000AVDS
> 
> TCD748000 Premiere XL - WD10EVDS or WD10EURS
> 
> TCD758250 Premiere Elite/XL4 - WD20EURS


I stand corrected for the Premieres! But their previous models did not utilize A/V drives.

Actually, looking through the data sheets for WD, it looks like all new low RPM drives are now also being marketed as "A/V" drives or have an A/V counterpart. The data sheets for the green drive vs. their A/V brothers look identical but the A/V drives are $5 - $10 more expensive. The warranties are also the same -- 3 years.

Interestingly, there are 3 TB A/V drives even though no DVR can actually use them. So I guess they're trying to sell them to people who edit movies at home.

Since A/V drives aren't as big a rip-off as they were before, I don't consider anyone who buys one a complete idiot. Not like those people who use synthetic motor oil.


----------



## lessd

unitron said:


> I'm talking about looking at it with WinMFS, probably mfsinfo specifically.
> 
> Why this would cause problems I don't know, as you'd think it would be a read-only operation, but people have reported it happening to them right here on this website.
> 
> Spike isn't going to guarantee that WinMFS won't bork a Premiere drive.
> 
> TiVo isn't going to guarantee it.
> 
> Microsoft isn't going to guarantee it.
> 
> Considering that the only way currently known to fix the problem is get hold of another Premiere drive and overwrite it, my advice is better safe than sorry.
> 
> Apparently you can boot into Linux with the MFS Live cd, v1.4, and use
> 
> pdisk -l
> 
> to look at the Premiere's partition map safely, but since
> 
> mfsinfo
> 
> on that cd is going to return an error message on a Premiere drive, there's no point in risking even that.


WinMFS is not totally compatible with the TP, but just looking at the drive with WinMFS will not bork the drive, people that have reported WinMFS borking the TP drive may have done something they should not have done, or did not realize they should not have done like super size a standard TP drive, that just a guess on my part.
You are correct that if you not sure what your doing with any TiVo drive not connecting it to any computer is safe from borking the drive, I know that some computer motherboards (at least one that has been reported) can bork a TiVo drive in the boot process.


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> WinMFS is not totally compatible with the TP, but just looking at the drive with WinMFS will not bork the drive, people that have reported WinMFS borking the TP drive may have done something they should not have done, or did not realize they should not have done like super size a standard TP drive, that just a guess on my part.
> You are correct that if you not sure what your doing with any TiVo drive not connecting it to any computer is safe from borking the drive, I know that some computer motherboards (at least one that has been reported) can bork a TiVo drive in the boot process.


At least one *brand* of motherboard, *GigaByte*


----------



## dwalke85

lessd said:


> I had a similar problem once, solves it by a program that did what was called a full low level format on the drive (I think the program is Max Blast ISO)


Thanks for the help.

I used the WD tools to check the drive and after a few hours the drive came up with Bad sectors. So I will have to return.


----------



## dameongreen

simple and flawless tut. 
Thanks!


----------



## True Colors

Is there any way to use a 3TB drive into any HD Tivo?

Thanks,

TC


----------



## lessd

True Colors said:


> Is there any way to use a 3TB drive into any HD Tivo?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> TC


No, they will not boot on any TiVo even with just a direct copy no expansion as the format of any drive above 2.2Tb is different and TiVo does not recognize it.


----------



## alyssa

No one except Weaknees & DVR_Dude has figured out how to marry and external to a Elite (XL4) yet?

as a data point, DVR_Dude charges $50 plus $10 shipping to do the pairing. You supply the hdd's & the external case.


----------



## irepoder

Thanks Comer,

I was able to recover a corrupted premiere hdd by using your software to copy a friends hdd, then after using it for a week, upgraded to a 1tb WD10EADS. All functions working flawlessly. Excellent program!


----------



## guammm17

Can you use this method to downgrade drive size (if you delete all the material off the original premiere drive)? I would like to try to put an SSD in mine but cant afford anything above 256 GB, and I don't really care that much about space, as I have it networked to a computer with over 2TB in the other room. Just trying to cut down on noise in the bedroom, it drives my lady nuts. I assume this wont work, but figured I'd ask since I couldn't seem to find any info on it elsewhere.


----------



## unitron

guammm17 said:


> Can you use this method to downgrade drive size (if you delete all the material off the original premiere drive)? I would like to try to put an SSD in mine but cant afford anything above 256 GB, and I don't really care that much about space, as I have it networked to a computer with over 2TB in the other room. Just trying to cut down on noise in the bedroom, it drives my lady nuts. I assume this wont work, but figured I'd ask since I couldn't seem to find any info on it elsewhere.


Any TiVo prior to the Premieres could only have a drive as small as the smallest drive used in that model.

For example, you could take the 80GB drive out of a TCD540080 and use an image from a TCD540040 and put it on a 40GB drive and put it in that TiVo and it would work.

The Premiere, however, and the rest of the S4s, have a slightly different file system and the software that can make truncated images from S1, S2, and S3 drives can't do so, so the only thing you can do is do a byte for byte copy using something like

dd

or

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

either onto a drive of the same size or do the copy onto a larger drive and use comer's jmfs cd to expand by adding a single MFS partition.

So, the short answer is, if your Premiere came with a 320GB drive, it has to have one at least that big.


----------



## lessd

guammm17 said:


> Can you use this method to downgrade drive size (if you delete all the material off the original premiere drive)? I would like to try to put an SSD in mine but cant afford anything above 256 GB, and I don't really care that much about space, as I have it networked to a computer with over 2TB in the other room. Just trying to cut down on noise in the bedroom, it drives my lady nuts. I assume this wont work, but figured I'd ask since I couldn't seem to find any info on it elsewhere.


Don't even think of using a SSD in a TiVo as it is writing all the time so a SSD will have a short life and the TiVo software does not have the TRIM software that Windows 7 has, the fan may be making the noise your hearing, try stopping the fan for a few seconds (by putting a paper clip into the fan blades) and see if the noise goes down, the fan can be replaced by a good quality quiet fan for not much $$


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> Don't even think of using a SSD in a TiVo as it is writing all the time so a SSD will have a short life and the TiVo software does not have the TRIM software that Windows 7 has, the fan may be making the noise your hearing, try stopping the fan for a few seconds (by putting a paper clip into the fan blades) and see if the noise goes down, the fan can be replaced by a good quality quiet fan for not much $$


Just to be on the safe side

DO NOT USE A PAPER CLIP OR SOMETHING ELSE MADE OF METAL

to momentarily stop the fan.

A Q-Tip, the non-bristle end of a skinny wooden handled paintbrush, take a plastic fork and break off all of the tines except one, etc.

The chances of something conductive causing a problem are low, but why risk it when safer ways to do it are available?


----------



## scole250

Guy Kuo said:


> Yes, do as Unitron instructs.
> 
> 320GB ---> intermediate 1TB drive via winMFS with swap carefully adjusted to avoid creating an extraneous AppleFree partition. Let winMFS expand to fill the 1TB drive.
> 
> You should end up with a 1TB that uses its entire capacity but does not have an AppleFree partition. If you do see an AppleFree partition on the 1TB, redo the 320GB ---> 1TB via winMFS but adjust the swap size to "use up" what would become the extraneous AppleFree partition.
> 
> Take the 1TB drive and copy / expand via JMFS to the 2 TB drive.
> 
> Unitron's 2 step process ensures that you keep all the created partitions below the 1TB limit in the TiVo disk drivers. This differs from the process in the first post of this thread which goes from 320 straight to 2GB. That creates a whopping 1.7 TB partition that may initially appear to work, but likely will become unstable once the system writes beyond 1TB in the big partition. Crashes, reboots, or possibly just overwriting of older shows despite them appearing to remain in My Shows listing.
> 
> Unitron's 2 step method might save a lot of grief. I think it is worth doing it his way unless you somehow have specific knowledge that TiVo has rewritten its disk drivers to properly address partitions greater than 1TB. Nobody on the web seems to be reporting such an updated was made by TiVo.


I want to upgrade a stock 75hr Premiere and put a 2TB drive in it. Are the instructions in the first post of this thread accurate or not? If not, is it just a 2 step process, go from stock drive to 1TB using the instructions from 1st post? Then upgrade 1TB to 2TB, using the same instructions in 1st post?


----------



## unitron

scole250 said:


> I want to upgrade a stock 75hr Premiere and put a 2TB drive in it. Are the instructions in the first post of this thread accurate or not? If not, is it just a 2 step process, go from stock drive to 1TB using the instructions from 1st post? Then upgrade 1TB to 2TB, using the same instructions in 1st post?


I'm not sure if the post you quote is from this thread or another, but my 1TB "middleman" on the way to 2TB approach is for Series 3 HD TiVos, the TCD652160, and maybe someday for the original S3.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!It is not for the Premiere or any other Series 4 TiVo.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The S4s have something different about the software, and WinMFS will only screw them up.

As far as I know, the only way to go to a bigger drive in a Premiere is to use comer's jmfs cd v1.04 to copy the original drive to the bigger one and then add a single MFS partition to use the rest of the space.

WinMFS and the MFS Live cd can only add space by adding MFS pairs, and that won't work in this case.

If you want to do it yourself, jmfs is the only way I know of for a Premiere.


----------



## scole250

unitron said:


> I'm not sure if the post you quote is from this thread or another, but my 1TB "middleman" on the way to 2TB approach is for Series 3 HD TiVos, the TCD652160, and maybe someday for the original S3.
> 
> !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!It is not for the Premiere or any other Series 4 TiVo.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> The S4s have something different about the software, and WinMFS will only screw them up.
> 
> As far as I know, the only way to go to a bigger drive in a Premiere is to use comer's jmfs cd v1.04 to copy the original drive to the bigger one and then add a single MFS partition to use the rest of the space.
> 
> WinMFS and the MFS Live cd can only add space by adding MFS pairs, and that won't work in this case.
> 
> If you want to do it yourself, jmfs is the only way I know of for a Premiere.


The post I read was #1650 on page 55. I did see a reference to an S3 in your post, previous to that one, but since this is the Premiere upgrade thread, I thought it might be relevant to S4 also. 57 pages of posts is a lot to scan and make sure you're reading/skipping the relevant posts.

So just follow instructions for using comer's jmfs in the first post?


----------



## unitron

scole250 said:


> The post I read was #1650 on page 55. I did see a reference to an S3 in your post, previous to that one, but since this is the Premiere upgrade thread, I thought it might be relevant to S4 also. 57 pages of posts is a lot to scan and make sure you're reading/skipping the relevant posts.
> 
> So just follow instructions for using comer's jmfs in the first post?


You missed the part where someone who I guess didn't know any better posted here in the Premiere thread about their Australian versions of the S3 HD, which apparently use a 320GB drive instead of a 160.

We should have been nastier and forced them to meet us over on the S3 thread.

Yeah, the instructions in the first post should work fine, just don't do it on a GigaByte brand motherboard without coming back and consulting me first, and be absolutely certain to know which drive is which so that you don't copy the first 320GB of an empty drive to your original TiVo drive.

You should have the original drive set up the way you want it, right zip code, right cable lineup, cable cards paired, season passes, favorites, thumb ratings, fixed IP address whether wired or wireless, etc.

Then after using jmfs to copy that drive to a bigger one and add another partiton, put the original away somewhere safe.

You may need it as a troubleshooting tool someday.


----------



## scole250

I upgraded to a 2TB using a WD20EARX. Could not get the WD Diagnostics version 5.04f from boot CD to recognize the drive. It said it saw a WD drive but the drive was too old to work with this version of software. I did run wdidle3 and disabled the timer, but I've been reading other forums where folks suggest setting the timer to 300 seconds. Not sure if that's a preferred setting for non-Tivo use. Should the timer be disabled or set to higher value like 5 minutes?

jmfs copy/expand/supersize process worked fine, Tivo running fine. 1 down 2 to go.

TWC's whole house DVRs getting kicked to the curb very soon.


----------



## unitron

scole250 said:


> I upgraded to a 2TB using a WD20EARX. Could not get the WD Diagnostics version 5.04f from boot CD to recognize the drive. It said it saw a WD drive but the drive was too old to work with this version of software. I did run wdidle3 and disabled the timer, but I've been reading other forums where folks suggest setting the timer to 300 seconds. Not sure if that's a preferred setting for non-Tivo use. Should the timer be disabled or set to higher value like 5 minutes?
> 
> jmfs copy/expand/supersize process worked fine, Tivo running fine. 1 down 2 to go.
> 
> TWC's whole house DVRs getting kicked to the curb very soon.


Greetings from a bit to your southeast.

Too bad TWC itself can't be kicked to the curb, or actually kicked from the curb, where it has a monopoly on running cable.

If wdidle3 will let you disable Intellipark, great, if not, setting the time period ridiculously long, like 60 seconds times 5, will accomplish the same thing where a TiVo is concerned.


----------



## Finalrinse

I disconnected my Windows drives in my PC. I hooked up my TiVo drive and my new drive, both SATA. The JMSF software would not recognize both my drives at the same time, even though they both showed up in the BIOS and individually they are recognized. I then decided to swap the order of the SATA ports and finally I found the right combination and all went smooth. Is there a specific SATA port order that the software needs to see?


----------



## billbillw

Great deal at newegg on the latest 2TB AV-GP right now. Its only $85 with free shipping right now (use a coupon code that is listed). That's the lowest price I've seen on that model.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136783

Price is good through 8/25.

My Premiere will finally be getting an upgrade.


----------



## unitron

billbillw said:


> Great deal at newegg on the latest 2TB AV-GP right now. Its only $85 with free shipping right now (use a coupon code that is listed). That's the lowest price I've seen on that model.
> 
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136783
> 
> Price is good through 8/25.
> 
> My Premiere will finally be getting an upgrade.


Already Out Of Stock


----------



## billbillw

unitron said:


> Already Out Of Stock


Not surprised. They dropped the price $16 and gave free shipping (vs $7 before). Hopefully this is a sign that HD supply (and prices) have recovered from the massive shortages that were brought on by flooding in Thailand last year.


----------



## Finalrinse

scole250 said:


> I upgraded to a 2TB using a WD20EARX. Could not get the WD Diagnostics version 5.04f from boot CD to recognize the drive. It said it saw a WD drive but the drive was too old to work with this version of software.


I had the exact same problem with a WD20EURS. So, I downloaded the DOS version 5.19 for floppy drive and that worked! Go figure?


----------



## PapioNE

scole250 said:


> I want to upgrade a stock 75hr Premiere and put a 2TB drive in it. Are the instructions in the first post of this thread accurate or not? If not, is it just a 2 step process, go from stock drive to 1TB using the instructions from 1st post? Then upgrade 1TB to 2TB, using the same instructions in 1st post?


Hi. Just joined and looking for information on upgrading my tivo premiere series4. Bought a WD10EARX and used jmfs to clone it, ran WDidle3 and installed in my tivo and it was just stuck on Welcome Starting Up screen. Powered on/off multiple times but nothing worked. Did you do anything different with your WD20EARX to get it to work? Thanks for any info.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

PapioNE said:


> Hi. Just joined and looking for information on upgrading my tivo premiere series4. Bought a WD10EARX and used jmfs to clone it, ran WDidle3 and installed in my tivo and it was just stuck on Welcome Starting Up screen. Powered on/off multiple times but nothing worked. Did you do anything different with your WD20EARX to get it to work? Thanks for any info.


Double check all your cables.


----------



## scole250

PapioNE said:


> Hi. Just joined and looking for information on upgrading my tivo premiere series4. Bought a WD10EARX and used jmfs to clone it, ran WDidle3 and installed in my tivo and it was just stuck on Welcome Starting Up screen. Powered on/off multiple times but nothing worked. Did you do anything different with your WD20EARX to get it to work? Thanks for any info.


Not sure that it would make a difference, but I ran wdidle3 first, before running jmfs. I did forget to connect the cable though and had to open it back up. Ditto on double check it.


----------



## clark_kent

From reading a lot of pages (but not all) I see some same problems, but I couldn't find any answers... after burning 5 coasters, I thought I'd ask for help:

I have an early 2010 MacBook Pro; running OSX 10.6.8; used Disk Utility to Convert the .iso to .dmg; and I'm using a dual disk SATA USB doc from:

http://Thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?S=1268&ID=1895#Tab4

I finally have a disk that boots, BUT getting 2 error messages:

1. No controller found

2. Fatal error occurred - Java MFS not found

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you.


----------



## dwit

clark_kent said:


> From reading a lot of pages (but not all) I see some same problems, but I couldn't find any answers... after burning 5 coasters, I thought I'd ask for help:
> 
> I have an early 2010 MacBook Pro; running OSX 10.6.8; used Disk Utility to Convert the .iso to .dmg; and I'm using a dual disk SATA USB doc from:
> 
> http://Thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?S=1268&ID=1895#Tab4
> 
> I finally have a disk that boots, BUT getting 2 error messages:
> 
> 1. No controller found
> 
> 2. Fatal error occurred - Java MFS not found
> 
> Any help is greatly appreciated!
> 
> Thank you.


You cannot use a dual dock enclouse with dual drives to perform the process. You can only use the dual dock in a single drive configuration for the process. Only one drive per dock.


----------



## clark_kent

Thanks for the info dwit. I wondered about that. I had also tried two OWC Mercury USB enclosures with the TiVo disk in one the the target disk in the other but I got the same two errors (no controller found and no JavaMFS found). I don't know if the OWC is problem or not. Would an incompatible controller cause the JavaMFS not to be found?


----------



## dwit

clark_kent said:


> Thanks for the info dwit. I wondered about that. I had also tried two OWC Mercury USB enclosures with the TiVo disk in one the the target disk in the other but I got the same two errors (no controller found and no JavaMFS found). I don't know if the OWC is problem or not. Would an incompatible controller cause the JavaMFS not to be found?


Sorry. I had meant to add to my first reply that even with the appropriate docks/enclosures, there may be some Apple/Mac issues going on there also. I have no experience there.

I am sure about that dual dock issue though, as it has been addressed several times here throughout the forums.


----------



## bandguy

billbillw said:


> Great deal at newegg on the latest 2TB AV-GP right now. Its only $85 with free shipping right now (use a coupon code that is listed). That's the lowest price I've seen on that model.
> 
> Price is good through 8/25.
> 
> My Premiere will finally be getting an upgrade.


GOOD deal!!!


----------



## dboff01

Another happy customer. Just completed a Premiere upgrade to a 2TB WD20EURS and 318 HD hour goodness.

One wrinkle is my PC video card died during the copy stage, shutting down the system before completing. Fortunately, the crash didn't affect the original drive contents, which I was able to put back in the Tivo until my new video card arrived.

Thanks for the utility.


----------



## lessd

dboff01 said:


> Another happy customer. Just completed a Premiere upgrade to 2TB and 318 HD hour goodness.
> 
> One wrinkle is my PC video card died during the copy stage, shutting down the system before completing. Fortunately, the crash didn't affect the original drive contents, which I was able to put back in the Tivo until my new video card arrived.
> 
> Thanks for the utility.


I don't want to come across as a hard a** but I think as we already have 35 pages to this Thread we should only post when someone has new information that may be useful to others on this Thread, just having success is quite common now, and many posts say that, and do thank JMFS for making this possible, more posting of success and thanks just clutter up the useful stuff and make it harder to find.
This is just my opinion.


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> I don't want to come across as a hard a** but I think as we already have 35 pages to this Thread we should only post when someone has new information that may be useful to others on this Thread, just having success is quite common now, and many posts say that, and do thank JMFS for making this possible, more posting of success and thanks just clutter up the useful stuff and make it harder to find.
> This is just my opinion.


I think jmfs author comer has a donate button on his website.

Seems like that would be an excellent place to express one's gratitude for his work and how it helped one, and he's more likely to notice it there than here as well.


----------



## steve614

unitron said:


> I think jmfs author comer has a donate button on his website.


There's also one on the first post of this thread.


----------



## BlackBetty

I'm going from a stock TiVo drive of 330gb to a new 2TB drive. I'm running the tools in this thread and its currently in the copy stage. My question is, am I done after it copies? Or do I then run "Expand" and after that runs, do I then finish by running "Super size"?

Thanks!!!!


----------



## lpwcomp

BlackBetty said:


> I'm going from a stock TiVo drive of 330gb to a new 2TB drive. I'm running the tools in this thread and its currently in the copy stage. My question is, am I done after it copies?


No.



BlackBetty said:


> Or do I then run "Expand" and after that runs, do I then finish by running "Super size"?


Yes.


----------



## unitron

BlackBetty said:


> I'm going from a stock TiVo drive of 330gb to a new 2TB drive. I'm running the tools in this thread and its currently in the copy stage. My question is, am I done after it copies? Or do I then run "Expand" and after that runs, do I then finish by running "Super size"?
> 
> Thanks!!!!


I assume you're using comer's jmfs v1.04, in which case after it finishes "Xeroxing" the 320 on to the 2TB, it should ask you if you want to expand.

What brand and model of 2TB are you using and from where did you buy it?


----------



## BlackBetty

unitron said:


> What brand and model of 2TB are you using and from where did you buy it?


Yes I am using jmfs. The drive is a WD20eurs. Brand new from eBay for $98 with shipping.

How long do the finally two steps of expand and supersize take?

Also the destination drive is hooked up via USB and the TiVo drive is hooked up via sata cable. How long roughly will the copy part take?

Thanks for your help!


----------



## lpwcomp

BlackBetty said:


> Yes I am using jmfs. The drive is a WD20eurs. Brand new from eBay for $98 with shipping.
> 
> How long do the finally two steps of expand and supersize take?


Pretty much instantaneous.


----------



## BlackBetty

How long does the copy take when one drive is hooked up via USB?


----------



## unitron

BlackBetty said:


> How long does the copy take when one drive is hooked up via USB?


Longer.



It takes as long as it takes, a few hours at most.

It could be worse, you could be going from one 2TB drive to another.


----------



## unitron

Of course you really should have run the WD diagnostics long test on that new drive (about 6 hours, maybe 8 through USB) before putting it into service.

Just because a drive is good when it leaves the factory doesn't mean it can't get hurt during shipping somewhere along the line.


----------



## BlackBetty

Everything went great! I now have 318 hours of HD recording capacity!


----------



## unitron

BlackBetty said:


> Everything went great! I now have 318 hours of HD recording capacity!


Congratulations, there, "old TiVo hand"!


----------



## Corran Horn

Is there any reason this upgrade process would not work on a Premiere 4? I followed the steps and did the copy...expand...supersize and my unit is stuck on the 'Welcome' screen. Going from stock drive (Seagate) to a 1TB brand new Seagate I had on hand.


----------



## unitron

Corran Horn said:


> Is there any reason this upgrade process would not work on a Premiere 4? I followed the steps and did the copy...expand...supersize and my unit is stuck on the 'Welcome' screen. Going from stock drive (Seagate) to a 1TB brand new Seagate I had on hand.


The stock drive is a Seagate?

What's the model number on the sticker?


----------



## Corran Horn

ST3500414CS Pipeline HD .2 500GB


----------



## unitron

Corran Horn said:


> ST3500414CS Pipeline HD .2 500GB


Maybe you should have gone with another Pipeline drive.

Does that one say anything on the label about advanced format?

Is it 3Gb/s or 6?


----------



## Corran Horn

Nothing about advanced on the label. Online specs say
ST3500414CS HEB 500GB SATAII 5900RPM 3.0Gb/s Pipeline HD

I'd be willing to get whatever replacement drive...just didn't think the 4 would be different than any of the earlier Premieres so I figured this'd work.


----------



## unitron

Corran Horn said:


> Nothing about advanced on the label. Online specs say
> ST3500414CS HEB 500GB SATAII 5900RPM 3.0Gb/s Pipeline HD
> 
> I'd be willing to get whatever replacement drive...just didn't think the 4 would be different than any of the earlier Premieres so I figured this'd work.


What's the model number of the 1TB you tried to use?


----------



## Corran Horn

unitron said:


> What's the model number of the 1TB you tried to use?


ST1000DM003 1TB Barracuda


----------



## unitron

Corran Horn said:


> ST1000DM003 1TB Barracuda


Well, that one's AF and 6Gb/s, and the Pipeline is neither, so maybe you need an older drive.


----------



## Corran Horn

unitron said:


> Well, that one's AF and 6Gb/s, and the Pipeline is neither, so maybe you need an older drive.


I didn't even consider that. Thanks for the help!


----------



## unitron

Corran Horn said:


> I didn't even consider that. Thanks for the help!


The WD20EARS is AF, but apparently an early version of it, better at pretending to the outside world that it's a 512 byte sector drive, and people have used it successfully in the first Premiere model, as well as S3 HDs.

Of course it's now considered an old model, and may be hard to find.

The WD20EURS is an AV drive of about the same age and is still available.

I'm getting ready to try one in an S3 HD.

There have been recent reports of success using it in original Premieres.


----------



## lessd

Corran Horn said:


> Nothing about advanced on the label. Online specs say
> ST3500414CS HEB 500GB SATAII 5900RPM 3.0Gb/s Pipeline HD
> 
> I'd be willing to get whatever replacement drive...just didn't think the 4 would be different than any of the earlier Premieres so I figured this'd work.


In the past I have had some problems with 5900Rpm drives, never knew what drive would work, solved the problem by using only 7200Rpm drives, never had any problem with that type of drive no matter what brand it was, I also used the advanced format drives without problems as long as it was 2Tb or less.


----------



## CoxInPHX

Corran Horn said:


> Nothing about advanced on the label. Online specs say
> ST3500414CS HEB 500GB SATAII 5900RPM 3.0Gb/s Pipeline HD
> 
> I'd be willing to get whatever replacement drive...just didn't think the 4 would be different than any of the earlier Premieres so I figured this'd work.


Odd, that the new Premiere 4 would be using an older Seagate Pipeline HDD, and not a current WD HDD.

It does not look like the Seagate ST3500414CS Pipeline is still in production.


----------



## unitron

I'm beginning to wonder if anyone's had success with a 6Gb/s drive.


----------



## retiredqwest

Corran Horn said:


> Is there any reason this upgrade process would not work on a Premiere 4? I followed the steps and did the copy...expand...supersize and my unit is stuck on the 'Welcome' screen. Going from stock drive (Seagate) to a 1TB brand new Seagate I had on hand.


What model # is this Tivo?

and where did you buy it?

I've never heard of a Seagate drive in any Tivo, but who knows.


----------



## Corran Horn

retiredqwest said:


> What model # is this Tivo?
> 
> and where did you buy it?
> 
> I've never heard of a Seagate drive in any Tivo, but who knows.


TiVo Premiere 4 bought Friday at BestBuy. Model TCD750500


----------



## CoxInPHX

Corran Horn said:


> TiVo Premiere 4 bought Friday at BestBuy. Model TCD750500


What is the Manufacture Date or Date Code on the stock Seagate 500GB HDD?

Seagate Datecode Calculator
http://www.westernnetworks.com/tools/seagatedatecode.php


----------



## retiredqwest

Corran Horn said:


> TiVo Premiere 4 bought Friday at BestBuy. Model TCD750500


Now that is interesting.... I know I looked at my XL4 and I thought it had a WD something. Don't remember now, and have some shows recording tonite to take a look.

So, I must assume the Premiere 4 booted up with no problems?

You could try JMFS again doing just the copy and try that in the Tivo. The downfall of JMFS is that it doesn't show write errors, only read errors.

If you try the above and it still won't boot you could try Seatools for DOS or Windows and test the 1TB for errors.

Or just grab another drive and try again.

And I would never do what you're doing until the 30 day return period ended.


----------



## Corran Horn

CoxInPHX said:


> What is the Manufacture Date or Date Code on the stock Seagate 500GB HDD?
> 
> Seagate Datecode Calculator
> http://www.westernnetworks.com/tools/seagatedatecode.php


It's back in and chugging away. I'll have to get the date code when I get a new drive for it. (likely a WD recommended above)



retiredqwest said:


> Now that is interesting.... I know I looked at my XL4 and I thought it had a WD something. Don't remember now, and have some shows recording tonite to take a look.
> 
> So, I must assume the Premiere 4 booted up with no problems?
> 
> You could try JMFS again doing just the copy and try that in the Tivo. The downfall of JMFS is that it doesn't show write errors, only read errors.
> 
> If you try the above and it still won't boot you could try Seatools for DOS or Windows and test the 1TB for errors.
> 
> Or just grab another drive and try again.
> 
> And I would never do what you're doing until the 30 day return period ended.


Yeah, booted fine, Cable Card pairing went fine, recorded fine on all 4 tuners. I didn't pop it open until I knew all that. (and this way the stock drive had the pairings before I did the copy)

Once I get the new replacement drive I'll do just the copy and test that. That is the time burn, anyway. The next 2 steps are pretty much instantaneous.

When I put the stock drive back in it booted fine and was working as normal. I make an effort to be extra careful during upgrades (this is my 4th since putting a second drive in my S1 a million years ago) but you're right...it could've been DOA or die in the next 30 days (knock on wood) and I'd be stuck. Here's hoping that doesn't happen.


----------



## Corran Horn

CoxInPHX said:


> What is the Manufacture Date or Date Code on the stock Seagate 500GB HDD?
> 
> Seagate Datecode Calculator
> http://www.westernnetworks.com/tools/seagatedatecode.php


Date Code Year:
2012
Date Code Week:
48
Date Code Day:
1
Build Date:
Saturday, May 26, 2012

Warranty Valid:
Yes

Pulled it to attempt the expansion to a new 2TB WD20EURS. Will report results.


----------



## Cap'n Preshoot

Somewhere I recall someone mentioning the need, or perhaps just recommending that we periodically go through the tedium of re installing the factory-original drive to keep its software version current, just in case the new 2-tb drive crashes and we have to rebuild another drive.

I understand the need to hang on to the original drive, but is it really necessary to periodically re-install it & pull down the latest code?... I mean, gee whiz...

But if truly so then how often? The drive replacement went well, but taking my TIVO out of service to do a drive swap, then forcing a software download, then reassembling again is really not an exercise I look forward to periodically needing to do.

What's the official word on this ? (Obviously new TIVOs sit in inventory for goodness-knows how long without being "updated", so what's the true scoop here?)

Thanks!!!!!
.


----------



## lessd

Cap'n Preshoot said:


> Somewhere I recall someone mentioning the need, or perhaps just recommending that we periodically go through the tedium of re installing the factory-original drive to keep its software version current, just in case the new 2-tb drive crashes and we have to rebuild another drive.
> 
> I understand the need to hang on to the original drive, but is it really necessary to periodically re-install it & pull down the latest code?... I mean, gee whiz...
> 
> But if truly so then how often? The drive replacement went well, but taking my TIVO out of service to do a drive swap, then forcing a software download, then reassembling again is really not an exercise I look forward to periodically needing to do.
> 
> What's the official word on this ? (Obviously new TIVOs sit in inventory for goodness-knows how long without being "updated", so what's the true scoop here?)
> 
> Thanks!!!!!
> .


No good reason to do this as if the drive (or copy of the drive) is needed TiVo will update the software itself.


----------



## Corran Horn

Confirming that the WD20EURS works as an upgrade drive follwing jmfs with the Tivo Premiere 4. Thanks for the advice and guidance all.


----------



## Cap'n Preshoot

lessd said:


> No good reason to do this as if the drive (or copy of the drive) is needed TiVo will update the software itself.


Thanks Les. I did put a Post-It note on the old drive with the date of removal & placed it along with the original JMFS CD back in a padded shipping carton

By the way, for the one or two I see inquiring, the new 2tb drive was a WD20EURS. No config. issues, followed Comer's original post
.


----------



## Dangler

Newegg has the WD20EURS on sale for $99.99. Just got it today and followed the instructions for the Premiere. Up and running in about 2.5 hours. The original drive was almost full at 90%, now it's at 12%.


----------



## jmbach

Does anybody know if an image from a premiere xl4 will work on a premiere xl. The xl drive went bad and I don't have a backup of it. The version numbers of the software were the same. It would be going from a 2tb drive to another 2tb drive. 
Thanks


----------



## lpwcomp

jmbach said:


> Does anybody know if an image from a premiere xl4 will work on a premiere xl. The xl drive went bad and I don't have a backup of it. The version numbers of the software were the same. It would be going from a 2tb drive to another 2tb drive.
> Thanks


I don't see any way that s/w designed for a 4-tuner, digital cable only TiVo will work in a TiVo with 2-tuner OTA and analog capability.


----------



## jmbach

lpwcomp said:


> I don't see any way that s/w designed for a 4-tuner, digital cable only TiVo will work in a TiVo with 2-tuner OTA and analog capability.


Since the version numbers were the same and some of the hardware overlaps I was not sure if the software was specifically tailored for each machine or if the software was more generic similar to OS for PC's where drivers for hardware are load as needed. If it is the latter, then it will work. Atleast that is the theory I have. I guess I can try and see what happens. Just did not want to go through the process of taking the XL4 apart if it was not going to work.


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> Since the version numbers were the same and some of the hardware overlaps I was not sure if the software was specifically tailored for each machine or if the software was more generic similar to OS for PC's where drivers for hardware are load as needed. If it is the latter, then it will work. Atleast that is the theory I have. I guess I can try and see what happens. Just did not want to go through the process of taking the XL4 apart if it was not going to work.


If you know anybody else with a Premiere XL, maybe you could borrow the 1TB out of their machine to copy.

What happened to the orginal 1TB drive out of yours?


----------



## lpwcomp

jmbach said:


> Since the version numbers were the same and some of the hardware overlaps I was not sure if the software was specifically tailored for each machine or if the software was more generic similar to OS for PC's where drivers for hardware are load as needed. If it is the latter, then it will work. Atleast that is the theory I have. I guess I can try and see what happens. Just did not want to go through the process of taking the XL4 apart if it was not going to work.


Only the first part of the version numbers are the same. The final 3 digits are different. Sometimes they will still work but in this case it is extremely unlikely. Too many differences.


----------



## lessd

lpwcomp said:


> Only the first part of the version numbers are the same. The final 3 digits are different. Sometimes they will still work but in this case it is extremely unlikely. Too many differences.


When people tried to load the TiVo-HDXL software into a TiVo-HD it seemed to work at first but the guide data would not load after the first two loads, so in about a week or so you would start getting a message that the guide data was running out, a forced call home did not load the guide data, the only option was a full C&D all then, after a new setup, you would a full 14 days of guide data, this was not acceptable.


----------



## drcos

:up::up::upremiere XL success story:
Replace 1TB with 2GB EURS drive, copy was 6h 45min (for those who wanted to know how long - copy was SATA to SATA). Up to 318 HD hours.

Had to replace an S3 with 1.2G, as the CC slots went south. The M-card from Comcast seems to work much better than dancing with the two S-cards (...so far).


----------



## unitron

drcos said:


> :up::up::upremiere XL success story:
> Replace 1TB with 2GB EURS drive, copy was 6h 45min (for those who wanted to know how long - copy was SATA to SATA). Up to 318 HD hours.
> 
> Had to replace an S3 with 1.2G, as the CC slots went south. The M-card from Comcast seems to work much better than dancing with the two S-cards (...so far).


What did you do with that S3?

Did it still work okay on over the air and analog cable?


----------



## drcos

> What did you do with that S3?


Sent you a PM...


----------



## vurbano

I've done this to a few premieres when the thread started. It's been awhile. My problem is that the pc has changed a lot since then. It's got a boot drive and 5- 2TB drives in it. Still the corsair case has an external sata dock built in that I will put the target 2tb av-gp drive in, I guess I will go inside the case and swap one of the 2tb drives for the stock premiere 4 drive. My problem is how to tell them all apart. I really dont want to unhook or remove them all. Does the software list the drives and show model numbers? I forget. Has anyone posted any screenshots? I bought the drive using the. Newegg 99 dollar sale and plan to wait for Black Friday to pickup the premiere 4 on the cheap.


----------



## unitron

vurbano said:


> I've done this to a few premieres when the thread started. It's been awhile. My problem is that the pc has changed a lot since then. It's got a boot drive and 5- 2TB drives in it. Still the corsair case has an external sata dock built in that I will put the target 2tb av-gp drive in, I guess I will go inside the case and swap one of the 2tb drives for the stock premiere 4 drive. My problem is how to tell them all apart. I really dont want to unhook or remove them all. Does the software list the drives and show model numbers? I forget. Has anyone posted any screenshots? I bought the drive using the. Newegg 99 dollar sale and plan to wait for Black Friday to pickup the premiere 4 on the cheap.


Go back and read comer's first post in this thread where he talks about using

hdparm

for drive identification

If the lowercase

-i

option doesn't give you sufficient info

the uppercase

-I

option will even give you the drive's serial number, so there'll be no doubt which drive is which

/dev/sd?

where ? is whichever letter of the alphabet, beginning with "a", has been assigned to the drive by the OS that loaded into memory when you booted with the jmfs cd v1.04


----------



## vurbano

unitron said:


> Go back and read comer's first post in this thread where he talks about using
> 
> hdparm
> 
> for drive identification
> 
> If the lowercase
> 
> -i
> 
> option doesn't give you sufficient info
> 
> the uppercase
> 
> -I
> 
> option will even give you the drive's serial number, so there'll be no doubt which drive is which
> 
> /dev/sd?
> 
> where ? is whichever letter of the alphabet, beginning with "a", has been assigned to the drive by the OS that loaded into memory when you booted with the jmfs cd v1.04


Thanks for the help. A little off topic but I've been thinking about adding an esata port to give me 2 external connections for situations like this. Any recommendations of cards that work under this OS. Newegg is full of recommendations as long as you are in a windows environment.


----------



## unitron

vurbano said:


> Thanks for the help. A little off topic but I've been thinking about adding an esata port to give me 2 external connections for situations like this. Any recommendations of cards that work under this OS. Newegg is full of recommendations as long as you are in a windows environment.


Beyond my "expertise", such as it may be.

Perhaps you should start a "Linux-compatible eSATA cards?" thread in the Help Center or Coffee House threads to maximize eyeballs.

And Google a lot.


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> If you know anybody else with a Premiere XL, maybe you could borrow the 1TB out of their machine to copy.
> 
> What happened to the orginal 1TB drive out of yours?


Died. Unable to retrieve SMART data. WD's program declares dead R.I.P. 

Will need to look for an image for the drive I have for it. Going to try a Seagate Pipline HD 2tb drive. Model ST2000vm003. It is an AF drive that shows 512 to the DVR.

So if anybody knows where to find an image, I would appreciate a PM.

Of course from trying to read the whole thread, it sounds like right now it is only able to be copied from drive to drive and not from an image to a drive. Too bad there is not a way to load just enough on to the drive to for a kickstart download of the software from the server. Hmmm. For now I will just wait.


----------



## steve614

Yeah, for now the S4 software can't be backed up and saved as an image like the earlier models. 
You need a working hard drive to make a copy.


----------



## vurbano

Usb3.0 doesn't work? Usb2.0 ports seem fine but not 3.0


----------



## mdurkin

Another Seagate drive...

I have a Virgin Media Tivo (UK), which is apparently a premiere. It comes with a 500G seagate. I have been trying to upgrade to a WD 2TB drive, managed the copyDisk.sh fine, but mfsLayout.sh and mfsadd.sh return with:
MfsAdd exception: No root MFS found.
The auto run detection also failed to find a tivo disk.
I am definitely using the right drive devices when running the commands (checked with fdisk -l).
Has anyone come across this before? Is there a way round it?

Any help appreciated!
Thanks,
Matt


----------



## lpwcomp

mdurkin said:


> Another Seagate drive...
> 
> I have a Virgin Media Tivo (UK), which is apparently a premiere. It comes with a 500G seagate. I have been trying to upgrade to a WD 2TB drive, managed the copyDisk.sh fine, but mfsLayout.sh and mfsadd.sh return with:
> MfsAdd exception: No root MFS found.
> The auto run detection also failed to find a tivo disk.
> I am definitely using the right drive devices when running the commands (checked with fdisk -l).
> Has anyone come across this before? Is there a way round it?
> 
> Any help appreciated!
> Thanks,
> Matt


Since it is a Premiere, you should probably try JMFS.


----------



## mdurkin

lpwcomp said:


> Since it is a Premiere, you should probably try JMFS.


I think I am - I'm using the jmfs-rev104 boot CD, but the guide.sh script fails, so I then tried the scripts manually.

Is there something else I should be doing, using some other tools perhaps? I'm just following the guide at the start of this thread...
Thanks,
Matt


----------



## lessd

mdurkin said:


> I think I am - I'm using the jmfs-rev104 boot CD, but the guide.sh script fails, so I then tried the scripts manually.
> 
> Is there something else I should be doing, using some other tools perhaps? I'm just following the guide at the start of this thread...
> Thanks,
> Matt


The UK TiVo version may be a bit different so that jmfs-rev104 boot CD does not recognize the drive as a US TiVo drive, only a guess on my part.


----------



## mdurkin

lessd said:


> The UK TiVo version may be a bit different so that jmfs-rev104 boot CD does not recognize the drive as a US TiVo drive, only a guess on my part.


I think something is different - but this method used to work ok for the UK TIVO (premiere). It looks like something has changed. I think Seagate drives are new as well.

I'll keep a watch on the forum in case someone else comes across this and finds a solution.

Thanks,
Matt


----------



## jmbach

mdurkin said:


> I think I am - I'm using the jmfs-rev104 boot CD, but the guide.sh script fails, so I then tried the scripts manually.
> 
> Is there something else I should be doing, using some other tools perhaps? I'm just following the guide at the start of this thread...
> Thanks,
> Matt


You may have already did this, but I would redownload the ISO and check the MD5 to make sure nothing screwed up in the download and remake the disk.

Jim


----------



## jmbach

Well I solved my software problem by buying a working XL off of ebay and copying the drive. I am using a Seagate Pipline HD 2tb drive, Model ST2000vm003 and it is working flawlessly sofar. Will have to see how they hold up. Seagate now only offers a 1 year warranty on the drives since they moved manufacturing from Japan after the tsunami to China. Wonder if they are worried about quality?


----------



## jmbach

On another note, has anybody tried to back up the 1tb image with dd and piping it through gzip to see how big the resultant image is? It might be manageable.

Jim


----------



## mdurkin

jmbach said:


> You may have already did this, but I would redownload the ISO and check the MD5 to make sure nothing screwed up in the download and remake the disk.
> 
> Jim


Hi Jim,
The ISO is fine - the environment boots and all the commands work, so it looks like something has changed under the hood on these tivos. I did actually download a couple of times and tried with both a bootable USB and a CDROM.


----------



## lpwcomp

mdurkin said:


> Hi Jim,
> The ISO is fine - the environment boots and all the commands work, so it looks like something has changed under the hood on these tivos. I did actually download a couple of times and tried with both a bootable USB and a CDROM.


The new drive isn't by any chance AF is it?


----------



## ggieseke

jmbach said:


> On another note, has anybody tried to back up the 1tb image with dd and piping it through gzip to see how big the resultant image is? It might be manageable.


I don't have a Premiere, but I have been screwing around with a virgin Series 2 drive and Windows 7 VHD files. Since they are inherently "sparse" files and most of a factory drive is all zeros I was able to create an 80GB virtual drive and connect it to a VMWare machine. Booting it with JMFS and running ddrescue resulted in a 1.7GB VHD file and zip took that down to about 1GB. Reversing the process gave me a bootable drive.

If anyone out there has a virgin Premiere drive and Windows 7, I wrote a program called TiVo2VHD that will create a virtual image of any drive (Disk2vhd from Microsoft only works with MS partitioned drives). If you want to try it send me a PM.

If it works, even a several GB "factory" image might be manageable and I could write the restore code and wrap it up into something like WinMFS that wouldn't depend on virtual machines. I would also want to process the VHD file manually instead of depending on Windows 7 APIs so that it would work on XP and handle bad sectors like ddrescue.

Any takers?


----------



## jmbach

ggieseke said:


> I don't have a Premiere, but I have been screwing around with a virgin Series 2 drive and Windows 7 VHD files. Since they are inherently "sparse" files and most of a factory drive is all zeros I was able to create an 80GB virtual drive and connect it to a VMWare machine. Booting it with JMFS and running ddrescue resulted in a 1.7GB VHD file and zip took that down to about 1GB. Reversing the process gave me a bootable drive.
> 
> If anyone out there has a virgin Premiere drive and Windows 7, I wrote a program called TiVo2VHD that will create a virtual image of any drive (Disk2vhd from Microsoft only works with MS partitioned drives). If you want to try it send me a PM.
> 
> If it works, even a several GB "factory" image might be manageable and I could write the restore code and wrap it up into something like WinMFS that wouldn't depend on virtual machines. I would also want to process the VHD file manually instead of depending on Windows 7 APIs so that it would work on XP and handle bad sectors like ddrescue.
> 
> Any takers?


I don't have a virgin drive but I do have a drive that I did a clear and delete everything on. I could try it on that. I would PM you except that I don't have ten posts yet.

Jim


----------



## ggieseke

jmbach said:


> I don't have a virgin drive but I do have a drive that I did a clear and delete everything on. I could try it on that. I would PM you except that I don't have ten posts yet.
> 
> Jim


PM sent. It will be interesting to see if C&DE actually zeroes the unused sectors (it takes long enough).


----------



## jmbach

ggieseke said:


> PM sent. It will be interesting to see if C&DE actually zeroes the unused sectors (it takes long enough).


Got it thanks. Will give it a try. Hopefully it will shrink it to something manageable. BTW as far as the destination drive, can it be a network drive or does it need to be physically connected to the machine.

Thanks,

Jim


----------



## ggieseke

jmbach said:


> BTW as far as the destination drive, can it be a network drive or does it need to be physically connected to the machine.


Any valid path that Windows recognizes should be fine.


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> Got it thanks. Will give it a try. Hopefully it will shrink it to something manageable. BTW as far as the destination drive, can it be a network drive or does it need to be physically connected to the machine.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jim


Remember, what we're talking about here is just a file.


----------



## Gene S

clark_kent said:


> Thanks for the info dwit. I wondered about that. I had also tried two OWC Mercury USB enclosures with the TiVo disk in one the the target disk in the other but I got the same two errors (no controller found and no JavaMFS found). I don't know if the OWC is problem or not. Would an incompatible controller cause the JavaMFS not to be found?


Did you ever get this to work? I'm having the same issue. MacBook Pro early 2011.

The controller error, I don't think is the hard drive enclosures, it's something with the utility disc. I get the error with my USB - SATA docks connected or not.

It's giving an error that is can't find JaveMFS, but it's there on the CD.

Does this utility load everything into memory, then never access the disc again? Can I boot from an external dvd drive, then swap it out? I only have 2 USB ports on the MacBook, and both will be needed for the Tivo copy.


----------



## jmbach

ggieseke said:


> Any valid path that Windows recognizes should be fine.


I am getting a side by side error when trying to run it. Has something to do with Microsoft visual C redistributable mismatch. Tried to install the version it is missing but it is older (2005) and it will not install.

Jim


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> Remember, what we're talking about here is just a file.


I understand completely. It depends on how his program writes the file. Higher level access will see what the OS sees. Lower level access sees physical drives attached to the computer. You can access network drives but requires a lot more programming.


----------



## ggieseke

jmbach said:


> I am getting a side by side error when trying to run it. Has something to do with Microsoft visual C redistributable mismatch. Tried to install the version it is missing but it is older (2005) and it will not install.


Try putting this dll in the same directory as TiVo2VHD.

http://www.4shared.com/zip/BqgiSwsf/msvcr80d.html

It's compiled in debug mode right now, which is probably what's causing the mismatch. If that doesn't work I will compile a release version, take it to work tomorrow, and test against a raw copy of Windows 7 to figure out what version of the VC2005 redist it needs.

Sorry about that.


----------



## jmbach

ggieseke said:


> Try putting this dll in the same directory as TiVo2VHD.
> 
> http://www.4shared.com/zip/BqgiSwsf/msvcr80d.html
> 
> It's compiled in debug mode right now, which is probably what's causing the mismatch. If that doesn't work I will compile a release version, take it to work tomorrow, and test against a raw copy of Windows 7 to figure out what version of the VC2005 redist it needs.
> 
> Sorry about that.


Did not work. Its okay, don't mind alpha/beta testing.

The event that is logged is "Activation context generation failed for "C:\Tivo\tivo2vhd.exe". Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.DebugCRT,processorArchitecture="x86",type="win32",version="8.0.50727.6195" could not be found"

BTW I am running Win 7 sp1 x64.

Cheers,

Jim


----------



## GreyhoundR

Hi - I searched the forums and Google for some time and couldn't find an answer to this, hope I'm not overlooking the obvious. . .

When I got my Premiere I used JMFS live successfully to go from 320gb to 1.5tb. A year and change later I think this particular drive is getting sporadically flaky, and I would like just a bit more storage space anyway - so I bought a new WD EURS 2tb.

Using the 1.5tb as the source and the 2tb as the destination jmfs copied it over just fine. The problem was when it tried to expand, it could not. Sorry I didn't grab a screen capture or remember the exact wording, it just couldn't.

I tried using iPartition on OSX (which at least can see and manipulate the partitions on the drive) to expand the one huge MFS partition (there was one and only one that was 1tb+) to gobble up all the free space, but the Tivo immediately didn't like it.

I have an original Premiere drive that I can supersize to the 2tb, but I don't believe it was the drive that came with this specific unit. I put it in just to test it and it booted and eventually loaded up but said "call Tivo to activate. .. problem with this unit." 

So - any advice would be welcomed. 
- Is there something I can do when the 2tb just has the 1.5tb cloned on to it to expand it properly? 
- Or should I redo it with my possibly mismatched original 320gb, cloned to the 2tb and expanded?
- Or I also have a .dmg compressed image of one of my 3 Premieres when it was new out of the box here on my Mac, but I actually don't know how I could put it back either on a 320gb drive or to a 2tb drive (nor do I know if it matched up with this exact machine).

Thanks!


----------



## unitron

GreyhoundR said:


> Hi - I searched the forums and Google for some time and couldn't find an answer to this, hope I'm not overlooking the obvious. . .
> 
> When I got my Premiere I used JMFS live successfully to go from 320gb to 1.5tb. A year and change later I think this particular drive is getting sporadically flaky, and I would like just a bit more storage space anyway - so I bought a new WD EURS 2tb.
> 
> Using the 1.5tb as the source and the 2tb as the destination jmfs copied it over just fine. The problem was when it tried to expand, it could not. Sorry I didn't grab a screen capture or remember the exact wording, it just couldn't.
> 
> I tried using iPartition on OSX (which at least can see and manipulate the partitions on the drive) to expand the one huge MFS partition (there was one and only one that was 1tb+) to gobble up all the free space, but the Tivo immediately didn't like it.
> 
> I have an original Premiere drive that I can supersize to the 2tb, but I don't believe it was the drive that came with this specific unit. I put it in just to test it and it booted and eventually loaded up but said "call Tivo to activate. .. problem with this unit."
> 
> So - any advice would be welcomed.
> - Is there something I can do when the 2tb just has the 1.5tb cloned on to it to expand it properly?
> - Or should I redo it with my possibly mismatched original 320gb, cloned to the 2tb and expanded?
> - Or I also have a .dmg compressed image of one of my 3 Premieres when it was new out of the box here on my Mac, but I actually don't know how I could put it back either on a 320gb drive or to a 2tb drive (nor do I know if it matched up with this exact machine).
> 
> Thanks!


I've only used jmfs with an S3 HD, never been in the same room as a Premiere, much less had one to open up and experiment on.

That being said, as I understand it jmfs is designed to copy the original Premiere drive and then expand by adding a single MFS Media partition.

When you went from the 320 to the 1.5, it did that.

Now that you want to go from the 1.5 to the 2, it sees that it's already added a single MFS Media partition, so it probably thinks it's done.

So likely you're going to need to get a 320 image on that EURS and then let jmfs add that one extra partition.


----------



## lessd

unitron said:


> I've only used jmfs with an S3 HD, never been in the same room as a Premiere, much less had one to open up and experiment on.
> 
> That being said, as I understand it jmfs is designed to copy the original Premiere drive and then expand by adding a single MFS Media partition.
> 
> When you went from the 320 to the 1.5, it did that.
> 
> Now that you want to go from the 1.5 to the 2, it sees that it's already added a single MFS Media partition, so it probably thinks it's done.
> 
> So likely you're going to need to get a 320 image on that EURS and then let jmfs add that one extra partition.


That true but there will be the loss of all data and programs that was on the 1.5Tb drive, that most likely is why he wants to go from the 1.5Tb to the 2Tb drive directly.


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> That true but there will be the loss of all data and programs that was on the 1.5Tb drive, that most likely is why he wants to go from the 1.5Tb to the 2Tb drive directly.


Then I fear unless he learns to hex edit hard drives AND manages to reverse-engineer a lot about the TiVo partition and file structure, his choices are using only 1.5TB of the 2TB drive, or starting from scratch and getting all 2TB but losing all his shows and settings.

I vote for the first method so that the rest of us can benefit from what he learns, but he may actually have a life.


----------



## jmbach

GreyhoundR said:


> I have an original Premiere drive that I can supersize to the 2tb, but I don't believe it was the drive that came with this specific unit. I put it in just to test it and it booted and eventually loaded up but said "call Tivo to activate. .. problem with this unit."


When I used another premiere drive image to fix my premiere I had what sounds like the same error. I had to do a 'clear and delete everything' to clear the error and make the unit usable again.

Jim


----------



## retiredqwest

GreyhoundR said:


> When I got my Premiere I used JMFS live successfully to go from 320gb to 1.5tb. A year and change later I think this particular drive is getting sporadically flaky, and I would like just a bit more storage space anyway - so I bought a new WD EURS 2tb.
> 
> Using the 1.5tb as the source and the 2tb as the destination jmfs copied it over just fine. The problem was when it tried to expand, it could not. Sorry I didn't grab a screen capture or remember the exact wording, it just couldn't.
> 
> I have an original Premiere drive that I can supersize to the 2tb, but I don't believe it was the drive that came with this specific unit. I put it in just to test it and it booted and eventually loaded up but said "call Tivo to activate. .. problem with this unit."
> 
> So - any advice would be welcomed.
> - Is there something I can do when the 2tb just has the 1.5tb cloned on to it to expand it properly?
> - Or should I redo it with my possibly mismatched original 320gb, cloned to the 2tb and expanded?


First question did you hookup the 2TB and see if the TP even boots? If it boots how many hours HD does it report.

When you used JMFS to go from 320GB to 1.5TB did you run supersize then? If so.... when you did the copy from the 1.5TB to the 2TB it copied it supersized. Or at least it was.....

If the 2TB shows 287 or so hours HD, just run Supersize against the drive again and it should show 317 hours HD.


----------



## jmbach

One thought and one question. Question first. How large is the dmg that you did of your virgin premiere drive. Now the thought. You might want to PM the author of JMFS and see how expand works. This might give you insight how to expand your 1.5tb to 2tb. I have not found information yet. There is good info on MFS and WinMFS but not on JMFS. I will also say I have not tried hard to find that information as JMFS worked right out of the box so to speak for my purposes. I know that the other programs do not work on the premiere line but I do not know the exact details as to why. 

If you are not concerned about loss of programs, then I would recommend cloning an original drive and expanding its from there. 

Jim


----------



## clark_kent

Gene S said:


> Did you ever get this to work? I'm having the same issue. MacBook Pro early 2011.
> 
> The controller error, I don't think is the hard drive enclosures, it's something with the utility disc. I get the error with my USB - SATA docks connected or not.
> 
> It's giving an error that is can't find JaveMFS, but it's there on the CD.
> 
> Does this utility load everything into memory, then never access the disc again? Can I boot from an external dvd drive, then swap it out? I only have 2 USB ports on the MacBook, and both will be needed for the Tivo copy.


No, I never did get it to work, this time around.

I got a small drive Premier a while back and somehow managed to use my MacbookPro to upgrade to a 2TB drive. Unfortunately, the USB stick or CD I used and booted the Mac (that worked great) got lost in the shuffle and everything I tried with a new USB or CD did not work, even though all the CD's I burned booted on a PC. I don't know if a Mac update changed something or I did something different. The time it did work, I used 2 OWC Mercury Elite Pro enclosures over USB to copy the original TiVo drive. After many frustrating hours (this time around), I finally gave up and bought a cheep PC ($75) off craigslist but I was a bit bummed not being able to do it with my Mac.


----------



## gkuyat

ggieseke said:


> I don't have a Premiere, but I have been screwing around with a virgin Series 2 drive and Windows 7 VHD files. Since they are inherently "sparse" files and most of a factory drive is all zeros I was able to create an 80GB virtual drive and connect it to a VMWare machine. Booting it with JMFS and running ddrescue resulted in a 1.7GB VHD file and zip took that down to about 1GB. Reversing the process gave me a bootable drive.
> 
> If anyone out there has a virgin Premiere drive and Windows 7, I wrote a program called TiVo2VHD that will create a virtual image of any drive (Disk2vhd from Microsoft only works with MS partitioned drives). If you want to try it send me a PM.
> 
> If it works, even a several GB "factory" image might be manageable and I could write the restore code and wrap it up into something like WinMFS that wouldn't depend on virtual machines. I would also want to process the VHD file manually instead of depending on Windows 7 APIs so that it would work on XP and handle bad sectors like ddrescue.
> 
> Any takers?


I have a refurbished Premier unit showing up on Thursday. I would hope they wipe the drive completely.
If you have the bits ready I could give it a whirl.
Sadly I too can not send PMs yet


----------



## unitron

gkuyat said:


> I have a refurbished Premier unit showing up on Thursday. I would hope they wipe the drive completely.
> If you have the bits ready I could give it a whirl.
> Sadly I too can not send PMs yet


What do you mean by wipe the drive completely?

Erase everything added by a previous user/owner?

Because you certainly want all of the TiVo software on the drive that's supposed to be there.


----------



## ggieseke

gkuyat said:


> I have a refurbished Premier unit showing up on Thursday. I would hope they wipe the drive completely.
> If you have the bits ready I could give it a whirl.
> Sadly I too can not send PMs yet


PM with links & instructions sent.

If they replaced the drive or whatever method they use to image it writes zeroes to unused sectors I'm hoping for a good compression ratio, but I have no idea. Hopefully we'll find out soon.


----------



## JulienPDX

Hello. I followed this guide a little under a year ago and used a 1TB drive that was in a broken "MyBook" external drive. (the drive itself wasn't broken, just the connector and the housing--I yanked out the drive, discovered it was just a normal SATA drive and "re-purposed" it). 

It worked beautifully btw. However, I purchased a 2TB drive last week at a ridiculously good price. Can I use this same process with the current drive (1TB) as the "source"? I was a moron and repurposed the original drive in the tivo so I no longer have the "original" so to speak...


----------



## GreyhoundR

JulienPDX said:


> Hello. I followed this guide a little under a year ago and used a 1TB drive that was in a broken "MyBook" external drive. (the drive itself wasn't broken, just the connector and the housing--I yanked out the drive, discovered it was just a normal SATA drive and "re-purposed" it).
> 
> It worked beautifully btw. However, I purchased a 2TB drive last week at a ridiculously good price. Can I use this same process with the current drive (1TB) as the "source"? I was a moron and repurposed the original drive in the tivo so I no longer have the "original" so to speak...


This was more or less my situation (don't know which model Tivo you have though, mine was a Premiere which I think has a slightly different partition structure). Thank you for all the input guys but I did have to abandon my existing biggie sized 1.5tb and start with an original Premiere image I had, and clone and expand it to the new 2tb. Then, (as mentioned) do a "clear and erase all" settings or else all the features and transfer/download ability won't work so you are back at square one and have to do the guided setup again, etc.

It wasn't that big of a pain for me though because I had nothing really mission critical saved on that Tivo (programming wise) and I was able to txfr my Season Passes off to another of my Tivos online, then transfer them back later. Only thing left to do is call Comcast and have them pair my cablecard again so I can get the premium channels.

To speed up the process I repeatedly forced it to connect a few times (software update, get Tivo Service # and other misc info, get programming guide after cable provider programmed, etc.) rather than wait for its reboots. It all went pretty fast and now I have something like 321-329 HD hours, and the WD EURS 2tb drive is pretty cheap. I ran the wdidle on it as well as Ross Walker's "hdparm" suggested command on his website for setting some of the HD variables. It locked up once on its first or second boot up, and I had to unplug it and plug back in, but I've had that happen before and all has been smooth since. I actually had a small APC UPS laying around and connected it to this unit for some defense against future power gremlins.

But yes, according to my attempts and research I wasn't able to find an off the shelf ready to go solution to expand an already expanded Premiere drive.

hth


----------



## jrtroo

JulienPDX said:


> I was a moron and repurposed the original drive in the tivo so I no longer have the "original" so to speak...


Yikes. You disobeyed the tivo, having the initial drive as a backup is one of the best reasons to updgrade, even if it were to a drive marginally larger.

I'm thinking you need a friend with a premiere to get a copy of the software or to bite the bullet from a third party.


----------



## unitron

JulienPDX said:


> Hello. I followed this guide a little under a year ago and used a 1TB drive that was in a broken "MyBook" external drive. (the drive itself wasn't broken, just the connector and the housing--I yanked out the drive, discovered it was just a normal SATA drive and "re-purposed" it).
> 
> It worked beautifully btw. However, I purchased a 2TB drive last week at a ridiculously good price. Can I use this same process with the current drive (1TB) as the "source"? I was a moron and repurposed the original drive in the tivo so I no longer have the "original" so to speak...


What brand and model number 2TB, and how much did you pay?

New or used?

If new, from where?

If you have a Premiere, and already used jmfs to copy and expand onto the 1TB, you may not have violated the "no more than 16 partitions on a single drive" rule that TiVos observe (for reasons known only to TiVo, Inc.), but I don't know if jmfs will copy that 1TB and add another single MFS media partition or not.

I'm sure it'll do the copying part, but when it goes to fill the unused space it may see the extra partition it had already added to the 1TB (or to be more accurate it may see the copy of it it just made onto the 2TB, along with the rest of the partitions) and think it's already done the expansion thing.

You could try it and see what happens. It won't change anything on the 1TB drive as long as you're careful about telling it which is the source and which is the target drive, so the worst outcome is you spent a bunch of time on it and no joy.

But the rest of us will have learned something the easy way which you learned the hard way since you're going to be conscientious and report back to us.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

JulienPDX said:


> Hello. I followed this guide a little under a year ago and used a 1TB drive that was in a broken "MyBook" external drive. (the drive itself wasn't broken, just the connector and the housing--I yanked out the drive, discovered it was just a normal SATA drive and "re-purposed" it).
> 
> It worked beautifully btw. However, I purchased a 2TB drive last week at a ridiculously good price. Can I use this same process with the current drive (1TB) as the "source"? I was a moron and repurposed the original drive in the tivo so I no longer have the "original" so to speak...


Julien, I have some stock Premiere drives on the shelf (as do others here, I'm sure). PM me (or reply here if you can't yet). if you want to arrange for me to dupe one of my drives to your new 2TB drive. Won't be a fast solution (with shipping it both ways), nor will it preserve your original shows, but you'll have your 300 hours of HD goodness eventually.


----------



## vurbano

jrtroo said:


> Yikes. You disobeyed the tivo, having the initial drive as a backup is one of the best reasons to updgrade, even if it were to a drive marginally larger.
> 
> I'm thinking you need a friend with a premiere to get a copy of the software or to bite the bullet from a third party.


Well it's nothing a couple of trips to a certain blue big box store wouldn't solve depending on his sense of morality.


----------



## milo99

i've tried searching this thread and haven't found a post that has the same problem, so hopefully this isn't a rehash.

I just got my premiere and download jmfs (both versions) so as to upgrade to a 1TB drive. after burning the ISO to a CD and putting it in my drive to boot from, after power on, it starts to load 2 files/scripts(?) but then the screen goes black and the PC reboots. it just keeps doing this in an endless loop. It never gets to any prompts or step by step guide or anything. I don't see the linux penguins... It does it with both version .68 and 1.04. What gives? is there a bios setting i need to be careful of?

i have my CD/Bluray/DVD drive as the first in the boot priority, and since it tries to boot of the cd i don't think that's a problem. It does regardless of what HDDs i have hooked up. Tried it with no tivo drives and just my regular Windows drive, tried it with only my Tivo stock drive and 1tb drive (no windows drive), and there's no difference in behavior.

i have an Asus 990fx mobo with an AMD fx8120 cpu. Don't know what in the Bios i'd need to change, a quick perusal through the settings didn't make anything jump out at me. But i'm also not fluent in linux, so i don't know what would be needed for that to work right.

anybody have any ideas?


----------



## unitron

milo99 said:


> i've tried searching this thread and haven't found a post that has the same problem, so hopefully this isn't a rehash.
> 
> I just got my premiere and download jmfs (both versions) so as to upgrade to a 1TB drive. after burning the ISO to a CD and putting it in my drive to boot from, after power on, it starts to load 2 files/scripts(?) but then the screen goes black and the PC reboots. it just keeps doing this in an endless loop. It never gets to any prompts or step by step guide or anything. I don't see the linux penguins... It does it with both version .68 and 1.04. What gives? is there a bios setting i need to be careful of?
> 
> i have my CD/Bluray/DVD drive as the first in the boot priority, and since it tries to boot of the cd i don't think that's a problem. It does regardless of what HDDs i have hooked up. Tried it with no tivo drives and just my regular Windows drive, tried it with only my Tivo stock drive and 1tb drive (no windows drive), and there's no difference in behavior.
> 
> i have an Asus 990fx mobo with an AMD fx8120 cpu. Don't know what in the Bios i'd need to change, a quick perusal through the settings didn't make anything jump out at me. But i'm also not fluent in linux, so i don't know what would be needed for that to work right.
> 
> anybody have any ideas?


Download 1.04 again (just in case the first one was faulty), and burn it as a image again to a cd-r and see what happens with no drives connected at all except the optical the cd is in.

Also, look into the possibility of creating a bootable USB thumb drive with that image on it. I think I remember seeing comer talking about that as an alternative, either here or on the "other site".

There's some stuff in BIOSes nowadays, one of them has something to do with allowing more IRQs, and the other has something to do with whether drives are seen in old-fashioned IDE mode or some new thing, and you might have to temporarily switch the setting on that.

Of course first you'll have to figure out what it is that I'm talking about and can't clearly remember.

Maybe it has something to do with AHCI


----------



## milo99

unitron said:


> Download 1.04 again (just in case the first one was faulty), and burn it as a image again to a cd-r and see what happens with no drives connected at all except the optical the cd is in.
> 
> Also, look into the possibility of creating a bootable USB thumb drive with that image on it. I think I remember seeing comer talking about that as an alternative, either here or on the "other site".


tried multiple images, no dice.

tried disconnecting everything but my blu ray drive, no dice.

haven't figured out how to make a bootable USB and haven't explored that option yet, so that'll be next i think.


> There's some stuff in BIOSes nowadays, one of them has something to do with allowing more IRQs, and the other has something to do with whether drives are seen in old-fashioned IDE mode or some new thing, and you might have to temporarily switch the setting on that.
> 
> Of course first you'll have to figure out what it is that I'm talking about and can't clearly remember.
> 
> Maybe it has something to do with AHCI


i found some SATA settings that allow you to set the different sata ports to IDE, RAID, or ACHI. They were on ACHI, switched them to IDE. No dice.

i guess i'll look into figuring out the bootable USB drive unless somebody has other ideas...


----------



## unitron

milo99 said:


> tried multiple images, no dice.
> 
> tried disconnecting everything but my blu ray drive, no dice.
> 
> haven't figured out how to make a bootable USB and haven't explored that option yet, so that'll be next i think.
> 
> i found some SATA settings that allow you to set the different sata ports to IDE, RAID, or ACHI. They were on ACHI, switched them to IDE. No dice.
> 
> i guess i'll look into figuring out the bootable USB drive unless somebody has other ideas...


Different, perhaps older, motherboard.

As long as it isn't a GigaByte brand one.


----------



## milo99

unitron said:


> Different, perhaps older, motherboard.
> 
> As long as it isn't a GigaByte brand one.


well, guess what. after trying the bootable usb and having that completely fail, i gave up and went to my 6 yr old pc. i wanted to do it on the newer faster one, but since now i'm going to be just leaving it to run overnight, the ancient slow one won't matter.

i put the cd in the dvd player.. it has a CD only player/writer as well but it hasn't been hooked up. i got to the linux boot (yay!), but it gave me an error that it couldn't load JavaMFS, and something about using an IDE device, copying the files there and something about mounting it. wtf? well, that drive IS an old IDE drive. So then i thought, let me put it in the CD drive and hook that up. wouldn't you know it, it worked! wtf... have no idea why it wouldn't work on the DVD drive but it did on the cd drive. those are both IDE.

meantime, the HDD are both on the internal sata ports (the mobo recognizes them as IDE though) and it's in process of copying now. man... hopefully when i wake up tomorrow it'll be ready to expand and supersize, and hopefully those don't take that long. i want to put everything back together before leaving for work!


----------



## unitron

milo99 said:


> well, guess what. after trying the bootable usb and having that completely fail, i gave up and went to my 6 yr old pc. i wanted to do it on the newer faster one, but since now i'm going to be just leaving it to run overnight, the ancient slow one won't matter.
> 
> i put the cd in the dvd player.. it has a CD only player/writer as well but it hasn't been hooked up. i got to the linux boot (yay!), but it gave me an error that it couldn't load JavaMFS, and something about using an IDE device, copying the files there and something about mounting it. wtf? well, that drive IS an old IDE drive. So then i thought, let me put it in the CD drive and hook that up. wouldn't you know it, it worked! wtf... have no idea why it wouldn't work on the DVD drive but it did on the cd drive. those are both IDE.
> 
> meantime, the HDD are both on the internal sata ports (the mobo recognizes them as IDE though) and it's in process of copying now. man... hopefully when i wake up tomorrow it'll be ready to expand and supersize, and hopefully those don't take that long. i want to put everything back together before leaving for work!


One should always keep a dedicated TiVo wrangling computer handy.


----------



## milo99

and everything went through with no hitches this morning.. put the 1Tb drive in the premiere, booted up, and all is well.



unitron said:


> One should always keep a dedicated TiVo wrangling computer handy.


seriously... although in due time, we may see another version of WinMFS that does this within a Windows boot and works with newer bioses, who knows.

Not that Comer's tool isn't fantastic - it is. But i'm guessing some others won't have an older pc sitting around so they won't be able to take advantage of it.

in any case, thanks to Comer for the tool! ...man, i love this forum. it really is what the internet community is all about (in my eyes anyway).


----------



## joesebastian

ggieseke said:


> I don't have a Premiere, but I have been screwing around with a virgin Series 2 drive and Windows 7 VHD files. Since they are inherently "sparse" files and most of a factory drive is all zeros I was able to create an 80GB virtual drive and connect it to a VMWare machine. Booting it with JMFS and running ddrescue resulted in a 1.7GB VHD file and zip took that down to about 1GB. Reversing the process gave me a bootable drive.
> 
> If anyone out there has a virgin Premiere drive and Windows 7, I wrote a program called TiVo2VHD that will create a virtual image of any drive (Disk2vhd from Microsoft only works with MS partitioned drives). If you want to try it send me a PM.
> 
> If it works, even a several GB "factory" image might be manageable and I could write the restore code and wrap it up into something like WinMFS that wouldn't depend on virtual machines. I would also want to process the VHD file manually instead of depending on Windows 7 APIs so that it would work on XP and handle bad sectors like ddrescue.
> 
> Any takers?


I would like to try the virtual image tool TIVO2VHD as I would like to backup my virgin S4 drive. I cannot PM you as I have less than 10 posts.

Thanks
Joe


----------



## unitron

joesebastian said:


> I would like to try the virtual image tool TIVO2VHD as I would like to backup my virgin S4 drive. I cannot PM you as *I have less than 10 posts*.
> 
> Thanks
> Joe


A quick argument with some of the guys here should fix that in no time.



I'll even start the argument. It's actually supposed to be "fewer than", not "less than".


----------



## ggieseke

joesebastian said:


> I would like to try the virtual image tool TIVO2VHD as I would like to backup my virgin S4 drive. I cannot PM you as I have less than 10 posts.
> 
> Thanks
> Joe


PM sent.

Sorry it took so long to answer. I have spent the last few days re-writing it to use its own VHD code so that it would run on XP as well as Windows 7. I had to work this morning and it took me a while to finish and test both programs this afternoon.

The Windows 7 versions have proven successful at backing up a virgin TCD746320 drive to a reasonably sized image (about 3.5GB before zip) and restoring it to a new drive. THANKS retiredqwest! I have only run each of the new versions once, so let me know if there are any problems.

There are 2 programs - TiVo2VHD and VHD2TiVo. Right now both of them are command-line programs without a UI. The command-line parameters are as follows...

TiVo2VHD or VHD2TiVo without any options lists the drives connected to your computer. On my PC it spits out

\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0=1862.94GB MARVELL Raid VD 0 SCSI Disk Device (S/N:15e0000015e00010)
\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1=3725.88GB MARVELL Raid VD 1 SCSI Disk Device (S/N:5a3000005a301050)
\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE2=74.53GB WDC WD80 0BB-55JKC0 USB Device (S/N:▼)

The ancient drive I'm testing with is the 80GB WD, so to back it up I would take the drive number from "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE2" and enter

TiVo2VHD 2 C:\Test.vhd

and to restore it I would enter

VHD2TiVo C:\Test.vhd 2

The "2" is the physical drive number. Disk Manager will see it the same, but it tries to initialize any drive that doesn't already have a Windows signature. I figured that it was safer to be able to list the drives without going into Disk Manager at all.

The "C:\Test.vhd" is the path to the file you want to use. It can be anything you like as long as it's a valid file path.

If it works out, get your post count up and we'll figure out a way to get a copy of your image to me. I'm hoping to get a clean image of every Premiere model and set up an FTP site with all of them.

P.S. Be DANG careful with VHD2TiVo. Run it without any parameters to get the list of drives and don't make any typos when you run it for real. It will happily wipe your computer if you give it the wrong drive number.


----------



## joesebastian

@ggieseke - Thanks for the PM and instructions in your post.


----------



## blackduck08

Please help. I installed jmfs on a CD-rom (with nero image), and when I try to load, I see the first two lines (for example, ......) then afterwards the screen goes black.

So the program does not want to load. 

I am trying to copy my failing 320 GB drive to my new WD 2GB drive.

Please help.


----------



## unitron

blackduck08 said:


> Please help. I installed jmfs on a CD-rom (with nero image), and when I try to load, I see the first two lines (for example, ......) then afterwards the screen goes black.
> 
> So the program does not want to load.
> 
> I am trying to copy my failing 320 GB drive to my new WD 2GB drive.
> 
> Please help.


Perhaps just a bad download or bad burn.

What kind of PC are you using and how old?

(might need to change something in the BIOS IDE settings)


----------



## blackduck08

Actually its a fairly new computer. The motherboard and comp is one year old. Also i downloaded program twice and did the iso image burn twice. Since I was running ssd, I did go to the bios to change mode back to IDE. It should be noted that when the screen does go black I see the DVD-rom lights blinking for a while longer and keyboard lights are on. One last note, I got the tivo green screen of death which is why I am trying to hopefully copy image to new 2gb drive.


----------



## milo99

blackduck08 said:


> Actually its a fairly new computer. The motherboard and comp is one year old. Also i downloaded program twice and did the iso image burn twice. Since I was running ssd, I did go to the bios to change mode back to IDE. It should be noted that when the screen does go black I see the DVD-rom lights blinking for a while longer and keyboard lights are on. One last note, I got the tivo green screen of death which is why I am trying to hopefully copy image to new 2gb drive.


sounds very similar to the problem i had (about a dozen posts before you), and my computer is also less than a year old. i couldn't get it to work, but it did work on my old computer just fine, so i stopped trying to figure out. if you can get your hands on a pc that's a few years old, that might work out better for you.

Has Comer checked in to this thread recently? i wonder if he'd have any insight as to what's going on with newer computers/motherboards...


----------



## lessd

milo99 said:


> sounds very similar to the problem i had (about a dozen posts before you), and my computer is also less than a year old. i couldn't get it to work, but it did work on my old computer just fine, so i stopped trying to figure out. if you can get your hands on a pc that's a few years old, that might work out better for you.
> 
> Has Comer checked in to this thread recently? i wonder if he'd have any insight as to what's going on with newer computers/motherboards...


I keep an old P4 HP computer in the cellar to do all my TiVo coping on, works great and I don't have to tie up my working computer.


----------



## unitron

Computers are like cars, you always need to keep an old one working so you can use it to fix the new one.


----------



## blackduck08

Ok. The got it to run on another computer but the problem is the program doesnt detect a tivo drive and i cant continue..but the bios sees the drive. I have a lifetime on the tivo. What are my options? Is it hopeless?


----------



## lessd

blackduck08 said:


> Ok. The got it to run on another computer but the problem is the program doesnt detect a tivo drive and i cant continue..but the bios sees the drive. I have a lifetime on the tivo. What are my options? Is it hopeless?


If your TiVo drive in NG you will have to purchase a drive off E-Bay or other venders.


----------



## blackduck08

If I do that do I lose my lifetime service?


----------



## unitron

blackduck08 said:


> Ok. The got it to run on another computer but the problem is the program doesnt detect a tivo drive and i cant continue..but the bios sees the drive. I have a lifetime on the tivo. What are my options? Is it hopeless?


Type

x

(for exit) and press the Enter key to get to the command line.

Then type and enter

fdisk -l

(that's a lowercase L)

and hit the Enter key.

That should list all of the hard drives (TiVo or not) detected by the OS loaded into memory by the jmfs cd when it booted.

You should have a

/dev/sda

and a

/dev/sdb

at least, and if the PC's regular hard drive (the one with Windows or whatever on it) is attached then a

/dev/sdc

as well, and maybe some sort of listing for the cd or dvd drive you have the jmfs cd in.

You should be able to tell by the size reported which drive is assigned which letter.

/dev

stands for device

In the old days

/hd*

would mean "hard drive", by which they meant the older type now retronymed as PATA, and also called IDE, the type with the 40 pin header for the data cable and the big 4 pin power connector.

Back then

/sd*

meant SCSI drive, but since one of the "S"es stands for serial, I guess Serial-ATA drives, commonly known as SATA, get detected and labeled the same.

In Unix/Linux, everything's a file, so all of the devices (drives, cd drives, flash drives, floppy drives, etc)are in the device folder,

/dev

so a drive is a file named

/s (or h) d *,

where * is a letter from a to z

(partitions on a drive, which DOS/Windows would see as separate drives --C: drive, D: drive, etc.--would be given a number, so /dev/sda1 would be the first partion on the first of the serially connected drives, but that's for drives with a DOS type partition table and not the modified Apple Partition Map used on TiVo drives. fdisk doesn't speak Apple.)

You need to make sure that jmfs is seeing all of the drives attached to the motherboard.

If you need to see something that went by too fast, hold down the shift key and use page up and page down to navigate.

And at the command line you can type

reboot

or

poweroff

to get out of it.

(It's not recommended to just flip the power switch on a Unix/Linux machine the way you could on an old DOS machine)

To answer your other question, TiVo, Inc. has a database of TiVo Service Numbers.

You can see what yours is by looking at the sticker on the back, but it's actually stored in a chip on the motherboard.

It's also recorded on the hard drive, but the one that counts is the one on the motherboard.

When the TiVo connects to the TiVo, Inc. servers, it sends in that number and the servers find it in the database and say "you aren't subscribed", or "your subscription payments are current and you're good until date so and so" or "you have Product Lifetime Service".

So as long as the motherboard is okay, your lifetime sub is okay.

Go ahead and go to mfslive.org and download the MFS Live cd v1.4 .iso file image and burn yourself a copy just in case we need something on it, but don't aim it at the TiVo drive unless I say so.

And tell us what part of the country in which you live, you might have to borrow someone's Premiere drive to "Xerox".


----------



## L David Matheny

blackduck08 said:


> If I do that do I lose my lifetime service?


No, the lifetime service is tied to a chip on the motherboard. But if you replace the drive (with another one for exactly the same model TiVo) you will lose all your recordings since you'll have to do a Clear & Delete Everything.


----------



## blackduck08

I am tried of going to my friend's house so I can use the boot up version. Can I use the windows version of mfslive and try to copy image to my computer then to the new drive?

Maybe this will work this way?


----------



## mattack

Is 2T still the maximum size? 4 TB drives are now becoming reasonably priced. I think I'll just get an external drive and manually copy shows off&#8230; but eventually upgrading the internal drive will be tempting. (Premiere 4&#8230


----------



## blackduck08

Could someone help?


----------



## blackduck08

Please?


----------



## ggieseke

blackduck08 said:


> Could someone help?


What model number is it (the TiVo)?


----------



## unitron

blackduck08 said:


> I am tried of going to my friend's house so I can use the boot up version. Can I use the windows version of mfslive and try to copy image to my computer then to the new drive?
> 
> Maybe this will work this way?


With a Premiere drive?

NO NO NO NO NO NO

WinMFS and the MFS Live cd are for use on Series 1 through Series 3 TiVos.

When they designed the Series 4 TiVos (the Premiere and the stuff that followed), they changed some stuff about the partitions and the file system (and of course didn't publish any documentation about it), so there are very few safe ways to do anything with a Premiere drive so far.

You can use the Unix/Linux command line utility

dd

or one of the two enhanced versions of it

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

(that last being the one that comer uses on the jmfs cd for the copying part)

to "Xerox" a Premiere drive to another drive as big or bigger.

And that's it.

Except for what comer's jmfs cd does to re-write the partition map of the copy of the original drive.

People have screwed up their Premiere drive in ways that still haven't been diagnosed, much less repaired, just by trying to look at a Premiere drive with WinMFS. It was probably Windows that caused the damage and not WinMFS itself, but since we don't know what the damage is exactly, we can' be sure.

What we do know is they couldn't boot their Premieres anymore.


----------



## unitron

blackduck08 said:


> I am tried of going to my friend's house so I can use the boot up version. Can I use the windows version of mfslive and try to copy image to my computer then to the new drive?
> 
> Maybe this will work this way?


READ MY OTHER ANSWER FIRST!!!

It's the other one where I start out yelling to try to keep you from screwing up your Premiere drive.

Do this:

Go to mfslive.org

Download the .iso image file for the MFS Live cd v1.4 and burn yourself a copy as an image.

See if that will boot to the command line in your computer.

Report back.


----------



## blackduck08

I connected both drives but the system only sees the USB.


----------



## blackduck08

Would someone mind to talk to me over the phone?


----------



## blackduck08

Thank so for everyone help..standing by


----------



## blackduck08

With Linux the fdisk l only recognizes the USB but bios sees all the drives. They are connected by Sata. Why doesn't Linux recognize my hard drive?


----------



## unitron

blackduck08 said:


> With Linux the fdisk l only recognizes the USB but bios sees all the drives. They are connected by Sata. Why doesn't Linux recognize my hard drive?


Did you start off with a working Premiere and want to install a bigger drive?

Or were you starting to have problems before you ever burned a copy of jmfs?


----------



## blackduck08

no. my tivo hard drive started to fail (green screen of death). so now I have a 2TB hard drive that i bought which I want to clone from my tivo hard drive.

i can boot with jmfs with only usb bootable drive. fdisk -l only sees the usb bootable.


----------



## lessd

blackduck08 said:


> no. my tivo hard drive started to fail (green screen of death). so now I have a 2TB hard drive that i bought which I want to clone from my tivo hard drive.
> 
> i can boot with jmfs with only usb bootable drive. fdisk -l only sees the usb bootable.


If your TiVo Hard drive is bad jmfs may not see it and/or the copy may also turn out bad, you need a working TP hard drive to make a copy to the 2Tb drive you have using jmfs. If you boot up jmfs without any extra drives connected to your computer (except what inside the computer) jmfs should say after booting no TiVo drives found, if it does that jmfs is working as it should, if the problems you are seeing after connecting your TiVo drive happen (using jmfs) your TP drive is ng.


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> If your TiVo Hard drive is bad jmfs may not see it and/or the copy may also turn out bad, you need a working TP hard drive to make a copy to the 2Tb drive you have using jmfs. If you boot up jmfs without any extra drives connected to your computer (except what inside the computer) jmfs should say after booting no TiVo drives found, if it does that jmfs is working as it should, if the problems you are seeing after connecting your TiVo drive happen (using jmfs) your TP drive is ng.


I'm handholding him by telephone. The MFS Live cd can't see any of his hard drives either, so I'm thinking there's a motherboard/Live Linux incompatibility that has nothing to do with whether his Premiere drive is hosed or not.

But he's got some cd that supposedly boots into a DOS environment that is seeing the drives, so I've got him booting the UBCD to run the WD diagnostic short test.

I think we may wind up having to have him do Kickstart 58.


----------



## ejonesss

does anyone know if any of the cloning programs on the mac like data rescue or disk utility would work by cloning the drive?

also in addition to the shows is there software on the drive that needs to be copied or will the box just redownload it from tivo?

i am on a mca and it would be easier for me to install a bigger drive in the tivo if i did not mind losing my shows and me being uneasy about booting linux or anything to make a non mac process work and if disk utility or data rescue could clone via making an iso image via the same method that the police would do in computer forensics?

thanks


----------



## unitron

You can follow the further adventures of blackduck08 here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=495925

where we beg El Paso area Premiere owners for the loan of a hard drive.

EDIT:

Apparently someone with mystical powers far beyond those of mortal men has merged that thread into the second one I created on the subject, which has a better headline and can be found here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=495926


----------



## ggieseke

unitron said:


> You can follow the further adventures of blackduck08 here:
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=495925
> 
> where we beg El Paso area Premiere owners for the loan of a hard drive.


Bad link??


----------



## unitron

ggieseke said:


> Bad link??


Not when I posted, but it is now.

See edit above.


----------



## lrhorer

blackduck08 said:


> With Linux the fdisk l only recognizes the USB but bios sees all the drives. They are connected by Sata. Why doesn't Linux recognize my hard drive?


Why do you think Linux does not recognize your hard drives?

Send me a PM if you want me to help by phone, but I will insist you install a current version of Linux on some system.


----------



## lrhorer

unitron said:


> /sd*
> 
> meant SCSI drive, but since one of the "S"es stands for serial, I guess Serial-ATA drives, commonly known as SATA, get detected and labeled the same.


It's a little lower level than that. Back in the day, there were two different drivers for hard drives. One for IDE and one for SCSI-like drives. Udev (or in the old days a manual utility whose name eludes me at the moment) creates the device files based upon which driver controls the drive. A couple of years ago, all hard drive access was moved to a single kernel module, so nowadays, all hard drives are /dev/sd*.

Note on the TiVo, witch employs an older kernel, even SATA drives are /dev/hda or /dev/hdb.



unitron said:


> (partitions on a drive, which DOS/Windows would see as separate drives --C: drive, D: drive, etc.--would be given a number, so /dev/sda1 would be the first partion on the first of the serially connected drives, but that's for drives with a DOS type partition table and not the modified Apple Partition Map used on TiVo drives.


That's not quite true. If the kernel recognizes the partition table, the naming will be the same, regardless of the partition type. There are two ways the kernel can be made to recognize a foreign partition table. One is to compile support for the partition into the kernel. This is what was done with MFS_Live, and of course it is how it is done with OS/X. Some modern distros (gentoo, maybe?) also have Apple partition support compiled in. The other way is to employ a utility such as tivopart to force a re-scan of the drive via an ioctl. Running


Code:


tivopart r /dev/sdX

 will cause the partitions to appear.



unitron said:


> fdisk doesn't speak Apple.)


True, but fdisk is only used to create or modify partitions. It's the kernel that matters.



unitron said:


> (It's not recommended to just flip the power switch on a Unix/Linux machine the way you could on an old DOS machine)


It's not recommended on a DOS machine, either, if a program other than the command interpreter is running. On any OS, including windows, it is best not to shut off a machine unless all the drives have been synced and unmounted. If the file systems are all journalled, then the impact may be minimal, but any data sitting in a buffer waiting to be written will be lost.


----------



## unitron

lrhorer said:


> Why do you think Linux does not recognize your hard drives?
> 
> Send me a PM if you want me to help by phone, but I will insist you install a current version of Linux on some system.


After he got the UBCD to boot on the same machine and start the DOS environment where the WD diagnostic program runs, it could see the drive enough to diagnose read failure.

I'd think attempting to install Linux on a machine on which it won't run would be a non-optimal approach to his problem at this point.

But if you have a 320GB Premiere drive he could borrow long enough to dd and live somewhere near El Paso I'm sure he'd love to hear from you.


----------



## ciper

When running the JMFS tools from the command line and running MFSadd it assumes the device to be /dev/Hdb even though the command line argument correctly used /dev/Sda

Is there anyway around this? When I run "/root/mfslayout.sh /dev/sda /dev/sdb" it works properly.

To see why I am asking please click here http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=9372955


----------



## unitron

ciper said:


> When running the JMFS tools from the command line and running MFSadd it assumes the device to be /dev/Hdb even though the command line argument correctly used /dev/Sda
> 
> Is there anyway around this? When I run "/root/mfslayout.sh /dev/sda /dev/sdb" it works properly.
> 
> To see why I am asking please click here http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=9372955


I'm confused as to why you'd be running jmfs and mfsadd on the same drive, and if it's for a Premiere why you wouldn't just use the jmfs cd v1.04 and follow the menu prompts.


----------



## ciper

When I boot the JMFS cd and try to use it through the prompts it says "the drive must be unmarried before it can be expanded" so I exited from the menu and ran it manually with command line arguments.

There is something hardcoded incorrectly in one of the scripts. The layout tool properly works with the command line arguments /dev/sda /dev/sdb BUT the space adding script assumes that you want /dev/sda /dev/*H*db


----------



## unitron

ciper said:


> When I boot the JMFS cd and try to use it through the prompts it says "the drive must be unmarried before it can be expanded" so I exited from the menu and ran it manually with command line arguments.
> 
> There is something hardcoded incorrectly in one of the scripts. The layout tool properly works with the command line arguments /dev/sda /dev/sdb BUT the space adding script assumes that you want /dev/sda /dev/*H*db


This is the Premiere jmfs thread.

You want the S3 HD jmfs thread.

I think jmfs expects one drive (the source) to have no more than 3 MFS pairs and the target to be unformatted.


----------



## ciper

Sorry, I didn't realize the threads were split. I'll go post in that thread instead.

Carry on


----------



## lessd

unitron said:


> I'm handholding him by telephone. The MFS Live cd can't see any of his hard drives either, so I'm thinking there's a motherboard/Live Linux incompatibility that has nothing to do with whether his Premiere drive is hosed or not.
> 
> But he's got some cd that supposedly boots into a DOS environment that is seeing the drives, so I've got him booting the UBCD to run the WD diagnostic short test.
> 
> I think we may wind up having to have him do Kickstart 58.


MFS live will not see any windows formatted drives unless you check a box on the screen, I have not used that program for a long time so I don't remember what the box said (something like see mounted drives)


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> MFS live will not see any windows formatted drives unless you check a box on the screen, I have not used that program for a long time so I don't remember what the box said (something like see mounted drives)


The MFS Live cd v1.4 is command line. It's the successor to MFS tools, and what I meant was that

fdisk -l

wasn't showing the drives, which ordinarily it would, regardless of format or lack thereof.

Since the drives showed up in the BIOS/CMOS screen, and since the WD diagnostic, running in a DOS environment, saw them, I figure it's a motherboard vs. Linux thing.

And the checkbox about mounted drives to which you refer is part of spike's other creation, WinMFS.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you haven't used either in a while. 

I haven't gotten them confused yet, but when I'm advice slinging I can't remember the right name of some of the features half the time because I haven't used either program in a week or 3. 

Saga continues here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=495926

and if you're anywhere near El Paso you might can help.


----------



## Arcady

Has anyone seen any problems using jmfs to copy a Premiere Elite drive? I have a stock working Elite and an Elite that is missing the hard drive. I plan to copy the working Elite's drive to a WD20EURS and install it in the other Elite. I have never done this with a drive of the same capacity, only upgrading to larger drives. Anything I need to watch out for before I try this?


----------



## unitron

Arcady said:


> Has anyone seen any problems using jmfs to copy a Premiere Elite drive? I have a stock working Elite and an Elite that is missing the hard drive. I plan to copy the working Elite's drive to a WD20EURS and install it in the other Elite. I have never done this with a drive of the same capacity, only upgrading to larger drives. Anything I need to watch out for before I try this?


I don't know what model drive they put in the Elite (I assume it's also a 2TB?), but as long as its LBA number is the same or slightly smaller than that of the EURS, then

dd

or a variation/update of it, like

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

should be able to "Xerox" it just fine, and I'm pretty sure jmfs uses

ddrescue

for the copy portion of what it does, but if you're afraid it'll screw something up somehow, just use the MFS Live cd v1.4 and run

dd_rescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb

(adjust drive letters according to your situation/disconnect your Windows drive just to be safe all around or use a separate non-GigaByte brand motherboard with just an optical to boot from and the target and source drives).

It will take several hours.


----------



## Arcady

Thanks. I just need to find the few hours where I can safely unhook the working Elite without upsetting anyone in the household.


----------



## lessd

Arcady said:


> Has anyone seen any problems using jmfs to copy a Premiere Elite drive? I have a stock working Elite and an Elite that is missing the hard drive. I plan to copy the working Elite's drive to a WD20EURS and install it in the other Elite. I have never done this with a drive of the same capacity, only upgrading to larger drives. Anything I need to watch out for before I try this?


I have used JMFS on all TPs, both 2 and 4 tuners without problems, as said above the new drive MUST have the same or more sectors as the original TiVo drive. (and can't be over 2Tb)


----------



## Arcady

Will a regular Premiere 320gb drive work as a source for the 2TB in the Elite?


----------



## unitron

Arcady said:


> Will a regular Premiere 320gb drive work as a source for the 2TB in the Elite?


Extremely unlikely.

They _are _different models.

You might be able to use the Premiere 320 and 500 GB drives interchangebly for an original Premiere or the new 500GB version, but that's probably about the extent of Series 4 compatibility.

You could always try and see what happens and at worst have to overwrite the 2TB a second time once you got hold of the proper drive to use as a source.


----------



## lessd

Arcady said:


> Will a regular Premiere 320gb drive work as a source for the 2TB in the Elite?


No


----------



## psm27

Hi,

I'm trying to upgrade a premiere from 320G to 2TB. I burned the jmfs-live iso onto a dvd, and then booted from the dvd. Linux starts - I see 4 penguins, but then I get an error about it not being able to find JavaMFS. Tells me I can try copying JavaMFS, to C:\JavaMFS, etc.. I tried that, to no avail. This is a new system I'm using to do the upgrade, and I don't have an older system to try. The system is a win7 AMD64 based system. The DVD is ASUS.

Thanks for any ideas/suggestions...

-Paul


----------



## unitron

psm27 said:


> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to upgrade a premiere from 320G to 2TB. I burned the jmfs-live iso onto a dvd, and then booted from the dvd. Linux starts - I see 4 penguins, but then I get an error about it not being able to find JavaMFS. Tells me I can try copying JavaMFS, to C:\JavaMFS, etc.. I tried that, to no avail. This is a new system I'm using to do the upgrade, and I don't have an older system to try. The system is a win7 AMD64 based system. The DVD is ASUS.
> 
> Thanks for any ideas/suggestions...
> 
> -Paul


Make sure it's jmfs v1.04

Try burning it to a cd-r instead. Can't hurt.

What brand is the PC motherboard involved?


----------



## psm27

The motherboard is a Gigabyte A75-D3H. I don't have a cd-r handy, but will get one and try it. I seem to remember somewhere in some thread, someone wondering if the dvd itself is the problem, so that makes sense to try.

The iso is: jmfs-rev104.iso, so I think its the right one. I also tried mfslive to see if I could at least get that to run on my system, and it would not run properly (it hung). So something is funky about my system...

Thanks,
Paul


----------



## unitron

psm27 said:


> The motherboard is a Gigabyte A75-D3H. I don't have a cd-r handy, but will get one and try it. I seem to remember somewhere in some thread, someone wondering if the dvd itself is the problem, so that makes sense to try.
> 
> The iso is: jmfs-rev104.iso, so I think its the right one. I also tried mfslive to see if I could at least get that to run on my system, and it would not run properly (it hung). So something is funky about my system...
> 
> Thanks,
> Paul


You will need to figure out which SATA port it considers the first one and make sure there's a drive attached to that so that it can put a host protected area on it and not any of your TiVo or TiVo to be drives.

If you connected an empty drive to that port when you got the board, then booted and proceeded to install Windows to that drive, then it should have written the HPA to it before you installed Windows, so that should have sated it's hunger to mess with drives.

Have you put the 320 drive back in the Premiere to make sure it still works?

Burn yourself a copy of the MFS Live cd v1.4 to cd-r as well, just in case we need it for some tricky low-level first aid that has nothing to do with manipulating TiVo software.

The .iso is available at mfslive.org

Don't be confused by the numerical similarity, it and jmfs are two different things, and ordinarily you wouldn't be using MFS Live (or WinMFS) when upgrading a Premiere.

Also,


----------



## psm27

unitron said:


> You will need to figure out which SATA port it considers the first one and make sure there's a drive attached to that so that it can put a host protected area on it and not any of your TiVo or TiVo to be drives.
> 
> If you connected an empty drive to that port when you got the board, then booted and proceeded to install Windows to that drive, then it should have written the HPA to it before you installed Windows, so that should have sated it's hunger to mess with drives.
> 
> Have you put the 320 drive back in the Premiere to make sure it still works?
> 
> Burn yourself a copy of the MFS Live cd v1.4 to cd-r as well, just in case we need it for some tricky low-level first aid that has nothing to do with manipulating TiVo software.
> 
> The .iso is available at mfslive.org
> 
> Don't be confused by the numerical similarity, it and jmfs are two different things, and ordinarily you wouldn't be using MFS Live (or WinMFS) when upgrading a Premiere.
> 
> Also,


The 320 still works.

Do I need to worry about which sata drive is first, if I'm connecting my 320 and 2T drives to unused sata ports in a working win7 system? The system has a number of unused sata ports, so my plan is just to connect the 320 and the 2T drives to two unused sata ports, and use mfscopy to copy everything to the 2T drive.

I do understand that mfslive and jfms are not the same. I just wanted to try another iso dvd, to see if the dvd really could be the problem. It didn't work either, so I'm more convinced that something is different booting off a dvd vs cd.

I'm headed out to buy some cd-r discs...

Thanks,
Paul


----------



## unitron

psm27 said:


> The 320 still works.
> 
> Do I need to worry about which sata drive is first, if I'm connecting my 320 and 2T drives to unused sata ports in a working win7 system? The system has a number of unused sata ports, so my plan is just to connect the 320 and the 2T drives to two unused sata ports, and use mfscopy to copy everything to the 2T drive.
> 
> I do understand that mfslive and jfms are not the same. I just wanted to try another iso dvd, to see if the dvd really could be the problem. It didn't work either, so I'm more convinced that something is different booting off a dvd vs cd.
> 
> I'm headed out to buy some cd-r discs...
> 
> Thanks,
> Paul


A GigaByte motherboard will attempt to put a host protected area on a hard drive that's one what it considers to the "first" hard drive port.

Originally that was the Primary IDE controller's Master drive, when the motherboards still had PATA/IDE headers.

It did this thinking that the "first" drive would be the one Windows is on, or would be installed on.

If the drive is a TiVo drive, it may well consider it to be blank if it understands PC/DOS/IBM/Windows style Master Boot Records, but not Apple Partition Map-type bootpages, and the TiVo drives use a version of the APM.

So, when using that brand motherboard, you have to be sure there's already a "sacrificial" drive connected to the "first" drive port. In your case, it's quite likely that your Windows drive is serving in that capacity and you're safe.

As long as you leave it connected.

If it doesn't find that HPA when it boots, it's going to look for some place to write one.

You need to boot the PC and go into the advanced BIOS settings and look for someplace where you get a choice of IDE mode or something else for your drives. Make a note of what it's set to so you can restore it to that and then change it to IDE mode to get the jmfs cd to work properly.

If Windows can't boot properly with that setting it doesn't matter because when you boot from your optical drive into jmfs you aren't booting into Windows and when you've finished with jmfs and disconnected the two TiVo drives, you can go into the BIOS and put it back the way it was before booting into Windows again.

But if you don't have enough SATA cables and were going to use the one connecting the Windows drive, don't, it needs to remain connected to keep the motherboard happy about that whole HPA thing.

So buy another cable if necessary.


----------



## psm27

unitron said:


> A GigaByte motherboard will attempt to put a host protected area on a hard drive that's one what it considers to the "first" hard drive port.
> 
> Originally that was the Primary IDE controller's Master drive, when the motherboards still had PATA/IDE headers.
> 
> It did this thinking that the "first" drive would be the one Windows is on, or would be installed on.
> 
> If the drive is a TiVo drive, it may well consider it to be blank if it understands PC/DOS/IBM/Windows style Master Boot Records, but not Apple Partition Map-type bootpages, and the TiVo drives use a version of the APM.
> 
> So, when using that brand motherboard, you have to be sure there's already a "sacrificial" drive connected to the "first" drive port. In your case, it's quite likely that your Windows drive is serving in that capacity and you're safe.
> 
> As long as you leave it connected.
> 
> If it doesn't find that HPA when it boots, it's going to look for some place to write one.
> 
> You need to boot the PC and go into the advanced BIOS settings and look for someplace where you get a choice of IDE mode or something else for your drives. Make a note of what it's set to so you can restore it to that and then change it to IDE mode to get the jmfs cd to work properly.
> 
> If Windows can't boot properly with that setting it doesn't matter because when you boot from your optical drive into jmfs you aren't booting into Windows and when you've finished with jmfs and disconnected the two TiVo drives, you can go into the BIOS and put it back the way it was before booting into Windows again.
> 
> But if you don't have enough SATA cables and were going to use the one connecting the Windows drive, don't, it needs to remain connected to keep the motherboard happy about that whole HPA thing.
> 
> So buy another cable if necessary.


Cool. That makes sense. I've got two extra cables, and plan to leave the rest of the system alone. Good to know about the HPA issue though.

I just tried with the CD-R, it behaves the exact same way as with DVD-R, which is to say it boots and then dies because it cannot find JavaMFS.

I then went into the bios advanced settings, but do not see anywhere where I can set the dvd drive to IDE mode - it appears to already *be* in IDE mode. Maybe I should post a picture of what my bios setting choices are - nothing jumps out at me as being a likely fix for this.

I tried setting the dvd drive into non-EFI mode, but that did not make any difference.

I'm thinking my easiest means to get this done might be to boot jmfs from a flash drive? Any issues with that?

Thanks,
Paul


----------



## unitron

psm27 said:


> ...
> 
> I'm thinking my easiest means to get this done might be to boot jmfs from a flash drive? Any issues with that?
> 
> Thanks,
> Paul


Don't know, never tried it that way, although I seem to remember reading about others doing so. Start here

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8144246#post8144246

to see what comer has to say about that.


----------



## TheNumberSix

Hi everyone.

I have a question and wanted to check with your collected wisdom.

I have some Tivo HDs and a Series3. (I know this is the Premier thread.) My backup strategy was always to have an expanded drive in each one. Then every six months or so I would take out the drive, back it up with WinMFS, run a disk utility (Spinrite 6), then reinstall it. While the backup and Spinrite was running, I would have the original drive installed for a week or two.

This scheme seemed to work well.

Now I have a Premier 4 on the way and I understand that WinMFS or any other tool cannot back up the drive image. All I can do is clone it.

So what I'm thinking is this. It comes with a 500GB drive, which is plenty big for me. I don't need to expand it. I will crack the case and look at whichever drive it is and I will try to buy another one, as close as possible to it. (Same vendor and size) Then every six months, I will clone the drive to the other and just swap it out.

Does this seem like a reasonable strategy? My concern is keeping high uptime in case of a problem. This way I just can swap out the drive and carry on. 

A potential problem I see with this approach is that I bet there will be some few bytes difference in between the drive sizes. Will that screw it up?

Also, I can try to use JMFS, but I also have a fully functioning Gentoo Linux box. Would it be easier to just to do a dd command?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


----------



## lessd

TheNumberSix said:


> Hi everyone.
> 
> I have a question and wanted to check with your collected wisdom.
> 
> I have some Tivo HDs and a Series3. (I know this is the Premier thread.) My backup strategy was always to have an expanded drive in each one. Then every six months or so I would take out the drive, back it up with WinMFS, run a disk utility (Spinrite 6), then reinstall it. While the backup and Spinrite was running, I would have the original drive installed for a week or two.
> 
> This scheme seemed to work well.
> 
> Now I have a Premier 4 on the way and I understand that WinMFS or any other tool cannot back up the drive image. All I can do is clone it.
> 
> So what I'm thinking is this. It comes with a 500GB drive, which is plenty big for me. I don't need to expand it. I will crack the case and look at whichever drive it is and I will try to buy another one, as close as possible to it. (Same vendor and size) Then every six months, I will clone the drive to the other and just swap it out.
> 
> Does this seem like a reasonable strategy? My concern is keeping high uptime in case of a problem. This way I just can swap out the drive and carry on.
> 
> A potential problem I see with this approach is that I bet there will be some few bytes difference in between the drive sizes. Will that screw it up?
> 
> Also, I can try to use JMFS, but I also have a fully functioning Gentoo Linux box. Would it be easier to just to do a dd command?
> 
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


Just get a bigger drive and when you make the copy do not expand the image, than you can keep going back and forth without problems, does seem a bit much for a drive that will most likely last you 4 or more years.


----------



## CoxInPHX

Western Digital WD AV-GP WD20EURS 2TB - $99.99

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/WD-AV-GP-TB-Hard-Drive/dp/B0042AG9V8/
Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136783


----------



## Arcady

unitron said:


> I don't know what model drive they put in the Elite (I assume it's also a 2TB?), but as long as its LBA number is the same or slightly smaller than that of the EURS, ...


It turned out my original Elite had the same drive in it, a WD 20EURS.



unitron said:


> It will take several hours.


I hooked both drives to SATA ports and booted the jmfs disk from a CD drive on USB. I don't know if my SATA ports are just really slow, but it took about 16 hours to copy the entire 2TB drive.

It is working now. Thanks to all for the assistance.


----------



## unitron

Arcady said:


> It turned out my original Elite had the same drive in it, a WD 20EURS.
> 
> I hooked both drives to SATA ports and booted the jmfs disk from a CD drive on USB. I don't know if my SATA ports are just really slow, but it took about 16 hours to copy the entire 2TB drive.
> 
> It is working now. Thanks to all for the assistance.


Thanks for the data points.


----------



## trusted-1

In case anyone wants to know:

The premiere_linux_inc_supersize_jmfs-rev104.iso imported easily into Parallels to create & run a virtual machine and worked well to create a copy, expand and supersize a Premiere 320gb image to a 1.5TB WD15EARS drive.

The transfer was 10800 kpbs average done on a couple of USB to SATA adapters.

The 2nd one I tried failed with a write error but the 1.5TB drives were not new so I suspect this is an issue with the drive not the Virtual Machine.

I am running an extended test on the drive to see if it needs an RMA prior to the next attempt.


----------



## socalhdtv

Hi! About to jump in and do the upgrade.

With the 20EURS model, do I have to perform the wdidle3 alchemy? Or with the EURS, am I good right out of the box?

Thanks so much!


----------



## ShinySteelRobot

socalhdtv said:


> Hi! About to jump in and do the upgrade.
> 
> With the 20EURS model, do I have to perform the wdidle3 alchemy? Or with the ERUS, am I good right out of the box?
> 
> Thanks so much!


I can't remember if I had to change the idle on my EURS, but just to be safe you should use the wdidle3 command to set it to 300 seconds. Simply download and burn this ISO, boot from it, and then change the idle time.

I remember my EARX drive defaulted to 8 seconds, which would have made reboots fail.


----------



## socalhdtv

ShinySteelRobot said:


> I can't remember if I had to change the idle on my EURS, but just to be safe you should use the wdidle3 command to set it to 300 seconds. Simply download and burn this ISO, boot from it, and then change the idle time.
> 
> I remember my EARX drive defaulted to 8 seconds, which would have made reboots fail.


Thanks - I'm guessing that wdidle does NOT work on a Mac? I've never used the program.


----------



## unitron

wdidle3 is also available on The Ultimate Boot CD.


----------



## socalhdtv

Thanks!

The strange thing is the EURS is not even listed as a "supported" drive on the wdidle-download page. So I'm so confused if the drive needs to be "wdidle"d or not!


----------



## unitron

socalhdtv said:


> Thanks!
> 
> The strange thing is the EURS is not even listed as a "supported" drive on the wdidle-download page. So I'm so confused if the drive needs to be "wdidle"d or not!


I recently put into service a EURS and a couple of EARX (wish they'd been EADS, but that's another rant for another time).

Can't remember which ones needed it, if any, but running it didn't break any of them--you just get a "this feature is not supported" type error message or it comes back saying it's disabled.


----------



## DM3MD157

CoxInPHX said:


> Western Digital WD AV-GP WD20EURS 2TB - $99.99
> 
> Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/WD-AV-GP-TB-Hard-Drive/dp/B0042AG9V8/
> Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136783


Just curious, is there a reason why people use the WD 20EURS drive? From what I read, you can use any newer SATA drive.


----------



## jmbach

Some drives are tuned for video use and others for computer use. Different parameters are adjusted to optimize drive noise, heat, streaming, etc. Some drives have issues with the Tivo OS like the WD20EURS which needs the idle head parking feature to be disabled to prevent issues locking up the system. 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## CoxInPHX

No, the WD20EURS does NOT need any tweaking. I have used that HDD several times for an upgrade as is, with no issues. The Premiere used to solely use WD AV-GP HDDs and the WD20EURS in the Elite.


----------



## unitron

The EURS, because of the way its error handling routine is optimized for A/V applications, isn't the right thing for anything else, but it is good for a TiVo, has a warranty at least as long if not longer than most everything else, and $100 is about the best price you're going to find on a 2TB drive.

It's only suitable for Series 3 and Series 4 TiVos, Series 1 and Series 2 units can, as far as is known, only use up to a 1TB drive, although since they're PATA/IDE, they can use 2 of them on the same data cable, unlike SATA drives.


----------



## unitron

And as soon as the sale at newegg ends the price at Amazon will go back up, so grab it now.


----------



## DM3MD157

I just upgraded to a Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB Drive (ST32000641AS) Will this work fine or should I go buy the WD20EURS?

It seems to be working fine with no problems so far, however I just installed it today.


----------



## CoxInPHX

If it's working fine I would leave it alone, the Seagate Barracuda is a 7200rpm Desktop HDD and will generate more heat than either a Seagate HD Pipeline or WD AV-GP, which are both 5900rpm HDDs and designed for continuous video recording, and low heat.

What was the original TiVo HDD you replaced?


----------



## DM3MD157

320gb TiVo premiere. Do you think using this drive will be detrimental to the life span of the drive or the TiVo itself?


----------



## CoxInPHX

What was the Make and Model# of the original 320GB?

WD AV-GP WD3200AVVS?


----------



## jmbach

CoxInPHX said:


> No, the WD20EURS does NOT need any tweaking. I have used that HDD several times for an upgrade as is, with no issues. The Premiere used to solely use WD AV-GP HDDs and the WD20EURS in the Elite.


Perhaps not. Many posts about the WD20EURS and disabling the head parking feature resolving some issues people were having with the drive,

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## DM3MD157

CoxInPHX said:


> What was the Make and Model# of the original 320GB?
> 
> WD AV-GP WD3200AVVS?


The original drive is a Western Digital WD3200AVVS - Green Power


----------



## socalhdtv

Overall, a very good experience.

* 1st attempt at copying the original drive from the Premiere died part-way through.
* Then was a bit finicky in recognizing the drives.
* 2nd attempt went smoothly. Took about 3.5 hours over USB on an iMac.
* Reboot of TiVo went great. Using 11% or so of the new 2TB.

In my experience, the EURS did NOT need wdidle set-up. 

Thanks all for the help!


----------



## DM3MD157

CoxInPHX said:


> If it's working fine I would leave it alone, the Seagate Barracuda is a 7200rpm Desktop HDD and will generate more heat than either a Seagate HD Pipeline or WD AV-GP, which are both 5900rpm HDDs and designed for continuous video recording, and low heat.
> 
> What was the original TiVo HDD you replaced?


Been using it for a couple hours now and it seems to be working fine with no issues. If it were to give me problems, what should I look for? Given this is a 7200 RPM drive and will generate more heat, what are the drawbacks?

I used this drive because I had it at my disposal, I could buy the Western Digital 20EURS drive if I really need to. Since I am a N00B I don't know what I should do!


----------



## lessd

DM3MD157 said:


> Been using it for a couple hours now and it seems to be working fine with no issues. If it were to give me problems, what should I look for? Given this is a 7200 RPM drive and will generate more heat, what are the drawbacks?
> 
> I used this drive because I had it at my disposal, I could buy the Western Digital 20EURS drive if I really need to. Since I am a N00B I don't know what I should do!


I have been using 7200 RPM drives for years without any problems, the advantage of the AV drives is the low error correction so one might expect to get less picture breakup over time, I have not ever noticed any problems with non AV drives, some have run for years.


----------



## CoxInPHX

DM3MD157 said:


> I used this drive because I had it at my disposal, I could buy the Western Digital 20EURS drive if I really need to. Since I am a N00B I don't know what I should do!


Was the HDD previously used in another device? How old is the HDD and did it already have many hours of use. If so, I would say to get a new WD20EURS. If it was relatively new and unused, I'd just stay with it. Watch the MBT: temp in System Info above ~50°C, I would be concerned.


----------



## DM3MD157

CoxInPHX said:


> Was the HDD previously used in another device? How old is the HDD and did it already have many hours of use. If so, I would say to get a new WD20EURS. If it was relatively new and unused, I'd just stay with it. Watch the MBT: temp in System Info above ~50°C, I would be concerned.


The hard drive had minimal use. I can keep an eye on the temps, is that info located in the system menu? Is the only risk of running this drive a HD failure? Or can it break the motherboard or power supply?


----------



## unitron

DM3MD157 said:


> The hard drive had minimal use. I can keep an eye on the temps, is that info located in the system menu? Is the only risk of running this drive a HD failure? Or can it break the motherboard or power supply?


The drive shouldn't damage either any more than any other drive, but if I were in your position, and had the extra $100 to spare (always a consideration), I'd get the EURS, do a byte for byte copy to it from the 2TB Seagate, and re-purpose the Seagate as a computer drive where you relocate the TiVo Desktop program's My TiVo Recordings folder after formatting that Seagate as one big NTFS partition.

That's assuming you have a Windows PC.

Otherwise, if you're a Mac person, I would think that you could put the drive in an external USB case, or in a NAS box, and still store copied TiVo shows on it (if not copyprotected by your cable company).

Messages and Settings > Account and System Information > System Information should show you the temp.

Just be careful when the Sys Info screen is showing if you have more than one TiVo (or have a Philips/Magnavox VCR or DirecTV receiver) in the house, as that's the screen that makes the TiVo vulnerable to a change of remote control address.


----------



## ggieseke

DM3MD157 said:


> I just upgraded to a Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB Drive (ST32000641AS) Will this work fine or should I go buy the WD20EURS?


FWIW, I have 3 of those drives in my desktop PC and they run at about 95F (35C). Cool, quiet, reliable.


----------



## unitron

ggieseke said:


> FWIW, I have 3 of those drives in my desktop PC and they run at about 95F (35C). Cool, quiet, reliable.


Are you talking about the Seagate or the WD?


----------



## sean584995

Hi, My tivo's model is TCD746320 Premiere.
can i use the WD20EURS 2TB to upgrade my tivo? Sorry, the FAQ doesn't mention my tivo's model #. Thanks.


----------



## unitron

sean584995 said:


> Hi, My tivo's model is TCD746320 Premiere.
> can i use the WD20EURS 2TB to upgrade my tivo? Sorry, the FAQ doesn't mention my tivo's model #. Thanks.


Considering that lots of other people have already done so successfully, I'd say grab one while they're still only $100 and make yourself a copy of the jmfs cd and go read the beginning of this thread.


----------



## sean584995

unitron said:


> Considering that lots of other people have already done so successfully, I'd say grab one while they're still only $100 and make yourself a copy of the jmfs cd and go read the beginning of this thread.


Thank you so much. I've ordered the drive. Will attempt to upgrade following the instructions. I've seen the forum very helpful in answering questions - hopefully, there will be someone to help me upgrade in case I need help. Thanks again!!


----------



## unitron

sean584995 said:


> Thank you so much. I've ordered the drive. Will attempt to upgrade following the instructions. I've seen the forum very helpful in answering questions - hopefully, there will be someone to help me upgrade in case I need help. Thanks again!!


If you're going to use a PC to do it, make sure it doesn't have a GigaByte brand motherboard. If it does, post back and we'll figure out a workaround.


----------



## sean584995

unitron said:


> If you're going to use a PC to do it, make sure it doesn't have a GigaByte brand motherboard. If it does, post back and we'll figure out a workaround.


Thanks. Instructions seem to indicate that the TIVO drive and the new WD drive need to be connected to a laptop(in my case) at the *same time* and boot from the CD. Does it mean I need 2 cables of USB to SATA so I connect my laptop to the 2 drives simultaneously??? I found this on Amazon:*** SATA/PATA/IDE Drive to USB 2.0 Adapter Converter Cable for 2.5/3.5 Inch Hard Drive / Optical Drive with External AC Power Adapter***. Is that what is needed. Is there another alternative. Please advise.


----------



## unitron

sean584995 said:


> Thanks. Instructions seem to indicate that the TIVO drive and the new WD drive need to be connected to a laptop(in my case) at the *same time* and boot from the CD. Does it mean I need 2 cables of USB to SATA so I connect my laptop to the 2 drives simultaneously??? I found this on Amazon:*** SATA/PATA/IDE Drive to USB 2.0 Adapter Converter Cable for 2.5/3.5 Inch Hard Drive / Optical Drive with External AC Power Adapter***. Is that what is needed. Is there another alternative. Please advise.


Let me begin by saying DO NOT RE-USE YOUR PREMIERE'S ORIGINAL DRIVE.

After successfully copying it to another drive, put it on the shelf for safekeeping.

You will have to have both the Premiere's original drive and the new one connected to the same computer at the same time in some way.

I've never had to use one of those things you're talking about because I always had the side off of a PC case and could get to the motherboard drive ports directly.

Searching Amazon for that phrase returns listings for several different very similar products, all of which _probably_ should work, if they don't send you bad ones, but I don't have any direct experience with any of them.

You should read the reviews and find where someone has had success with a 2TB or larger drive, because some of the chipsets, for some reason, can only handle smaller ones.

Another possibility to consider is using external hard drive enclosures.

That way, you can put some other drives in them when you're done for extra storage space.

But again, check reviews to make sure it'll handle 2TB or more drives. Several of them seem to limited to 1TB.

newegg has some external cases on sale right now, I can forward the email with the discount codes if you like, you should be able to click on my user name to the left and email me via this site, or send it directly to me at coastalnet.com where I'm the same user name as I am here.

There are some USB/hard drive thingies that have slots for drives to be put in like toast slices, but only one USB connector. I'm pretty sure I''ve seen people around here saying they won't work because you can only access one of the drives at the time.

The alternative to having both drives connected to your laptop at the same time is to have them connected to someone's desktop PC or Mac at the same time.

It's times like these that having richsadams around really came in handy--he already knew all of this stuff from experience.


----------



## ggieseke

unitron said:


> Are you talking about the Seagate or the WD?


The Seagate ST32000641AS.


----------



## sean584995

unitron said:


> Let me begin by saying DO NOT RE-USE YOUR PREMIERE'S ORIGINAL DRIVE.
> 
> After successfully copying it to another drive, put it on the shelf for safekeeping.
> 
> You will have to have both the Premiere's original drive and the new one connected to the same computer at the same time in some way.
> 
> I've never had to use one of those things you're talking about because I always had the side off of a PC case and could get to the motherboard drive ports directly.
> 
> Searching Amazon for that phrase returns listings for several different very similar products, all of which _probably_ should work, if they don't send you bad ones, but I don't have any direct experience with any of them.
> 
> You should read the reviews and find where someone has had success with a 2TB or larger drive, because some of the chipsets, for some reason, can only handle smaller ones.
> 
> Another possibility to consider is using external hard drive enclosures.
> 
> That way, you can put some other drives in them when you're done for extra storage space.
> 
> But again, check reviews to make sure it'll handle 2TB or more drives. Several of them seem to limited to 1TB.
> 
> newegg has some external cases on sale right now, I can forward the email with the discount codes if you like, you should be able to click on my user name to the left and email me via this site, or send it directly to me at coastalnet.com where I'm the same user name as I am here.
> 
> There are some USB/hard drive thingies that have slots for drives to be put in like toast slices, but only one USB connector. I'm pretty sure I''ve seen people around here saying they won't work because you can only access one of the drives at the time.
> 
> The alternative to having both drives connected to your laptop at the same time is to have them connected to someone's desktop PC or Mac at the same time.
> 
> It's times like these that having richsadams around really came in handy--he already knew all of this stuff from experience.


I do have access to a PC at work which I should be able to use for this if it makes it easier. I think most PCs have provision to connect another slave/hard drive internerally (in addition to the main drive) using the sata cable. So, do you think it will work if I 'remove' the existing 'main' drive from PC, connect the original TIVO drive AND the new 2TB drive to this PC, boot it up using the JMFS live CD and follow the prompts?? Once I'm done with my job, remove both the drives and I put back the main drive into the PC. Anything wrong with what I'm saying?? Please advise. Thanks.


----------



## unitron

sean584995 said:


> I do have access to a PC at work which I should be able to use for this if it makes it easier. I think most PCs have provision to connect another slave/hard drive internerally (in addition to the main drive) using the sata cable. So, do you think it will work if I 'remove' the existing 'main' drive from PC, connect the original TIVO drive AND the new 2TB drive to this PC, boot it up using the JMFS live CD and follow the prompts?? Once I'm done with my job, remove both the drives and I put back the main drive into the PC. Anything wrong with what I'm saying?? Please advise. Thanks.


If you're going to use a PC at work, make sure it doesn't have a GigaByte brand motherboard and that you can open it up without getting fired.

(If it does have a GigaByte board, there are precautions to be taken)

You should disconnect the SATA data cable from the work PC's hard drive to protect it from any "ooopsies", and you can use it and the power cable for one of the drives. You shouldn't actually remove the drive, just disconnect the cables and do the work with your 2 hard drives lying on the table next to the open case and an armed guard nearby to keep everyone else away from it.

You'll need a power and data cable for the other one, and you can't use the CD or DVD drive's, because you have to use it to boot from the jmfs cd.

The PC may have unused power connectors, but very likely won't have an unused SATA data cable inside, even if it has an unused SATA header on the motherboard.

So basically you're going to need to open it up and see what you've got to work with one day and then maybe do the actual work the next after picking up some cables.

What you could possibly do is hook up one drive with the cables the PC's drive uses and hook up the other drive via some sort of USB connection, depending on what you get your hands on.

If it's a "brand" PC, like Dell, Compaq/HP, etc, it won't have a GigaByte board, but if it was put together at a screwdriver shop it might. If it does, the first hard drive it "sees" when it first boots up, almost certainly the one it boots from that has Windows on it, will have to remain connected to keep the board from trying to put a Host Protected Area on any other hard drive that gets attached. It does this to have a place to put some sort of backup on, but it does it without warning or notice and there's no way to turn it off in the BIOS settings. This will either screw up an already formatted drive, or steal space at the end of an unformatted one.

Also you need to go into the BIOS and make sure it's set to boot from cd before it boots from a hard drive, and if it's not you need to remember to change it back to the way it was when you're done.


----------



## sean584995

Thanks Unitron!!!!I was able to find a PC with an unused power and SATA ports that I can use for the new 2TB drive. I'm going to disconnect the main HDD and connect its power and SATA to the drive from TIVO. UPS will be delivering the HD today, so, will try the upgrade tomorrow. I see some posts where the WDidle3 command was being asked to run on the new HD. Is this still needed??



unitron said:


> If you're going to use a PC at work, make sure it doesn't have a GigaByte brand motherboard and that you can open it up without getting fired.
> 
> (If it does have a GigaByte board, there are precautions to be taken)
> 
> You should disconnect the SATA data cable from the work PC's hard drive to protect it from any "ooopsies", and you can use it and the power cable for one of the drives. You shouldn't actually remove the drive, just disconnect the cables and do the work with your 2 hard drives lying on the table next to the open case and an armed guard nearby to keep everyone else away from it.
> 
> You'll need a power and data cable for the other one, and you can't use the CD or DVD drive's, because you have to use it to boot from the jmfs cd.
> 
> The PC may have unused power connectors, but very likely won't have an unused SATA data cable inside, even if it has an unused SATA header on the motherboard.
> 
> So basically you're going to need to open it up and see what you've got to work with one day and then maybe do the actual work the next after picking up some cables.
> 
> What you could possibly do is hook up one drive with the cables the PC's drive uses and hook up the other drive via some sort of USB connection, depending on what you get your hands on.
> 
> If it's a "brand" PC, like Dell, Compaq/HP, etc, it won't have a GigaByte board, but if it was put together at a screwdriver shop it might. If it does, the first hard drive it "sees" when it first boots up, almost certainly the one it boots from that has Windows on it, will have to remain connected to keep the board from trying to put a Host Protected Area on any other hard drive that gets attached. It does this to have a place to put some sort of backup on, but it does it without warning or notice and there's no way to turn it off in the BIOS settings. This will either screw up an already formatted drive, or steal space at the end of an unformatted one.
> 
> Also you need to go into the BIOS and make sure it's set to boot from cd before it boots from a hard drive, and if it's not you need to remember to change it back to the way it was when you're done.


----------



## unitron

sean584995 said:


> Thanks Unitron!!!!I was able to find a PC with an unused power and SATA ports that I can use for the new 2TB drive. I'm going to disconnect the main HDD and connect its power and SATA to the drive from TIVO. UPS will be delivering the HD today, so, will try the upgrade tomorrow. I see some posts where the WDidle3 command was being asked to run on the new HD. Is this still needed??


I just brought a WD20EURS in off of the porch, waiting for it to reach room temp before continuing, will see if it needs wdidle3 or not, but it's available on the hard drives-device info and management menu of the Ultimate Boot CD, a copy of which is a good thing to keep handy, so you could try it and if it doesn't need it, no harm done.


----------



## unitron

sean584995 said:


> Thanks Unitron!!!!I was able to find a PC with an unused power and SATA ports that I can use for the new 2TB drive. I'm going to disconnect the main HDD and connect its power and SATA to the drive from TIVO. UPS will be delivering the HD today, so, will try the upgrade tomorrow. I see some posts where the WDidle3 command was being asked to run on the new HD. Is this still needed??


Remember, this WD drive you're getting isn't going to come with a SATA data cable, so be sure you have an extra one available.


----------



## sean584995

unitron said:


> Remember, this WD drive you're getting isn't going to come with a SATA data cable, so be sure you have an extra one available.


Unitron,
couple more questions. During the copy/expand process, I'm assuming the jmfs live cd software is not going to alter the source TIVO drive? Is 'supersizing' a separate option that can be run or is that part of the copy/expand? Thanks.
EDIT: is there a good program to run diagnostics on the new WD20EURS drive before using it with jmfs??


----------



## unitron

sean584995 said:


> Unitron,
> couple more questions. During the copy/expand process, I'm assuming the jmfs live cd software is not going to alter the source TIVO drive? Is 'supersizing' a separate option that can be run or is that part of the copy/expand? Thanks.
> EDIT: is there a good program to run diagnostics on the new WD20EURS drive before using it with jmfs??


The Ultimate Boot CD has the WD diagnostic software on it (along with the same for several other brands), and wdidle3

Download the .iso and burn it as an image to a cd-r, just like you need to do with the jmfs cd .iso image.

jmfs should be able to detect the original 320GB Premiere drive as a TiVo drive, and make a note to itself that it's read only.

Be sure when you specify the target drive, that you're sure you've selected the WD20EURS.

jmfs will "Xerox" the original Premiere drive to it and then expand into the extra space by creating an MFS Media partition, and after it does that you can tell it to supersize.

It'll take you through the whole thing step by step by step by...well, there're only 3 steps, including supersizing.

Go back and read

USAGE BASIC

in the first post of this thread

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8143047#post8143047

As for the WD diagnostic software, run the short test first (5 minutes), and then if no problem the long test (all day, 8 to 12 hours or so on a drive that large--2TB).

So it may take you two days, one to run the long test, and another half day to do the jmfs voodoo.

And run wdidle3 first to get it out of the way in case it is neccessary.

Have the 2TB be the only hard drive connected when you run it.

It's a DOS command line thing, so

wdidle3 /D

should disable it (you have to hit the Enter key after typing that in), and if it doesn't like the /D switch, then

wdidle3 /S 300

should set it for 300 seconds (five minutes), which is just as good as disabled from the TiVo standpoint.

What you're trying to avoid is a situation where, if the TiVo reboots, it spends so much time on other stuff before it tries to load anything from the hard drive that the hard drive thinks it's not needed and goes to sleep, which means it doesn't respond fast enough when the TiVo calls on it, which makes the TiVo think there's a problem, so it reboots, at which point the hard drive isn't being talked to so it goes back to sleep so it's not ready when the TiVo is, lather, rinse, repeat.

And if it doesn't need Intellipark disabled no harm will be done to the drive (but remember, it tries to do all connected drives at the same time, so make sure the 2TB is the only one connected for that step.


----------



## sean584995

Thanks Unitron for your guidance. The cloning seems successful. Will put in the new disk in my tivo when I get home tonight. My fingers crossed...


unitron said:


> The Ultimate Boot CD has the WD diagnostic software on it (along with the same for several other brands), and wdidle3
> 
> Download the .iso and burn it as an image to a cd-r, just like you need to do with the jmfs cd .iso image.
> 
> jmfs should be able to detect the original 320GB Premiere drive as a TiVo drive, and make a note to itself that it's read only.
> 
> Be sure when you specify the target drive, that you're sure you've selected the WD20EURS.
> 
> jmfs will "Xerox" the original Premiere drive to it and then expand into the extra space by creating an MFS Media partition, and after it does that you can tell it to supersize.
> 
> It'll take you through the whole thing step by step by step by...well, there're only 3 steps, including supersizing.
> 
> Go back and read
> 
> USAGE BASIC
> 
> in the first post of this thread
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8143047#post8143047
> 
> As for the WD diagnostic software, run the short test first (5 minutes), and then if no problem the long test (all day, 8 to 12 hours or so on a drive that large--2TB).
> 
> So it may take you two days, one to run the long test, and another half day to do the jmfs voodoo.
> 
> And run wdidle3 first to get it out of the way in case it is neccessary.
> 
> Have the 2TB be the only hard drive connected when you run it.
> 
> It's a DOS command line thing, so
> 
> wdidle3 /D
> 
> should disable it (you have to hit the Enter key after typing that in), and if it doesn't like the /D switch, then
> 
> wdidle3 /S 300
> 
> should set it for 300 seconds (five minutes), which is just as good as disabled from the TiVo standpoint.
> 
> What you're trying to avoid is a situation where, if the TiVo reboots, it spends so much time on other stuff before it tries to load anything from the hard drive that the hard drive thinks it's not needed and goes to sleep, which means it doesn't respond fast enough when the TiVo calls on it, which makes the TiVo think there's a problem, so it reboots, at which point the hard drive isn't being talked to so it goes back to sleep so it's not ready when the TiVo is, lather, rinse, repeat.
> 
> And if it doesn't need Intellipark disabled no harm will be done to the drive (but remember, it tries to do all connected drives at the same time, so make sure the 2TB is the only one connected for that step.


----------



## DM3MD157

Update: So far the Seagate Barracuda drive seems to be working fine. I don't see any issues in playback or recording. Right now the MBT is 35 degrees (Normal).

So should I be still worried about using this drive despite it being 7200 RPM?


----------



## jmbach

As long as everything is functioning and temperature is fine you should be okay. For the most part I do not believe that the TiVo stresses the drives enough to cause problems. The AV drives are designed to handle 20 or more simultaneous video streams. We use 3 or 5 at most. 

Jim

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## ggieseke

I will buy you a WD20EURS and have it shipped to your door if you agree to send me the ST32000641AS in return. Daddy's RAID needs more drives...

Seriously, I wouldn't sweat it at all if the temps are good. I have run "AV" drives and "desktop" drives in my TiVos for years and never noticed any difference.


----------



## sean584995

ya h o o oo oo. I've successfully upgraded my TIVO to 2 TB drive. 
UNITRON, Thanks so much for your prompt responses without which I would not have ordered the drive from newegg. Carefully wrapped up my original drive and shelved it. Thanks again...


----------



## unitron

sean584995 said:


> ya h o o oo oo. I've successfully upgraded my TIVO to 2 TB drive.
> UNITRON, Thanks so much for your prompt responses without which I would not have ordered the drive from newegg. Carefully wrapped up my original drive and shelved it. Thanks again...


Enjoy!


----------



## Davelnlr_

DM3MD157 said:


> Update: So far the Seagate Barracuda drive seems to be working fine. I don't see any issues in playback or recording. Right now the MBT is 35 degrees (Normal).
> 
> So should I be still worried about using this drive despite it being 7200 RPM?


Ive been running the Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm drive in my Premier for a year, no issues at all.


----------



## MrQblets

Dear Lord 'unitron':  I promise you I have genuinly already scanned as well as searched through the current 64 pages of this thread (and many, many other threads for that matter) to try and find this answer prior to this post, so please forgive me if it's already been asked and/or answered. But here's the situation:

>Currently own:
-TiVo HD TCD652160 that I've upgraded to 1Tb (int only)
-TiVo HDXL TCD658000 with a 1Tb DVR Expander hanging off it for a total 2Tb/300HD hours capacity. This has been my primary unit and the capacity has been perfect over the past couple a years

>I have a TiVo Premiere TCD746320 and WD20EURS both being delivered either today (hopefully) or Wednesday

>My intention is for the new Premiere to completely takeover the duties of my existing HDXL TCD658000 listed above which currently has 1Tb Int + 1Tb Ext
(The HDXL will then be brought up here to the Mancave to takeover for the HD/1Tb unit which I'll then probably just offload on eBay or something)

Ok, so here's the question/concern: 
Q: Will I be able to copy the combo 'Married' pair of 1TbInt+1TbExt drives from the TCD658000 to just the single WE20EURS which is to be my new, upgraded drive for the new Premiere TCD746320???

PLEASE SAY "YES" .... PLEASE SAY THE 'JMFS' (or something else) WILL RECOGNIZE THE 'MARRIED' PAIR OF DRIVES ..... :up:


----------



## lpwcomp

MrQblets said:


> Dear Lord 'unitron':  I promise you I have genuinly already scanned as well as searched through the current 64 pages of this thread (and many, many other threads for that matter) to try and find this answer prior to this post, so please forgive me if it's already been asked and/or answered. But here's the situation:
> 
> >Currently own:
> -TiVo HD TCD652160 that I've upgraded to 1Tb (int only)
> -TiVo HDXL TCD658000 with a 1Tb DVR Expander hanging off it for a total 2Tb/300HD hours capacity. This has been my primary unit and the capacity has been perfect over the past couple a years
> 
> >I have a TiVo Premiere TCD746320 and WD20EURS both being delivered either today (hopefully) or Wednesday
> 
> >My intention is for the new Premiere to completely takeover the duties of my existing HDXL TCD658000 listed above which currently has 1Tb Int + 1Tb Ext
> (The HDXL will then be brought up here to the Mancave to takeover for the HD/1Tb unit which I'll then probably just offload on eBay or something)
> 
> Ok, so here's the question/concern:
> Q: Will I be able to copy the combo 'Married' pair of 1TbInt+1TbExt drives from the TCD658000 to just the single WE20EURS which is to be my new, upgraded drive for the new Premiere TCD746320???
> 
> PLEASE SAY "YES" .... PLEASE SAY THE 'JMFS' (or something else) WILL RECOGNIZE THE 'MARRIED' PAIR OF DRIVES ..... :up:


The only way to copy the recordings is via a transfer, either direct TiVo-to-TiVo or TiVo-PC-TiVo. If the recordings are copy protected, you are SOL. There is absolutely no way to do it the way you want to do it.

You'll need JMFS to copy, expand and supersize the 320GB to the 2TB drive but that is it.

There is not, never has been, and likely never will be a way to do what you want to do.


----------



## unitron

MrQblets said:


> Dear Lord 'unitron':  I promise you I have genuinly already scanned as well as searched through the current 64 pages of this thread (and many, many other threads for that matter) to try and find this answer prior to this post, so please forgive me if it's already been asked and/or answered. But here's the situation:
> 
> >Currently own:
> -TiVo HD TCD652160 that I've upgraded to 1Tb (int only)
> -TiVo HDXL TCD658000 with a 1Tb DVR Expander hanging off it for a total 2Tb/300HD hours capacity. This has been my primary unit and the capacity has been perfect over the past couple a years
> 
> >I have a TiVo Premiere TCD746320 and WD20EURS both being delivered either today (hopefully) or Wednesday
> 
> >My intention is for the new Premiere to completely takeover the duties of my existing HDXL TCD658000 listed above which currently has 1Tb Int + 1Tb Ext
> (The HDXL will then be brought up here to the Mancave to takeover for the HD/1Tb unit which I'll then probably just offload on eBay or something)
> 
> Ok, so here's the question/concern:
> Q: Will I be able to copy the combo 'Married' pair of 1TbInt+1TbExt drives from the TCD658000 to just the single WE20EURS which is to be my new, upgraded drive for the new Premiere TCD746320???
> 
> PLEASE SAY "YES" .... PLEASE SAY THE 'JMFS' (or something else) WILL RECOGNIZE THE 'MARRIED' PAIR OF DRIVES ..... :up:


Royalty or nobility I ain't.

Each model of the TiVo has it's own version of the software, so you can't control an S4 with S3 drives or the stuff on them.

In order to get shows from either S3 to the new Premiere, which is an S4, you need to copy them, via your home network that the TiVos already use to download guide data, to a computer (to a partition formatted with a file system that handles files larger than 4GB) via TiVo Desktop or one of the other methods you'll find discussed here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=35

or you can copy them straight from the S3 to the S4 over your home network, but you can't hook S3 drives and the S4 drive (or drive to be) up to a PC and copy off shows that way, and hooking up the S4 drive to a PC and booting into anything other than the jmfs cd is not recommended.

Also, if you use a GigaByte brand motherboard, there are certain precautions which need to be taken.


----------



## DM3MD157

I think I have given up on my SD-H400 TiVo, it is a series 2, can I transfer recordings to my Premiere via my home network?


----------



## MrQblets

unitron said:


> Royalty or nobility I ain't.
> 
> Each model of the TiVo has it's own version of the software, so you can't control an S4 with S3 drives or the stuff on them.
> 
> In order to get shows from either S3 to the new Premiere, which is an S4, you need to copy them, via your home network that the TiVos already use to download guide data, to a computer (to a partition formatted with a file system that handles files larger than 4GB) via TiVo Desktop or one of the other methods you'll find discussed here:
> 
> {url omitted}
> 
> or you can copy them straight from the S3 to the S4 over your home network, but you can't hook S3 drives and the S4 drive (or drive to be) up to a PC and copy off shows that way, and hooking up the S4 drive to a PC and booting into anything other than the jmfs cd is not recommended.
> 
> Also, if you use a GigaByte brand motherboard, there are certain precautions which need to be taken.


Tks fur the quick replies gents! Of course not the answers that I wanted, but sometimes the truth is not kind. 

From the OS standpoint; That was going to be phase two of my inquiry because I remember that (back in the day using MFSLive and/or WinMFS) I was _not_ able to move the drive from my HD160 directly into the HDXL once I had added that one to the family. My hope was that with the since introduction of a new tool (JMFS) perhaps that had also been resolved and the move from a S3 to S4 would be kinda turn-key if ya know what I mean. C'est la vie ...

Well, God bless gigabit networks, eh? Looks as though mines gonna be breathin' pretty hard for the next good while.

Incidentally ... A happy New Years to y'allz!!! Be Safe!


----------



## unitron

DM3MD157 said:


> I think I have given up on my SD-H400 TiVo, it is a series 2, can I transfer recordings to my Premiere via my home network?


Unfotunately, the satellite TiVos don't network the way the standalones do.

EDIT: Ooops!, I got confused, that's a Toshiba DVD machine, and according to tivopedia it does do networking, so you'll need something that plugs into one of it's USB ports and does ethernet, either wired or wireless.


----------



## DM3MD157

I tried following these instructions: http://www.tivo.com/mytivo/howto/record-once-watch-anywhere/howto_transfer_shows_dvrs.html

For some reason, the SD-H400 isn't showing up in the "My Shows" list on the Premiere. The TiVos are both networked to my home network. When doing the Guided Setup on the SD-H400, it never asks you to name the DVR (e.g. Bedroom DVR). I wonder if this is a limitation on TiVo Basic?


----------



## lpwcomp

DM3MD157 said:


> I tried following these instructions: http://www.tivo.com/mytivo/howto/record-once-watch-anywhere/howto_transfer_shows_dvrs.html
> 
> For some reason, the SD-H400 isn't showing up in the "My Shows" list on the Premiere. The TiVos are both networked to my home network. When doing the Guided Setup on the SD-H400, it never asks you to name the DVR (e.g. Bedroom DVR). I wonder if this is a limitation on TiVo Basic?


You assign TiVo names at tivo.com. Log into your account, select My Tivo->My Account->Change device preferences. This is also where you enable video sharing.


----------



## jmbach

Hope everybody is having a great start to the New Year. I have been experimenting with drive images and my TiVo Premiere XL and I thought I would post my results.
I have been successful copying a 320gb premiere drive to a 1TB drive then placing it in my Premiere XL and through the kickstart portal code 52 upon initial boot to have it install XL OS on it and then use JMFS to expand it to a full TB. The partition map is different and I do not think you can expand that drive any further but it works.
I also have been trying to make a truncated back up. Have not been fully successful with this. I can get it down from 1TB to less than 6GB but the restore drive has some menus with altered color scheme. Drive does seem to work otherwise.
If anybody has a partition map of an XL4, I would like to see it.

Cheers, Jim


----------



## HerronScott

unitron said:


> I just brought a WD20EURS in off of the porch, waiting for it to reach room temp before continuing, will see if it needs wdidle3 or not, but it's available on the hard drives-device info and management menu of the Ultimate Boot CD, a copy of which is a good thing to keep handy, so you could try it and if it doesn't need it, no harm done.


Unitron,

The one I bought 4 months ago already had it disabled so it was not needed.

Scott


----------



## unitron

HerronScott said:


> Unitron,
> 
> The one I bought 4 months ago already had it disabled so it was not needed.
> 
> Scott


Same with the one I got the other day, so anybody buying one with a recent build date probably doesn't have to worry about running wdidle3.

But it won't hurt.


----------



## retiredqwest

jmbach said:


> Hope everybody is having a great start to the New Year. I have been experimenting with drive images and my TiVo Premiere XL and I thought I would post my results.
> I have been successful copying a 320gb premiere drive to a 1TB drive then placing it in my Premiere XL and through the kickstart portal code 52 upon initial boot to have it install XL OS on it and then use JMFS to expand it to a full TB. The partition map is different and I do not think you can expand that drive any further but it works.
> I also have been trying to make a truncated back up. Have not been fully successful with this. I can get it down from 1TB to less than 6GB but the restore drive has some menus with altered color scheme. Drive does seem to work otherwise.
> If anybody has a partition map of an XL4, I would like to see it.
> 
> Cheers, Jim


Since I've been wanting to back up the XL4 anyways....

Disk '/dev/sda'
------------------
1 : start= 1, size= 63 ( 31.50K), type='Apple_partition_map', name='Apple'
13: start= 64, size=2148865840 ( 1.00T), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region 2'
2 : start=2148865904, size= 8 ( 4.00K), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 1'
3 : start=2148865912, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 1'
4 : start=2148882296, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 1'
5 : start=2149406584, size= 8 ( 4.00K), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 2'
6 : start=2149406592, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 2'
7 : start=2149422976, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 2'
8 : start=2149947264, size= 262144 (128.00M), type='Swap' , name='Linux swap'
9 : start=2150209408, size= 1048576 (512.00M), type='Ext2' , name='/var'
14: start=2151257984, size= 6291456 ( 3.00G), type='Ext2' , name='SQLite'
10: start=2157549440, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region'
12: start=2159187840, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region 2'
11: start=2160826240, size=1746202928 (832.65G), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region'
------------------
Unallocated space: 0 (0.00b)

Zones Logical
------------------
[0] /dev/sda10 start= 1121, size= 1 (512.00b), end= 1121 NODE descriptor
[0] /dev/sda10 start= 1122, size= 524288 (256.00M), end= 525409 NODE data
[1] /dev/sda10 start= 525410, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end= 525475 MEDIA descriptor
[2] /dev/sda10 start= 525476, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end= 525605 APP descriptor
[2] /dev/sda10 start= 525606, size= 1112592 (543.26M), end= 1638197 APP data
[2] /dev/sda10 start= 1638202, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end= 1638331 APP descriptor backup
[1] /dev/sda10 start= 1638332, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end= 1638397 MEDIA descriptor backup
[0] /dev/sda10 start= 1638398, size= 1 (512.00b), end= 1638398 NODE descriptor backup
[1] /dev/sda11 start= 1638400, size=1746186240 (832.65G), end=1747824639 MEDIA data
[3] /dev/sda12 start=1747841024, size= 1 (512.00b), end=1747841024 NODE descriptor
[3] /dev/sda12 start=1747841025, size= 524288 (256.00M), end=1748365312 NODE data
[4] /dev/sda12 start=1748365313, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=1748365378 MEDIA descriptor
[5] /dev/sda12 start=1748365379, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=1748365508 APP descriptor
[5] /dev/sda12 start=1748365509, size= 1113712 (543.80M), end=1749479220 APP data
[5] /dev/sda12 start=1749479227, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=1749479356 APP descriptor backup
[4] /dev/sda12 start=1749479357, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=1749479422 MEDIA descriptor backup
[3] /dev/sda12 start=1749479423, size= 1 (512.00b), end=1749479423 NODE descriptor backup
[4] /dev/sda13 start=1749479424, size=2148864000 ( 1.00T), end=3898343423 MEDIA data
------------------

Zones Physical
------------------
[4] /dev/sda13 start= 64, size=2148864000 ( 1.00T), end=2148864063 MEDIA data
[0] /dev/sda10 start=2157550561, size= 1 (512.00b), end=2157550561 NODE descriptor
[0] /dev/sda10 start=2157550562, size= 524288 (256.00M), end=2158074849 NODE data
[1] /dev/sda10 start=2158074850, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=2158074915 MEDIA descriptor
[2] /dev/sda10 start=2158074916, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=2158075045 APP descriptor
[2] /dev/sda10 start=2158075046, size= 1112592 (543.26M), end=2159187637 APP data
[2] /dev/sda10 start=2159187642, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=2159187771 APP descriptor backup
[1] /dev/sda10 start=2159187772, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=2159187837 MEDIA descriptor backup
[0] /dev/sda10 start=2159187838, size= 1 (512.00b), end=2159187838 NODE descriptor backup
[3] /dev/sda12 start=2159187840, size= 1 (512.00b), end=2159187840 NODE descriptor
[3] /dev/sda12 start=2159187841, size= 524288 (256.00M), end=2159712128 NODE data
[4] /dev/sda12 start=2159712129, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=2159712194 MEDIA descriptor
[5] /dev/sda12 start=2159712195, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=2159712324 APP descriptor
[5] /dev/sda12 start=2159712325, size= 1113712 (543.80M), end=2160826036 APP data
[5] /dev/sda12 start=2160826043, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=2160826172 APP descriptor backup
[4] /dev/sda12 start=2160826173, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=2160826238 MEDIA descriptor backup
[3] /dev/sda12 start=2160826239, size= 1 (512.00b), end=2160826239 NODE descriptor backup
[1] /dev/sda11 start=2160826240, size=1746186240 (832.65G), end=3907012479 MEDIA data
------------------

Size of zones:
Used:	2310049624 (1.08T)
Free:	1588275496 (757.35G)
Total:	3898325120 (1.82T)

Recordable space reported by Tivo: 3898344448 (1.82T), approximately 287 HD hours

MfsLayout: done


----------



## unitron

retiredqwest said:


> Since I've been wanting to back up the XL4 anyways....
> 
> Disk '/dev/sda'
> ------------------
> 1 : start= 1, size= 63 ( 31.50K), type='Apple_partition_map', name='Apple'
> 13: start= 64, size=2148865840 ( 1.00T), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region 2'
> 2 : start=2148865904, size= 8 ( 4.00K), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 1'
> 3 : start=2148865912, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 1'
> 4 : start=2148882296, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 1'
> 5 : start=2149406584, size= 8 ( 4.00K), type='Image' , name='Bootstrap 2'
> 6 : start=2149406592, size= 16384 ( 8.00M), type='Image' , name='Kernel 2'
> 7 : start=2149422976, size= 524288 (256.00M), type='Ext2' , name='Root 2'
> 8 : start=2149947264, size= 262144 (128.00M), type='Swap' , name='Linux swap'
> 9 : start=2150209408, size= 1048576 (512.00M), type='Ext2' , name='/var'
> 14: start=2151257984, size= 6291456 ( 3.00G), type='Ext2' , name='SQLite'
> 10: start=2157549440, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS'  , name='MFS application region'
> 12: start=2159187840, size= 1638400 (800.00M), type='MFS' , name='MFS application region 2'
> 11: start=2160826240, size=1746202928 (832.65G), type='MFS' , name='MFS media region'
> ------------------
> Unallocated space: 0 (0.00b)
> 
> Zones Logical
> ------------------
> [0] /dev/sda10 start= 1121, size= 1 (512.00b), end= 1121 NODE descriptor
> [0] /dev/sda10 start= 1122, size= 524288 (256.00M), end= 525409 NODE data
> [1] /dev/sda10 start= 525410, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end= 525475 MEDIA descriptor
> [2] /dev/sda10 start= 525476, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end= 525605 APP descriptor
> [2] /dev/sda10 start= 525606, size= 1112592 (543.26M), end= 1638197 APP data
> [2] /dev/sda10 start= 1638202, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end= 1638331 APP descriptor backup
> [1] /dev/sda10 start= 1638332, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end= 1638397 MEDIA descriptor backup
> [0] /dev/sda10 start= 1638398, size= 1 (512.00b), end= 1638398 NODE descriptor backup
> [1] /dev/sda11 start= 1638400, size=1746186240 (832.65G), end=1747824639 MEDIA data
> [3] /dev/sda12 start=1747841024, size= 1 (512.00b), end=1747841024 NODE descriptor
> [3] /dev/sda12 start=1747841025, size= 524288 (256.00M), end=1748365312 NODE data
> [4] /dev/sda12 start=1748365313, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=1748365378 MEDIA descriptor
> [5] /dev/sda12 start=1748365379, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=1748365508 APP descriptor
> [5] /dev/sda12 start=1748365509, size= 1113712 (543.80M), end=1749479220 APP data
> [5] /dev/sda12 start=1749479227, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=1749479356 APP descriptor backup
> [4] /dev/sda12 start=1749479357, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=1749479422 MEDIA descriptor backup
> [3] /dev/sda12 start=1749479423, size= 1 (512.00b), end=1749479423 NODE descriptor backup
> [4] /dev/sda13 start=1749479424, size=2148864000 ( 1.00T), end=3898343423 MEDIA data
> ------------------
> 
> Zones Physical
> ------------------
> [4] /dev/sda13 start= 64, size=2148864000 ( 1.00T), end=2148864063 MEDIA data
> [0] /dev/sda10 start=2157550561, size= 1 (512.00b), end=2157550561 NODE descriptor
> [0] /dev/sda10 start=2157550562, size= 524288 (256.00M), end=2158074849 NODE data
> [1] /dev/sda10 start=2158074850, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=2158074915 MEDIA descriptor
> [2] /dev/sda10 start=2158074916, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=2158075045 APP descriptor
> [2] /dev/sda10 start=2158075046, size= 1112592 (543.26M), end=2159187637 APP data
> [2] /dev/sda10 start=2159187642, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=2159187771 APP descriptor backup
> [1] /dev/sda10 start=2159187772, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=2159187837 MEDIA descriptor backup
> [0] /dev/sda10 start=2159187838, size= 1 (512.00b), end=2159187838 NODE descriptor backup
> [3] /dev/sda12 start=2159187840, size= 1 (512.00b), end=2159187840 NODE descriptor
> [3] /dev/sda12 start=2159187841, size= 524288 (256.00M), end=2159712128 NODE data
> [4] /dev/sda12 start=2159712129, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=2159712194 MEDIA descriptor
> [5] /dev/sda12 start=2159712195, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=2159712324 APP descriptor
> [5] /dev/sda12 start=2159712325, size= 1113712 (543.80M), end=2160826036 APP data
> [5] /dev/sda12 start=2160826043, size= 130 ( 65.00K), end=2160826172 APP descriptor backup
> [4] /dev/sda12 start=2160826173, size= 66 ( 33.00K), end=2160826238 MEDIA descriptor backup
> [3] /dev/sda12 start=2160826239, size= 1 (512.00b), end=2160826239 NODE descriptor backup
> [1] /dev/sda11 start=2160826240, size=1746186240 (832.65G), end=3907012479 MEDIA data
> ------------------
> 
> Size of zones:
> Used:	2310049624 (1.08T)
> Free:	1588275496 (757.35G)
> Total:	3898325120 (1.82T)
> 
> Recordable space reported by Tivo: 3898344448 (1.82T), approximately 287 HD hours
> 
> MfsLayout: done


What software did you use to generate that report?

It looks a little more detailed than

pdisk -l

turns out, but not quite what WinMFS's mfsinfo reports.


----------



## retiredqwest

unitron said:


> What software did you use to generate that report?
> 
> It looks a little more detailed than
> 
> pdisk -l
> 
> turns out, but not quite what WinMFS's mfsinfo reports.


Read message #1 of this thread.....mfslayout.sh


----------



## unitron

retiredqwest said:


> Read message #1 of this thread.....mfslayout.sh


OK, thanks, didn't realize you were using jmfs to look at it, and frankly I've only used the guide steps from it to copy and expand an S3 HD drive, never played around with it the way I have with the MFS Live cd.


----------



## capkj

Is there a way to do this on a standard linux distro? I am not highly fluid in linux but I would like to try beating my head against my linux box for a few days learning. 

Thanks


----------



## unitron

capkj said:


> Is there a way to do this on a standard linux distro? I am not highly fluid in linux but I would like to try beating my head against my linux box for a few days learning.
> 
> Thanks


If there's a way to do it without using comer's jmfs in some way, I've yet to hear of it.

But there are no doubt plenty of ways to screw up a Premiere drive and turn your TiVo into a boat anchor, and what you have in mind will probably lead you to discover at least one of them.

Go back and read the first post of this thread, the advanced section, and see if that's not enough to slake your thirst for the command line.


----------



## DM3MD157

Has anyone used the WD20EZRX in their Premiere?


----------



## djjuice

I made a mistake of copying to the tivo drive, it ran out space pretty fast, did i hose the original tivo HD? I'm doing this at a friends without the actual tivo hardware. it appears it just tried to copy to the free space which it ran out, since it states its only in read mode


----------



## capkj

unitron said:


> If there's a way to do it without using comer's jmfs in some way, I've yet to hear of it.
> 
> But there are no doubt plenty of ways to screw up a Premiere drive and turn your TiVo into a boat anchor, and what you have in mind will probably lead you to discover at least one of them.
> 
> Go back and read the first post of this thread, the advanced section, and see if that's not enough to slake your thirst for the command line.


Thanks for the advice.
I'm pretty good at making sure I've got a good backup before messing with stuff that can I can break easily. I already did a ddrescue on the drive, and verified it in the premiere.

To clarify, what I was wondering is if it is possible to use JMFS in a standard linux environment. (no boot cd) like comer used to do as posted in:
http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8095021#post8095021


----------



## unitron

capkj said:


> Thanks for the advice.
> I'm pretty good at making sure I've got a good backup before messing with stuff that can I can break easily. I already did a ddrescue on the drive, and verified it in the premiere.
> 
> To clarify, what I was wondering is if it is possible to use JMFS in a standard linux environment. (no boot cd) like comer used to do as posted in:
> http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8095021#post8095021


I'd tell you to contact comer and ask him (since I don't know), but he'd probably tell you to read that post.


----------



## unitron

djjuice said:


> I made a mistake of copying to the tivo drive, it ran out space pretty fast, did i hose the original tivo HD? I'm doing this at a friends without the actual tivo hardware. it appears it just tried to copy to the free space which it ran out, since it states its only in read mode


You made the mistake of copying _what_ to the TiVo drive, and which model TiVo did it come out of? A Premiere?

Did you get the drives backwards and copy the new, empty drive onto the TiVo drive?


----------



## djjuice

unitron said:


> You made the mistake of copying _what_ to the TiVo drive, and which model TiVo did it come out of? A Premiere?
> 
> Did you get the drives backwards and copy the new, empty drive onto the TiVo drive?


ok so i went through the steps, selected the tivo, then selected the tivo drive again as the drive to copy to. this gave the out of space error after about 5 min. I then rebooted and did the copying correctly. I'm just wondering if I messed up the original HD or did it just try to copy to the free space and then ran out (thus everything is ok?). I DO have an older 320GB drive that is still untouched if the worst case comes around.


----------



## unitron

djjuice said:


> ok so i went through the steps, selected the tivo, then selected the tivo drive again as the drive to copy to. this gave the out of space error after about 5 min. I then rebooted and did the copying correctly. I'm just wondering if I messed up the original HD or did it just try to copy to the free space and then ran out (thus everything is ok?). I DO have an older 320GB drive that is still untouched if the worst case comes around.


Be more specific.

People sometimes post about other model TiVos and other methods and softwares in this thread.

You're trying to put a bigger drive in a Premiere?

You booted with the jmfs cd?

You selected the original drive as both source and target?

I wouldn't have thought it would let you do that, and it should have caught that one drive had the TiVo software on it and the other drive did not.


----------



## djjuice

unitron said:


> Be more specific.
> 
> People sometimes post about other model TiVos and other methods and softwares in this thread.
> 
> You're trying to put a bigger drive in a Premiere?
> 
> You booted with the jmfs cd?
> 
> You selected the original drive as both source and target?
> 
> I wouldn't have thought it would let you do that, and it should have caught that one drive had the TiVo software on it and the other drive did not.


ok so its a premiere, (4 tuner) used the boot cd, selected the tivo Hard Drive first, then selected the Tivo Hard drive again instead of the new 2TB hard drive. after 5 minutes it errors out saying out of a free space.

so i restarted and did it the correct way (writing to 2TB drive). I'm actually still waiting for it to finish.

my concern is that did I actually write over anything on the original tivo Hard drive? I would think not since it would be in read only mode. if anything it wrote to free space and cancelled out since there was not enough free space.


----------



## unitron

djjuice said:


> ok so its a premiere, (4 tuner) used the boot cd, selected the tivo Hard Drive first, then selected the Tivo Hard drive again instead of the new 2TB hard drive. after 5 minutes it errors out saying out of a free space.
> 
> so i restarted and did it the correct way (writing to 2TB drive). I'm actually still waiting for it to finish.
> 
> my concern is that did I actually write over anything on the original tivo Hard drive? I would think not since it would be in read only mode. if anything it wrote to free space and cancelled out since there was not enough free space.


I've never found myself copying a drive to itself, and didn't know that was even possible, although if it read each sector into memory and then wrote it where it was supposed to go you may have gotten extremely lucky, although how a drive can be both read-only and read-write is another mystery.

Perhaps you've found a bug in jmfs.

Are you sure you haven't overwritten the boot hard drive (the one with Windows on it) of the PC you're using with the contents of the original TiVo drive?

If so, the Ulimate Boot CD (and I think the command line part of the Parted Magic CD) has a utility called testdisk which might be able to recover the original DOS/Windows partitioning, although how much of the data got scrambled I couldn't say.

Is this the 4 tuner version that comes stock with a 1TB drive or a 2TB drive?


----------



## CoxInPHX

unitron said:


> Is this the 4 tuner version that comes stock with a 1TB drive or a 2TB drive?


4 Tuners come in 2 flavors,
500GB - Premiere 4
2TB - Premiere XL4/Elite


----------



## GPT999

Hi,

I did search thru thread, but maybe missed this... 

So I want to replace my supersized 2 Tb HDD with another 2 Tb HDD...

I replaced my internal Premiere drive and supersized to a 2Tb, a year or 2 ago, its now making some noises so I think I should replace it b4 it craps out. 

My question is, can I use this utility (do I need to use this utility?) to create a new drive or can just do a disk copy of the original to the new 2 Tb. I would lthink I could just do a low level disk copy to make the new one?

It's at 80% full and I'd like to retain the recordings.


----------



## unitron

GPT999 said:


> Hi,
> 
> I did search thru thread, but maybe missed this...
> 
> So I want to replace my supersized 2 Tb HDD with another 2 Tb HDD...
> 
> I replaced my internal Premiere drive and supersized to a 2Tb, a year or 2 ago, its now making some noises so I think I should replace it b4 it craps out.
> 
> My question is, can I use this utility (do I need to use this utility?) to create a new drive or can just do a disk copy of the original to the new 2 Tb. I would lthink I could just do a low level disk copy to make the new one?
> 
> It's at 80% full and I'd like to retain the recordings.


I assume you used the jmfs cd back when to copy the original 320 to the new 2TB and expand?

Use it again

Your new 2TB drive has to have an LBA number at least as large as the LBA number of the olde 2TB drive.

You also have to be absolutely certain which drive is /dev/sdthisdrive and which is /dev/sdthatdrive, or you'll wind up copying the emptiness of the new drive to the TiVo drive.

When you boot the jmfs cd, it should start in the guide shell, and should detect which is the TiVo drive and which one(s) isn't(aren't) yet.

Assuming you will not be using a GigaByte brand motherboard to do the procedure, connect the cd or dvd drive from which you'll be booting and only the TiVo drive and the TiVo drive to be.

Disconnect all other hard drives.

Boot from the jmfs cd.

If it finds one and only one TiVo drive and can find the other drive, then tell it to copy and that should be that.

Anything else and type

S

to shutdown and post back here what happened and we'll see about getting you into the root shell and invoking ddrescue directly.

Unless you've already got a copy of the MFS Live cd v1.4 handy, in which case we'll just use

dd_rescue

instead.


----------



## simon7

I am trying to upgrade a Tivo Premiere. I have successfully done this process a couple years ago on a different Premiere, but am totally stumped now. 

I am replacing the stock 320GB Drive, which is still fully functional (tested), with a 2TB WD20EURS purchased in December. 

Using a Gigabyte motherboard:
- W7 boot drive attached to SATA-0
- Tivo 320 drive attached to SATA-2
- WD20EURS drive attached to SATA-4

Using IDE in BIOS, the process failed twice midway through the copy.

Using AHCI in BIOS, the copy, expand, supersize process completed with no apparent problems. I've successfully completed process multiple times, BUT the drive will not boot in Tivo (power cycles after either a few seconds or about 45 seconds). Never gets past initial light blue screen. 

Before ever beginning process, I cycled the drive Intellipower settings from /D to /S 300 then back to /D (probably should have left well enough alone). After failures, have tried adjusting again to both /D and /S300. Setting seems to change fine, but drive still will not boot.

Tried redoing the process with Copy and Expand, but not Supersize -- still will not boot. 

Tried redoing the process again with a Dell laptop. CD would not boot using IDE. Using AHCI, CD booted fine and process completed fine, using:
- W7 on SATA 0 
- Tivo 320 on USB external 1
- WD20EURS on USB external 2
Copied and Expended fine, did not try Supersizing.
Everything appears to go fine, but drive WILL NOT BOOT in Tivo. 

I am totally stumped. My only thoughts at this point are that maybe WD has recently made firmware changes to this drive that will not allow Tivo support, or unless WDIDLE3 is reporting incorrectly. 

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. The last time I did this, it was pretty easy. This time, I've spent the better part of a week with no success.


----------



## lpwcomp

simon7 said:


> Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. The last time I did this, it was pretty easy. This time, I've spent the better part of a week with no success.


Does the original drive still work?


----------



## simon7

lpwcomp said:


> Does the original drive still work?


Yes, I pop the original drive in the Tivo and it boots no problem.

I might need to consolidate data on my system to free up another drive for testing. If I can get another drive to work using my current methodology, that would isolate the problem with the WD20EURS. However, the WD20EURS seems to work fine, and consolidating data will be a lot more work.


----------



## unitron

simon7 said:


> I am trying to upgrade a Tivo Premiere. I have successfully done this process a couple years ago on a different Premiere, but am totally stumped now.
> 
> I am replacing the stock 320GB Drive, which is still fully functional (tested), with a 2TB WD20EURS purchased in December.
> 
> Using a Gigabyte motherboard:
> - W7 boot drive attached to SATA-0
> - Tivo 320 drive attached to SATA-2
> - WD20EURS drive attached to SATA-4
> 
> Using IDE in BIOS, the process failed twice midway through the copy.
> 
> Using AHCI in BIOS, the copy, expand, supersize process completed with no apparent problems. I've successfully completed process multiple times, BUT the drive will not boot in Tivo (power cycles after either 2 seconds or about 45 seconds). Never gets past initial light blue screen.
> 
> Before ever beginning process, I cycled the drive Intellipower settings from /D to /S 300 then back to /D (probably should have left well enough alone). After failures, have tried adjusting again to both /D and /S300. Setting seems to change fine, but drive still will not boot.
> 
> Tried redoing the process with Copy and Expand, but not Supersize -- still will not boot.
> 
> Tried redoing the process again with a Dell laptop. CD would not boot using IDE. Using AHCI, CD booted fine and process completed fine, using:
> - W7 on SATA 0
> - Tivo 320 on USB external 1
> - WD20EURS on USB external 2
> Copied and Expended fine, did not try Supersizing.
> Everything appears to go fine, but drive WILL NOT BOOT in Tivo.
> 
> I am totally stumped. My only thoughts at this point are that maybe WD has recently made firmware changes to this drive that will not allow Tivo support, or unless WDIDLE3 is reporting incorrectly.
> 
> Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. The last time I did this, it was pretty easy. This time, I've spent the better part of a week with no success.


I'm sure it will be of little use and even less joy to you for me to point out that it is in fact "Intellipark", and not "Intellipower" which is manipulated by wdidle3.

Since there's a GigaByte board involved (does it have any IDE/PATA headers, or is it all SATA?), let us turn our suspicions there.

By all means, leave the Win7 boot hard drive attached to the first of the SATA ports to protect the other drives, but let's not assume that it has done so.

First verify that the original 320 still works in the TiVo, then take it back out of the TiVo.

Using either the jmfs cd "exited" to the command line or the MFS Live cd,

hdparm -N /dev/sda

should show you the Win7 drive

(although

hdparm -I /dev/sda

will show you the model number, size, and serial number, as well a bunch of other stuff)

and should show you 2 numbers, one the full size of the drive in sectors and the other the number of sectors the drive reports after the Host Protected Area set up by the GigaByte board is subtracted.

What's attached to SATA 1 and SATA 3?

Anyway, assuming SATA 2 is /dev/sdc and SATA 4 is /dev/sde,

hdparm -I /dev/sdc

to make sure the TiVo drive is the TiVo drive, then

hdparm -N /dev/sdc

to make sure it returns only one number and not two, then

hdparm -I /dev/sde

and

hdparm -N /dev/sde

to make sure the EURS is the EURS and has no HPA.


----------



## simon7

unitron said:


> I'm sure it will be of little use and even less joy to you for me to point out that it is in fact "Intellipark", and not "Intellipower" which is manipulated by wdidle3.



Thanks, I will try your suggestions and report back. The original drive does still work in the Tivo. The frustrating part is that everything seems to work and the process completes just fine, but the new drive wont boot.


----------



## simon7

unitron said:


> First verify that the original 320 still works in the TiVo, then take it back out of the TiVo.


YES



> Using either the jmfs cd "exited" to the command line or the MFS Live cd,
> hdparm -N /dev/sda
> should show you the Win7 drive


HPA is disabled



> What's attached to SATA 1 and SATA 3?


Nothing, empty ports



> hdparm -N /dev/sdc
> to make sure it returns only one number and not two, then


HPA is disabled, Tivo source is fine



> hdparm -N /dev/sde


Hmm... seeing a problem here. There is a huge mismatch with the two sector counts, way more than HPA should effect (but maybe a contributing factor). Here is exactly what I am seeing:
"max sectors = 18446744073321613488/3907029168(18446744073321613488?), HPA setting seems invalid"


----------



## simon7

I am going to initialize in the target disk in W7, then try one more time...


----------



## unitron

simon7 said:


> YES
> 
> HPA is disabled
> 
> Nothing, empty ports
> 
> HPA is disabled, Tivo source is fine
> 
> Hmm... seeing a problem here. There is a huge mismatch with the two sector counts, way more than HPA should effect (but maybe a contributing factor). Here is exactly what I am seeing:
> "max sectors = 18446744073321613488/3907029168(18446744073321613488?), HPA setting seems invalid"


So /dev/sde is absolutely confirmed to be the brand new never used for anything yet WD20EURS?

After I've done some looking at a recently acquired, haven't had time to put it into service yet EURS, we may need to try some secret ninja hdparm options*.

Or you may need to exercise the secret ninja RMA option.

Email [email protected] so that I have your email address 'cause my PM box here keeps filling up too fast.

And of course replace me with my user name here.

*They aren't really that secret if I found them on the web, but hdparm has the potential to turn hard drives into shiny silver paperweights in a quinstant if one makes the least misstep.

In the meantime, hook the EURS up to SATA 1 and SATA 3 and see if

hdparm -N returns the same info.

But under no circumstances have the Windows drive not connected to SATA 0.

It has to be there as a blood sacrifice to the HPA monster.

And include the model number of that GigaByte mobo in the email so I can look it up on the Google machine.


----------



## unitron

simon7 said:


> I am going to initialize in the target disk in W7, then try one more time...


WHAT?!?

You don't format a hard drive that's going into a TiVo with anything having anything to do with Microsoft!!!!

And that HPA weirdness is far beyond anything MS could do to the drive.

(but perhaps not beyond what a malfunctioning SATA controller on a GigaByte board could do, or appear to have done)

Copying the original Premiere drive to the target drive with

dd

or

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

,which is what the jmfs cd uses,

is all the formatting/initializing/screwing around with needed to get something that'll boot the TiVo.

Of course using the second phase of jmfs, the expand part, is the reason to use jmfs, but you can copy, test in the TiVo, and then go back and expand later with jmfs.


----------



## simon7

I am going to try copying to a different hard drive. If that works, we will know it is the drive and not the motherboard. Will report back in several hours or tomorrow.



> So /dev/sde is absolutely confirmed to be the brand new never used for anything yet WD20EURS?


No, actually I did format it in W7 right after taking it out of the package. I wanted to be sure any bad sectors were reallocated.


----------



## simon7

I have three different 2TB disks. I ran each of them through the hdparm and ALL THREE return the mysterious: "max sectors = 18446744073321613488/3907029168(18446744073321613488?), HPA setting seems invalid"

I also tried several 1TB drives and a 3TB drive. All check out normally. Really not sure what to make of it. 

I tried reformatting one of the 2TB drives on my laptop, but I still get the weird hdparm outcome. All these 2TB drives were probably orginially formatted on my desktop at the beginning of their life, so they do have that in common. But shouldn't a fresh format elsewhere fix any partition problem. And if it is a 2TB limit, wouldn't the 3TB drive have problems too? 

Could it be a bug in hdparm? 

So weird...


----------



## unitron

simon7 said:


> I am going to try copying to a different hard drive. If that works, we will know it is the drive and not the motherboard. Will report back in several hours or tomorrow.
> 
> No, actually I did format it in W7 right after taking it out of the package. I wanted to be sure any bad sectors were reallocated.


The way to do that is to run the WD diagnostics long test. No need for Windows to ever touch the drive.


----------



## unitron

simon7 said:


> I have three different 2TB disks. I ran each of them through the hdparm and ALL THREE return the mysterious: "max sectors = 18446744073321613488/3907029168(18446744073321613488?), HPA setting seems invalid"
> 
> I also tried several 1TB drives and a 3TB drive. All check out normally. Really not sure what to make of it.
> 
> I tried reformatting one of the 2TB drives on my laptop, but I still get the weird hdparm outcome. All these 2TB drives were probably orginially formatted on my desktop at the beginning of their life, so they do have that in common. But shouldn't a fresh format elsewhere fix any partition problem. And if it is a 2TB limit, wouldn't the 3TB drive have problems too?
> 
> Could it be a bug in hdparm?
> 
> So weird...


What are the brand and model numbers of those 3 2TB drives?

What's the model number of the GigaByte motherboard?

Try looking at the EURS with

hdparm -N /dev/sdwhatever

on the laptop after booting it with something with hdparm, like the jmfs cd or the MFS Live cd.

(at this point, you should probably burn yourself a copy of the MFS Live cd v1.4, available from mfslive.org, and use it for hdparming, to reduce the chance of accidents and confusion)

I'll look at my "spare, but only for the moment" EURS on a non-GB board with hdparm -N and see what I get, but don't forget that email, 'cause I think we're gonna have to go ninja before this is through.


----------



## simon7

Just tried repeating the exact same process on the Gigabyte motherboard but instead using a 2TB Samsung HD204UI: WORKED perfectly the first time. 

Not only that, but the 2TB Samsung reports the same weird hdparm message ("max sectors = 18446744073321613488/3907029168(18446744073321613488?), HPA setting seems invalid"), yet it still boots just fine in the Tivo (both expanded and expanded and supersized).

So, I'm back to the WD20EURS being the problem. I would simply conclude that it is DOA, but I can format and access it in Windows, and S.M.A.R.T. looks fine. 

Sooooo.... possible theories include
- WDIDLE3 1.05 incorrectly reporting/configuring the Intellipark for this drive (I did mess with this)
- changes to the WD20EURS firmware that somehow makes it incompatible with TIVO
- some minor hardware failure that Windows ignores, but Tivo does not
- something else beyond my comprehension (like maybe a change to advance format or something)

Ug. At this point, I'm tempted to just use the Samsung, but I was using it for something else and bought the EURS specifically for the Tivo.

Thanks for all your hard thinking on this issue.


----------



## unitron

"changes to the WD20EURS firmware that somehow makes it incompatible with TIVO"

Sure hope that's not the case or I'm out $100.

As an experiment, could you try 

a. Running hdparm -N on the laptop on that EURS

b. "Xeroxing" the Samsung to the WD and seeing if that boots the TiVo


----------



## jmbach

simon7 said:


> Just tried repeating the exact same process on the Gigabyte motherboard but instead using a 2TB Samsung HD204UI: WORKED perfectly the first time.
> 
> Not only that, but the 2TB Samsung reports the same weird hdparm message ("max sectors = 18446744073321613488/3907029168(18446744073321613488?), HPA setting seems invalid"), yet it still boots just fine in the Tivo (both expanded and expanded and supersized).
> 
> So, I'm back to the WD20EURS being the problem. I would simply conclude that it is DOA, but I can format and access it in Windows, and S.M.A.R.T. looks fine.
> 
> Sooooo.... possible theories include
> - WDIDLE3 1.05 incorrectly reporting/configuring the Intellipark for this drive (I did mess with this)
> - changes to the WD20EURS firmware that somehow makes it incompatible with TIVO
> - some minor hardware failure that Windows ignores, but Tivo does not
> - something else beyond my comprehension (like maybe a change to advance format or something)
> 
> Ug. At this point, I'm tempted to just use the Samsung, but I was using it for something else and bought the EURS specifically for the Tivo.
> 
> Thanks for all your hard thinking on this issue.


Don't believe wdidle3 did anything to the drive. I ran wdidle3 on my WD20EURS dive and showed the intellipark has been disabled making me believe like others that newer versions of the drive has it disabled as a default. 
Would connect the drive to a non gigabyte MB and do testing and such. Many gigabyte MB have a feature that stores a copy of the BIOS on the drive for recovery later. This might be causing your discrepancy. On some MB you can go into the BIOS and disable this feature but not all. This is why you want to keep a drive connected to SATA0. It is supposed that the BIOS uses any drive connected to SATA0 for this purpose. 
I would as I believe has been suggested earlier run WD diagnostic on the drive. Would run it from a non gigabyte MB just to make sure. It can erase the drive which may reset the parameters you are having trouble with. Would run it connected as a SATA or eSata drive. I have performed copy expand and supersize all from a laptop for multiple TiVo drives. Connecting it via USB I found that information provided to the diagnostic program is somewhat limited. 
Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## simon7

unitron said:


> As an experiment, could you try
> a. Running hdparm -N on the laptop on that EURS


I'm pretty sure I did do this yesterday when trying the USB copy, with the same weird outcome. Maybe will try again, after finishing B.



> b. "Xeroxing" the Samsung to the WD and seeing if that boots the TiVo


I've started this process today. It will take a looooooong time.


----------



## unitron

simon7 said:


> I'm pretty sure I did do this yesterday when trying the USB copy, with the same weird outcome. Maybe will try again, after finishing B.
> 
> I've started this process today. It will take a looooooong time.


Yes, it will.

And that's if you let it copy at the default fast, big chunks at a time, rate.

I've had dd_rescue running for about 4 days now at 512 bytes, 1 byte fallback hoping to save the contents of a WD20EADS that's gone squirrely, with another 400Gb or so to go.


----------



## HerronScott

jmbach said:


> Don't believe wdidle3 did anything to the drive. I ran wdidle3 on my WD20EURS dive and showed the intellipark has been disabled making me believe like others that newer versions of the drive has it disabled as a default.


Unitron,

I don't believe any of WD's AV drives have had Intellipark active.

Scott


----------



## L David Matheny

Here are a couple of data points. Since I like backups and nature abhors an empty drive, I cloned my Premiere's WD20EVDS to a new WD20EURS using the ddrescue copy function of Comer's JMFS CD. It took about 18.2 hours (on my old Asus P4C800-E motherboard), and the new drive booted OK (cold and warm) and ran without incident for the several hours I tested it, including at least one point at which it was making two recordings while I watched a third one. I used the HDUI (which I'm evaluating) with no network connection, ignoring the C130 errors.

While the EURS was in the Premiere, I copied again to a new WD20EFRX (WD Red drive designed for NAS) using the ddrescue on the Ubuntu Rescue Remix 12.04 CD. That copy took only about 7.2 hours (why?), and the new drive behaved similarly to the EURS as far as I can tell. One bit of strangeness is that during the copy operation the EFRX's activity LED (on the drive dock, I guess) would stutter and stop briefly every 25 to 30 seconds causing the current rate to plunge briefly. During the copy to the EURS, the current rate would jump around within a window from about 75% to 100% of maximum, but it never plunged. I thought the difference in average rates could be due to a difference in ddrescue block size used, but the GNU ddrescue online manual indicates that it defaults to only 64K blocks just like the version the JMFS CD uses. Could this mean that the JMFS CD is actually using the older dd_rescue but calling it "ddrescue"? Or is it just using an older release?

To verify that the difference wasn't caused by the drive, I copied a third time onto another EURS, and that also took about 7.2 hours and behaved similarly. I've had both WD20EURS drives for several months and had run only the WD long diagnostic test on them before. I think I'll use the (presumably newer) ddrescue version on the Ubuntu Rescue Remix CD for any multi-terabyte copies I do in the future.


----------



## joeshannallie

Need T800 image


----------



## lpwcomp

joeshannallie said:


> Need T800 image


Wrong thread.


----------



## retiredqwest

ddrescue -V shows version # and Diaz as the author on both copies.

ddrescue on the JMFS is version 1.11 and Ubuntu cd is version 1.14. I tried to find a change list/file for ddrescue, but struck out.

I tried the Ubuntu Remix CD and got as far as fdisk. I tried various switches
but it still kept giving me an error. JMFS fdisk worked just fine. This is using a known good 320GB and 2TB drives on direct MB SATA ports. I might go play with this later.



L David Matheny said:


> Here are a couple of data points. Since I like backups and nature abhors an empty drive, I cloned my Premiere's WD20EVDS to a new WD20EURS using the ddrescue copy function of Comer's JMFS CD. It took about 18.2 hours (on my old Asus P4C800-E motherboard), and the new drive booted OK (cold and warm) and ran without incident for the several hours I tested it, including at least one point at which it was making two recordings while I watched a third one. I used the HDUI (which I'm evaluating) with no network connection, ignoring the C130 errors.
> 
> While the EURS was in the Premiere, I copied again to a new WD20EFRX (WD Red drive designed for NAS) using the ddrescue on the Ubuntu Rescue Remix 12.04 CD. That copy took only about 7.2 hours (why?), and the new drive behaved similarly to the EURS as far as I can tell. One bit of strangeness is that during the copy operation the EFRX's activity LED (on the drive dock, I guess) would stutter and stop briefly every 25 to 30 seconds causing the current rate to plunge briefly. During the copy to the EURS, the current rate would jump around within a window from about 75% to 100% of maximum, but it never plunged. I thought the difference in average rates could be due to a difference in ddrescue block size used, but the GNU ddrescue online manual indicates that it defaults to only 64K blocks just like the version the JMFS CD uses. Could this mean that the JMFS CD is actually using the older dd_rescue but calling it "ddrescue"? Or is it just using an older release?
> 
> To verify that the difference wasn't caused by the drive, I copied a third time onto another EURS, and that also took about 7.2 hours and behaved similarly. I've had both WD20EURS drives for several months and had run only the WD long diagnostic test on them before. I think I'll use the (presumably newer) ddrescue version on the Ubuntu Rescue Remix CD for any multi-terabyte copies I do in the future.


----------



## tdp117

So I have all my drives connected, boot from the cd, and it tells me there is no Tivo disk detected. I go to the prompt and it is recognizing the drives are connected. It shows that neither the new drive nor the Original have any existing partitions. Does this mean what I think it means? Is my original drive toast and now I have to get ahold of another working premiere drive? Or am I possibly doing something wrong?


----------



## Davelnlr_

Plug it back in the Tivo and see if it boots.


----------



## mattack

How are the drives connected? Directly to the computer? The Linux on the jmfs CD won't see external USB<>SATA 'docks' for example.


----------



## jmbach

mattack said:


> How are the drives connected? Directly to the computer? The Linux on the jmfs CD won't see external USB<>SATA 'docks' for example.


Have not had a problem with the Linux on the JMFS seeing my SATA <>USB docks unless it is connected to my USB 3.0 port.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## jmbach

tdp117 said:


> So I have all my drives connected, boot from the cd, and it tells me there is no Tivo disk detected. I go to the prompt and it is recognizing the drives are connected. It shows that neither the new drive nor the Original have any existing partitions. Does this mean what I think it means? Is my original drive toast and now I have to get ahold of another working premiere drive? Or am I possibly doing something wrong?


Could try running MFSInfo on the drive and see what it displays.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## tdp117

Both drives are hooked up via usb enclosures. I should also preface that the original drive, when in the tivo, does the loop reboot with the GSOD.


----------



## unitron

tdp117 said:


> So I have all my drives connected, boot from the cd, and it tells me there is no Tivo disk detected. I go to the prompt and it is recognizing the drives are connected. It shows that neither the new drive nor the Original have any existing partitions. Does this mean what I think it means? Is my original drive toast and now I have to get ahold of another working premiere drive? Or am I possibly doing something wrong?


See if the jmfs cd has

pdisk

on it, cause

fdisk

ain't gonna show Apple Partition Map style partitions, which is what the TiVo drive uses

At the command line

pdisk -l

That's a lowercase L, and be sure to include the space before the hyphen and don't put a space after it.

That should show all the drives and only find the APM type, ignoring any MS/IBM/DOS/WINDOWS/MBR type partitions.

Or you could go back to the first post in this thread, read the USAGE ADVANCED part and learn how to use mfslayout.sh

Probably better not to boot into Windows and try to look at the Premiere drive with WinMFS.


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> Could try running MFSInfo on the drive and see what it displays.
> 
> Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


Perhaps the one on the MFS Live cd, but the one in WinMFS involves booting into Windows, and some people have managed to hose their Premiere drives doing that.


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> Perhaps the one on the MFS Live cd, but the one in WinMFS involves booting into Windows, and some people have managed to hose their Premiere drives doing that.


I agree. Would be MFSlayout on JMFS I believe.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## sethmeisterg

Hi,

I tried building the sources using OpenJDK 1.6, 1.7 and Oracle JDK 1.7 and they all fail at:

Buildfile: /home/seth/jmfs/build.xml

init:

compile:
[echo] Compiling...
[javac] /home/seth/jmfs/build.xml:86: warning: 'includeantruntime' was not set, defaulting to build.sysclasspath=last; set to false for repeatable builds
[javac] Compiling 49 source files to /home/seth/jmfs/bin
[javac] /home/seth/jmfs/src/tivo/mfs/db/SubObject.java:41: error: invalid inferred types for T; inferred type does not conform to declared bound(s)
[javac] a = Utils.read(in, a);
[javac] ^
[javac] inferred: Attribute<?>
[javac] bound(s): Readable<Attribute<?>>
[javac] where T,K are type-variables:
[javac] T extends Readable<T> declared in method <T,K>read(DataInput,K)
[javac] K extends T declared in method <T,K>read(DataInput,K)
[javac] 1 error

BUILD FAILED
/home/seth/jmfs/build.xml:86: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details.

Total time: 1 second

What am I missing?

Thanks,
--S


----------



## unitron

sethmeisterg said:


> Hi,
> 
> I tried building the sources using OpenJDK 1.6, 1.7 and Oracle JDK 1.7 and they all fail at:
> 
> Buildfile: /home/seth/jmfs/build.xml
> 
> init:
> 
> compile:
> [echo] Compiling...
> [javac] /home/seth/jmfs/build.xml:86: warning: 'includeantruntime' was not set, defaulting to build.sysclasspath=last; set to false for repeatable builds
> [javac] Compiling 49 source files to /home/seth/jmfs/bin
> [javac] /home/seth/jmfs/src/tivo/mfs/db/SubObject.java:41: error: invalid inferred types for T; inferred type does not conform to declared bound(s)
> [javac] a = Utils.read(in, a);
> [javac] ^
> [javac] inferred: Attribute<?>
> [javac] bound(s): Readable<Attribute<?>>
> [javac] where T,K are type-variables:
> [javac] T extends Readable<T> declared in method <T,K>read(DataInput,K)
> [javac] K extends T declared in method <T,K>read(DataInput,K)
> [javac] 1 error
> 
> BUILD FAILED
> /home/seth/jmfs/build.xml:86: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details.
> 
> Total time: 1 second
> 
> What am I missing?
> 
> Thanks,
> --S


Google "omikron prom day" and you'll find links to that "other" TiVo-centric site which may not be named here where there's less activity but the readership is more likely to be able to discuss things on the level necessary to handle your question.


----------



## MapleLeaf

Last week, I bit on Tivo's current $549 offer for a lifetime TP4. I got it up and running this weekend, and plan to eventually use JMFS to upgrade the hard drive to a WD20EURS that I purchased just before Christmas. I've already run the quick and extended WD Diag tests on the WD20EURS, used wdidle3 to confirm that it came with Intellipark disabled, and burned myself a copy of the JMFS CD. So I think I'm pretty much ready to proceed with the JMFS upgrade. I just want to give the TP4 a bit of bake time to ensure it's working properly before cracking it open (I'll probably give it another week or so).

However, my big concern is that the PC with which I plan to perform the upgrade has a Gigabyte motherboard. The model number is GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3. Now, I did notice that the user ShinySteelRobot posted in this thread about a year ago (post #1430) that he successfully performed an upgrade using a very similar Gigabyte motherboard model (GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3). Nevertheless, all the other warnings in this thread regarding Gigabyte motherboards and its HPA has me a little freaked out.

I currently have an SSD hooked up to SATA port 0 and on which Windows 7 64-bit is installed. I also have a WD20EARS hooked up to SATA port 1 which houses Windows' \users directory and other data. I am planning on hooking up the WD20EURS drive to SATA port 2 and the TP4 drive to SATA port 3. My thinking is that if there is an HPA issue with my motherboard, it'll target one of the first three drives and leave the TP4 drive alone. If one of the other three drives gets screwed up, I can easily rebuild my Windows box. I just don't want it messing with my TP4 drive and possibly rendering the TP4 unusable.

Does this sound a reasonable plan of action to hopefully eliminate any risk of my TP4 drive geting screwed up?

Thanks!


----------



## unitron

MapleLeaf said:


> Last week, I bit on Tivo's current $549 offer for a lifetime TP4. I got it up and running this weekend, and plan to eventually use JMFS to upgrade the hard drive to a WD20EURS that I purchased just before Christmas. I've already run the quick and extended WD Diag tests on the WD20EURS, used wdidle3 to confirm that it came with Intellipark disabled, and burned myself a copy of the JMFS CD. So I think I'm pretty much ready to proceed with the JMFS upgrade. I just want to give the TP4 a bit of bake time to ensure it's working properly before cracking it open (I'll probably give it another week or so).
> 
> However, my big concern is that the PC with which I plan to perform the upgrade has a Gigabyte motherboard. The model number is GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3. Now, I did notice that the user ShinySteelRobot posted in this thread about a year ago (post #1430) that he successfully performed an upgrade using a very similar Gigabyte motherboard model (GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3). Nevertheless, all the other warnings in this thread regarding Gigabyte motherboards and its HPA has me a little freaked out.
> 
> I currently have an SSD hooked up to SATA port 0 and on which Windows 7 64-bit is installed. I also have a WD20EARS hooked up to SATA port 1 which houses Windows' \users directory and other data. I am planning on hooking up the WD20EURS drive to SATA port 2 and the TP4 drive to SATA port 3. My thinking is that if there is an HPA issue with my motherboard, it'll target one of the first three drives and leave the TP4 drive alone. If one of the other three drives gets screwed up, I can easily rebuild my Windows box. I just don't want it messing with my TP4 drive and possibly rendering the TP4 unusable.
> 
> Does this sound a reasonable plan of action to hopefully eliminate any risk of my TP4 drive geting screwed up?
> 
> Thanks!


Boot that GB mobo with the jmfs cd without the TiVo drive or the TiVo drive to be hooked up.

X

to exit to the command line, then

hdparm -i /dev/sda

to make sure the SSD is hooked where you think it is

then use the up arrow to bring back the command and use the backspace key to change it to

hdparm -i /dev/sdb

and make sure thats the EARS.

Then if everything is where it's supposed to be,

hdparm -N /dev/sda

should tell you if there's an HPA on the SSD or not.

Then

hdparm -N /dev/sdb

should show that there's not one on the EARS.

If that's the case, you should be good to go.


----------



## MapleLeaf

unitron said:


> Boot that GB mobo with the jmfs cd without the TiVo drive or the TiVo drive to be hooked up.
> 
> ...


Awesome, that'll make me feel even better that I'm not about to screw up my TP4 drive. I will give that a shot. Thanks for the prompt and detailed advice, Unitron!


----------



## jmbach

MapleLeaf said:


> Last week, I bit on Tivo's current $549 offer for a lifetime TP4. I got it up and running this weekend, and plan to eventually use JMFS to upgrade the hard drive to a WD20EURS that I purchased just before Christmas. I've already run the quick and extended WD Diag tests on the WD20EURS, used wdidle3 to confirm that it came with Intellipark disabled, and burned myself a copy of the JMFS CD. So I think I'm pretty much ready to proceed with the JMFS upgrade. I just want to give the TP4 a bit of bake time to ensure it's working properly before cracking it open (I'll probably give it another week or so).
> 
> However, my big concern is that the PC with which I plan to perform the upgrade has a Gigabyte motherboard. The model number is GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3. Now, I did notice that the user ShinySteelRobot posted in this thread about a year ago (post #1430) that he successfully performed an upgrade using a very similar Gigabyte motherboard model (GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3). Nevertheless, all the other warnings in this thread regarding Gigabyte motherboards and its HPA has me a little freaked out.
> 
> I currently have an SSD hooked up to SATA port 0 and on which Windows 7 64-bit is installed. I also have a WD20EARS hooked up to SATA port 1 which houses Windows' \users directory and other data. I am planning on hooking up the WD20EURS drive to SATA port 2 and the TP4 drive to SATA port 3. My thinking is that if there is an HPA issue with my motherboard, it'll target one of the first three drives and leave the TP4 drive alone. If one of the other three drives gets screwed up, I can easily rebuild my Windows box. I just don't want it messing with my TP4 drive and possibly rendering the TP4 unusable.
> 
> Does this sound a reasonable plan of action to hopefully eliminate any risk of my TP4 drive geting screwed up?
> 
> Thanks!


A couple things. If that drive in your new TP4 is still virgin, pm ggieseke to use his program to make a compressed backup of it. It makes a backup of several gigabytes that zips down to about 2gb. It does this because most of a virgin drive is all 0's. 
The other thing, some gigabyte motherboards have a setting in bios that reserves part of the first heard drive for a backup of the BIOS for emergency recovery. You can disable that setting which should prevent hosing your TiVo drive accidently. Just an experience I had with my fathers gigabyte motherboard and tivo drives. Even so, do what unitron recommends.

Jim


----------



## superflysocal

Is it recommended to plug in a brand new tivo first and setup everything before doing this, or afterwards. Or does it matter?


----------



## unitron

superflysocal said:


> Is it recommended to plug in a brand new tivo first and setup everything before doing this, or afterwards. Or does it matter?


Before you go to the trouble of opening up the TiVo, removing the drive, and copying and expanding onto a bigger drive, go ahead and plug it in, set up your subscription, run through Guided Setup, get your cable cards paired, and make sure the TiVo is working properly.

Then after a couple of weeks or so to make sure it's downloaded the latest software updates and all of that, you do the upgrade and then put the original drive somewhere safe, so it's ready to go if you ever need to use it for troubleshooting or to copy to another drive if the first replacement has problems.


----------



## jmbach

superflysocal said:


> Is it recommended to plug in a brand new tivo first and setup everything before doing this, or afterwards. Or does it matter?


If you are trying to make a compressed back up of the drive , it is better to do it before plugging it up the first time. If you are just going to copy and expand then follow Unitron's advice.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> If you are trying to make a compressed back up of the drive , it is better to do it before plugging it up the first time. If you are just going to copy and expand then follow Unitron's advice.
> 
> Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


This is a Premiere thread.

If he knew how to make a compressed or truncated backup of an S4 drive, he'd be schooling all of us. 

And on older sets, best to make a truncated back up (preferably one via WinMFS and another via the MFS Live cd), then set it up, then make backups again with different names to indicate that the first ones dump you to Guided Setup and the second ones are specific to that unit and have all of your info, like cable lineup, cable card pairings, etc.


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> This is a Premiere thread.
> 
> If he knew how to make a compressed or truncated backup of an S4 drive, he'd be schooling all of us.
> 
> And on older sets, best to make a truncated back up (preferably one via WinMFS and another via the MFS Live cd), then set it up, then make backups again with different names to indicate that the first ones dump you to Guided Setup and the second ones are specific to that unit and have all of your info, like cable lineup, cable card pairings, etc.


I understand. I am not talking about a truncated backup but a compressed backup of the drive. Ggieseke has a program that makes a compressed backup. I have successfully used this to backup and restore a Premiere drive.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> I understand. I am not talking about a truncated backup but a compressed backup of the drive. Ggieseke has a program that makes a compressed backup. I have successfully used this to backup and restore a Premiere drive.
> 
> Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


It just seemed to me that if superflysocal were already on the level of being able to do that he/she'd already know that you set up the original drive before copying to a bigger one.

Is Ggieseke's technique/program covered earlier in this thread or a different one?

Or do I have to look over on "the other site which must not be named"?


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> It just seemed to me that if superflysocal were already on the level of being able to do that he/she'd already know that you set up the original drive before copying to a bigger one.
> 
> Is Ggieseke's technique/program covered earlier in this thread or a different one?
> 
> Or do I have to look over on "the other site which must not be named"?


It's covered earlier in the thread. Have to pm him for the program as it is a work in progress.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## pspens

cds618 said:


> Stan,
> 
> I bought the WD20EVDS on Ebay last week. search for WD20EVDS & look in the list for the one priced at $99 or best offer with free priority shipping, the guy is in PA. I offered to buy it for $85 & he counter offered for $92 said that's the cheapest he could sell it for. I couldn't find that drive for less anywhere else. It arrived 5 days later with a manufacture date of 11/4/2010


Newbie here. I've been reading through this thread with the intent of upgrading my new Premier 4 with a 2 TB drive. Mentioned as usable is a
WD model WD20EARS. I saw one on Amazon but it had an exposed drive (no cover) and a lot of other drives are displayed that way. Can anyone explain if that is normal/okay to use? All the drives I've dealt with in my experience have been enclosed.

Thats for any enlightenment.


----------



## pspens

richsadams said:


> Welcome to the forum (well, sort of...I see you posted once a few years ago).  Here you go...
> 
> http://www.mediafire.com/?pfc9n8o30tc64
> 
> Happy upgrading!
> 
> BTW, I think they cut the posting count for seeing/posting links to five now.


Nope, it's still 10!!


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Newbie here. I've been reading through this thread with the intent of upgrading my new Premier 4 with a 2 TB drive. Mentioned as usable is a
> WD model WD20EARS. I saw one on Amazon but it had an exposed drive (no cover) and a lot of other drives are displayed that way. Can anyone explain if that is normal/okay to use? All the drives I've dealt with in my experience have been enclosed.
> 
> Thats for any enlightenment.


What you want to do is keep an eye out for the WD20EURS dropping to $100.

Although the WD20EARS has been used by many in Premieres and S3s as well successfully, and if you found a new old stock WD20EADS it'd probably work as well. Maybe even the WD20EACS. But those 3 are older models and unused ones unlikely to be available.

The WD20EURS is an A/V application-specific drive.

Instead of retrying several times to handle errors, which is what you want the drives on a computer or server to do, it is more forgiving of them so that it can keep from falling behind on constantly writing one or more audio/video streams to the platters.

A single wrong byte is such a short amount of time that your eyes or ears won't notice anything wrong, whereas in your PC it could mean a disastrous error on a spread sheet or in a database.

That picture is a stock photo, supplied originally by Western Digital, but the drives are not sold with the cover missing like that.

Due to the way hard drives work (the heads float just above the platters on a thin film of air that's dragged along by friction of the platters against the air, but the space between the head and the platter is smaller than the diameter of a smoke particle, and a piece of dust looks like a boulder to it), leaving the cover off anywhere but in an absolute "clean room" would reduce its lifespan to minutes.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> What you want to do is keep an eye out for the WD20EURS dropping to $100.
> 
> That picture is a stock photo, supplied originally by Western Digital, but the drives are not sold with the cover missing like that.
> 
> Due to the way hard drives work (the heads float just above the platters on a thin film of air that's dragged along by friction of the platters against the air, but the space between the head and the platter is smaller than the diameter of a smoke particle, and a piece of dust looks like a boulder to it), leaving the cover off anywhere but in an absolute "clean room" would reduce its lifespan to minutes.


Thanks for your thorough response. There's a WD20EURS for $108 on amazon right now...


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Thanks for your thorough response. There's a WD20EURS for $108 on amazon right now...


But last week when newegg had it on sale for $100, they price matched until about a day after newegg's sale ended, and that's not the first time it's gone down to $100 at both places at about the same time, so if you're not in a big hurry...

It's still free shipping, right?


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> But last week when newegg had it on sale for $100, they price matched until about a day after newegg's sale ended, and that's not the first time it's gone down to $100 at both places at about the same time, so if you're not in a big hurry...
> 
> It's still free shipping, right?


I just bought it. Free shipping with there slowest method. I've only had my Premier 4 for 2 days, so there's no rush on performing the surgery. I still want to read up on the Intellpark stuff.


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> I just bought it. Free shipping with there slowest method. I've only had my Premier 4 for 2 days, so there's no rush on performing the surgery. I still want to read up on the Intellpark stuff.


Go back to the top of the page and read what I told superflysocal about what to do before upgrading the drive.

You want to make sure the TiVo works okay before you open it up and change anything, in case you have to return it for another unit.

As for Intellipark, since the WD20EURS is designed with running constantly, every second, in mind, it should arrive with Intellipark not having been enabled at the factory.

Make yourself a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD, and you'll have both wdidle3 (in the unlikely event that you need it) and the WD diagnostic software, so that you can run the long test on it before putting it into service.

Brand new drives don't usually show up with something wrong already, but it's not unheard of.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> Go back to the top of the page and read what I told superflysocal about what to do before upgrading the drive.
> 
> You want to make sure the TiVo works okay before you open it up and change anything, in case you have to return it for another unit.
> 
> As for Intellipark, since the WD20EURS is designed with running constantly, every second, in mind, it should arrive with Intellipark not having been enabled at the factory.
> 
> Make yourself a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD, and you'll have both wdidle3 (in the unlikely event that you need it) and the WD diagnostic software, so that you can run the long test on it before putting it into service.
> 
> Brand new drives don't usually show up with something wrong already, but it's not unheard of.


Good info, thx. It's been running fine for about 4 days now. When I did the guided setup it downloaded the latest software.


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Good info, thx. It's been running fine for about 4 days now. When I did the guided setup it downloaded the latest software.


You've only had your Premiere for 2 days but it's been running for 4 days?

That must have been some long extension cord unreeling out the back of that UPS truck.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> You've only had your Premiere for 2 days but it's been running for 4 days?
> 
> That must have been some long extension cord unreeling out the back of that UPS truck.


 The 2 days was just off the top of my head... time flies when you're having fun. After thinking about it, I realized I got it installed on Thursday.


----------



## steve614

Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I recommend that you wait until you get past the 90 day free replacement warranty period before you upgrade.

If you decide to forge ahead, keep in mind that if you have any issues, don't call TiVo. They can read the system info from your Tivo and can tell if you have an upgraded hard drive and will refuse the warranty.


----------



## unitron

steve614 said:


> Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I recommend that you wait until you get past the 90 day free replacement warranty period before you upgrade.
> 
> If you decide to forge ahead, keep in mind that if you have any issues, don't call TiVo. They can read the system info from your Tivo and can tell if you have an upgraded hard drive and will refuse the warranty.


Oh, you people with the budgets for non-used TiVos and your fancy problems.


----------



## ggieseke

unitron said:


> This is a Premiere thread.
> 
> If he knew how to make a compressed or truncated backup of an S4 drive, he'd be schooling all of us.


I'm still schooling myself. 

A true truncated backup in the classic MFSLive sense is still a ways off, but my method works fairly well if you start with a "virgin" drive. It uses the same tech as Microsoft's virtual hard drive files for Virtual PC. The drive is broken into 2MB blocks, and the blocks that are all zeroes are just noted in the header instead of being copied. Other than that it's just a byte for byte copy like dd.

The only Premiere image I have at the moment is a TCD746320 that went through at least one guided setup and software update (but no recordings). The VHD file is 3.4GB and it will zip down to less than 2GB. Another member used it on a brand-new drive and the raw VHD file was 1.5GB.

The first alpha only ran on Windows 7, but now I read and write the VHD files myself and it runs on XP or later.


----------



## lpwcomp

ggieseke said:


> I'm still schooling myself.
> 
> A true truncated backup in the classic MFSLive sense is still a ways off, but my method works fairly well if you start with a "virgin" drive. It uses the same tech as Microsoft's virtual hard drive files for Virtual PC. The drive is broken into 2MB blocks, and the blocks that are all zeroes are just noted in the header instead of being copied. Other than that it's just a byte for byte copy like dd.
> 
> The only Premiere image I have at the moment is a TCD746320 that went through at least one guided setup and software update (but no recordings). The VHD file is 3.4GB and it will zip down to less than 2GB. Another member used it on a brand-new drive and the raw VHD file was 1.5GB.
> 
> The first alpha only ran on Windows 7, but now I read and write the VHD files myself and it runs on XP or later.


Have you or anyone else experimented with restoring this to a larger HD and using JMFS to expand/supersize?


----------



## jmbach

lpwcomp said:


> Have you or anyone else experimented with restoring this to a larger HD and using JMFS to expand/supersize?


I have. The image is from a 320GB premiere drive. I restored it to a 1TB drive and placed it in my XL and forced a reload of the OS and went through the setup. Took it out of my XL and used JMFS to expand and supersize it. Put it back in the XL and worked just fine with full 1TB capacity.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## lessd

ggieseke said:


> I'm still schooling myself.
> 
> A true truncated backup in the classic MFSLive sense is still a ways off, but my method works fairly well if you start with a "virgin" drive. It uses the same tech as Microsoft's virtual hard drive files for Virtual PC. The drive is broken into 2MB blocks, and the blocks that are all zeroes are just noted in the header instead of being copied. Other than that it's just a byte for byte copy like dd.
> 
> The only Premiere image I have at the moment is a TCD746320 that went through at least one guided setup and software update (but no recordings). The VHD file is 3.4GB and it will zip down to less than 2GB. Another member used it on a brand-new drive and the raw VHD file was 1.5GB.
> 
> The first alpha only ran on Windows 7, but now I read and write the VHD files myself and it runs on XP or later.


For a business this may have some good use but for somebody that just wants a backup and expansion of his TP or TP-4 holding onto a 320Gb or 500Gb drive is just not that costly at todays prices + if you set up the original drive first your backup (if and when needed) will not need the cable cards paired again.


----------



## lpwcomp

lessd said:


> For a business this may have some good use but for somebody that just wants a backup and expansion of his TP or TP-4 holding onto a 320Gb or 500Gb drive is just not that costly at todays prices + if you set up the original drive first your backup (if and when needed) will not need the cable cards paired again.


How about for people in this situation?


----------



## ggieseke

lpwcomp said:


> Have you or anyone else experimented with restoring this to a larger HD and using JMFS to expand/supersize?


The original image was from retiredqwest. He restored it to a 2TB drive and it expanded successfully with JMFS. It has also been used by gkuyat and jmbach. Thank you gentlemen!

I don't have a Premiere, but it's a fun project.



lessd said:


> For a business this may have some good use but for somebody that just wants a backup and expansion of his TP or TP-4 holding onto a 320Gb or 500Gb drive is just not that costly at todays prices + if you set up the original drive first your backup (if and when needed) will not need the cable cards paired again.


Agreed. It's more for people with a failed drive and no backup. It could also help XL4 owners or anyone who just wants a backup. Set up your new TiVo, get it paired, then back it up before you start recording shows. A DVD or thumb drive is cheap insurance.


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> I have. The image is from a 320GB premiere drive. I restored it to a 1TB drive and placed it in my XL and forced a reload of the OS and went through the setup. Took it out of my XL and used JMFS to expand and supersize it. Put it back in the XL and worked just fine with full 1TB capacity.
> 
> Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


When you say XL, do you mean a Premiere XL?


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> When you say XL, do you mean a Premiere XL?


Yes

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> Intellipark notices a lack of drive activity,
> 
> A TiVo's hard drive is always working, because at a minimum the 30 minute buffer is being filled all the time.
> 
> The 2 exceptions to that are when the AC power has been disconnected from the TiVo, obviously, and when the TiVo is doing a soft re-boot.


Isn't a 3rd exception when you place the unit into standby? I think it only records Season Passes at that point and not Live TV, or am I wrong about that?


----------



## lpwcomp

pspens said:


> Isn't a 3rd exception when you place the unit into standby? I think it only records Season Passes at that point and not Live TV, or am I wrong about that?


That's right, you're wrong. 
All recording continues.


----------



## mattack

jmbach said:


> Have not had a problem with the Linux on the JMFS seeing my SATA <>USB docks unless it is connected to my USB 3.0 port.
> 
> Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


Sorry, maybe it's only the "dual dock" ones. Do you have one of those?


----------



## mattack

BTW, another slight exception is when you're checking the cablecards and/or channels, IIRC&#8230; Whichever thing you rarely do that it warns you that it has to stop recording live TV and scheduled recordings..


----------



## jmbach

mattack said:


> Sorry, maybe it's only the "dual dock" ones. Do you have one of those?


Yes it is dual dock. I actually have two. One eSata / USB and the other is the USB 3.0 version. Neither work off my USB 3.0 port when JMFS is loaded but works when connected to the USB 2.0 ports on the same computer. BIOS sees them and can boot off of drives connected to them if the OS on the drive supports USB 3.0. JMFS disk just does not have the drivers for my USB 3.0 ports.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


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## mattack

Do you mean that it works *IN JMFS* when connected to USB 2.0? Heck, I've use it on a Mac, and I honestly don't know if the ports were USB 2.0 or 3.0.. I think 2.0, since this was a while ago. I finally just took the drives into work and plugged them directly into SATA ports internally.


----------



## jmbach

mattack said:


> Do you mean that it works *IN JMFS* when connected to USB 2.0? Heck, I've use it on a Mac, and I honestly don't know if the ports were USB 2.0 or 3.0.. I think 2.0, since this was a while ago. I finally just took the drives into work and plugged them directly into SATA ports internally.


Yes. It all depends on if the Linux kernel on the JMFS disk has the drivers for the ports on the computer you are working on. The computer I was using was a newer Lenovo notebook. Consequently, the drivers for the chipset for the USB 3.0 ports were not on the disk. Fortunately the drivers that are on the disk covers most computers. I was able to use JMFS disk on the Macbook I have at home. It is I believe a 2009/2010 model with an Intel C2D. I cannot remember the exact specs.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> I just brought a WD20EURS in off of the porch, waiting for it to reach room temp before continuing, will see if it needs wdidle3 or not, but it's available on the hard drives-device info and management menu of the Ultimate Boot CD, a copy of which is a good thing to keep handy, so you could try it and if it doesn't need it, no harm done.


Where can I find the "Ultimate Boot CD"?


----------



## jmbach

pspens said:


> Where can I find the "Ultimate Boot CD"?


Google is your friend.


----------



## MapleLeaf

unitron said:


> Boot that GB mobo with the jmfs cd without the TiVo drive or the TiVo drive to be hooked up.
> 
> X
> 
> to exit to the command line, then
> 
> hdparm -i /dev/sda
> 
> to make sure the SSD is hooked where you think it is
> 
> then use the up arrow to bring back the command and use the backspace key to change it to
> 
> hdparm -i /dev/sdb
> 
> and make sure thats the EARS.
> 
> Then if everything is where it's supposed to be,
> 
> hdparm -N /dev/sda
> 
> should tell you if there's an HPA on the SSD or not.
> 
> Then
> 
> hdparm -N /dev/sdb
> 
> should show that there's not one on the EARS.
> 
> If that's the case, you should be good to go.


Unitron,

I tried the steps above, and the "hdparm -i" commands verified that my SSD is on sda and my WD20EARS is on sdb. When I then ran "hdparm -N /dev/sda", it reported that HPA is disabled. And when I ran "hdparm -N /dev/sdb", it reported that the HPA setting seems invalid. Are these expected? Is there any danger that an HPA will get slapped onto my TP4 drive when I connect it (and the target WD20EURS) to the system?

The one other thing I should mention is that I verified that the BIOS has an option to save the BIOS image to disk, but the option was already disabled, so I didn't play with it.


----------



## unitron

MapleLeaf said:


> Unitron,
> 
> I tried the steps above, and the "hdparm -i" commands verified that my SSD is on sda and my WD20EARS is on sdb. When I then ran "hdparm -N /dev/sda", it reported that HPA is disabled. And when I ran "hdparm -N /dev/sdb", it reported that the HPA setting seems invalid. Are these expected? Is there any danger that an HPA will get slapped onto my TP4 drive when I connect it (and the target WD20EURS) to the system?
> 
> The one other thing I should mention is that I verified that the BIOS has an option to save the BIOS image to disk, but the option was already disabled, so I didn't play with it.


Maybe they finally came to their senses and made the HPA thing optional and switch-off-able, and your board is new enough to have that.

hdparm -N

should report

number/number

and both numbers should be identical if there's no HPA. Did /dev/sdb report any numbers in that x/x format?

I don't know any reason an SSD drive couldn't have an HPA put on it, but like most things while they're still expensive, I know very little about them.

Also, I was never able to decipher GigaByte's slogans and buzz words enough to tell if the HPA was for BIOS backup or bare bones OS boot-necessary stuff for some sort of corrupted MBR recovery, so I don't know for sure that we can trust what it says about being disabled.

So I guess it's not impossible that an HPA aimed at /dev/sda would get deflected to /dev/sdb.

Can you do it again and write down exactly what it said the /dev/sdb setting seeming invalid, including any numbers involved.

I think I've seen that answer before, I'm just trying to remember the circumstances.


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Where can I find the "Ultimate Boot CD"?


http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Go to the bottom of the page where it says mirror sites and choose one geographically close to you.

There's a rather small and unobstrusive donate button near the top of the page as well, if your budget has recovered from the holidays.


----------



## pspens

lpwcomp said:


> That's right, you're wrong.
> All recording continues.


So that means that since HD's don't like being interrupted, we should only voluntarily pull the plug on a Tivo unit during a warm boot.


----------



## Ziggy86

Will this work with the Tivo premiere elite drives as well?


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> So that means that since HD's don't like being interrupted, we should only voluntarily pull the plug on a Tivo unit during a warm boot.


If it's not frozen up, I always only pull the plug after going into the menu and selecting restart the TiVo.

After hitting thumbs down 3 times I pull the plug right after hitting enter, before the welcome screen pops back up.

Some people put it in stand by, but this, as I recall, causes it to go back into standby after re-booting, and if you forgot, or did it to make a backup and forgot, then you wind up thinking the TiVo's broken.


----------



## lpwcomp

pspens said:


> So that means that since HD's don't like being interrupted, we should only voluntarily pull the plug on a Tivo unit during a warm boot.


It's not that HD's don't like being interrupted. They don't like being jerked around, i.e. power "bounces". So when you do unplug it, don't immediately reapply power. Give it a chance to spin down.


----------



## billbillw

I'm going to be attempting another upgrade to a 2TB using a WD20EARX. The last one I did was with the AV-GP EURS and it went flawlessly. I would have used another EURS, but I snagged this EARX for only $60 (Best Buy's $50 off $100 coupon last Monday), so for $40 less, I'll give it a try. 

Anyone have an recent experience with the EARX? I plan to run WDIDLE on it. Do you suggest disabling it completely or just setting it to something like 300? 

Does anyone mess with the jumper settings? This particular one is a SATA III 6.0Gbps drive, with AF. I see there are settings to alter the AF and also to limit to 3.0Gbps. Leave them alone or tweak?


----------



## GRAVLDO

but can you email me a link to the VHD - gravlindon @ gmail


----------



## ggieseke

GRAVLDO said:


> but can you email me a link to the VHD - gravlindon @ gmail


Email sent.


----------



## MapleLeaf

unitron said:


> Can you do it again and write down exactly what it said the /dev/sdb setting seeming invalid, including any numbers involved.
> 
> I think I've seen that answer before, I'm just trying to remember the circumstances.


Unitron,

For the SSD, running "hdparm -N /dev/sda" yields the following:

/dev/sda:
max sectors: 156301488/156301488, HPA is disabled

For the WD20EARS, running "hdparm -N /dev/sdb" yields the following:

/dev/sdb:
max sectors: 18446744073321613488/3907029168(1844674407332161613488?), HPA setting seems invalid

Long string of numbers, but I'm pretty sure I got it right because I just saw in the "Premiere HD upgrade with JMFS failed" thread that Oregonian got the exact same string when he ran it against his drive.

Anyway, just to reiterate, given the results above for the two drives currently hooked up to my system (recall that the SSD is my Windows boot drive hooked up to SATA port 0 and the WD20EARS drive is my Windows data drive hooked up to SATA port 1), I'm wondering what will happen when I hook up a WD20EURS to SATA port 2 (which will be the target drive for my TP4 upgrade) and the original drive from my TP4 to SATA port 3. Specifically, is there any risk that my Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 motherboard is going to end up slapping an HPA onto my TP4 drive and render it useless?

Thanks for your help so far!


----------



## pspens

I've booted with the jmfs Live CD and exited out to check things out a bit. There doesn't seem to be a man page for ddrescue. I was curious if ddrescue performs a sector by sector copy from device to device. If so, couldn't we use it to create a clone of a Windows disk? I wouldn't mind having a drive tucked away in case my Windows 7 drive goes south. I've had to restore a Dell computer hard drive before when it went belly up and it was quite a pain.


----------



## jmbach

pspens said:


> I've booted with the jmfs Live CD and exited out to check things out a bit. There doesn't seem to be a man page for ddrescue. I was curious if ddrescue performs a sector by sector copy from device to device. If so, couldn't we use it to create a clone of a Windows disk? I wouldn't mind having a drive tucked away in case my Windows 7 drive goes south. I've had to restore a Dell computer hard drive before when it went belly up and it was quite a pain.


Yes it is agnostic to the drive it is cloning.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## unitron

MapleLeaf said:


> Unitron,
> 
> For the SSD, running "hdparm -N /dev/sda" yields the following:
> 
> /dev/sda:
> max sectors: 156301488/156301488, HPA is disabled
> 
> For the WD20EARS, running "hdparm -N /dev/sdb" yields the following:
> 
> /dev/sdb:
> max sectors: 18446744073321613488/3907029168(1844674407332161613488?), HPA setting seems invalid
> 
> Long string of numbers, but I'm pretty sure I got it right because I just saw in the "Premiere HD upgrade with JMFS failed" thread that Oregonian got the exact same string when he ran it against his drive.
> 
> Anyway, just to reiterate, given the results above for the two drives currently hooked up to my system (recall that the SSD is my Windows boot drive hooked up to SATA port 0 and the WD20EARS drive is my Windows data drive hooked up to SATA port 1), I'm wondering what will happen when I hook up a WD20EURS to SATA port 2 (which will be the target drive for my TP4 upgrade) and the original drive from my TP4 to SATA port 3. Specifically, is there any risk that my Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 motherboard is going to end up slapping an HPA onto my TP4 drive and render it useless?
> 
> Thanks for your help so far!


3907029168 sectors x 512 Bytes per sector is a 2TB drive.

3907029168 is what that EARS should be reporting on both sides of the /

Where that other number came from I have no idea.

The EARS is an "advanced format" 4k per sector drive, but I don't know if that has anything to do with it or not.

Do you have that EARS jumpered for 512 compatibility or to step it down from 3Gb/s to 1.5?

Doing a little Googling just now I found out that after GB started putting an option in BIOS to disable Xpress Recovery--the thing that writes an HPA on the first disk at every boot, not only did setting it to "don't do that" not always work, sometimes another bug would cause it to, instead of using about 1.5MB for the HPA, grab an entire TB on a drive larger than 1TB.

Your model doesn't have any PATA/IDE headers/controllers, so if it were going to put an HPA on a drive, it should have put it on that SSD hooked to SATA 0.

Check your BIOS and see if there's a setting that lets you disable Xpress Recovery or Xpress Recovery2 or something similar sounding.

I see I'm starting to repeat myself because I'm advising more than one TCF'er at the same time and losing track of which is which, while simultaneously enjoying something that wants to be the flu when it grows up, so forgive me for coughing all over this post. 

What do you have on that EARS?


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> I see I'm starting to repeat myself because I'm advising more than one TCF'er at the same time and losing track of which is which, while simultaneously enjoying something that wants to be the flu when it grows up, so forgive me for coughing all over this post.
> 
> What do you have on that EARS?


So you are becoming buggy as well . If it is the flu better get some debugging done early (like with in the first 2 days where there is some medication that can abort it) otherwise it'll take a long time to debug you. 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> So you are becoming buggy as well . If it is the flu better get some debugging done early (like with in the first 2 days where there is some medication that can abort it) otherwise it'll take a long time to debug you.
> 
> Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


This is something I've had before several times. It feels like the flu coming on when it first starts but doesn't get nearly as bad and beyond treating the symptoms with decongestant and anti-histamine, and intaking lots of fluids, it's best dealt with by applying the passage of one day every 24 hours. 

I was smart enough to get a flu shot last fall.


----------



## billbillw

Upgrade complete with WD20EARX successful. Just ran WDIDLE3, set to 300. No jumper adjustments and everything seems to be working fine so far, 318 hrs!


----------



## L David Matheny

pspens said:


> I've booted with the jmfs Live CD and exited out to check things out a bit. There doesn't seem to be a man page for ddrescue. I was curious if ddrescue performs a sector by sector copy from device to device. If so, couldn't we use it to create a clone of a Windows disk? I wouldn't mind having a drive tucked away in case my Windows 7 drive goes south. I've had to restore a Dell computer hard drive before when it went belly up and it was quite a pain.


There's a manual for GNU ddrescue here.


----------



## pspens

L David Matheny said:


> There's a manual for GNU ddrescue here.


Thanks. I need to make sure the "in" and "out" are in the correct order!


----------



## jmbach

MapleLeaf said:


> /dev/sdb:
> max sectors: 18446744073321613488/3907029168(1844674407332161613488?), HPA setting seems invalid


Googling this issue (max sectors > native sectors) does not apparently yield a single solution. The interesting thing with Oregonian testing is that when he copied the 2TB drive to his 1.5TB with JMFS he still could not expand the drive. It would have been interesting to see the HPA parametes of the 1.5TB drive. Would assume it had some funky numbers as well. When he used JMFS to copy his good 1TB drive to 1.5TB, he was able to expand it. I am wondering if JMFS is seeing the first 10 numbers (1844674407) which would be close to 1TB (1950866432) and consequently nothing to expand. (the max number of sectors that can be addressed by the TiVo/Apple partition map is 4294967295 (FF FF FF FF in hex)) I do not know enough of HPA and hdparm to know where it gets the max sectors number. Apparently HDAT2 sees things differently because Oregonian states HDAT2 does not report the same information for HPA as hdparm. Perhaps looking at the first few blocks and possibly last few blocks of the drive might yield some information.


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> Googling this issue (max sectors > native sectors) does not apparently yield a single solution. The interesting thing with Oregonian testing is that when he copied the 2TB drive to his 1.5TB with JMFS he still could not expand the drive. It would have been interesting to see the HPA parametes of the 1.5TB drive. Would assume it had some funky numbers as well. When he used JMFS to copy his good 1TB drive to 1.5TB, he was able to expand it. I am wondering if JMFS is seeing the first 10 numbers (1844674407) which would be close to 1TB (1950866432) and consequently nothing to expand. (the max number of sectors that can be addressed by the TiVo/Apple partition map is 4294967295 (FF FF FF FF in hex)) I do not know enough of HPA and hdparm to know where it gets the max sectors number. Apparently HDAT2 sees things differently because Oregonian states HDAT2 does not report the same information for HPA as hdparm. Perhaps looking at the first few blocks and possibly last few blocks of the drive might yield some information.


I fear we are wandering off into "I know just enough to be a danger to myself and others" territory here.

Perhaps HDAT2 can fix it if hdparm can't, but I'd be much more confident trying either on a non-GigaByte brand motherboard.

I'm pretty sure

hdparm -N /dev/drive'x'

is supposed to return

physical sectors/logical sectors

but I can't swear to it.

I don't know how drive makers go about making advanced format drives pretend to be the old-fashioned kind, but I suspect that not only does it vary from brand to brand, but from model to model within a brand, and maybe even from early in production run to late in production run for particular models (if they can produce a WD10EADS that's not AF and then change it to AF later on while not changing the model number they can't really be trusted about anything).

And I don't know if AF is behind those weird numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised.


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> I fear we are wandering off into "I know just enough to be a danger to myself and others" territory here.
> 
> Perhaps HDAT2 can fix it if hdparm can't, but I'd be much more confident trying either on a non-GigaByte brand motherboard.
> 
> I'm pretty sure
> 
> hdparm -N /dev/drive'x'
> 
> is supposed to return
> 
> physical sectors/logical sectors
> 
> but I can't swear to it.
> 
> I don't know how drive makers go about making advanced format drives pretend to be the old-fashioned kind, but I suspect that not only does it vary from brand to brand, but from model to model within a brand, and maybe even from early in production run to late in production run for particular models (if they can produce a WD10EADS that's not AF and then change it to AF later on while not changing the model number they can't really be trusted about anything).
> 
> And I don't know if AF is behind those weird numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised.


Some drives like the Seagate pipeline do the conversion automatically. I am not sure about WD. I only use EURS which is an advanced format drive I believe. I used both in TiVos and have not had a problem.

I am comfortable reading, modifying, writing HD blocks with the tools I have. Hdparm could be just as dangerous to drives. Just depends on someone's comfort with the tools and what they are willing to risk. Would recommend that people work with copies and not original drives to reduce risk. In any case I agree with you about the potential.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## MapleLeaf

unitron said:


> I see I'm starting to repeat myself because I'm advising more than one TCF'er at the same time and losing track of which is which, while simultaneously enjoying something that wants to be the flu when it grows up, so forgive me for coughing all over this post.


Unitron,

Just to make sure we're on the same page and you're not getting different issues mixed up, I'll summarise my situation.

I've currently got a Windows 7 64-bit system with an Intel SSD hooked up to SATA port 0 and hosting the Windows OS as the C: drive. In addition, I've also got a WD20EARS drive hooked up to SATA port 1 and hosting the Windows data drive as the D: drive (basically, it hosts everything that gets written-to frequently such as Windows' \users directory, temp. files, swap file, etc. in order to minimise writes to the SSD drive). The machine has a Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 motherboard. In the motherboard's BIOS settings, the closest setting I could see that might correspond to some sort of express recovery mechanism is a setting called "Backup BIOS Image to HDD". That setting is currently set to "Disabled" (it's always been that way, I never touched it).

I haven't looked at the jumpers on the WD20EARS, but running "fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo" from an elevated Windows command prompt tells me that the "Bytes Per Physical Sector" for the WD20EARS is 512.

When I boot using the JMFS CD and run "hdparm -N /dev/sda", it reports the following for the SSD:

/dev/sda:
max sectors: 156301488/156301488, HPA is disabled

When I run "hdparm -N /dev/sdb", it reports the following for the WD20EARS:

/dev/sdb:
max sectors: 18446744073321613488/3907029168(1844674407332161613488?), HPA setting seems invalid

So that's my existing PC system. Now, I've recently picked up a Tivo Premiere 4 as well as a WD20EURS drive. I've already run wdidle3 on the WD20EURS to verify that Intellipark came disabled and I've also successfully run Western Digital's quick and extended diagnostics on it. My intent is to use my existing PC and run JMFS to copy the Premiere 4's hard drive onto the WD20EURS drive and expand it to 2Tb. However, because I have a Gigabyte motherboard, I was worried that it might try to write an HPA onto the TP4 drive and render it useless (at least, for Tivo'ing purposes). I plan to hook up the WD20EURS to SATA port 2 and the original TP4 drive to SATA port 3.

So after hooking up all 4 hard drives, I should have the following:

SATA port 0: SSD (Windows boot drive, which hdparm reports as "HPA is disabled")

SATA port 1: WD20EARS (Windows data drive, which hdparm reports as "HPA setting seems invalid")

SATA port 2: WD20EURS (target drive for TP4 upgrade)

SATA port 3: original TP4 drive

When I hook up my PC in this manner and boot into JMFS, my only concern is whether an HPA is going to get slapped onto my original TP4 drive (and thus render my Tivo unusable). I'm not terribly concerned if it gets slapped onto any of the other drives, because if there's any deleterious effect, it would only affect my Windows installation and I can always restore that (admittedly, it would take a bit of effort, but I think much less than trying to get my Tivo working again if my TP4 drive gets hosed). I was worried that the original TP4 drive might be a potential target for an HPA because, despite the fact that it's on the fourth SATA port, the drive on the first SATA port (the SSD) seems to have the HPA disabled, the drive on the second SATA port (the WD20EARS) seems to have an invalid HPA setting, and the drive that will be on the third SATA port (the WD20EURS) is not currently formatted, so I'm not sure what that means in terms of its HPA status.

So the only question I was hoping that you (or anyone else) could answer for me is, given the setup described above, would there be any risk that an HPA will be slapped onto my original TP4 drive?

Thanks!


----------



## jmbach

Hook up your EURS drive first and check it with hdparm. If it checks out okay than I think the best guess is that you will be okay. Personally if the EURS drive checked out ok, I would remove it and place the T4 drive there since the EURS apparently was not touched. Interesting that your Windows drive has the same HPA sector reporting issue that others are having. 

GigaByte brand motherboards maybe the sole culprit in the sector issue based on problems people are having on TCF. Some Googling indicates some versions of Lenovo and other brands may also do this as well. 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## MPSAN

unitron said:


> If it's not frozen up, I always only pull the plug after going into the menu and selecting restart the TiVo.
> 
> After hitting thumbs down 3 times I pull the plug right after hitting enter, before the welcome screen pops back up.
> 
> Some people put it in stand by, but this, as I recall, causes it to go back into standby after re-booting, and if you forgot, or did it to make a backup and forgot, then you wind up thinking the TiVo's broken.


Congressman...I mean Unitron...Your method is what TIVO told me to do with my THD's as well. They say that the THD is supposed to be OK if you just pull the plug, but to be sure they said to do a restart as you said.


----------



## unitron

Like jmbach said, I'd leave the TiVo drive away from the PC for now and hook up the EURS and run

wdparm -N /dev/sdc

just to see what it reports.

But not just yet.

That BIOS setting that's disabled I'd leave disabled, but you should check and see if the current version of the BIOS on that board is the latest for that board.

I googlestumbled across some GB HPA talk that said some boards had BIOS'es that had the disable option (mine don't, they're older), but there's a bug in the BIOS that prevents disabling from actually disabling.

Although if it weren't disabled I would have expected it to have HPA'ed the SSD

Anyway, check your BIOS version, check GB's website to see if there's a newer version, and google the board number and BIOS number to see if anybody mentions anything about the HPA problem.

You'll probably have to try several different combinations of the various pertinent search terms.


----------



## jmbach

unitron said:


> Although if it weren't disabled I would have expected it to have HPA'ed the SSD


It might be that his ssd is not in a true sata port. My laptop has it in a msata port. Some desktop motherboards also have msata ports for ssd cards. It might have to be in an actual sata port for it HPA'ed it. Perhaps it is the first normal sata drive it comes to in order to place and HPA on a drive.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## lpwcomp

MPSAN said:


> Congressman...I mean Unitron...Your method is what TIVO told me to do with my THD's as well. They say that the THD is supposed to be OK if you just pull the plug, but to be sure they said to do a restart as you said.


About the only time I pull the plug is when it is non-responsive. Makes it difficult to restart it before hand. I do use that method if I am planning to take a TiVo out of service for a while, like to move, upgrade, or repair it.

As far as putting it in standby is concerned, that is useless for this purpose even if it is responsive. It does not idle the drive at all.


----------



## Am_I_Evil

billbillw said:


> Upgrade complete with WD20EARX successful. Just ran WDIDLE3, set to 300. No jumper adjustments and everything seems to be working fine so far, 318 hrs!


upgraded to this drive last week...no issues until tonight...guess i should have tested it more or something...been running fine and now it seems to be crapping out...

and right at primetime...ugh...

in a premiere 4

the TiVo boots up fine...but the picture starts to get all distorted and just disappears...trying another restart (left it powered down for a bit to see if it helped)


----------



## jmbach

Am_I_Evil said:


> upgraded to this drive last week...no issues until tonight...guess i should have tested it more or something...been running fine and now it seems to be crapping out...
> 
> and right at primetime...ugh...
> 
> in a premiere 4
> 
> the TiVo boots up fine...but the picture starts to get all distorted and just disappears...trying another restart (left it powered down for a bit to see if it helped)


Might not be the drive. Try putting in the original drive. If it still has the problem then it is probably the Tivo unit.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## Am_I_Evil

seems ok since the second reboot...but no recordings going yet...

i've got some starting in a few so we'll see how it holds up...

edit: definitely not good...as soon as the recording started it lost signal...froze then grey screen...

something's definitely wrong...will try the original drive tomorrow to see what happens...i'm assuming if its the tivo i've screwed the warranty...i've also purchased lifetime...is it possible to return this to best buy and contact tivo to have lifetime moved or am i screwed and stuck with a bad box? (that is if its the box and not the drive...)


----------



## steve614

Am_I_Evil said:


> i'm assuming if its the tivo i've screwed the warranty...


If your upgraded drive never worked in the first place, there's a chance that it won't be an issue, as long as you have the original hard drive in place when you contact TiVo. YMMV.


----------



## Am_I_Evil

steve614 said:


> If your upgraded drive never worked in the first place, there's a chance that it won't be an issue, as long as you have the original hard drive in place when you contact TiVo. YMMV.


it worked since last friday...so just a little over a week...


----------



## Am_I_Evil

original drive back in...everything seems to be ok so far...2 recordings just started and everything seems to be ok...

guess i'll be heading out to microcenter and seeing if they'll let me exchange (if this thing keeps going)

edit: looks like i spoke to soon...definitely the tivo...

so what are my options here?


----------



## MapleLeaf

unitron said:


> Like jmbach said, I'd leave the TiVo drive away from the PC for now and hook up the EURS and run
> 
> wdparm -N /dev/sdc
> 
> just to see what it reports.
> 
> But not just yet.
> 
> That BIOS setting that's disabled I'd leave disabled, but you should check and see if the current version of the BIOS on that board is the latest for that board.
> 
> I googlestumbled across some GB HPA talk that said some boards had BIOS'es that had the disable option (mine don't, they're older), but there's a bug in the BIOS that prevents disabling from actually disabling.
> 
> Although if it weren't disabled I would have expected it to have HPA'ed the SSD
> 
> Anyway, check your BIOS version, check GB's website to see if there's a newer version, and google the board number and BIOS number to see if anybody mentions anything about the HPA problem.
> 
> You'll probably have to try several different combinations of the various pertinent search terms.


Unitron & jmbach,

Per your advice, I hooked up the WD20EURS (the target drive for my TP4 upgrade) to SATA port 2 and fired up the JMFS CD. It was assigned to /dev/sdc, and running hdparm against it reported the exact same thing as the WD20EARS (ie. "max sectors: 18446744073321613488/3907029168(1844674407332161613488?), HPA setting seems invalid").

I verified that my BIOS was up-to-date, and then after saying a few prayers, I bit the bullet and went ahead and hooked up the TP4 drive to SATA port 3 and booted the JMFS CD again.

And the upshot is... I got my panties in a bunch over nothing. 

The Tivo drive (a WD5000AVDS, BTW) was assigned to /dev/sdd as expected. It took just under three hours to copy, and then after expanding and supersizing the WD20EURS, I put it into the TP4 and fired it up. It booted up without issue, and it now shows I have 318 HD hours available! I played around with it a bit and manually recorded a show, and everything seems to be operating normally.

I never actually tried running hdparm on the original TP4 drive, so I'm not sure what it would have reported. To be honest, I wanted to do the minimum with the drive while it was hooked up to that Gigabyte motherboard, so the only things I did were the copy, expand, and supersize, and then I immediately powered down and pulled the drive back out. I've now stored it away for safekeeping.

Anyway, like I said, it seems I was overly paranoid and worried about nothing. Other than the weirdness with the hdparm output, the upgrade went smoothly and painlessly. Thanks very much for all your help!


----------



## unitron

Has everybody who's gotten the weird return on

hdparm -N

been running it off of the jmfs cd?

If I can work up the energy I'm going to try both that and the one on the MFS Live cd v1.4 to see if my still not in service 20EURS does it on either or both.

But when it comes to possibly screwing up a hard drive, *especially* a Premiere drive, there's no such thing as too paranoid.


----------



## billbillw

Am_I_Evil said:


> original drive back in...everything seems to be ok so far...2 recordings just started and everything seems to be ok...
> 
> guess i'll be heading out to microcenter and seeing if they'll let me exchange (if this thing keeps going)
> 
> edit: looks like i spoke to soon...definitely the tivo...
> 
> so what are my options here?


How long ago did you buy from Best Buy? I would take it back to them. They will probably exchange it and transfer the lifetime service to the new box. If they give you trouble, call Tivo. It is under warranty. Drive swap shouldn't affect that as long as the original drive is back in.


----------



## Am_I_Evil

billbillw said:


> How long ago did you buy from Best Buy? I would take it back to them. They will probably exchange it and transfer the lifetime service to the new box. If they give you trouble, call Tivo. It is under warranty. Drive swap shouldn't affect that as long as the original drive is back in.


exchanged at best buy...using new box now...will wait a few weeks before trying the 2tb upgrade again...


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
> 
> Go to the bottom of the page where it says mirror sites and choose one geographically close to you.
> 
> There's a rather small and unobstrusive donate button near the top of the page as well, if your budget has recovered from the holidays.


I clicked to download UBCD and ended up downloading 7zip? I try it again and get Zoom downloader? WTF How do I get the UBCD?


----------



## lpwcomp

pspens said:


> I clicked to download UBCD and ended up downloading 7zip? I try it again and get Zoom downloader? WTF How do I get the UBCD?


Are you sure it wasn't saying it would _*open*_ the iso with 7zip?


----------



## pspens

lpwcomp said:


> Are you sure it wasn't saying it would _*open*_ the iso with 7zip?


I think that's what it said but all it did was install 7zip. Then I tried it again and got Zoom downloader. Anyway, I found a site where I could download the iso file directly.

Now I've put the new drive in my computer and booted SLAX, but it's not seeing the new drive??

I booted up UBCD and did a diskinfo and it appears he found it.... I'm not actually sure how to get to the WD diagnostics. HDD, I suspect, but then. I would hate to do something wrong and wipe out my windows drive, which is sitting in the other bay.


----------



## pspens

Ok, I found the diagnostics for the WD drives. I ran the "quick test" and it failed, saying it couldn't find "test sectors"?

"missing test tracks"
error/status code: 0229

Does this mean my drive is junk?


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Ok, I found the diagnostics for the WD drives. I ran the "quick test" and it failed, saying it couldn't find "test sectors"?
> 
> "missing test tracks"
> error/status code: 0229
> 
> Does this mean my drive is junk?


On the UBCD, under hard drive, under diagnostics, there are two WD programs, be sure to choose the one for newer, larger, drives.

Also, you can go down in the main menu to where it says Parted Magic and launch that and it'll put you into a "Windows"-ish looking graphical interface.

There will be an icon on the left about mid-page or higher that says something about disk health, double click on that to launch it, see what it says about your drives and then (IIRC) right click on the particular drive and choose details.

It'll also offer a short, long, and "was this drive damaged in transit" test.

(actually those are tests built into the drive's SMART firmware, it just lets you get at them)


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> I clicked to download UBCD and ended up downloading 7zip? I try it again and get Zoom downloader? WTF How do I get the UBCD?


Okay, it had been a while and I forgot a small detail. At the bottom of that page where it says mirror sites, there are little icons just to the left of the names of the mirror sites.

Click on one of those.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> On the UBCD, under hard drive, under diagnostics, there are two WD programs, be sure to choose the one for newer, larger, drives.
> 
> Also, you can go down in the main menu to where it says Parted Magic and launch that and it'll put you into a "Windows"-ish looking graphical interface.
> 
> There will be an icon on the left about mid-page or higher that says something about disk health, double click on that to launch it, see what it says about your drives and then (IIRC) right click on the particular drive and choose details.
> 
> It'll also offer a short, long, and "was this drive damaged in transit" test.
> 
> (actually those are tests built into the drive's SMART firmware, it just lets you get at them)


 I got the interface you mentioned and clicked on "disk health". It says basic health check passed. A box with SMART enabled is checked. One with auto offline data collection is not checked. What now? Oh, and I did use the diagnostic for the larger drives.

I noticed in the menu some "tests" and I'm running one of them now. These are routines that evidently come with the drive. Is it possible that the version of Diagnostic on the UBCD can't handle advanced format drives?

The short self-test completed without error.
I'm running "extended" self-test now...


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> Okay, it had been a while and I forgot a small detail. At the bottom of that page where it says mirror sites, there are little icons just to the left of the names of the mirror sites.
> 
> Click on one of those.


Thanks, that would have saved me some time and head-scratching. As noted, I found a different site where I could download the .iso file directly.


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> I got the interface you mentioned and clicked on "disk health". It says basic health check passed. A box with SMART enabled is checked. One with auto offline data collection is not checked. What now? Oh, and I did use the diagnostic for the larger drives.
> 
> I noticed in the menu some "tests" and I'm running one of them now. These are routines that evidently come with the drive. Is it possible that the version of Diagnostic on the UBCD can't handle advanced format drives?
> 
> The short self-test completed without error.
> I'm running "extended" self-test now...


I've used the more recent of those WD programs within the past month or 3 on a WD20EURS and a couple of WD20EARXs without problem, so I don't know what happened in your situation.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> I've used the more recent of those WD programs within the past month or 3 on a WD20EURS and a couple of WD20EARXs without problem, so I don't know what happened in your situation.


Perhaps I got an older version of UBCD... I wasn't paying any attention to version. The next time I boot it, I'll check the version and see if it is the latest.


----------



## pspens

Extended test has completed without errors. It took over 6 hours to complete.
Conveyance test has completed without errors.

Does this mean I'm good to go?

The UBCD version is 5.2b1. Is this the lastest to anyone's knowledge?


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Extended test has completed without errors. It took over 6 hours to complete.
> Conveyance test has completed without errors.
> 
> Does this mean I'm good to go?
> 
> The UBCD version is 5.2b1. Is this the lastest to anyone's knowledge?


Considering that the UBCD site itself says

Current release: V5.1.1

I'm not sure what you got hold of, from where, or who's added what to it.

Suggest you go back to

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

go to the mirror site list on the bottom of the page, click on one of the little icons to the immediate left of the site you choose, and download 5.1.1 from there.

Once you burn it, try the WD short test again.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> Considering that the UBCD site itself says
> 
> Current release: V5.1.1
> 
> I'm not sure what you got hold of, from where, or who's added what to it.
> 
> .


Interesting. v. 5.1.1 is quite a bit smaller than the 5.2b1. So it looks like someone did, indeed, add something.

Quick test succeeded!!! 

Since the other extended test ran without errors, is there much value in running this extended test? Or are they the same thing?


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Interesting. v. 5.1.1 is quite a bit smaller than the 5.2b1. So it looks like someone did, indeed, add something.
> 
> Quick test succeeded!!!
> 
> Since the other extended test ran without errors, is there much value in running this extended test? Or are they the same thing?


I'd go ahead and do it, just to be on the safe side.

Speaking of being on the safe side, you might want to take that 5.2 cd and snap it in half to prevent it ever accidentally being used, since we don't know what else is on it.

I assume you still have the .iso for it on a hard drive somewhere, so if we ever find out it's legit you can burn another.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> I'd go ahead and do it, just to be on the safe side.
> 
> Speaking of being on the safe side, you might want to take that 5.2 cd and snap it in half to prevent it ever accidentally being used, since we don't know what else is on it.
> 
> I assume you still have the .iso for it on a hard drive somewhere, so if we ever find out it's legit you can burn another.


5.2 already ****canned.


----------



## pspens

I want to thank everyone here for helping me through this process. One thing I might mention is that after Expanding, you get a question, none of whose choices is "Supersize". I forget how it's stated, but you have to go back to the original menu to find the Supersize option.

Seagate 500 GB --> WD20EURS 2 TB.


----------



## 172pilot

Sorry if this has been answered - I admittedly didn't read ALL Of the 69 pages in this thread, but I read a good portion of it, and did some searches with no results.... so..

I've got a 2-tuner Premier that I upgraded to 1tb when I first got it several years ago. I have the original disk (hasn't ever even booted in the Tivo) so I do have a "backup plan", but now I've got probably 800g of shows saved, plus all the season passes and configs, and I'm seeing evidence that the hard drive might be going bad. Occasional freeze of video that eventually end up in the Tivo rebooting, etc.. so I'm thinking it's time to be a little bit proactive.

I'm assuming that I could pop the 1tb drive out, and use either the jmfs boot disk, or probably even just a basic dd command to clone this drive to another 1tb drive, but I'm wondering if the jmfs disk would let me expand again, say onto a 2tb (or larger?) disk?

Is there a limit to how many times you can expand with the jmfs?

I guess another related question would be whether there'd be a performance disadvantage to going to a larger disk - I remember on my old series 1 Tivo which started with a 13g disk that I upgraded to 500g or so, and at least my perception was that the GUI was less responsive with the big disk

Thanks in advance, and again, sorry if it's been answered elsewhere, but if I couldn't find it, perhaps this will help someone else find it later too??

-Steve


----------



## unitron

172pilot said:


> Sorry if this has been answered - I admittedly didn't read ALL Of the 69 pages in this thread, but I read a good portion of it, and did some searches with no results.... so..
> 
> I've got a 2-tuner Premier that I upgraded to 1tb when I first got it several years ago. I have the original disk (hasn't ever even booted in the Tivo) so I do have a "backup plan", but now I've got probably 800g of shows saved, plus all the season passes and configs, and I'm seeing evidence that the hard drive might be going bad. Occasional freeze of video that eventually end up in the Tivo rebooting, etc.. so I'm thinking it's time to be a little bit proactive.
> 
> I'm assuming that I could pop the 1tb drive out, and use either the jmfs boot disk, or probably even just a basic dd command to clone this drive to another 1tb drive, but I'm wondering if the jmfs disk would let me expand again, say onto a 2tb (or larger?) disk?
> 
> Is there a limit to how many times you can expand with the jmfs?
> 
> I guess another related question would be whether there'd be a performance disadvantage to going to a larger disk - I remember on my old series 1 Tivo which started with a 13g disk that I upgraded to 500g or so, and at least my perception was that the GUI was less responsive with the big disk
> 
> Thanks in advance, and again, sorry if it's been answered elsewhere, but if I couldn't find it, perhaps this will help someone else find it later too??
> 
> -Steve


You could pick up a WD20EURS and then "Xerox" that 1TB onto it with

ddrescue

which is what jmfs uses, or

dd_rescue

a similar utility found on the MFS Live cd v1.4 (which is handy to have a copy of).

Either way, the bootpage and partition map will be cloned, so the TiVo will think it's still a 1TB drive.

As for expanding, I've never seen any indication anywhere that jmfs is anything other than a one-time deal.

You could use it to copy the original 320GB to the 2TB and expand, but of course that wouldn't save the shows on the 1TB.

There may be someone somewhere who knows how to copy the 1TB to a 2TB and do some fancy hex editing to enlarge that last partition which jmfs put on the 1TB in such a way that the TiVo will accept it, but I haven't seen anything anywhere about anyone having actually done that.


----------



## mattack

Apparently no TiVo can even BOOT with a drive bigger than 2 TB in it, even if the filesystem on it only thinks its 2 TB. So at some point we're going to be stuck when < 2 TB drives become scarce.


----------



## retiredqwest

172pilot said:


> Sorry if this has been answered - I admittedly didn't read ALL Of the 69 pages in this thread, but I read a good portion of it, and did some searches with no results.... so..
> 
> I've got a 2-tuner Premier that I upgraded to 1tb when I first got it several years ago. I have the original disk (hasn't ever even booted in the Tivo) so I do have a "backup plan", but now I've got probably 800g of shows saved, plus all the season passes and configs, and I'm seeing evidence that the hard drive might be going bad. Occasional freeze of video that eventually end up in the Tivo rebooting, etc.. so I'm thinking it's time to be a little bit proactive.
> 
> I'm assuming that I could pop the 1tb drive out, and use either the jmfs boot disk, or probably even just a basic dd command to clone this drive to another 1tb drive, but I'm wondering if the jmfs disk would let me expand again, say onto a 2tb (or larger?) disk?
> 
> Is there a limit to how many times you can expand with the jmfs?
> 
> I guess another related question would be whether there'd be a performance disadvantage to going to a larger disk - I remember on my old series 1 Tivo which started with a 13g disk that I upgraded to 500g or so, and at least my perception was that the GUI was less responsive with the big disk
> 
> Thanks in advance, and again, sorry if it's been answered elsewhere, but if I couldn't find it, perhaps this will help someone else find it later too??
> 
> -Steve


IF it is a stock TP 320G drive AND you used JMFS to create the 1TB. Yes, you can go from the 1TB to a 2TB. It will take 8-10 hrs to copy though.

Tivo's partitions are what determine the amount of times JMFS can copy and expand your TP. Stock it has 14 partitions, JMFS adds 1 partition every time you do an expand. So you get 1 more expand to achieve the max of 16 partitions that the Tivo will work with.

If you bought the 1TB from a dealer.... That would require further details to check on the amount of partitions on that drive.


----------



## jmbach

retiredqwest said:


> IF it is a stock TP 320G drive AND you used JMFS to create the 1TB. Yes, you can go from the 1TB to a 2TB. It will take 8-10 hrs to copy though.
> 
> Tivo's partitions are what determine the amount of times JMFS can copy and expand your TP. Stock it has 14 partitions, JMFS adds 1 partition every time you do an expand. So you get 1 more expand to achieve the max of 16 partitions that the Tivo will work with.
> 
> If you bought the 1TB from a dealer.... That would require further details to check on the amount of partitions on that drive.


It is true that JMFS may add a partition (this is definitely true if the 15th partition is an Apple_Free partition) but a premiere TiVo will remove any partition number over 15 from its superheader which effectively making the partition unusable by the Tivo. If you check the partition map it will still be there.

Getting a 2TB and let JMFS copy and expand from your 1TB and report back. It is quite possible that it may just make the third partition larger. I have not looked into that yet so I am not sure of the behavior of JMFS in that situation.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## jmbach

On a different note I see that JMFS source also has windows batch files to run JMFS. At least that's what it looks like. Just not sure how to set up the directory and environment structure to see if it does work in Windows. Java based applications should work quasi universally if the hardware and java version requirements are met. Anybody with any ideas. 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## RKofCAL

Hi all,

The jmfs procedure provided by comer appears to require that the new drive be larger than the existing TiVo drive (at least that's the way I'm interpreting the specific instructions). 

Is this really a requirement? My new TiVo shipped with a 2TB drive and I would like to produce a backup drive with some initialization (such as cable card pairing) but I am already at the size limit. My target drive would be the Western Digital WD20EURS 2TB drive.


----------



## unitron

RKofCAL said:


> Hi all,
> 
> The jmfs procedure provided by comer appears to require that the new drive be larger than the existing TiVo drive (at least that's the way I'm interpreting the specific instructions).
> 
> Is this really a requirement? My new TiVo shipped with a 2TB drive and I would like to produce a backup drive with some initialization (such as cable card pairing) but I am already at the size limit. My target drive would be the Western Digital WD20EURS 2TB drive.


jmfs does two things.

It uses

ddrescue

to copy the source drive to the target.

Then, if you tell it to, it'll expand into additional space by adding a single MFS Media partition, and adjusting all of the other partions to make them aware of it.

All you need is the first step.

(You could also do it with

dd_rescue

which is available on the MFS Live cd v1.4)

You do need to make sure that the LBA number of the EURS is as large (or larger) as the LBA number of the TiVo's drive.

And you should run the WD diagnostics long test on the EURS first to make sure there's nothing wrong with it before doing the copy, just to be on the safe side.


----------



## RKofCAL

unitron said:


> jmfs does two things.
> 
> It uses
> 
> ddrescue
> 
> to copy the source drive to the target.
> 
> Then, if you tell it to, it'll expand into additional space by adding a single MFS Media partition, and adjusting all of the other partions to make them aware of it.
> 
> All you need is the first step.
> 
> (You could also do it with
> 
> dd_rescue
> 
> which is available on the MFS Live cd v1.4)
> 
> You do need to make sure that the LBA number of the EURS is as large (or larger) as the LBA number of the TiVo's drive.
> 
> And you should run the WD diagnostics long test on the EURS first to make sure there's nothing wrong with it before doing the copy, just to be on the safe side.


Thanks, one small follow-up question. I have never used this program, so I have no idea what it can do in terms of drive identification. Since the two drives are of equal size, would one be able to tell which is the proper source drive loaded with the TiVo OS and which is the new blank?


----------



## unitron

RKofCAL said:


> Thanks, one small follow-up question. I have never used this program, so I have no idea what it can do in terms of drive identification. Since the two drives are of equal size, would one be able to tell which is the proper source drive loaded with the TiVo OS and which is the new blank?


First of all, we need to be sure your PC doesn't have a GigaByte brand motherboard, since if it does there are special precautions to be taken before letting a TiVo drive get anywhere near it.

There's something (although I don't know exactly what) about Series 4 and (apparently by lucky accident) later model Series 3 TiVo drives for which jmfs knows to look, and when it boots up if it finds one it'll offer to let you copy it to another drive.

Be sure you tell it to copy to the empty 2TB and not your Windows drive.

If you're worried about not knowing which drive is which, go back and read the first comment again

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8143047#post8143047

where it talks about using

fdisk

and

hdparm

As long as you don't have more than one of the same model number hard drive attached to the computer you should be able to tell them apart.


----------



## retiredqwest

retiredqwest said:


> IF it is a stock TP 320G drive AND you used JMFS to create the 1TB. Yes, you can go from the 1TB to a 2TB. It will take 8-10 hrs to copy though.
> 
> Tivo's partitions are what determine the amount of times JMFS can copy and expand your TP. Stock it has 14 partitions, JMFS adds 1 partition every time you do an expand. So you get 1 more expand to achieve the max of 16 partitions that the Tivo will work with.
> 
> If you bought the 1TB from a dealer.... That would require further details to check on the amount of partitions on that drive.


WOW, I stand or sit corrected......

I just tried this the 320G to 1 1TB, then the 1TB to a 2TB. And shure enuff the TP asked if I wanted to divorce the external. And I cudda sworn I tried this at least once before.

So I guess you only get one shot at expanding an S4. And Weaknees and DVR-DUDE are wrong about the max 16 partitions in a S4. Unless they have some way around this.


----------



## retiredqwest

RKofCAL said:


> Hi all,
> 
> The jmfs procedure provided by comer appears to require that the new drive be larger than the existing TiVo drive (at least that's the way I'm interpreting the specific instructions).
> 
> Is this really a requirement? My new TiVo shipped with a 2TB drive and I would like to produce a backup drive with some initialization (such as cable card pairing) but I am already at the size limit. My target drive would be the Western Digital WD20EURS 2TB drive.


You won't have a problem as long as the target drive is the same model # as the source. And JMFS will squawk if the target drive is too small.

Hook up the source and target drives, run JMFS. It will look for a drive with the MFS O.S. on them. If it only shows one drive you should be good to go. IF it shows 2 drives, flip a coin.

NOOOOO. The best way to find out is write down the drive serial numbers.

eXit out of the JMFS menu and type this command "hdparm -I /dev/sda" (thats an uppercase I), after the screen stops scrolling use <shift> <page up> <page down> to scroll the screen output. Scroll up the screen and at the beginng you will find the drive serial number, write down which S/N is sda. Do it again using "hdparm -I /dev/sdb" and write down which S/N is sdb.

You don't need to reboot to get back to the guide, just type "/root/guide.sh" and go from there.

When you select the copy function the /dev/sda or dev/sdb will be on the same line as the drive info.

AND be prepared..... it takes 18 hours to copy the 2TB to a 2TB..... I know.


----------



## boshk

hi all, 
i am trying to create the bootable USB drive for JMFS using the Universal USB installer. every time i boot with the USB i get an 
"ERROR: no configuration file found
no defualt or UI configuration directive found"

anyone have any idea what to do to fix that?


----------



## jmbach

boshk said:


> hi all,
> i am trying to create the bootable USB drive for JMFS using the Universal USB installer. every time i boot with the USB i get an
> "ERROR: no configuration file found
> no defualt or UI configuration directive found"
> 
> anyone have any idea what to do to fix that?


Hmmm. I have used unetbootin to create bootable USB with JMFS iso. Only time I had a similar problem was when one of my USB sticks went bad. I could not boot with it anymore but could still use it otherwise. Not sure why.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## sbourgeo

I also used UNetbootin to create a bootable JMFS USB drive with no issues. It was an old 8 GB Crucial stick I had hanging around if that helps at all.


----------



## Ziggy86

Is there a youtube video that shows how to make a backup drive for a tivo premiere?


----------



## sbourgeo




----------



## boshk

boshk said:


> hi all,
> i am trying to create the bootable USB drive for JMFS using the Universal USB installer. every time i boot with the USB i get an
> "ERROR: no configuration file found
> no defualt or UI configuration directive found"
> 
> anyone have any idea what to do to fix that?


never mind, i am just a moron. it was a long night and i was trying to make a boot disk from the .iso.zip instead of extracting the .iso and then creating it... once i got that working, upgrading my premiere 4 from 500gb to 2tb was pretty foolproof.


----------



## pspens

comer said:


> *revision 104 - Nov-06-2010 - with Supersize!*
> 
> ***WARNING***
> 
> *Software is provided with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. Please read the licence terms (GPL v3).*
> *Opening your Tivo cover will void manufacturer's warranty.*
> *Although program is not designed to do (and actually attempts to prevent) data loss and distruction, it certainly has a potential to do so. It is ultimately YOUR responsibility to backup, stow away and otherwise protect your data.*
> 
> If you like my work, buy me a beer... or milk... or a harddrive
> 
> *OVERVIEW*
> This is a bootable Linux CD based on Slax distribution. It includes all software tools known to make a harddrive larger than the standard work in Tivo Premiere with expanded capacity.
> Basic usage, suitable for most users who only want to expand their Tivo disk capacity, is fully *guided*, based on simple prompt-choice automated *script*.
> 
> *Once again, for clarity's sake, if youd don't want to tinker, experiment and/or dig in the code or Tivo, the "USAGE BASIC" and some hardware is enough to set you up with larger Tivo Premiere drive!
> *
> *It was ONLY TESTED ON PREMIERE DISK. Also, it was not tested and probably will not work on multi-disk configurations.*
> 
> The full procedure of making a larger Tivo Premiere disk contains the following:
> 
> Taking the original disk out of the Tivo
> Copying the original disk onto a new larger one
> Doing modifications of structures on the new disk to make extra space available for Tivo
> Installing the new disk back into Tivo.
> This CD helps in doing steps #2 and #3 of this procedure.​
> *DOWNLOAD*
> Current: *Download link* (*Mirror* thanks *coold8*! :up
> MD5 checksum:
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> a5ef24d6841f75c5c5cfd5fd703f6069 *./jmfs-rev104.iso.zip
> 
> Previous: *Download link* (*Mirror* courtesy of *coold8* as well)
> MD5 checksum:
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> c6241f5838cf5d1f4b451229b184f031 *./jmfs-rev68.iso.zip


I wish I could figure out what's going on when I try to download the src. When I go to the mediafire site, I see the two jmfs files there. I click on the src one and I keep getting a screen with a capcha code and a large download button. When I put in the code and click download, it turns out I'm downloading something else.. (different things none of which I want.) Is there some magic to using this site? Do you have to register for it or something?


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> I wish I could figure out what's going on when I try to download the src. When I go to the mediafire site, I see the two jmfs files there. I click on the src one and I keep getting a screen with a capcha code and a large download button. When I put in the code and click download, it turns out I'm downloading something else.. (different things none of which I want.) Is there some magic to using this site? Do you have to register for it or something?


Free download services have to be paid for somehow.

In this case they put up stuff for those who don't know any better to click on to be led to something where they might spend some money.

Right click on this link

http://www.mediafire.com/?pfc9n8o30tc64

which is the first one given in the first post of this thread (the mirror sites seem to have gone belly up)

and click on open in new tab or on open in new window

It helps if you have flashblock installed.

Once you kill the extra pages that get launched you should get to one with the filename in a box in the middle and a download button right below it.

Of course there'll be other stuff on the page meant to distract you and trick you away.

If you're downloading the right think you should get a small gray box popping up that asks if you want to open the file or save it, and it'll have a dropdown box to let you choose where to save it.

If you get something else, kill it and try again.

If it never works, come back and say so and I'll PM you a link.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> Free download services have to be paid for somehow.
> 
> If it never works, come back and say so and I'll PM you a link.


This is the page I get:

I attached a jpg file...


----------



## pspens

This is the 2nd page I get when I click on the src file:

again, attaching...


----------



## pspens

pspens said:


> This is the 2nd page I get when I click on the src file:
> 
> again, attaching...


Son of a gun, I clicked on the green download and it worked this time! I'm pretty sure I tried this before... oh well, I've got the file now... thanks!


----------



## alaska man

found this while searching for expanded storage for tivo. 
i put a WD RED 2T disc ($120.00 shipped ) in;
copied, expanded and supersized. 
fired her up and bam, she works. 
did the job on my 1st gen intel mac pro, used two of the hard drive bays and easy peasy. 
thanks comer. buy that person a beer:up:


----------



## unitron

alaska man said:


> found this while searching for expanded storage for tivo.
> i put a WD RED 2T disc ($120.00 shipped ) in;
> copied, expanded and supersized.
> fired her up and bam, she works.
> did the job on my 1st gen intel mac pro, used two of the hard drive bays and easy peasy.
> thanks comer. buy that person a beer:up:


As it happens, in post #1 of this thread, Comer has a Donate button.

I may have to look into getting one of those myself.


----------



## Ziggy86

I have a Premiere Elite and want to create a backup drive in case my current one crashes. I have two questions.

1. which drive have people been using with good results with the Premiere elite.

2. Will Jmfs still work with these new TiVo units or are there different steps to follow?

Thank you for your help.


----------



## ntrance

ggieseke, I would like to try your compressed Premiere image. I just bought a Premiere without a hard drive installed, and this seems like the easiest way for me to get it working. I can't PM as I don't have enough posts yet.


----------



## rafaelvelasquez2

Hi fellas, 
I recently have been having issues with not enough space on my TiVo Premiere. I came across this site and have been reading and researching for hours now and I think I want to go this route to updating the internal memory in my premier. However, in my hours of searching I could not find a list of current compatible hard drives and thought I should just ask you guys, the professionals.

My question is...Will the WD My Book 2T External hard drive (WDBACW0020HBK-NESN) work for my upgrading needs? (After ripping it apart to get to the drive of course.)

or the....

Fantom GreenDrive Pro 2 TB USB 2.0/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive 32 MB Cache (GDP2000EU)


----------



## unitron

rafaelvelasquez2 said:


> Hi fellas,
> I recently have been having issues with not enough space on my TiVo Premiere. I came across this site and have been reading and researching for hours now and I think I want to go this route to updating the internal memory in my premier. However, in my hours of searching I could not find a list of current compatible hard drives and thought I should just ask you guys, the professionals.
> 
> My question is...Will the WD My Book 2T External hard drive (WDBACW0020HBK-NESN) work for my upgrading needs? (After ripping it apart to get to the drive of course.)
> 
> or the....
> 
> Fantom GreenDrive Pro 2 TB USB 2.0/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive 32 MB Cache (GDP2000EU)


Just wait for the next time newegg and Amazon drop the WD20EURS to $100 and grab one.

3 year warranty, designed for AV applications.


----------



## rafaelvelasquez2

unitron said:


> Just wait for the next time newegg and Amazon drop the WD20EURS to $100 and grab one.
> 
> 3 year warranty, designed for AV applications.


So that WD20EURS would be the best of the best and what everybody should try to get first before looking at other options?


----------



## unitron

rafaelvelasquez2 said:


> So that WD20EURS would be the best of the best and what everybody should try to get first before looking at other options?


I'm just another TiVo user, not a hard drive engineer, but it's my first choice.


----------



## rafaelvelasquez2

unitron said:


> I'm just another TiVo user, not a hard drive engineer, but it's my first choice.


Thank you for the info. Amazon has got it for $111 right now so I'm gonna get it. In 2-3 days, if all goes well, I should be back here to report some good news. Thanks again.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2


----------



## ggieseke

ntrance said:


> ggieseke, I would like to try your compressed Premiere image. I just bought a Premiere without a hard drive installed, and this seems like the easiest way for me to get it working. I can't PM as I don't have enough posts yet.


What model number is it? The only image I have so far is for a TCD 746320, which should work fine on any 746 series. A few others like jmbach have gotten it to work on a 748 series because it recognizes that it has the wrong (or possibly outdated) software and updates itself, but there still may be some issues there - we're not sure yet.


----------



## ntrance

That's the model I have, tcd746320.


----------



## ggieseke

ntrance said:


> That's the model I have, tcd746320.


PM sent.


----------



## pspens

netringer said:


> MFSCOPY on the JMFS tool or Live MFS or WinMFS for that matter will work, any Linux Live CD will do it with dd.
> 
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024
> 
> _(In from disk a, out to disk b)_
> 
> BUT I'll bet you don't have a bad disk. Mine has done the freeze/reboot dance and I'm thinking the disk is OK. After I restarted to TV to clear HDCP confusion, my Premiere has stayed up but I've still gotten signs of impending failure with drops and slowdowns.
> 
> One suggestion so far has to been to see how solid the operation is when you keep the Ethernet cable unplugged as much as possible - with the SD menus. The HD menus will complain endlessly about no net access.


Is the blocksize option on the dd command important when you're cloning a disk?


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Is the blocksize option on the dd command important when you're cloning a disk?


That depends on whether the source drive is in good shape or not.

Although if it has any problems at all you're better off using

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

but to go back to your original question, the larger the block size specified the fewer reads and writes will be necessary and that means you'll be done sooner.

As long as you don't set the block size too high.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> That depends on whether the source drive is in good shape or not.
> 
> Although if it has any problems at all you're better off using
> 
> dd_rescue
> 
> or
> 
> ddrescue
> 
> but to go back to your original question, the larger the block size specified the fewer reads and writes will be necessary and that means you'll be done sooner.
> 
> As long as you don't set the block size too high.


Well my source drive is in good shape. I did a clone with no parameters of a 1.5 TB disk and it took over 16 hours. The new drive is still questionable to me even though I ran all the tests I could and they all passed. BTW, this was a clone of Windows 7 c: drive. The resulting drive was not bootable and I think I may know why. There is probably a security mechanism related to Windows licensing that encodes something specific about the drive, such as the S/N, so that someone couldn't just clone drives and sell them. I ended up trying dd because the Acronis cloning software which came with the drive (DOM 2009) failed with the error "MFT bitmap corrupted". I ran chkdsk on my c: drive and received no errors, so I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact I'm running Windows 7 and the software Acronis software's date was sometime during Vista and something in the Windows 7 environment broke it. I'll probably call Seagate tomorrow if I can't find a resolution on my own. BTW, dd_rescue and ddrescue; there are 2 different utilities? When I saw someone write dd_rescue, I thought they just made a typo.


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> Well my source drive is in good shape. I did a clone with no parameters of a 1.5 TB disk and it took over 16 hours. The new drive is still questionable to me even though I ran all the tests I could and they all passed. BTW, this was a clone of Windows 7 c: drive. The resulting drive was not bootable and I think I may know why. There is probably a security mechanism related to Windows licensing that encodes something specific about the drive, such as the S/N, so that someone couldn't just clone drives and sell them. I ended up trying dd because the Acronis cloning software which came with the drive (DOM 2009) failed with the error "MFT bitmap corrupted". I ran chkdsk on my c: drive and received no errors, so I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact I'm running Windows 7 and the software Acronis software's date was sometime during Vista and something in the Windows 7 environment broke it. I'll probably call Seagate tomorrow if I can't find a resolution on my own. BTW, dd_rescue and ddrescue; there are 2 different utilities? When I saw someone write dd_rescue, I thought they just made a typo.


Is/was there a GigaByte brand motherboard involved in any of this?

Did you do the non-bootable cloning inside of Windows?

dd

is a Unix command line utility that actually came from somewhere else, which is why the syntax is different from most of the Unix command line stuff.

It's available on just about any of the bootable Linux environment cd's.

The Linux command line utility

dd_rescue

is on the MFS Live cd, and is much more flexible than

dd

Another Linux command line utility is

ddrescue

which is apparently what the jmfs cd uses for the copy part of what it does.

It, too, is more flexible than

dd

You might find

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

to be interesting reading.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> Is/was there a GigaByte brand motherboard involved in any of this?


No, thank god. I read about those nightmares in this thread.



> Did you do the non-bootable cloning inside of Windows?


No, I booted to SLAX.



> dd
> 
> is a Unix command line utility that actually came from somewhere else, which is why the syntax is different from most of the Unix command line stuff.
> 
> It's available on just about any of the bootable Linux environment cd's.
> 
> The Linux command line utility
> 
> dd_rescue
> 
> is on the MFS Live cd, and is much more flexible than
> 
> dd
> 
> Another Linux command line utility is
> 
> ddrescue
> 
> which is apparently what the jmfs cd uses for the copy part of what it does.
> 
> It, too, is more flexible than
> 
> dd
> 
> You might find
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
> 
> to be interesting reading.


Thanks. I know this is the wrong thread to be discussing cloning a Windows 7 drive... I appreciate the patience.


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> No, thank god. I read about those nightmares in this thread.
> 
> No, I booted to SLAX.
> 
> Thanks. I know this is the wrong thread to be discussing cloning a Windows 7 drive... I appreciate the patience.


Maybe it's got something to do with the whole advanced format and GPT instead of an MBR thing.

Other than that, I got nothin'.

Unless it boots enough to read the S.M.A.R.T. data, including drive model and serial number, and realize that it's not on the same drive on which it was originally installed and balks at that, though I'd expect it to give you some kind of screen saying you had to re-validate the installation or something.

Okay, now I really got nothin'.


----------



## pspens

unitron said:


> Maybe it's got something to do with the whole advanced format and GPT instead of an MBR thing.
> 
> Other than that, I got nothin'.
> 
> Unless it boots enough to read the S.M.A.R.T. data, including drive model and serial number, and realize that it's not on the same drive on which it was originally installed and balks at that, though I'd expect it to give you some kind of screen saying you had to re-validate the installation or something.
> 
> Okay, now I really got nothin'.


The manual which came with the DiskWizard software indicates that during cloning under Vista, the Vista OS disk will be needed for security purposes. Since Windows 7 is just an upgrade of Vista, I suspect the same thing would be true if I had the right version of DiskWizard. Therefore, merely cloning the disk leaves something out, some piece of security verification that I truly own the Windows 7 which I'm copying. BTW, other than not being bootable, the disk looks identical to the original. dd reported no errors. Also interesting is dd runs silently and there does not seem to be a switch to have it do otherwise, so once I executed the dd command, it just sat there for 16 hours doing its thing with no output to the screen.


----------



## unitron

pspens said:


> The manual which came with the DiskWizard software indicates that during cloning under Vista, the Vista OS disk will be needed for security purposes. Since Windows 7 is just an upgrade of Vista, I suspect the same thing would be true if I had the right version of DiskWizard. Therefore, merely cloning the disk leaves something out, some piece of security verification that I truly own the Windows 7 which I'm copying. BTW, other than not being bootable, the disk looks identical to the original. dd reported no errors. Also interesting is dd runs silently and there does not seem to be a switch to have it do otherwise, so once I executed the dd command, it just sat there for 16 hours doing its thing with no output to the screen.


Whereas

dd_rescue

has a verbose option

-v

which causes it to constantly be putting updated figures on the screen.

ddrescue

probably does as well, but I don't have any experience with it to speak of.


----------



## pspens

Ok, now I am a little confused. I went to Seagate and downloaded their latest DiskWizard software. I ran the clone option and this time didn't get that bogus error (MFT bitmap corrupted). It went ahead and cloned the disk for me and it is bootable! However, it did NOT ask me for any verification of ownership of the OS. So, either

1) dd should have worked, or
2) DiskWizard is automagically doing something that makes the drive bootable.


----------



## ntrance

ggieseke said:


> What model number is it? The only image I have so far is for a TCD 746320, which should work fine on any 746 series. A few others like jmbach have gotten it to work on a 748 series because it recognizes that it has the wrong (or possibly outdated) software and updates itself, but there still may be some issues there - we're not sure yet.


Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.


----------



## unitron

ntrance said:


> Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.


May we presume you used the jmfs cd to do the expansion?

Pity you didn't use a 2TB drive, as it's a one-shot only deal.


----------



## ntrance

unitron said:


> May we presume you used the jmfs cd to do the expansion?
> 
> Pity you didn't use a 2TB drive, as it's a one-shot only deal.


Correct, I used the jmfs cd to expand/super size. The 1tb drive was one I had handy for trying it out. I may use a 2tb drive instead.


----------



## ggieseke

ntrance said:


> Thanks for the image! It worked great. I was also able to expand it to a 1tb drive. I wasn't able to copy the image to the disk until I ran the Windows Command Prompt as administrator. I also had to Clear and Delete Everything so that it had the correct Tivo Service Number instead of zeros.


Glad it worked. That software is basically just the Windows equivalent of dd with a Microsoft dynamically expanding VHD as the target drive. Since the "amost virgin" source drive the image was based on still had huge chunks of space with all zeroes it compressed down fairly well.

Running it as administrator and doing a C&DE afterward is normal.

The next generation is still a work in progress but it's almost there. It can take any Premiere drive (even a 2TB XL4 with months of recordings) down to about 2.7GB, and zipping the resulting image knocks off another 30-40 percent. Once I tweak the "What Not to Backup" code a little further and run a lot more tests it should be ready.


----------



## ldmattice

I was going to use JMFS Live 104 Boot CD to upgrade my drive, but I get no Video (or it hangs, can't tell) on boot up.

I have an ASUS M5A88-M MOBO with integrated video. I tried going back to factory setting on the board, but no luck. I see the linux loading message (first two lines) then nothing.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!


----------



## unitron

ldmattice said:


> I was going to use JMFS Live 104 Boot CD to upgrade my drive, but I get no Video (or it hangs, can't tell) on boot up.
> 
> I have an ASUS M5A88-M MOBO with integrated video. I tried going back to factory setting on the board, but no luck. I see the linux loading message (first two lines) then nothing.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks!


See if the MFS Live cd v1.4 and the Ultimate Boot cd will boot on that board.

Then we'll have more info.

And you should have those cd's on hand for GP anyway.


----------



## ldmattice

Thanks for the quick reply!

I had an MFS 1.4 CD available and it only boots part way in text mode. Here are the last few lines .....

Intel machine check reporting enabled on CPU#0.
using C1E aware idle routine
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
ACPI: Core revision 20080926
weird, boot CPU (#0) not listedby the BIOS.
..TIMER: vector=0x30 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1
CPU0: AMD FX(tm)-4100 Quad-Core Processor
Booting processor 1 APIC 0x10 ip 0x6000 

I will try ubcd shortly.

I have tried disabling APIC and shutting down two of the four cores with no luck.

Thanks in adavance for any more suggestions.


----------



## unitron

I think there are some motherboards, especially AMD CPU ones, that just don't like Live Linux.


----------



## magnus

Has anyone figured out how to make a truncated backup of a Premiere yet?


----------



## unitron

magnus said:


> Has anyone figured out how to make a truncated backup of a Premiere yet?


I think the compressed backup of a virgin image that's enjoying some experimental success remains the only alternative so far to overwriting with a second drive.


----------



## AintHurtinNobody

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


ggieseke

I was pointed to this thread....I'd love to get that image for the TCD746320. My drive got jacked, I was about to just put it in the PC, so I'm not going to do any harm. Happy to be a guinea pig.

Let me know if there's a way to get it...and BTW, if you PM me, I can't reply yet, as this is post No. 2.


----------



## ggieseke

AintHurtinNobody said:


> ggieseke
> 
> I was pointed to this thread....I'd love to get that image for the TCD746320. My drive got jacked, I was about to just put it in the PC, so I'm not going to do any harm. Happy to be a guinea pig.
> 
> Let me know if there's a way to get it...and BTW, if you PM me, I can't reply yet, as this is post No. 2.


PM sent.


----------



## ggieseke

magnus said:


> Has anyone figured out how to make a truncated backup of a Premiere yet?


I should have something out in a week or two.


----------



## drvanhook

question about upgrade options...bought a new-to-me Premiere that has the original 320 GB drive in it...have to do a "clear and delete" anyways to set it up for us, was thinking to just upgrade it to a 2TB before we start using it as our primary family tivo...so at this point there are NO recordings or settings I need to preserve, could either buy a blank WD20EURS drive and follow the steps in post 1 OR buy a pre-configured drive for around $70extra...

came across DVR-Dude's ebay listings for pre-configured drives, and was wondering if all the "why my image is the best" details were just hype/"buzz words", or if his pre-configured drive really would perform better than what I'd have if I did it myself?

anyone have any metrics? or details on how/why his image differs from what you get by following the steps in this thread? or the preconfigured drives from weaknees or anyone else for that matter?

I have no problem cracking my computer open and doing the upgrade per post 1, as I did the upgrade for my HD Tivo myself, but it does seem to run a tad slower after the upgrade, but if there IS an actual performance improvement with his image, I'd have no problem paying the extra $70 to buy his ready-to-go drive and save my time...

thanks for any info!


----------



## AintHurtinNobody

Big, big props to ggieseke...his image restored my Premiere to working order.

I may end up having to replace the drive, as WD diagnostics found errors, then errored out at the end of fixing them and errored when I tried to do a quick test after that. But all that aside, the image worked, and it's back up and running.


----------



## ringo->

Trying to get the W off my arse... ;-) She uses tivo and has a Tivo Premier Series 4 HD model: TCD746320 with a cable card. Of course right over a year old and just went into Green Screen loop. Have left on over night twice and just keeps rebooting Green Screen. From what I have read this means Drive NG. She's addicted to this thing so now I am hearing about it. I was actually about to upgrade the drive to a 2TB and had already purchased the drive and reading about the process to upgrade when this happened. Hadn't touched the tivo yet when this happened. Since it was already not working I went ahead and pulled the drive and made the iso from this latest rev104.iso booted up with the iso and the old tivo drive that green screen'd and the new 2TB drive. It boots up and says no Tivo drive found. Any way to get a good image to upload to this new drive or a way to pull/fix the old drive to transfer to this new drive? Looking for any advice on where to proceed with this tivo to get it going again. Thanks.


----------



## lessd

ringo-> said:


> Trying to get the W off my arse... ;-) She uses tivo and has a Tivo Premier Series 4 HD model: TCD746320 with a cable card. Of course right over a year old and just went into Green Screen loop. Have left on over night twice and just keeps rebooting Green Screen. From what I have read this means Drive NG. She's addicted to this thing so now I am hearing about it. I was actually about to upgrade the drive to a 2TB and had already purchased the drive and reading about the process to upgrade when this happened. Hadn't touched the tivo yet when this happened. Since it was already not working I went ahead and pulled the drive and made the iso from this latest rev104.iso booted up with the iso and the old tivo drive that green screen'd and the new 2TB drive. It boots up and says no Tivo drive found. Any way to get a good image to upload to this new drive or a way to pull/fix the old drive to transfer to this new drive? Looking for any advice on where to proceed with this tivo to get it going again. Thanks.


Unless you have a friend with the same model TiVo you are out of luck as a do-it -yourself project, you will have to purchase a formatted drive off E-Bay or weaknees.


----------



## unitron

lessd said:


> Unless you have a friend with the same model TiVo you are out of luck as a do-it -yourself project, you will have to purchase a formatted drive off E-Bay or weaknees.


I think someone around here has produced a compressed image of a virgin drive from that model.


----------



## lessd

unitron said:


> I think someone around here has produced a compressed image of a virgin drive from that model.


Its being worked on, it will ready in a few weeks +-, as I do not see a link to it and it is big for download 2+ G, but for some better than nothing.


----------



## lpwcomp

lessd said:


> Its being worked on, it will ready in a few weeks +-, as I do not see a link to it and it is big for download 2+ G, but for some better than nothing.


What's being worked on is a _*truncated*_ image. The @2GB _*compressed*_ image has already been created and tested. Or at least that is _*my*_ understanding of the current situation.


----------



## jmbach

lpwcomp said:


> What's being worked on is a _*truncated*_ image. The @2GB _*compressed*_ image has already been created and tested. Or at least that is _*my*_ understanding of the current situation.


You are correct. Looks like we have a successful truncated image as well. It is about the same size as the virgin image compressed. Ggieseke is now working on a gui interface. Works only in Windows at this time.


----------



## Leon WIlkinson

ggieseke said:


> I should have something out in a week or two.


That would be cool, I have a 2 Tb drive ready to upgrade has of tomorrow.


----------



## ggieseke

Ringo->,

PM sent. Read it carefully - the existing command line program will overwrite your Windows drive without hesitating if you get the syntax wrong. The download is big and my DSL sux, so expect it to take at least 6-8 hours.

Leon,

I'm working on it. I want the release to be as safe and intuitive to use as Guided Setup but my UI skills are sadly lacking.


----------



## Leon WIlkinson

Safer is better, I'd hate to hire a hitman.


----------



## ringo->

ggieseke said:


> Ringo->,
> 
> PM sent. Read it carefully - the existing command line program will overwrite your Windows drive without hesitating if you get the syntax wrong. The download is big and my DSL sux, so expect it to take at least 6-8 hours.


Thanks!!! I'll read the PM this evening and start the download. I'll let you know how it turns out.


----------



## lessd

lpwcomp said:


> What's being worked on is a _*truncated*_ image. The @2GB _*compressed*_ image has already been created and tested. Or at least that is _*my*_ understanding of the current situation.


When I said a big image was 2Gb that not the total drive of 2Tb, so of course it is compressed, how else could you get a 2Tb image that would fit into 2Gb. This makes sense for the TPXL-4 as otherwise one would have to purchase another 2Tb drive to have a backup, but for the 500Gb TP-4 I would just purchase a 2Tb drive and put the 500Gb in storage. I would also set up the 500Gb drive so if I had to make another copy I would not have to pair the cable card again.


----------



## lpwcomp

lessd said:


> When I said a big image was 2Gb that not the total drive of 2Tb, so of course it is compressed, how else could you get a 2Tb image that would fit into 2Gb. This makes sense for the TPXL-4 as otherwise one would have to purchase another 2Tb drive to have a backup, but for the 500Gb TP-4 I would just purchase a 2Tb drive and put the 500Gb in storage. I would also set up the 500Gb drive so if I had to make another copy I would not have to pair the cable card again.


It's not the size I was talking about, it is the availability. Whatever its size, you only need to download it if you have no working Premiere drive.


----------



## jmbach

The size of a truncated backup of an XL4 or a TP is about the same size. The size of the core partitions and gui data in the MFS partitions is about the same across the whole S4 series. The XL4 has a slightly different partition size of the bootstrap partition but that's about it. We don't have info on a TP4 partition layout (so if anybody would like to post it, thanks in advance) but the truncated backup image would be the same. Have tested this on a TP, XL, and an XL4 sofar. Also tested it on an S3 OLED and an S1. The backups are fatter than WinMFS but that is because the method is different.


----------



## keffer

Is there an available Premier 320GB disk image available? Mine died, I have verified the disk is good (SpinRite) and would like to re-image the origional dirve in hopes of recovering programming on my external HD. Is it best to go buy another 320GB dirve with an image on it?


----------



## unitron

keffer said:


> Is there an available Premier 320GB disk image available? Mine died, I have verified the disk is good (SpinRite) and would like to re-image the origional dirve in hopes of recovering programming on my external HD. Is it best to go buy another 320GB dirve with an image on it?


When you say, "mine died", do you mean the TiVo itself, the internal drive, or the external drive?


----------



## jmbach

keffer said:


> Is there an available Premier 320GB disk image available? Mine died, I have verified the disk is good (SpinRite) and would like to re-image the origional dirve in hopes of recovering programming on my external HD. Is it best to go buy another 320GB dirve with an image on it?


What happened to it since the drive is good. Did you also run the manufacturer diagnostic program for verification. 
PM ggieseke for information on imagine drives.


----------



## ggieseke

keffer said:


> Is there an available Premier 320GB disk image available? Mine died, I have verified the disk is good (SpinRite) and would like to re-image the origional dirve in hopes of recovering programming on my external HD. Is it best to go buy another 320GB dirve with an image on it?


If the drive is good (and I trust SpinRite), what happened? Forcing an emergency OS reinstall with a kickstart might get you running again but if you image it the data on your external drive will be gone forever.

I think the conventional gospel that all recordings are written across both drives once you add an external may be flawed, but the inode tables, database files and directory structure needed to access them are written on the first drive. Even if I'm right and some recordings may be contained entirely on one drive or the other the result is the same.


----------



## keffer

The internal drive died. When booting up TiVo pops up a screen indicating a serious error occurred, to not power off and wait for TiVo to attempt to repair, may take hours. TiVo will eventually reboot, same thing. TiVo rep had me remove the external drive, TiVo recognized it was removed (possibly indicating the external was the problem) but then does same loop. I ran SpinRite in repair mode, it found and made a repair. Put back in TiVo, same problem. Ran SpinRite in detailed diagnostic (30+ hours) and nothing found. I have not run additional diagnostic programs (manufacturer). From what I've read including above it appears my programming on the external is GONE. I just had hopes.

Appears Fourm will not let me PM. I can be reached at [email protected].


----------



## ggieseke

Crud. If you already divorced the external drive (thanks for nothing CS) your recordings are probably gone for good.

You could try the kickstart for an emergency OS install just to eliminate any doubt. I think it's code 50 or 52, but check the FAQ at weaknees.com to be sure. I don't have the link handy.


----------



## nyjack

comer said:


> revision 104 - Nov-06-2010 - with Supersize!
> 
> **WARNING**
> 
> [*]	Software is provided with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. Please read the licence terms (GPL v3).
> [*]	Opening your Tivo cover will void manufacturer's warranty.
> [*]	Although program is not designed to do (and actually attempts to prevent) data loss and distruction, it certainly has a potential to do so. It is ultimately YOUR responsibility to backup, stow away and otherwise protect your data.
> 
> If you like my work, buy me a beer... or milk... or a harddrive
> 
> OVERVIEW
> This is a bootable Linux CD based on Slax distribution. It includes all software tools known to make a harddrive larger than the standard work in Tivo Premiere with expanded capacity.
> Basic usage, suitable for most users who only want to expand their Tivo disk capacity, is fully guided, based on simple prompt-choice automated script.
> 
> Once again, for clarity's sake, if youd don't want to tinker, experiment and/or dig in the code or Tivo, the "USAGE BASIC" and some hardware is enough to set you up with larger Tivo Premiere drive!
> 
> It was ONLY TESTED ON PREMIERE DISK. Also, it was not tested and probably will not work on multi-disk configurations.
> 
> The full procedure of making a larger Tivo Premiere disk contains the following:
> 
> [*]	Taking the original disk out of the Tivo
> [*]	Copying the original disk onto a new larger one
> [*]	Doing modifications of structures on the new disk to make extra space available for Tivo
> [*]	Installing the new disk back into Tivo.
> 
> This CD helps in doing steps #2 and #3 of this procedure.
> 
> DOWNLOAD
> Current: Download link (Mirror thanks coold8! :up
> MD5 checksum:
> a5ef24d6841f75c5c5cfd5fd703f6069 *./jmfs-rev104.iso.zip
> 
> Previous: Download link (Mirror courtesy of coold8 as well)
> MD5 checksum:
> c6241f5838cf5d1f4b451229b184f031 *./jmfs-rev68.iso.zip
> 
> REQUIREMENTS and PREREQUISITES
> You will need:
> [*] Your original Tivo disk
> [*] New disk larger than Tivo's
> [*] Computer that you can boot from CD or USB
> [*] Jmfs Live CD
> 
> It implies that you also need an ability and willingness to:
> [*] Open/close your Tivo box
> [*] Take harddrive out of the Tivo and put harddrive back into it
> [*] Connect/disconnect the original and the new harddrive to a computer using SATA or USB
> [*] Burn ISO image on a CD or set up a bootable USB stick
> [*] Boot up/shutdown a computer using the prepared bootable media
> [*] Follow the guided prompt
> [*] Wait for 2-4 hours for process to finish
> 
> USAGE BASIC
> 
> [*] Download CD disk image (ISO). For basic usage you only need the "jmfs-*.iso.zip" file. Sources (jmfs-src*.zip) are also in the folder for those who want to build themselves. (download link above)
> [*] Unzip the ISO and burn it on CD
> [*] Connect a Tivo disk and a new large disk to a computer. SATA or USB - does not matter, it will work either way, but SATA is faster.
> [*] Boot that computer from the CD burned in step #2.
> [*] The guide will be started automatically, follow the prompts.
> 
> [*] If you are upgrading from stock drive, you will need to do: Copy, Expand, Supersize - in that order.
> [*] If you are supersizing an already expanded drive, just do Supersize.
> 
> If you ever find yourself in a shell (command prompt) you can:
> 
> [*] Restart the guide by
> 
> [*]"/root/guide.sh" command
> [*] Shutdown the system by any of:
> 
> [*]pressing Ctrl-D
> [*] "exit" command,
> [*] "logout" command
> [*] "poweroff" command
> [*] Reboot the system by any of:
> 
> [*]pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del
> [*] "reboot" command
> 
> During the guided process there is a log file created "/root/log.log". If you experience any problems or errors please check that file for any extended error information. It would like to ask for assistance, please copy the log file somewhere, where you can access it later (e.g. mount an external USB drive or existing partitions and copy it there).
> 
> USAGE ADVANCEDYou are in the root shell, no need to "sudo" anything.
> You need to know your disk names. The source Tivo disk and the targer where you want to copy or the one you want to expand. To find harddrive names in the system:
> 
> [*]	run "fdisk -l" and make note of the device names and capacities (for ex. "Disk /dev/sda: 2000.3 GB").
> [*]	run "hdparm -i <device>" (for ex. "hdparm -i /dev/sda") which will output the disk model (e.g. "/dev/sda: Model=WDC WD20EVDS-63T3B0")
> 
> All disks are made read-only on boot, so if you are planning to copy and/or expand, make your target drive writable by "chmod u+w <target drive path>" (e.g. "chmod u+w /dev/sda").
> 
> There are scripts included to run tools separately, outside of the guided prompt:
> 
> [*]	mfsadd.sh
> Expects 1 parameter - target drive for expansion (e.g. "/dev/sda").
> Drive must already contain copy of the original Tivo disk.
> [*]	diskCopy.sh
> A "shortcut" for "ddrescue", expects two parameters: source disk and target disk or file name
> (e.g. "/dev/sda /dev/sdb" or "/dev/sda /mnt/sdb1/tivo.img").
> [*]	mfslayout.sh
> Prints the layout of a Tivo disk. Usefull for testing/making sure the disk is OK.
> Expects 1 parameter - Tivo drive name (e.g. "/dev/sda").
> [*]	jmfs.sh
> Base script to run a class from jmfs package. All arguments are passed to executed class.
> 
> BUILDING
> You need Apache ANT 1.7.1 or above and JDK 1.6 or above.
> The ANT build script is included with sources. The targets are:
> 
> [*] build (default)
> only compiles the sources.
> [*] clean
> deletes all built files, so all sources will be recompiled
> [*] package
> compiles and creates packages - jar, bin.zip and src.zip for distribution.


Will this process and software work with the TiVo Premiere 4 as well as the regular 2 tuner TiVo Premiere?

Thanks,
Jack


----------



## keffer

ggieseke said:


> Crud. If you already divorced the external drive (thanks for nothing CS) your recordings are probably gone for good.
> 
> You could try the kickstart for an emergency OS install just to eliminate any doubt. I think it's code 50 or 52, but check the FAQ at weaknees.com to be sure. I don't have the link handy.


Process is interesing when your pointed in the correct direction. Kickstart instructions are:
TIVO PREMIERE / PREMIERE XL:

1. Restart the box and the green light comes on.

2. The green, and amber lights begin to flicker. Quickly press and release the PAUSE button on the remote.

IMPORTANT: Unlike the HD and Series3, you cannot continuously hold down the pause button.

3. Press the one or two digits of the kickstart code from the list below on the remote control. (You will have approximately 10 seconds to do this.) If this was done successfully, the blue light will come on.

Mine:
Power on - all lites come on/off
green lite comes on - tv = welcome screen
after 50 sec green lite goes out
green lite comes on/amber lite flashes
PRESS PAUSE ON REMOTE
green lite goes off/amber lite on
PRESS KICKSTARE CODE = 52
green/yellow/green/yellow/green/yellow....
lites go out, green comes on - tv almost there...
after 25 sec get GBOD

I also tried kickstart codes of 0, 1, 54, & 57 with the exact same results.


----------



## jmbach

Since the last update, when I go into KS mode is do not get the solid blue light but the rapidly alternating green/yellow on my XL (748)


----------



## jmbach

Could not even get into the hard drive KS menu. Hmmmm.  That is somewhat catastrophic. Cables connected securely inside the unit. Make sure power supply voltage okay. If those are good then try a re image. If that doesn't work then a different drive and re image. If that doesn't work, another Tivo


----------



## ggieseke

keffer said:


> Mine:
> Power on - all lites come on/off
> green lite comes on - tv = welcome screen
> after 50 sec green lite goes out
> green lite comes on/amber lite flashes
> PRESS PAUSE ON REMOTE
> green lite goes off/amber lite on
> PRESS KICKSTARE CODE = 52
> green/yellow/green/yellow/green/yellow....
> lites go out, green comes on - tv almost there...
> after 25 sec get GBOD
> 
> I also tried kickstart codes of 0, 1, 54, & 57 with the exact same results.


The way the lights work seems to have changed lately from what I've read, but AFAIK the kickstart procedures are contained in ROM or flash memory. You should be able to invoke it even if it the drive is dead or missing and get something different than the standard boot loop.

I've had problems getting it to work in the past because I programmed most of the keys on my universal remote with "single-press" codes instead of codes that repeated as long as the button was pressed. Once I figured that out I could still get it to work by pressing the pause key over and over until the lights changed state, then entering the code.


----------



## keffer

jmbach said:


> Could not even get into the hard drive KS menu. Hmmmm.  That is somewhat catastrophic. Cables connected securely inside the unit. Make sure power supply voltage okay. If those are good then try a re image. If that doesn't work then a different drive and re image. If that doesn't work, another Tivo


THANKS!! New imaged HD is in the mail (Weaknees). I will make a backup of the HD this time and learn to push programming I want to keep to the computer.


----------



## Ebuddy

ggieseke said:


> Ringo->,
> 
> PM sent. Read it carefully - the existing command line program will overwrite your Windows drive without hesitating if you get the syntax wrong. The download is big and my DSL sux, so expect it to take at least 6-8 hours.
> 
> Leon,
> 
> I'm working on it. I want the release to be as safe and intuitive to use as Guided Setup but my UI skills are sadly lacking.


Sent you a PM, but I'd be deeply grateful if I could get that image also. =)


----------



## ggieseke

Ebuddy said:


> Sent you a PM, but I'd be deeply grateful if I could get that image also. =)


Done.


----------



## maraudx

ggieseke said:


> Ringo->,
> 
> PM sent. Read it carefully - the existing command line program will overwrite your Windows drive without hesitating if you get the syntax wrong. The download is big and my DSL sux, so expect it to take at least 6-8 hours.
> 
> Leon,
> 
> I'm working on it. I want the release to be as safe and intuitive to use as Guided Setup but my UI skills are sadly lacking.


I can host the image on my FTP server. Double win as it's fast and I desperately need an image to recover my dead premier.


----------



## ggieseke

maraudx said:


> I can host the image on my FTP server. Double win as it's fast and I desperately need an image to recover my dead premier.


It's a deal :up: I sent you a PM with my email address.


----------



## StorminMike

I recently purchased a Premiere 4 since my aging HDR212 is really not worth repairing once the drives die 

I don't watch a lot of TV; I mainly use Tivo so on the rare occasion I do want to watch TV there's something good on. As such I don't feel any need to upgrade to a bigger hard drive.

That said, I want to make a backup of the software on the hard drive so that should it fail prematurely, I can just buy another 500 GB drive and restore to that. With the Series 1 there was the minimal backup option in mfstools that did exactly that. (And I in fact used it after a disk failure on my series 1) I've poked around the threads but from what I can see there doesn't appear to be a series 4 equivalent (eg backup the software but not the actual recordings) yet. Is it out there somewhere and I missed it?

Assuming it isn't there, does anyone have a rough idea of how well an image of the full 500 GB drive compresses if you do just backup the entire thing?


----------



## jmbach

ggieseke has almost a program that will do what you are asking. Working through beta testing now. Depending on the size of the drive and how spread out required elements are inside the MFS media partitions the truncated backup created is under 4gb and will zip down under 2gb.


----------



## Loach

OK I must be completely helpless because I can't even get past comer's steps 1 and 2 (download, unzip and burn to CD). I figured I probably should see if I can even accomplish that before I bother investing in a larger hard drive.

So I downloaded the zipped file successfully from mediafire. First I used winzip to burn it to a CD, but it looks like that just burned the zipped file and didn't extract anything. I knew that wasn't what I wanted so I went back into winzip and unzipped it to the PC's hard drive. That appeared to place the files in folders called "boot" and "JavaMFS", which looked right, so I burned those folders to a CD-R from Windows Explorer. Confirmed that those folders are there on the CD by looking at it in Windows Explorer.

Took the CD over to an older machine that I will use to accomplish the hard drive upgrade. Changed the BIOS settings to put CD first in the boot order. Tried booting with the CD - no luck. CD drive spins and makes all kinds of noise, but fails to boot and then the hard drive just boots up Windows. Tried it again by hitting F12 for boot options and selected CD and it just says "Selected option not available" or something to that effect.

So how am I managing to screw this up? I must admit I have zero experience trying to create a boot CD from a downloaded zip file.

*Edit:* I see there is another file within the "boot" folder called "initrd" that looks like it has not been unzipped. Could that be causing my problems?


----------



## unitron

You should have a file named 

jmfs-rev104.iso.zip

That should unzip to a file named

jmfs-rev104.iso

That file should be burned to a cd-r "as an image".

If not burned as an image, it won't produce a bootable cd-r.


----------



## Loach

unitron said:


> You should have a file named
> 
> jmfs-rev104.iso.zip
> 
> That should unzip to a file named
> 
> jmfs-rev104.iso
> 
> That file should be burned to a cd-r "as an image".
> 
> If not burned as an image, it won't produce a bootable cd-r.


I see a folder named jmfs-rev104.iso, not a file. Within that folder there are subfolders "boot" and "JavaMFS". I gather I'm probably unzipping it wrong. Don't know how to burn it "as an image" either.

Is there a different program I should be using to unzip it? Or different options to select within Winzip? This can't be that difficult. I'm either using the wrong software or wrong options within the software.


----------



## lpwcomp

Loach said:


> I see a folder named jmfs-rev104.iso, not a file. Within that folder there are subfolders "boot" and "JavaMFS". I gather I'm probably unzipping it wrong. Don't know how to burn it "as an image" either.
> 
> Is there a different program I should be using to unzip it? Or different options to select within Winzip? This can't be that difficult. I'm either using the wrong software or wrong options within the software.


I think you probably unzipped it "too far" as it were. You not only unzipped the .zip file, you unzipped the .iso file that it contains.

Start over. Open the "jmfs-rev104.iso.zip" file with winzip. Extract the .iso file. Then open up you cd burner s/w. There should be an option to "burn iso" or "burn image". Select that and it should prompt you to select an iso fiile.


----------



## Loach

lpwcomp said:


> I think you probably unzipped it "too far" as it were. You not only unzipped the .zip file, you unzipped the .iso file that it contains.
> 
> Start over. Open the "jmfs-rev104.iso.zip" file with winzip. Extract the .iso file. Then open up you cd burner s/w. There should be an option to "burn iso" or "burn image". Select that and it should prompt you to select an iso fiile.


Yes. While you were responding I figured it out and the problem is pretty much what you described. The .iso file was there, but stupid Windows Explorer was showing it as a WinZip file type so I assumed it had a .zip extension and still needed to be unzipped (bad assumption).

Then I used Windows Disc Image Burner to burn to CD. Boots up fine now. I've invested too much time now....will have to get me a 2TB drive! Thanks unitron and lpwcomp for your help with my newbie questions.


----------



## Loach

Just ordered a WD20EURS to do my upgrade. Cox is turning on SDV in my market on Monday, so I'll be using a tuning adapter starting then. I'm a little nervous about doing the upgrade so close to this Cox change. Should I wait to see if there is any TA weirdness going on before I do the upgrade? I realize one thing has nothing to do with the other but I'm a little worried about the possibility of needing Tivo tech support re: the TA and somebody trying to blame the upgraded hard drive.


----------



## unitron

Loach said:


> Just ordered a WD20EURS to do my upgrade. Cox is turning on SDV in my market on Monday, so I'll be using a tuning adapter starting then. I'm a little nervous about doing the upgrade so close to this Cox change. Should I wait to see if there is any TA weirdness going on before I do the upgrade? I realize one thing has nothing to do with the other but I'm a little worried about the possibility of needing Tivo tech support re: the TA and somebody trying to blame the upgraded hard drive.


While you're taking the time to run the WD diagnostics long test on the EURS before putting it into service, you can get the TiVo and its original drive set up the way it going to need to be going forward and make sure that's all going to work out.

After a couple of weeks of behaving itself, you can copy to the 2TB drive with relative peace of mind.


----------



## Loach

unitron said:


> While you're taking the time to run the WD diagnostics long test on the EURS before putting it into service, you can get the TiVo and its original drive set up the way it going to need to be going forward and make sure that's all going to work out.
> 
> After a couple of weeks of behaving itself, you can copy to the 2TB drive with relative peace of mind.


Sounds like a reasonable strategy - if I can convince myself to wait a couple weeks. Might only be a week of good behavior - once I start these types of projects I like to git-r-done


----------



## smmarczak

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


ggieseke, I would like to try your compressed Premiere image. I can't PM as I don't have enough posts yet.


----------



## ggieseke

smmarczak said:


> ggieseke, I would like to try your compressed Premiere image. I can't PM as I don't have enough posts yet.


PM sent.


----------



## Loach

I am trying to run WD diagnostics on my new WD20EURS drive from the Ultimate Boot CD (Data Lifeguard Diagnostics 5.20). The program recognizes the drive (lists the model # and s/n), but is unable to run the test. I receive the following error message:

UNABLE TO RUN THE TEST - PLEASE CONTACT TECHNICAL SUPPORT

DLGDIAG 5.20 - DATA LIFEGUARD DIAGNOSTICS
MISSING TEST TRACKS
ERROR/STATUS CODE: 0229

I've searched WD's web site for that error code to no avail. What could I be doing wrong here? Do I have a bad copy of the diagnostics? Should I give up on the UBCD and download a Windows version of the diagnostics instead?

EDIT: Couldn't get the Windows version of WD Diagnostics to even see the hard drive. Gave up and just ran JMFS without bothering to test. No errors on the copy and everything seems to be working fine. Intellipark was already disabled on my drive, which had a manufacture date of 12/22/12.


----------



## Dckcentaur

Can I please have the image also my drive is messed up and it will not copy till larger drive. I had tivo delete all file . And now I have the green screen of death. 

Thanks


----------



## ggieseke

Dckcentaur said:


> Can I please have the image also my drive is messed up and it will not copy till larger drive. I had tivo delete all file . And now I have the green screen of death.
> 
> Thanks


What model do you have?


----------



## dogcatcherdrew

I just wanted to report that I successfully upgraded my Tivo Premier (TCD746320) from the stock (320GB WD Green AV) drive to a 2 TB WD EURS AV-GP. 

I read the first 15 or 20 pages, and the last 10 or 15 pages of this thread, but really all I needed was Comer's disk (rev 104) and the basic usage instructions.

I didn't do any wdidle, nor did I run a hard disk check before copying. (I probably would have if I had more time.)

Everything has been running great for almost a week.

The hardest part was finding the requisite SATA power and data cables. I ended up borrowing an external hard drive from work, swapping out the drives, and using USB. 

Thanks to Comer for the awesome software, and to Unitron for helpful troubleshooting over many pages of posts. :up:


----------



## Dckcentaur

sorry I had the tcd746320 also.


----------



## ggieseke

Dckcentaur said:


> sorry I had the tcd746320 also.


PM sent.


----------



## Dckcentaur

it worked thanks by the way do you have the TCD748000 Premiere XL image that has the THX on it as it got deleted on my tivo prem XL and it is not in deleted programs anymore


----------



## ggieseke

Dckcentaur said:


> it worked thanks by the way do you have the TCD748000 Premiere XL image that has the THX on it as it got deleted on my tivo prem XL and it is not in deleted programs anymore


Yes, but it wouldn't help. You have to run Clear & Delete Everything after restoring an image from another TiVo or you'll get error 51 and it won't play, record or transfer.


----------



## nooneuknow

retiredqwest said:


> AND be prepared..... it takes 18 hours to copy the 2TB to a 2TB..... I know.


Wow! The last time I even came close to it taking that long was with USB 2.0 adapters from the WD external drives I bought to takes the drives out of. I aborted, went SATA2 instead, and it was going to be about 8 hours with the jmfs utility. I spent a couple days learning about ddrescue (GNU), booted from jmfs CD, exited the guided jmfs utility to command line, set the sector size to 4096 (even though the AF drives emulate 512, and the non-AF are 512), let ddrescue decide how many blocks to copy at a time, and now I can do 2TB to 2TB in 2 hours, or less.

I have since altered the command line to do direct disk access reads, and synchronous writes, just for peace of mind, which is slower on some drives with smaller caches, but it helps insure integrity (or that's what understanding I took from all the reading I did about ddrescue, anyway).

I'll point out that if there is ANY suspicion of the source drive having issues, that the jmfs guided parameters are a safer bet, and worth the extra time.

What I've done is buy from DVR_DUDE, one WD20EURS drive for each model TiVo, kept them virgin, and I use them as source drives. I have no qualms copying them, as it turns out, the layout of the drives he provided (for premieres, not HDs), are in no way optimized in any special way I can ascertain. The layout has the size of the factory partitions identical, with a huge, single partition added, just like jmfs would do. jmfs recognizes the premiere drive, and will copy it. The HD drive is a different story. I can't even look at the map, and jmfs doesn't recognize it as a TiVo drive. But, drop to the command line, and ddrescue has no issue making a copy.

DVR_DUDE has dropped to the level of perpetuating myths that scare you into thinking his drives are the ONLY way to go, just like all the other sources for pre-imaged TiVo drives. I don't wish to start a war over what drives are made for what, especially since a lot of the either no longer applicable, or never the case, myths are being repeated by people I respect on here. I do agree, if the price is right, the EURS line is a no-brainer, best choice for those who don't want to worry about the intellipark issue, and/or adjusting the acoustics, and they come with a longer warranty than the cheaper alternatives, in some cases. (note: if you remove the drive from an external enclosure, you technically have voided any and all warranty, unless you can sneak it back in and leave no trace of tampering). I actually would like to discuss the matter of AV vs non-AV drives for TiVo use, and how some say it's unsuitable to use an AV drive in a computer. I'd just like it to be civil, and in the right thread. Perhaps those who feel strongly on their opinions could PM me on the matter.

I never expected it to be so simple and fast. I've even used WD20EZRX drives in two premieres (the ones that were in the external USB enclosures, but can be purchased standalone), without issue. They are the king of WD's low power green drives, thus they don't have a chip dedicated to making them quiet, and you can get them dirt cheap, on sale. I couldn't recommend them for a bedroom, though, since if your not watching TV, you can hear them seeking, which gets loud when the database is being updated.

My next round of tinkering was going to involve booting from the Ultimate Boot/Rescue CD, with the most recent GNU ddrescue and see what I could do with it.

Now that I read that somebody else is working on a universal truncated & compressed image, maybe I'll just kick back and see what that's all about and how it was done. I'm VERY interested in this project. Perhaps I could contribute in some way?

One thing I'd like to ask, is there a way to, legitimately, get some WD20EADS drives that are a week from end of warranty, and borderline, to fail enough to get warranty replacement? They were in TiVo Premieres, and sections of them have VERY slow read/write times, which leaves them unsuitable for TiVo use, and I don't trust them for anything else. I doubt WD would replace just due to degraded performance. I also have one that insists its SMART status is OK, but the SMART tests abort when in a TiVo (any model), and when tested with WD WinDLG, on any computer. It says aborted due to too many bad sectors (WD WinDLG), and Fail 7 (TiVo) but the overall SMART status still says PASSED/OK. The borderline drives will produce read errors if used as a source drive with ddrescue, but I can't get any write errors, and WD WinDLG says they all pass. How do I force the problem areas to get flagged as bad? I've been working with computers and hard drives for over 20 years, and I've never had an issue like this...

Also, is WD in the habit of putting a hold on your credit card when doing an advanced RMA? I've heard of people having an issue with having no space on their credit card until WD gets the drives back. Then, what happens if they decide that the drives sent back weren't "bad enough"? Do I end up paying full price for whatever drives they advance shipped? I understand it's possible I could wind up with larger drives, non-compatible w/TiVo, with a high price tag. I could live with that, as long as I don't wind up paying for it.


----------



## ggieseke

nooneuknow said:


> Now that I read that somebody else is working on a universal truncated & compressed image, maybe I'll just kick back and see what that's all about and how it was done.
> 
> One thing I'd like to ask, is there a way to, legitimately, get some WD20EADS drives that are a week from end of warranty, and borderline, to fail enough to get warranty replacement? They were in TiVo Premieres, and sections of them have VERY slow read/write times in areas, which leaves them unsuitable for TiVo use, and I don't trust them for anything else. I doubt WD would replace just due to degraded performance. I also have one that insists its SMART status is OK, but the SMART tests abort in both when in a TiVo (any model), and when tested with WD WinDLG, on any computer. It says aborted due to too many bad sectors (WD WinDLG), and Fail 7 (TiVo) but the overall SMART status still says PASSED/OK. The borderline drives will produce read errors if used as a source drive with ddrescue, but I can't get any write errors, and WD WinDLG says they all pass. How do I force the problem areas to get flagged as bad? I've been working with computers and hard drives for over 30 years, and I've never had an issue like this...
> 
> Also, is WD in the habit of putting a hold on your credit card when doing an advanced RMA? I've heard of people having an issue with having no space on their credit card until WD gets the drives back. Then, what happens if they decide that the drives sent back weren't "bad enough"? Do I end up paying full price for whatever drives the advance ship?


I released DvrBARS on the 13th. Give it a whirl.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=503261

If WinDlg says aborted due to too many bad sectors they'll give you an RMA number, and I've never had them say anything after the fact. They probably just scan the serial number and throw 99% of the returned drives in the recycler bin.


----------



## nooneuknow

ggieseke said:


> I released DvrBARS on the 13th. Give it a whirl.
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=503261
> 
> If WinDlg says aborted due to too many bad sectors they'll give you an RMA number, and I've never had them say anything after the fact. They probably just scan the serial number and throw 99% of the returned drives in the recycler bin.


Will do. I've been away from the forums for so long I only had two active threads left in my subscribed list, this was one of them.

I'm not so worried about that one drive, since I can get some form of error with their own utility. It's the other five drives, then the other three that are currently getting their wear and tear and will likely be in the same shape in a few months, also right on the cusp of warranty by that time.

My biggest concern, is I've read reports of people shipping their drives in, non-advanced RMA, only to get the same drive right back, still bad, and out the cost of shipping, and pushed out of warranty. I also can't afford a charge authorization hold on my card, which I've seen reports of. I guess there has been some recent changes at WD regarding returns. I know Newegg's policies have changed to the point of people switching to retail drive purchases. Gotta love "The Great Recession"...


----------



## lessd

nooneuknow said:


> Also, is WD in the habit of putting a hold on your credit card when doing an advanced RMA? I've heard of people having an issue with having no space on their credit card until WD gets the drives back. Then, what happens if they decide that the drives sent back weren't "bad enough"? Do I end up paying full price for whatever drives they advance shipped? I understand it's possible I could wind up with larger drives, non-compatible w/TiVo, with a high price tag. I could live with that, as long as I don't wind up paying for it.


Never been a problem, just send back the old drive quickly and have a credit card that $150 off the credit line will not give you a problem.


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> Never been a problem, just send back the old drive quickly and have a credit card that $150 off the credit line will not give you a problem.


I'm assuming that's per drive. I was hoping to send all the "borderline" drives, as in too sluggish for TiVo use anymore, in one shot. I've been letting them stack up to save on shipping and make it one thing to do. If $150 per drive, that'll leave me returning 1 or 2, and adding the rest to my wall of dead, and untrustworthy WD drives I didn't get to in time...

Yet, I have drives that are over 10 years old, and still running.

I've autopsied a few newer ones, from my computers, and you can see the Teflon on the fluid dynamic bearings wears off in the direction of gravity, which obviously would allow the platters to wobble. It can't help that some drives vibrate bad enough to move if not secured. Have learned that mounting drives vertically, ensures quicker death, but surprised that 24/7 drives can't keep such wear from happening. Maybe the 7200RPM drives still running keep the float, avoiding the contact wear, and the low RPM/variable speed green drives don't. Well, I won't clog up the thread with this any further, and will talk to WD. Thanks, everybody. Feel free to PM if you have any further ideas/thoughts, perhaps a pointer to a thread devoted to such matters.


----------



## lessd

nooneuknow said:


> I'm assuming that's per drive. I was hoping to send all the "borderline" drives, as in too sluggish for TiVo use anymore, in one shot. I've been letting them stack up to save on shipping and make it one thing to do. If $150 per drive, that'll leave me returning 1 or 2, and adding the rest to my wall of dead, and untrustworthy WD drives I didn't get to in time...
> 
> Yet, I have drives that are over 10 years old, and still running.
> 
> I've autopsied a few newer ones, from my computers, and you can see the Teflon on the fluid dynamic bearings wears off in the direction of gravity, which obviously would allow the platters to wobble. It can't help that some drives vibrate bad enough to move if not secured. Have learned that mounting drives vertically, ensures quicker death, but surprised that 24/7 drives can't keep such wear from happening. Maybe the 7200RPM drives still running keep the float, avoiding the contact wear, and the low RPM/variable speed green drives don't. Well, I won't clog up the thread with this any further, and will talk to WD. Thanks, everybody. Feel free to PM if you have any further ideas/thoughts, perhaps a pointer to a thread devoted to such matters.


The drives have to be in warranty for the RMA to work, I think you can do 10 drives at a time, I have only done a single drive at one time.


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> The drives have to be in warranty for the RMA to work, I think you can do 10 drives at a time, I have only done a single drive at one time.


Yes, I understand that. The drives that I started out talking about are all in warranty for a week and then they won't be anymore. This is because I purchased them all on the same date, but have just been stacking them up as they became problematic, recycling them back into service if they just needed re-imaging. They're no longer within acceptable read performance thresholds for use in TiVo, or for anything that read errors would be a problem with.


----------



## lessd

nooneuknow said:


> Yes, I understand that. The drives that I started out talking about are all in warranty for a week and then they won't be anymore. This is because I purchased them all on the same date, but have just been stacking them up as they became problematic, recycling them back into service if they just needed re-imaging. They're no longer within acceptable read performance thresholds for use in TiVo, or for anything that read errors would be a problem with.


Just get them back to WD, you do not have to use your credit card if you don't need advance replacement, just send back your old drives and WD will send out the replacements when they get your old drives, just get a RMA for each drive.


----------



## tlwizard

I have a Premiere XL that I moved from one room to the other. When I plugged it in the other room, it kept rebooting in the Welcome Screen bootup. The drive was also making a repeated high pitch pattern of noise.

Opened everything up, hooked the hard drive up to a computer, and the drive is unrecognizable in disk management. Won't boot, won't start, won't nothing. I do not have a back up of the drive.

Will ggieseke 's program or image allow me to get this Tivo (with lifetime) (model TCD748000) hopefully back up and running? I have another WD Green 1TB at the ready. Don't even care about increasing storage size. Just don't want to lose the Tivo.

Thanks!


----------



## jmbach

tlwizard said:


> I have a Premiere XL that I moved from one room to the other. When I plugged it in the other room, it kept rebooting in the Welcome Screen bootup. The drive was also making a repeated high pitch pattern of noise.
> 
> Opened everything up, hooked the hard drive up to a computer, and the drive is unrecognizable in disk management. Won't boot, won't start, won't nothing. I do not have a back up of the drive.
> 
> Will ggieseke 's program or image allow me to get this Tivo (with lifetime) (model TCD748000) hopefully back up and running? I have another WD Green 1TB at the ready. Don't even care about increasing storage size. Just don't want to lose the Tivo.
> 
> Thanks!


The short answer is yes. The Tivo drive should be present but uninitialized in Windows disk management. Do not let windows disk management do anything to the drive. I would download the manufacturer drive diagnostics and run any non destructive test on the drive. See what it says about the drive. Probably the drive is bad and ggieseke's program may be able to back up the drive and you can restore it on another drive. But if the original is bad you may be making a bad copy. Worth a shot. You can pm ggieseke and he may be able to get you an image you can restore to the new drive. You won't have any of your shows but you'll have your TiVo back.


----------



## tlwizard

jmbach said:


> The short answer is yes. The Tivo drive should be present but uninitialized in Windows disk management. Do not let windows disk management do anything to the drive. I would download the manufacturer drive diagnostics and run any non destructive test on the drive. See what it says about the drive. Probably the drive is bad and ggieseke's program may be able to back up the drive and you can restore it on another drive. But if the original is bad you may be making a bad copy. Worth a shot. You can pm ggieseke and he may be able to get you an image you can restore to the new drive. You won't have any of your shows but you'll have your TiVo back.


Thanks for the response. To be clear, the drive doesn't even appear in disk management and the WD diagnostics Is also unable to find it. I don't think there's anything I can salvage, unfortunately.

I'll send ggieseke a pm and see if I can apply the image to a fresh drive to save the Tivo.


----------



## tlwizard

Just wanted to say that ggieseke hooked me up with the image and everything's working perfectly. And the DvrBARS program he created made it all super easy too!


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## pbhm

My Tivo Premiere (TCD746320) HD failed and not able to recover any type of image. I read in this forum that such image may be around. I am new to this forum (as of today) so any direction as how the image can be transferred to me would be helpful.


----------



## ggieseke

pbhm said:


> My Tivo Premiere (TCD746320) HD failed and not able to recover any type of image. I read in this forum that such image may be around. I am new to this forum (as of today) so any direction as how the image can be transferred to me would be helpful.


PM sent. Welcome to the community.


----------



## jmbach

pbhm said:


> My Tivo Premiere (TCD746320) HD failed and not able to recover any type of image. I read in this forum that such image may be around. I am new to this forum (as of today) so any direction as how the image can be transferred to me would be helpful.


Would first download DvrBARS and wait for ggieseke to see your post and he will then probably pm you with an image.


----------



## tom gonzalez

Thanks Comer, I just doubled my premiere to 143 hours! it took about 3 hours to copy, expand, & supersize.


----------



## ftballpack

Hey guys,

So, I am not sure if I should be posting this here or another thread. I bought a premiere back in 2011 and shortly after purchasing it, I upgraded the HD to a WD20EURS using Comer's method. I choose not to supersize the drive as I figured the negative disk space reading might confuse the wife....

Here is my problem, the drive while playing video back, tends to at times start pulsing. The video would be playing fine and then eventually I get a strange pulse activity. The video and audio studders for about 5 seconds and then eventually the disk recovers and it keeps playing. This happens with both live TV and recorded programming. Other people have had similar problems occur as can be seen by these two following reviews on newegg:

h t t p://w w w.newegg.c o m/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-136-783&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=10&PurchaseMark=&SelectedRating=1&VideoOnlyMark=False&VendorMark=&IsFeedbackTab=true&SelectedRating1=1&Keywords=pulse&Page=1#scrollFullInfo

(just remove the extra spaces from the link provided, I literally am one post short of being allowed to post links)

I am not sure what to do guys. I am considering buying a WD20EZRX and just doing the widdle3 thing to made it compatible with TiVo and swapping out the drives.

When I originally installed the WD20EURS I never got these errors and now over time they have just become so frequent/annoying I am not sure if I can stand it anymore. 

Any advice guys?


----------



## jmbach

Run the manufacturer diagnostic on the drive and run any non destructive test. Could also use a program called HDD Guardian to look at the drive SMART results and to see if the drive is starting to reassign sectors. If it is, the drive needs to be replaced. Recertifying it is a temporary fix only.


----------



## tom gonzalez

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my premiere drive to a 1Tb (seagate st31000340ns) I had laying around. My Tivo is working fantastic with the larger drive. Last night I noticed this drive is loud. I can hear the heads clicking from the next room. I don't think the drive is failing because the Tivo is working great. Is anybody else using this drive notice how loud it is?


----------



## Shastada

ggieseke said:


> PM sent. Welcome to the community.


I have a similar issue. My mom's Tivo died and I need to replace the hard drive. If you have a way to access the image I would be much appreciated. Thanks!


----------



## ggieseke

Shastada said:


> I have a similar issue. My mom's Tivo died and I need to replace the hard drive. If you have a way to access the image I would be much appreciated. Thanks!


What model number do you need an image for?


----------



## Shastada

ggieseke said:


> What model number do you need an image for?


Its a Premiere, the model number on the back shows TCD746320. Thanks for any help you can provide!


----------



## ggieseke

Shastada said:


> Its a Premiere, the model number on the back shows TCD746320. Thanks for any help you can provide!


I sent you a PM with links to the image and DvrBARS.


----------



## Guitar-Builder

I used this system to upgrade one of my 3 Premieres and after the second try message said copy completely successful. Then I did the expansion and supersize. All worked perfectly. But then last night I was going to record some of my premium channels but the grey screen popped up showing the cable card needed to be paired. I thought that doing the exact copy all of the c card info would be saved. I called charter twice last night asking them to ping my cable card and tuning adapter. No luck. It's the Memorial Day weekend so I won't see anyone til mid week. Anyone else run into this? Any suggestions?


----------



## nooneuknow

Guitar-Builder said:


> I used this system to upgrade one of my 3 Premieres and after the second try message said copy completely successful. Then I did the expansion and supersize. All worked perfectly. But then last night I was going to record some of my premium channels but the grey screen popped up showing the cable card needed to be paired. I thought that doing the exact copy all of the c card info would be saved. I called charter twice last night asking them to ping my cable card and tuning adapter. No luck. It's the Memorial Day weekend so I won't see anyone til mid week. Anyone else run into this? Any suggestions?


Yes. One of the recent firmware updates that have been getting deployed to Cisco/Scientific Atlanta CableCards has protection that can tell if the CableCard is no longer being used with the same drive (by verifying that the TiVo and hard drive have the same serial numbers as the last time it was initialized). You can no longer clone the drive and keep the pairing. You may lose the ability to view some of your existing recordings. It depends on tightly the CableCo is restricting certain content. It's a protection that is independent of the CCI byte.

I've verified this MANY times, as well as a helpful TCF user pointing out the specifications of the firmware update on the CableCard's manufacturer's website. It's marketed to the Cable Companies as a very flexible and easy way to protect "Advanced TV" content.

I was no longer able to view any Advanced TV content in my Now Playing List, after swapping cards between two TiVos, as well, even though I had them re-paired. Backing up your pairing is soon to be a thing of the past, if the other manufacturers, like Motorola, do the same thing. Sorry.


----------



## lessd

nooneuknow said:


> Yes. One of the recent firmware updates that have been getting deployed to Cisco/Scientific Atlanta CableCards has protection that can tell if the CableCard is no longer being used with the same drive (by verifying that the TiVo and hard drive have the same serial numbers as the last time it was initialized). You can no longer clone the drive and keep the pairing. You may lose the ability to view some of your existing recordings. It depends on tightly the CableCo is restricting certain content. It's a protection that is independent of the CCI byte.
> 
> I've verified this MANY times, as well as a helpful TCF user pointing out the specifications of the firmware update on the CableCard's manufacturer's website. It's marketed to the Cable Companies as a very flexible and easy way to protect "Advanced TV" content.
> 
> I was no longer able to view any Advanced TV content in my Now Playing List, after swapping cards between two TiVos, as well, even though I had them re-paired. Backing up your pairing is soon to be a thing of the past, if the other manufacturers, like Motorola, do the same thing. Sorry.


Your saying that you can't watch programs that were recorded before ?? what if you left out the cable card from the TiVo, can you then watch the programs, I did not think that the cable card controlled what you can watch, only what you can tune. (not talking about HBO type copy protection) Every time I upgrade a TiVo I put the cable card into the new TiVo, pair it, than xfer the programs I want from the old TiVo that now has no cable card to the new TiVo, never had a problem (except HBO type programs). Even with HBO type programs you may not copy them to another TiVo but you can watch them on the TiVo after you remove the cable card. I was under the impression that all recorded TiVo program were protected by the TSN of the TiVo that recorded them, not the cable card itself. If what your saying is true than if my cable Card went bad and I got a new cable card I could not watch the programs that I had on my TiVo ? We all know that if a TiVo motherboard went bad there would be no way one could watch the programs that were recorded on that TiVos hard drive even if the hard drive was good, because putting that hard drive into another TiVo you must still do a C&D all to get the drive working.


----------



## lpwcomp

lessd said:


> Your saying that you can't watch programs that were recorded before ?? what if you left out the cable card from the TiVo, can you then watch the programs, I did not think that the cable card controlled what you can watch, only what you can tune. (not talking about HBO type copy protection) Every time I upgrade a TiVo I put the cable card into the new TiVo, pair it, than xfer the programs I want from the old TiVo that now has no cable card to the new TiVo, never had a problem (except HBO type programs). Even with HBO type programs you may not copy them to another TiVo but you can watch them on the TiVo after you remove the cable card. I was under the impression that all recorded TiVo program were protected by the TSN of the TiVo that recorded them, not the cable card itself. If what your saying is true than if my cable Card went bad and I got a new cable card I could not watch the programs that I had on my TiVo ? We all know that if a TiVo motherboard went bad there would be no way one could watch the programs that were recorded on that TiVos hard drive even if the hard drive was good, because putting that hard drive into another TiVo you must still do a C&D all to get the drive working.


IMHO, he is stating a theory as if it were established fact. Part of it is based on, again IMHO, a complete mis-interpretation of what the Cisco CableCARD specs say. Another part is based on well, he couldn't _*possibly*_ be doing anything wrong.


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> Your saying that you can't watch programs that were recorded before ?? what if you left out the cable card from the TiVo, can you then watch the programs, I did not think that the cable card controlled what you can watch, only what you can tune. (not talking about HBO type copy protection) Every time I upgrade a TiVo I put the cable card into the new TiVo, pair it, than xfer the programs I want from the old TiVo that now has no cable card to the new TiVo, never had a problem (except HBO type programs). Even with HBO type programs you may not copy them to another TiVo but you can watch them on the TiVo after you remove the cable card. I was under the impression that all recorded TiVo program were protected by the TSN of the TiVo that recorded them, not the cable card itself. If what your saying is true than if my cable Card went bad and I got a new cable card I could not watch the programs that I had on my TiVo ? We all know that if a TiVo motherboard went bad there would be no way one could watch the programs that were recorded on that TiVos hard drive even if the hard drive was good, because putting that hard drive into another TiVo you must still do a C&D all to get the drive working.


Yep, already recorded, already watched before, programming that was on the non-premium, move-pak channels (with Cox is: Encore, IFC, Sundance, LMN, Epix, etc., with Epix being the only one with CCI byte in use), available only with "Cox Advanced TV", and Cisco advertising their new ways they protect "Advanced TV services". The TiVo will claim there was either no signal available, or that I do not subscribe to the channel", even though I do, and it played just fine before, and I can tune to, record, and watch from that channel again (after re-pairing), but the recordings viewable before the re-pair stay that way. I've been obsessed over just how far this could impact things. What's next, limiting just how long I can keep it to watch again, or for the first time after recording it, if I want to watch it only when I have nothing else I like better to watch?

I tried it all, and your questioning the same things that I was myself questioning in the TiVo software update thread, and at least one other, where it may not have been the best place(s). Four Premieres are all doing this (I just tried the HDs, which still won't allow cloned drives to stay paired). AFAIK, yes, if you find yourself with a failed cablecard, and have to have it replaced, and your CableCo is using these measures, you will lose the ability to watch any applicable programming. Cox claims they have no idea what the flash update does, and won't comment on my questions - which is S.O.P. for them for a while now.

You can get away with pulling the cablecard out, if you put it right back in (the same one). I've taken multiple identical drives, paired the cards, cloned them, then the clone isn't paired (Premiere & HD), paired the clone, then put the other drive back in and the pairing is gone. You can view the affected programming with the cable signal source unplugged, but it's a limited window of time, before the card expires itself, and its pairing/authorization.

I was provided a bunch of links in the TiVo software thread to the Cisco website areas that describe this.

It was about two months before this TiVo update that all the CableCards received a firmware flash.

I'm sure the implementation, use, and restrictions using the new measures widely varies, and some markets may not be using it (or those with non-Cisco/SA cablecards).

I can only *assume* TiVo had to know this was coming, and quietly implemented some support for it in Premieres.

So far, I haven't lost my ability to view content recorded on HD units, just lost the ability to keep pairing, with ANY cloned drive, which leaves me with basic cable, until re-paired, then even if I put the first drive back in, same deal. The obvious conclusion, before reading about the new protection, was that even with a HD unit, The cable card knows the serial number of the hard drive, apparently that much ability was already there way back when the last TiVo HD update was released. Who knows how many things anything is capable of, if those things aren't used for anything... Then, whammo, you find out, like this situation...


----------



## nooneuknow

lpwcomp said:


> IMHO, he is stating a theory as if it were established fact. Part of it is based on, again IMHO, a complete mis-interpretation of what the Cisco CableCARD specs say. Another part is based on well, he couldn't _*possibly*_ be doing anything wrong.


Oh, shove it. I've proven it, not dreamed it. Come on over here and prove I'm doing something wrong.

But, I know your style. You jump all over people, when they express opinions, experiences, or concerns, without any solid proof your rebuttals are anything but either a lack of anything anything better to do, or just a way to pick a fight.

QUICK EDIT: I admit, I knew much less when I started talking about this in the TiVo software thread. That's why I decided to research the matter, and do more testing. I decided to leave it be, and wait for others to report anything about it, or that seemed to be related to it. I spotted a question here, and felt that I had a truthful, and proven answer, for the original post asking why the cloned drive lost the pairing. Then I was asked, by another person, to expand upon what I posted. I did. So sue me.

EDIT 2: It's no wonder those who have helped the most people on these forums are long inactive (left), just like how TiVo reps USED TO participate here, and stopped. A person tries to help, and some person ATTACKS them, like a freakin' rabid dog (usually one with a pattern of it, which there's no shortage of on here). You really don't think I remember who ATTACKS, versus those who simply disagree. I've been wrong before, and learned to admit when I am. Ignoring those who won't/can't do so and only like to come on here for their benefit and pick fights, I'm working on... and not doing so well with...


----------



## lpwcomp

nooneuknow said:


> Oh, shove it. I've proven it, not dreamed it. Come on over here and prove I'm doing something wrong.
> 
> But, I know your style. You jump all over people, when they express opinions, experiences, or concerns, without any solid proof your rebuttals are anything but either a lack of anything anything better to do, or just a way to pick a fight.


 No, I object to fools stating their "opinions" as if they were established, objective facts and then, when challenged, claim they were only "stating an opinion".



nooneuknow said:


> QUICK EDIT: I admit, I knew much less when I started talking about this in the TiVo software thread. That's why I decided to research the matter, and do more testing. I decided to leave it be, and wait for others to report anything about it, or that seemed to be related to it. I spotted a question here, and felt that I had a truthful, and proven answer, for the original post asking why the cloned drive lost the pairing. Then I was asked, by another person, to expand upon what I posted. I did. So sue me.


You haven't proven anything except that you think you're infallible and that your interpretation of the events and data is the only possible one. Until someone who actually knows what they are doing or has actual, confirmable information, I will continue to believe that you are making an unsupported leap to a conclusion.

Answer these questions:

Why would they care what disk is in a DVR? CableCARDs are also installed in diskless, cable STBs. All it accomplishes is forcing the user to get the card paired again.

Also explain why CableLabs would certify any such modification?

How is the CableCARD even accessing that information?


----------



## nooneuknow

lpwcomp said:


> No, I object to fools stating their "opinions" as if they were established, objective facts and then, when challenged, claim they were only "stating an opinion".
> 
> You haven't proven anything except that you think you're infallible and that your interpretation of the events and data is the only possible one. Until someone who actually knows what they are doing or has actual, confirmable information, I will continue to believe that you are making an unsupported leap to a conclusion.
> 
> Answer these questions:
> 
> Why would they care what disk is in a DVR? CableCARDs are also installed in diskless, cable STBs. All it accomplishes is forcing the user to get the card paired again.
> 
> Also explain why CableLabs would certify any such modification?
> 
> How is the CableCARD even accessing that information?


I wish I had all the answers. It doesn't make sense to me either.

If you didn't follow the links in the other thread, provided by somebody else (WHO IS ACTUALLY HELPFUL), I'd suggest you do. I'd like to know if there's a regulatory agency that I can contact to ask if any such changes were approved. Maybe they didn't need to be. Throw me some phone numbers or web sites that I can make inquiries with.

I see a lack of you providing answers, instead dishing out opinions and arguments, most of which are malicious in nature. I mean that as a whole, forum-wide.

The more time I spend going back and forth with you, the less I can do to help anybody, or get any answers. So, as much as I'd like to let you prove my OPINION of you, I'm going to let you find somebody else to hassle/harass, which you certainly will, and get back to looking for the answers to questions in this matter, and any other issues people are asking about, that I either know how to help with, or can at least try to.

As for the bulk of your post, shove that too. Have a nice day...


----------



## lpwcomp

nooneuknow said:


> I see a lack of you providing answers, instead dishing out opinions and arguments, most of which are malicious in nature. I mean that as a whole, forum-wide.
> 
> The more time I spend going back and forth with you, the less I can do to help anybody, or get any answers. So, as much as I'd like to let you prove my OPINION of you, I'm going to let you find somebody else to hassle/harass, which you certainly will, and get back to looking for the answers to questions in this matter, and any other issues people are asking about, that I either know how to help with, or can at least try to.


Seriously? You have just proved yourself to be even more clueless than it at first appeared. I have yet to see you providing annyone actual help, just stating your theories as if they immutable facts and or less telling people there is nothing they can do about it.



nooneuknow said:


> As for the bulk of your post, shove that too. Have a nice day...


I'd give you the same advice, but your head is in the way.


----------



## nooneuknow

lpwcomp said:


> Seriously? You have just proved yourself to be even more clueless than it at first appeared. I have yet to see you providing annyone actual help, just stating your theories as if they immutable facts and or less telling people there is nothing they can do about it.
> 
> I'd give you the same advice, but your head is in the way.


On the first segment, sticks and stones.

On the second, I'll take it under advisement.

One thing that stands out to me, is (and often is) you are reading this (and other) thread(s), yet you did nothing to help the original poster, in ANY way, who was asking if anybody knew anything about why he lost his cablecard pairing after cloning. You didn't even so much as offer up an alternative theory, or opinion on a plausible explanation, you just laid into me. You also implied that he and/or I were doing something wrong, yet couldn't/wouldn't offer up WHAT was possibly being done wrong. That's not very helpful, nor friendly. It's your M.O.

So, like I've done in the past, I'll ask you to come up with other plausible reasons/explanations/guesses. I'll ask you to try and answer any questions since that person came asking for help, especially your own that you asked. If you had/have the answers, why not share them? That would be far more humbling to me than your usual demeanor.

I'll happily recant, and apologize, if you come up with either a plausible alternative answer for that person regarding losing their pairing (other than merely "doing something wrong"), which solves their problem, or if you can prove that what I say is happening in my regional cable provider's area, isn't actually happening.

So, what's it going to be, more attacking, or as laid out above? I know what I'd bet my money on... However, I don't have any issues with being wrong or proven wrong. I'd like to be wrong, and NOT be looking at a future with more imposing restrictions and limitations on the programming I record. I'd love for the issue I described, to be something I can make go away, or it found to be a bug/issue that will get resolved. Sometimes being wrong is what I hope for the most of all. Seriously...


----------



## lpwcomp

nooneuknow said:


> On the first segment, sticks and stones.
> 
> On the second, I'll take it under advisement.
> 
> One thing that stands out to me, is (and often is) you are reading this (and other) thread(s), yet you did nothing to help the original poster, in ANY way, who was asking if anybody knew anything about why he lost his cablecard pairing after cloning. You didn't even so much as offer up an alternative theory, or opinion on a plausible explanation, you just laid into me. You also implied that he and/or I were doing something wrong, yet couldn't/wouldn't offer up WHAT was possibly being done wrong. That's not very helpful, nor friendly. It's your M.O.
> 
> So, like I've done in the past, I'll ask you to come up with other plausible reasons/explanations/guesses. I'll ask you to try and answer any questions since that person came asking for help, especially your own that you asked. If you had/have the answers, why not share them? That would be far more humbling to me than your usual demeanor.
> 
> I'll happily recant, and apologize, if you come up with either a plausible alternative answer for that person regarding losing their pairing (other than merely "doing something wrong"), which solves their problem, or if you can prove that what I say is happening in my regional cable provider's area, isn't actually happening.
> 
> So, what's it going to be, more attacking, or as laid out above? I know what I'd bet my money on... However, I don't have any issues with being wrong or proven wrong. I'd like to be wrong, and NOT be looking at a future with more imposing restrictions and limitations on the programming I record. I'd love for the issue I described, to be something I can make go away, or it found to be a bug/issue that will get resolved. Sometimes being wrong is what I hope for the most of all. Seriously...


How exactly is what you did helpful? If you had stated it as a theory or what you think, that would be one thing. Instead, you stated it in terms that implied that these were established, independently verifiable facts. That is counterproductive when someone is seeking a solution to their problem.

You want my theory? Ok. The more likely explanation is that both you and the OP screwed something up when you did the the copy/expand. Or that there is a problem with the s/w or h/w. It is *extremely unlikely* that the CableCARD is checking the s/n of the disk.

I can assure you that I have provided useful information in the TCF that enabled people to fix their problems and been thanked for it. I've also fixed problems in s/w used by some TCF members. Can you provide a link to a single post wherein you actually helped anyone?


----------



## lessd

*Calm down people*


----------



## ggieseke

lessd said:


> *Calm down people*


+1


----------



## nooneuknow

lpwcomp said:


> How exactly is what you did helpful? If you had stated it as a theory or what you think, that would be one thing. Instead, you stated it in terms that implied that these were established, independently verifiable facts. That is counterproductive when someone is seeking a solution to their problem.
> 
> You want my theory? Ok. The more likely explanation is that both you and the OP screwed something up when you did the the copy/expand. Or that there is a problem with the s/w or h/w. It is *extremely unlikely* that the CableCARD is checking the s/n of the disk.
> 
> I can assure you that I have provided useful information in the TCF that enabled people to fix their problems and been thanked for it. I've also fixed problems in s/w used by some TCF members. Can you provide a link to a single post wherein you actually helped anyone?


Everybody is entitled to their opinions and theories. Hopefully, SOMEBODY will get the facts at some point. I can't fully agree or disagree with the theory you presented. I feel it's pointless to try and work with you on getting to the bottom of the cablecard/cloning matter, unfortunately.

You seem to rarely pay attention to any details except for ones you can attack. Otherwise, you'd know the details of my upgrades, my experience level, that I do help people, do get thanked, and that I recently bought DVR_DUDE drives, and just clone them as needed, to new, identical model drives. I still have one Premiere I did with JMFS and a different model drive, that I haven't swapped-out, and it doesn't behave any differently in the cablecard/cloning matter.

You dodge questions, then ask your own. You brag about your help and thanks you received, without giving me a full list of links (or any at all), then expect me to provide you with mine? Interaction with you is a joke, and a big waste of time. I'd like to say "put up, or shut up", but what's the point? There is none. You've stuck to your narcissistic ways here for years, there isn't anything anybody but a forum moderator can do that about that.

All future posts from you, anywhere, aimed at me, shall be ignored, with a brief canned line stating I choose to ignore you. Now, run along and find a new bullying victim. I'm done with you, but not these forums.


----------



## lessd

nooneuknow said:


> Everybody is entitled to their opinions and theories. Hopefully, SOMEBODY will get the facts at some point. I can't fully agree or disagree with the theory you presented. I feel it's pointless to try and work with you on getting to the bottom of the cablecard/cloning matter, unfortunately.
> 
> You seem to rarely pay attention to any details except for ones you can attack. Otherwise, you'd know the details of my upgrades, my experience level, that I do help people, do get thanked, and that I recently bought DVR_DUDE drives, and just clone them as needed, to new, identical model drives. I still have one Premiere I did with JMFS and a different model drive, that I haven't swapped-out, and it doesn't behave any differently in the cablecard/cloning matter.
> 
> You dodge questions, then ask your own. You brag about your help and thanks you received, without giving me a full list of links (or any at all), then expect me to provide you with mine? Interaction with you is a joke, and a big waste of time. I'd like to say "put up, or shut up", but what's the point? There is none. You've stuck to your narcissistic ways here for years, there isn't anything anybody but a forum moderator can do that about that.
> 
> All future posts from you, anywhere, aimed at me, shall be ignored, with a brief canned line stating I choose to ignore you. Now, run along and find a new bullying victim. I'm done with you, but not these forums.


I hope DVR_DUDE does not come after you for cloning his drives !!! I would never admit to something like that on a public forum.


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> I hope DVR_DUDE does not come after you for cloning his drives !!! I would never admit to something like that on a public forum.


I'm usually more careful to specify that I only clone them for my own use. The purchased drives are in a virgin, never used state. So, if I only clone them to another identical model drive, and never use the purchased ones at all, how is that an issue?

The mere fact that they can be cloned, and the sheer number of people selling upgrades under very close names, like DVR_DADDY, etc., claiming the same claims he makes, are the ones that I would think he cares about.

I went with DVR_DUDE, since it's been implied that he pioneered the higher-priced upgrades from weeknees/DVRUpgrade, has a unbelievably great eBay reputation, and has been doing it far longer than the others, who I speculate DO sell clones of his work as their own.

His drives don't come with any "terms of use" or license, merely an invoice.

Technically, he, and other upgrade vendors, are the ones who are publicly putting themselves in a potentially compromising position, quite publicly. They're profiting by re-selling clones of TiVo's intellectual property. TiVo seems to not care, at this time. That could also change at any time.

But, I think I'm just stating what you already know, beyond clarifying that I DON'T clone and share, nor do I clone and profit. I don't even post his partition layouts, although I have been tempted, at times, so that the tools in progress for backing up TiVo drives will work with his as well. Why shouldn't I, since he doesn't actually prohibit it? He's only been vocal about others selling upgrades that are either, allegedly, inferior in quality, or possibly knock-offs, minus the support he provides his customers.


----------



## lessd

nooneuknow said:


> He's only been vocal about others selling upgrades that are either, allegedly, inferior in quality, or possibly knock-offs, minus the support he provides his customers.


I never heard of an inferior TiVo copy, if it works, it works, the length of time it works has to do with the Hard Drive used, and he makes an issue that he uses a better grade hard drive than many others on E-Bay.


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> I never heard of an inferior TiVo copy, if it works, it works, the length of time it works has to do with the Hard Drive used, and he makes an issue that he uses a better grade hard drive than many others on E-Bay.


I understand your point, and don't disagree.

What I meant was, if you read his constantly growing & changing description of why you should buy his drives, he's included every myth & no-longer valid/never proven bit of information he's been able to dig up, to practically scare people into only buying from him, and without directly attacking Comer & JMFS by name, he dismisses them as an improper upgrade, that will give inferior results, also claiming that the existing tools and other vendors "trick" your TiVo into displaying that it has more capacity than it actually does, but with his drives, the System Info screen reports true capacity, as opposed to tricked capacity.

He also claims true & full 4K partition alignment, which is an outright lie, on two-tuner Premieres and anything that came before them.

He dismisses any upgrade done by any existing tools, other than his own work as inferior. He also claims he built his image from the ground-up. That's a pretty hard thing to do when you need the original TiVo software to start.

The 4K alignment (the bulk of the reason I bought from him) is bogus, for all the units I have. It's a little bit harder to prove his claims that a pre-imaged upgrade drive sourced from anyplace else, or expanded with any other method than his gives a false capacity reading on the System Information screen. The other thing claimed was that only HIS supersize was a true, properly implemented, supersize.

I get why he's using the scare-tactics, but just how much of it can be substantiated remains left to be proven/disproven. I'm ticked-off about paying for 4K alignment, when that's not what I got... I've looked at his so-called "optimized partition layout", and while it may be on a HD unit, the Premiere image just has one huge partition tacked onto the end of what would have been on a stock drive. How is that "optimized"?

The scare-tactics may be a necessity to keep the money coming in, for him. But, my respect-level, in general, has declined, as he didn't used to use them, until all the competition flooded in on eBay.


----------



## lessd

I have not read his latest scare-tactics, good stuff to know, but as you said no way to prove if it has any real meaning, my delete folder is full, I did a quick add of the hours of these programs, than added the non deleted programs and the math was within 5%, of the reported space, both total and what was used on the TiVo, good enough for me as each program may take a difference amount of HD record space. OH, I am using a 2Tb drive upgrade (I made myself) on a TP-4.


----------



## jmbach

nooneuknow said:


> I understand your point, and don't disagree.
> 
> What I meant was, if you read his constantly growing & changing description of why you should buy his drives, he's included every myth & no-longer valid/never proven bit of information he's been able to dig up, to practically scare people into only buying from him, and without directly attacking Comer & JMFS by name, he dismisses them as an improper upgrade, that will give inferior results, also claiming that the existing tools and other vendors "trick" your TiVo into displaying that it has more capacity than it actually does, but with his drives, the System Info screen reports true capacity, as opposed to tricked capacity.
> 
> He also claims true & full 4K partition alignment, which is an outright lie, on two-tuner Premieres and anything that came before them.
> 
> He dismisses any upgrade done by any existing tools, other than his own work as inferior. He also claims he built his image from the ground-up. That's a pretty hard thing to do when you need the original TiVo software to start.
> 
> The 4K alignment (the bulk of the reason I bought from him) is bogus, for all the units I have. It's a little bit harder to prove his claims that a pre-imaged upgrade drive sourced from anyplace else, or expanded with any other method than his gives a false capacity reading on the System Information screen. The other thing claimed was that only HIS supersize was a true, properly implemented, supersize.
> 
> I get why he's using the scare-tactics, but just how much of it can be substantiated remains left to be proven/disproven. I'm ticked-off about paying for 4K alignment, when that's not what I got... I've looked at his so-called "optimized partition layout", and while it may be on a HD unit, the Premiere image just has one huge partition tacked onto the end of what would have been on a stock drive. How is that "optimized"?
> 
> The scare-tactics may be a necessity to keep the money coming in, for him. But, my respect-level, in general, has declined, as he didn't used to use them, until all the competition flooded in on eBay.


4k aligned is relatively easy as the partitions need to start on the correct boundary. If it means anything to the TiVo unit who knows. Has been some debate about it. For it to provide a lot of benefit the OS should be using 4k clusters as well. Otherwise get a small degradation in overall performance.

When comparing "optimized" layout versus "non optimized" layout the only difference I see is the placement of the core partitions (bootstrap, kernel, root, their alternates, swap, and var) in the middle of the disk versus at the beginning of the disk. This is, I suppose, to minimize head travel thus improve performance to some degree. So in a sense, if all that happened was that the extra space at the end of a normal TiVo image was converted to a MFS partition to gain the extra space then it is not optimized based on that definition.


----------



## nooneuknow

jmbach said:


> 4k aligned is relatively easy as the partitions need to start on the correct boundary. If it means anything to the TiVo unit who knows. Has been some debate about it. For it to provide a lot of benefit the OS should be using 4k clusters as well. Otherwise get a small degradation in overall performance.
> 
> When comparing "optimized" layout versus "non optimized" layout the only difference I see is the placement of the core partitions (bootstrap, kernel, root, their alternates, swap, and var) in the middle of the disk versus at the beginning of the disk. This is, I suppose, to minimize head travel thus improve performance to some degree. So in a sense, if all that happened was that the extra space at the end of a normal TiVo image was converted to a MFS partition to gain the extra space then it is not optimized based on that definition.


I fully agree with everything you say. :up:


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> I have not read his latest scare-tactics, good stuff to know, but as you said no way to prove if it has any real meaning, my delete folder is full, I did a quick add of the hours of these programs, than added the non deleted programs and the math was within 5%, of the reported space, both total and what was used on the TiVo, good enough for me as each program may take a difference amount of HD record space. OH, I am using a 2Tb drive upgrade (I made myself) on a TP-4.


It's my understanding that your model (a four-tuner unit), fully supports 4K alignment, in all respects. Did you achieve it, post upgrade? I'd like to have a look at your partition layout, if you have the time.


----------



## lessd

nooneuknow said:


> It's my understanding that your model (a four-tuner unit), fully supports 4K alignment, in all respects. Did you achieve it, post upgrade? I'd like to have a look at your partition layout, if you have the time.


I have no idea as I just copied the original 500Tb drive using jmfs Live CD than expanded it, and super sized it, than I back up the full 2Tb drive into a 1.6Tb file using (DvrBARS). Now when I need a 2Tb image for any TP-4 it only takes a few minutes to make. If you tell me what to do to get the partition, I do have a spare 2Tb drive with the AF that I can make a 2Tb TP-4 drive for and check the partition layout. The only program I have that did show the partition layout was the old WinMFS and I don't think it works with the Series 4 disk drives.


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> I have no idea as I just copied the original 500Tb drive using jmfs Live CD than expanded it, and super sized it, than I back up the full 2Tb drive into a 1.6Tb file using (DvrBARS). Now when I need a 2Tb image for any TP-4 it only takes a few minutes to make. If you tell me what to do to get the partition, I do have a spare 2Tb drive that I can make a 2Tb TP-4 drive for and check the partition layout. The only program I have that did show the partition layout was the old WinMFS and I don't think it works with the Series 4 disk drives.


The mfslayout utility is included on some Linux distro Live boot CDs/DVDs. It's on the JMFS distro, and might be on the MFSLive CD. I just don't know how to "pipe" the output to a file, as I'm not very Linux experienced. I *think* Linux fdisk can give some info, as well, but it's VERY dangerous to play with fdisk if you don't know what you're doing, or aren't careful.

The mfslayout and fdisk version, or maybe it's the kernel, of the JMFS distro don't know how to report/display 4K info properly, last I was aware. But, you can always Get the most recent Ulimate Boot/Rescue distro, and then you have a chance of getting correct data reported.


----------



## jmbach

The 2TB XL4 unit is 4k Aligned. I will have to get back to you about the 500GB TP4 model but if memory serves, it is 4k Aligned as well.


----------



## jmbach

lessd said:


> I have no idea as I just copied the original 500Tb drive using jmfs Live CD than expanded it, and super sized it, than I back up the full 2Tb drive into a 1.6Tb file using (DvrBARS). Now when I need a 2Tb image for any TP-4 it only takes a few minutes to make. If you tell me what to do to get the partition, I do have a spare 2Tb drive with the AF that I can make a 2Tb TP-4 drive for and check the partition layout. The only program I have that did show the partition layout was the old WinMFS and I don't think it works with the Series 4 disk drives.


You could create a virtual device with VBox or any other virtual machine product, load the JMFS iso or MFS live iso in the "Virtual CD Drive" and the vhd of you TiVo image from DvrBARS as the "Virtual hard drive". Start the virtual machine and have it boot off the "Virtual CD Drive" and you can look at or manipulate the TiVo vhd at will.

Sounds harder than it is. It is relatively easy. Would work with a copy of your backup vhd just to be safe.


----------



## lpwcomp

Redirecting the output of mfslayout _*should*_ be a simple matter of adding "> _pathtofile_" to the command (minus the quotes and where _pathtofile_ is the full path to the file). The more difficult part would be mounting a writable file system other than the TiVo drive, especially if you later want to access the file from Windows or Mac OS.


----------



## ggieseke

jmbach said:


> You could create a virtual device with VBox or any other virtual machine product, load the JMFS iso or MFS live iso in the "Virtual CD Drive" and the vhd of you TiVo image from DvrBARS as the "Virtual hard drive". Start the virtual machine and have it boot off the "Virtual CD Drive" and you can look at or manipulate the TiVo vhd at will.
> 
> Sounds harder than it is. It is relatively easy. Would work with a copy of your backup vhd just to be safe.


Somehow my last post mysteriously disappeared overnight, but as long as we're on the subject of VMs it should be easy to create another virtual drive and redirect the output of MFSLayout or whatever tool you prefer to it as lpwcomp suggested. With Windows 7 it's easy to create almost any virtual drive that you want and then use it in a virtual machine. That's one of the main reasons I didn't create my own compressed file format for DvrBARS and stuck with a standard that most virtual machine software already knows how to deal with.

P.S. The next time I'm censored without even the courtesy of a PM will be the last time I ever contribute a damn thing. Write your own frelling software and buy your own 100GB Dropbox for the images....


----------



## ggieseke

jmbach,

The last bit wasn't directed at you, I just wrote everything in one post and didn't consider how it would look.


----------



## nooneuknow

ggieseke said:


> Somehow my last post mysteriously disappeared overnight, but as long as we're on the subject of VMs it should be easy to create another virtual drive and redirect the output of MFSLayout or whatever tool you prefer to it as lpwcomp suggested. With Windows 7 it's easy to create almost any virtual drive that you want and then use it in a virtual machine. That's one of the main reasons I didn't create my own compressed file format for DvrBARS and stuck with a standard that most virtual machine software already knows how to deal with.
> 
> P.S. The next time I'm censored without even the courtesy of a PM will be the last time I ever contribute a damn thing. Write your own frelling software and buy your own 100GB Dropbox for the images....


 What do you mean? The forum moderators wiped out a post of yours on here without saying anything? That's not entirely a shock to me, though.

If that's the case, maybe you should try and keep the image thing more on the DL... There's a reason there's a cleverly named thread on here for people to beg for images. Then a person who has it can send a PM with a link. But, in the past, the person with the image, or the link to get to it would *discretely* PM the info, to the person requesting it. They generally didn't post on any threads "Image sent", or even reference it, except maybe a hint that they should check their PM box, if they kept begging and it was already waiting for them.

I'd wondered if they'd lightened up around here, since people have been asking for images all over the place lately. It used to be if a person did that, they'd get notified (more like warned) to use that one thread.

I had to do a whole cloak-and-dagger dance, a long time back, by getting told to use that thread, then I got a PM, where I had to give an email address, then was emailed a link to a FTP site, along with a password, and asked not to give out the link or password, due to the FTP site winding up getting shut down regularly.

Please don't take out your very understandable frustration on the users of the forum. You have my full support, and I applaud your hard work. I'm sure many others feel the same.

It only takes one person, especially a forum operator, or moderator, that opposes image trading or gifting, that's either paranoid that TiVo will shutter this site with a lawsuit over TiVo's intellectual property, or doesn't condone the practice to shut you down. The forum sponsors can't be very happy with your work and free image trading, though...

Personally, I'd love for a new, better forum to come into play, and turn this place into the ghost town that MySpace turned into after Facebook came along. But, it takes money to provide this, and your excellent work is a threat to the sponsors of this forum, who profit when people want or need to re-image and/or upgrade their TiVo.

I'd be much more vocal, and blunt about how I feel about the way this place is run, and who gets to pull the strings, but I don't want to find myself banned, the next time I come to check the forum...


----------



## nooneuknow

lpwcomp said:


> Redirecting the output of mfslayout _*should*_ be a simple matter of adding "> _pathtofile_" to the command (minus the quotes and where _pathtofile_ is the full path to the file). The more difficult part would be mounting a writable file system other than the TiVo drive, especially if you later want to access the file from Windows or Mac OS.


Yeah, the ">" was what I thought, but I didn't know for certain where the output file would go. With the JMFS distro, I believe it just got wrote into a built-in ram-disk, but that distro's tools/kernel weren't made to deal specifically with 4K sectors. I wonder how hard it would be to just update the JMFS Live distro to display accurate data...


----------



## lpwcomp

ggieseke said:


> P.S. The next time I'm censored without even the courtesy of a PM will be the last time I ever contribute a damn thing. Write your own frelling software and buy your own 100GB Dropbox for the images...


Do you know which mod removed it and have any idea why it was done? While there are certain topics that are "forbidden" on the TCF, I've never heard of a post being removed simply for discussing image sharing, which goes on all of the time. There's an entire thread pretty much devoted to it.


----------



## jmbach

nooneuknow said:


> Yeah, the ">" was what I thought, but I didn't know for certain where the output file would go. With the JMFS distro, I believe it just got wrote into a built-in ram-disk, but that distro's tools/kernel weren't made to deal specifically with 4K sectors. I wonder how hard it would be to just update the JMFS Live distro to display accurate data...


Just to clarify something. At this time the XL4 2TB drive is 4k aligned but still uses 512mb sector addressing in the partition tables. Now JMFS will add an aligned partition if the last partition ends on the right boundary so the new partition will start the correct 4k boundary. WinMFS does the same for non premiere Tivos. When TiVo transitions to drives over 2TB, then they will have to use 4k blocks. At that time JMFS will have to be re written. Or if we support some of our excellent programmer(s), we could get a program that not only backs up and restrores premiere Tivos and beyond but also gives us a truly optimized expanded image. :thumbup::thumbup:


----------



## nooneuknow

jmbach said:


> Just to clarify something. At this time the XL4 2TB drive is 4k aligned but still uses 512mb sector addressing in the partition tables. Now JMFS will add an aligned partition if the last partition ends on the right boundary so the new partition will start the correct 4k boundary. WinMFS does the same for non premiere Tivos. When TiVo transitions to drives over 2TB, then they will have to use 4k blocks. At that time JMFS will have to be re written. Or if we support some of our excellent programmer(s), we could get a program that not only backs up and restrores premiere Tivos and beyond but also gives us a truly optimized expanded image. :thumbup::thumbup:


That's a good reflection of what I've been thinking: You just put it in a concise and understandable way.

If it comes down to it, those who want these tools need to show their support and commitment, help in any way they can, and if need be, chip in some financial aid towards a project, that may have to distance itself from forums sponsored by those who would rather SELL it to us and advertise it on the banner ads we're forbidden to even block, which, in turn, funds this place.

It's been done before, but over at the forum that dabbles in the areas we're prohibited from discussing here, or even providing links to from here.

LONG LIVE FREE TOOLS FOR TIVO OWNERS TO REPAIR/RESTORE/UPGRADE/BACKUP THE EQUIPMENT THEY HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR THE PRIVELEGE OF OWNING AND USING!!! DOWN WITH THE TYRANTS AND PROFITEERS THAT WANT TO FORCE THEM TO PAY FOR IT!!!

Yeah, that's a bit over the top... But, if those who work so hard to provide the tools are going to get censored here, what choice is there? Just give up, bend-over and take it for doing it for free, and giving it to us for free? I don't think so. That's just wrong.


----------



## ggieseke

lpwcomp said:


> Do you know which mod removed it and have any idea why it was done? While there are certain topics that are "forbidden" on the TCF, I've never heard of a post being removed simply for discussing image sharing, which goes on all of the time. There's an entire thread pretty much devoted to it.


This one wasn't even about images, just my personal opinions about 4K partition aliagnment or lack thereof.

I ran DvrBARS past TiVo and they had no issues with it (while obviously not being able to endorse it). Big brother isn't the problem.

I tried to get them to approve posting the links to the images but you can probably guess where that went. They haven't said no, but I think it's best to keep it on a PM basis for now. I'm checking in here several times a day and monitoring most of the sub-forums.

I have no idea where that post went. It was slightly in opposition to some other people's opinions re AF drives but I was clear that it was only my own WAG. It was still there yesterday afternoon but today it's gone. I'm typing with my left hand and a straw in my mouth at the moment, and it really ticked me off.


----------



## lessd

jmbach said:


> You could create a virtual device with VBox or any other virtual machine product, load the JMFS iso or MFS live iso in the "Virtual CD Drive" and the vhd of you TiVo image from DvrBARS as the "Virtual hard drive". Start the virtual machine and have it boot off the "Virtual CD Drive" and you can look at or manipulate the TiVo vhd at will.
> 
> Sounds harder than it is. It is relatively easy. Would work with a copy of your backup vhd just to be safe.


I do my TiVo work on an old HP P4 computer in the cellar with XP on it, I once tried the VD and got it to work, but now I do use MS version of the XP VD on my windows 7 to run some old 16 bit programs, an old (from the 80s Db Master) data base and my alarm control. If you want the image to play with just PM me.


----------



## lpwcomp

ggieseke said:


> I have no idea where that post went. It was slightly in opposition to some other people's opinions re AF drives but I was clear that it was only my own WAG. It was still there yesterday afternoon but today it's gone. I'm typing with my left hand and a straw in my mouth at the moment, and it really ticked me off.


I was hoping I had at least part of the post in a notification e-mail to jog my memory but no joy as I cycled Thunderbird yesterday just after Noon, which emptied the trash. I certainly don't recall reading a post by you that would merit deletion.

As far as posting the links to image d/l sites is concerned, it may just be a case of keeping things on the "downlow" to make it less likely that TiVo will take "official notice" and also maybe make it less likely that some of the advertisers would consider withdrawing their ads, but who knows?. I certainly don't think it has anything to do with kowtowing to TiVo, Inc. requests or being cowed by threats from external sources.


----------



## nooneuknow

ggieseke said:


> This one wasn't even about images, just my personal opinions about 4K partition aliagnment or lack thereof.
> 
> I ran DvrBARS past TiVo and they had no issues with it (while obviously not being able to endorse it). Big brother isn't the problem.
> 
> I tried to get them to approve posting the links to the images but you can probably guess where that went. They haven't said no, but I think it's best to keep it on a PM basis for now. I'm checking in here several times a day and monitoring most of the sub-forums.
> 
> I have no idea where that post went. It was slightly in opposition to some other people's opinions re AF drives but I was clear that it was only my own WAG. It was still there yesterday afternoon but today it's gone. I'm typing with my left hand and a straw in my mouth at the moment, and it really ticked me off.


Perhaps the sponsors don't want people finding out that their pre-imaged drop-in upgrades might not be what they make them out to be, when it comes to the 4K matter... I partially blame Western Digital (and anybody else), who says Windows XP is the only platform that requires alignment, without disclosing the extra wear and tear that unaligned disk read/write cycles cause when not 4K aligned. The performance hit is no secret to users, but they don't advertise/advise on that either...

I'd suggest you be cautious with Big Brother (TiVo). They could just be trying to get as much info as they can, to pass along to their legal team.

I've had one pretty high ranking person at TiVo say something was fine, then as soon as a repeated it I got whammied by somebody higher.

I'm not saying to become paranoid, just be aware that what can often seem as good-faith discussion, can sometimes just be data-mining. The more they know about your work, the easier it is for them to use what you've given them against you, or take from you to present as their own work.

While TiVo has been allowing people to self-upgrade, without their approved means and equipment, allowing people like Weeknees/DVRUpgrade/DVR_DUDE/Comer to do what they do, they COULD change their minds.

The more they know about how your software works, the easier they could blacklist it/come up with countermeasures, or basically steal your work and sell it as their own.

It took somebody else making their own remote season pass manager to get them to make their own.

You also have to consider that while TiVo isn't required to provide any support to anybody who opens their TiVo up and changes anything, it doesn't stop people who have from calling in and demanding support.

There's no doubt in my mind that they are weighing the pros and cons of letting you innovate, while most of what they do is litigate.

Just be careful, for your sake. There still is the fact that if your tools become as robust, useful, and easy as many envision in the future, you're a direct threat to the primary sponsors of these forums.

Best of luck. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help. I have a lot of TiVos, a lot of computers, and a lot of time. I just wish I was more familiar with Linux, and the Tivoized version of it,


----------



## lpwcomp

I think it likely that at least weaKnees/DVRUpgrade pays TiVo for the right to distribute the s/w. This is based on the fact that there used to be a user maintained site that hosted most if not all of the then existent images which was shut down due to threats of legal action by TiVo. Meanwhile, DVRUpgrade was selling InstantCake with nary a peep from TiVo. And both weaKnees and DVRUpgrade (they were still separate at that time) were selling pre-imaged drive. It wouldn't surprise me at all if dvr_dude has a similar arrangement,


----------



## nooneuknow

lpwcomp said:


> I think it likely that at least weaKnees/DVRUpgrade pays TiVo for the right to distribute the s/w. This is based on the fact that there used to be a user maintained site that hosted most if not all of the then existent images which was shut down due to threats of legal action by TiVo. Meanwhile, DVRUpgrade was selling InstantCake with nary a peep from TiVo. And both weaKnees and DVRUpgrade (they were still separate at that time) were selling pre-imaged drive. It wouldn't surprise me at all if dvr_dude has a similar arrangement,


That's all very logical and makes sense. I also have a hunch that TiVo never hassled Comer, as if I recall correctly, he's in Canada.

I used to have access to the site you mention as well (or one that was as you describe), and recall it being shut down a few times, before whoever was reviving/mirroring it, playing invite only, password protected, catch me if you can, under multiple ftp site URL changes, ceased hosting it. I still have all the content that was on there.

I seem to recall that horrible piece of work known as InstantCake, claiming to be licensed by TiVo for distribution. I find that CD works good for shimming up a wobbly workbench now (but was the ONLY source for a DIY image at the time, and got the job done on the old models, before drives reached 1TB capacity, which it couldn't handle). It sure wasn't cheap, either, especially considering the TiVo user would technically be paying to get the same software that they already paid licensing to use before their TiVo hard drive died on them...

Now, in the present, if these DIY drive upgrade suppliers are paying licensing fees to TiVo, while the mere use of these upgrades absolves TiVo of providing support to the end-user, something stinks...


----------



## jmbach

Just checked a 750500 image and it is also 4k aligned. So it appears all the 4 tuner premieres are 4k aligned. FWIW. The partition tables are still using 512mb blocks. If someone was real adventurous, they could dissect the ext partitions to see if they use 4k clusters. If they do, then it would imply that being 4k aligned has more meaning.


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## jmbach

ggieseke said:


> I have no idea where that post went. It was slightly in opposition to some other people's opinions re AF drives but I was clear that it was only my own WAG. It was still there yesterday afternoon but today it's gone. I'm typing with my left hand and a straw in my mouth at the moment, and it really ticked me off.


I never pressed the triangle with the exclamation point on a post so I do not know what carnage ensues once someone does press it. Wonder if someone accidentally pressed it and the post got deleted.  I guess I could make a post and try it.  Afraid someone might come to my house and confiscate my computer if I do.


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## nooneuknow

jmbach said:


> Just checked a 750500 image and it is also 4k aligned. So it appears all the 4 tuner premieres are 4k aligned. FWIW. The partition tables are still using 512mb blocks. If someone was real adventurous, they could dissect the ext partitions to see if they use 4k clusters. If they do, then it would imply that being 4k aligned has more meaning.


This is as I have been suspecting... 2-tuner: no alignment (unsure if a software update can align), 4-tuner: factory aligned (possibly, or capable with a software update).

For those with the time to play around:

1. Make sure your TiVo has 2 hours, that it won't be busy.

2. From LiveTV mode: Press 911, then rapidly hit clear (so channel doesn't actually change).

3. Reboot, do a kickstart 52 (emergency software reinstall).

4. As soon as you can get back to LiveTV, repeat the 911-clear.

5. Go to System Information screen: Press Clear, Clear, Enter, Enter, Zero.

6. View the system logs (I suggest not messing with the other items in the backdoor screen), using the right arrow to change through the logs, Up & down to scroll, and look for the 911 markers in the logs.

7. When you find the log with loads of info about the filesystem, find the top 911 marker, and you'll get your drive model, capabilities, modes, drive state, sector size, clusters/blocks.

8. Scroll through until you've reviewed to the second 911-clear marker, and take notes of anything you feel is relevant.

9. Report back here with your model, number of tuners, model and capacity of drive, and what the file system is/isn't doing.

I think this is where we prove what's going on with what in the 512/4K/alignment matter, and there may be some competing theories as to what the future may or may not bring (like 4K alignment).

The KS 52 does a full assessment of the drive and the file system, before copying the current software to the alternate partition. It's also far less likely to brick your unit than a KS 57 or 58, if (when) repairs and cleanup operations are performed on the file system.

* All 911-clear does is put a one-line marker stamp in the logs, so you can find what you're looking for faster/easier


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## lpwcomp

I thought KS 52 was "Emergency Software Reinstall".


----------



## retiredqwest

How to download screens using the jmfs software.
1. Have a HPFS or FAT disk attached together with your Tivo disk. Harddrive or USB.
2. Boot jmfs
3. Exit to shell (x)
4. Run *fdisk -l*. Check the HPFS/FAT partition names, it has to have a number after disk name, like:


Code:


   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1      194522  1562497933+  HPFS

5. Create directory: *mkdir mydisk*
6. Mount the partition on which you want to copy the log (akin to "assign drive letter" in Windows). If it is HPFS, then you need to specify the driver to use (the default one is read-only). No need to do it for FAT. For HPFS: *mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/<partiton name> mydisk* (for example: "*mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 mydisk*")
For FAT: *mount /dev/<partiton name> mydisk* (for example: "*mount /dev/sda1 mydisk*")
6. Run "*/root/mfslayout.sh /dev/<partition name>*" and see if you get the correct output on the screen. If so, then run "*/root/mfslayout.sh /dev/<partition name> > filename*" of your choosing. This pipes the screen output to that file. Then run "*cp filename mydisk/*" (it will copy the log to the root directory of the given partition).
7. Unmount partition (just a precaution, so all the buffers are flushed and file system is clean): *umount mydisk*


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## nooneuknow

lpwcomp said:


> I thought KS 52 was "Emergency Software Reinstall".


It is, but it runs VERY thorough file system checks, has NEVER nuked a TiVo (like a 57 or 58 has done to me from time to time), and logs more data than the other two combined.

Think about it: The last thing TiVo wants is to nuke a unit into the GSOD reboot loop when sending out updates, so It checks, cleans, and defrags the file system of the alternate software partition FIRST, and logs more data, just in case an update does nuke a unit.

One bit of misinformation I've seen floating around here from time to time, is that KS52 installs the previous software version - absolutely false.

I found the "extreme logging" that happens on a software install/re-install by accident.

I did update my post, figuring that if I didn't specify what KS52 was, questions would pop up.

The only danger, is if there's an unidentified bad sector on the alternate partition, but that would hit you on the next software update anyway, since every update switches to the other of the two partitions. If that worries anybody, then run the full battery of SMART tests first (under KS54).


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## lpwcomp

retiredqwest said:


> How to download screens using the jmfs software.
> 1. Have a HPFS or FAT disk attached together with your Tivo disk. Harddrive or USB.
> 2. Boot jmfs
> 3. Exit to shell (x)
> 4. Run *fdisk -l*. Check the HPFS/FAT partition names, it has to have a number after disk name, like:
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1               1      194522  1562497933+  HPFS
> 
> 5. Create directory: *mkdir mydisk*
> 6. Mount the partition on which you want to copy the log (akin to "assign drive letter" in Windows). If it is HPFS, then you need to specify the driver to use (the default one is read-only). No need to do it for FAT. For HPFS: *mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/<partiton name> mydisk* (for example: "*mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 mydisk*")
> For FAT: *mount /dev/<partiton name> mydisk* (for example: "*mount /dev/sda1 mydisk*")
> 6. Run "*/root/mfslayout.sh /dev/<partition name>*" and see if you get the correct output on the screen. If so, then run "*/root/mfslayout.sh /dev/<partition name> > filename*" of your choosing. This pipes the screen output to that file. Then run "*cp filename mydisk/*" (it will copy the log to the root directory of the given partition).
> 7. Unmount partition (just a precaution, so all the buffers are flushed and file system is clean): *umount mydisk*


You might want to make it clear that *<partition name>* in the _second_ step 6 (you have 2) refers to the TiVo drive and is not the same as *<partition name>* in the _first_ step 6. Actually, shouldn't it be a device (ex.: /dev/sdb) rather than a partition in the second step 6?

Minor, somewhat geeky correction: You are not "piping" the output, you are re-directing it.

On a lighter note, anyone ever see the mfslayouts in concert?


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## ggieseke

nooneuknow said:


> The more they know about how your software works, the easier they could blacklist it/come up with countermeasures, or basically steal your work and sell it as their own.


I doubt that they need MFS lessons from me. 

Que Sera, Sera. Now back to our regularly-scheduled thread.


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## Leon WIlkinson

unitron said:


> At least one *brand* of motherboard, *GigaByte*


 Dang this 

I just bought HP ENVY H8-1450 Desktop which as a Gigabyte card. So is this mostly a single or small amount of Mother Boards or is it all known Gigabyte boards?


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## Leon WIlkinson

I feel better now with a bit more research. will need to look into bios and check sata position of drives, I wondering if putting the caching SSD in sata0/1 would be ok.


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## nooneuknow

I just received a shipment of six WD20EADS-00S2B0 HARCHV2AA 2TB Western Digital hard drives, as replacements for some degraded/defective ones I sent back. They're factory recertified replacements, still sealed.

PM me if you'd like to make me an offer. If you'd like, I could pre-image them for either TiVo HD, or 2-tuner Premiere. I don't need them, because I already bought EURS AV-GP replacements, when Newegg had them on special.

I know some don't like/trust 4K drives, so I figured these 512-byte sector ones may be of interest to some of you.


----------



## tom gonzalez

Does anybody know if the WD20EURS has intellipark enabled?


----------



## nooneuknow

tom gonzalez said:


> Does anybody know if the WD20EURS has intellipark enabled?


Straight from the factory, it is enabled. You can disable it (with a tool called WDIDLE3.exe), if it causes you to hang on the boot screen after a menu reboot (warm reboot, versus a "cold" power-cord-pull-boot).

I've heard that something with the firmware of the WDEURS, implemented a while back, stops that from happening. But, it used to be an issue with any Green drive from WD, unless manually disabled.

ALL GreenPower WD drives have the intellipark feature, even if they are advertised for 24/7 video usage.

I haven't seen recent posts reporting an issue with the warm boot hang, for quite some time. So, either TiVo and/or WD have fixed that, or those that encounter it find the many posts on here that say how to disable it.

I've seen a FEW, *old* reports that a full disable can cause strange behavior, but increasing the idle timeout to 300 seconds, instead of 3, didn't cause those issues, and achieved the ability to not get hung on a warm reboot. So, that's how I've been setting mine, when setting up a new drive.


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## HerronScott

nooneuknow said:


> Straight from the factory, it is enabled. You can disable it (with a tool called WDIDLE3.exe), if it causes you to hang on the boot screen after a menu reboot (warm reboot, versus a "cold" power-cord-pull-boot).


The new WD20EURS that I bought from Amazon last August did *not* have Intellipark enabled which I verified by checking with WDIDL3. I used this successfully in an TiVo HD that I had picked up for my son for college.

Scott


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## nooneuknow

HerronScott said:


> The new WD20EURS that I bought from Amazon last August did *not* have Intellipark enabled which I verified by checking with WDIDL3. I used this successfully in an TiVo HD that I had picked up for my son for college.
> 
> Scott


I guess they must have come to their senses and realized that a 24/7 rated drive shouldn't need it, if used for the *primary* target market. Also, since TiVo uses those drives in their 2TB models, they might've been inclined to disable it, since they do market it for non-surveillance DVR use as well. I could see applications where people might use the drive for AV streaming non-24/7 run-time, and it'd make sense to use it, but that's a minority scenario. I've seen mixed reports, so I erred on the side of caution...

Thanks for clearing that up.


----------



## adster

So I've tried reading through this entire thread (and believe me it was long) but I'm trying to find a solution to upgrade my TiVo Premiere drive using only one USB to SATA device. Is there a way to make an image of one of the drive then restore it to another drive without doing a direct copy with both drives attached?


----------



## nooneuknow

adster said:


> So I've tried reading through this entire thread (and believe me it was long) but I'm trying to find a solution to upgrade my TiVo Premiere drive using only one USB to SATA device. Is there a way to make an image of one of the drive then restore it to another drive without doing a direct copy with both drives attached?


http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=503261


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## mattack

adster said:


> So I've tried reading through this entire thread (and believe me it was long) but I'm trying to find a solution to upgrade my TiVo Premiere drive using only one USB to SATA device. Is there a way to make an image of one of the drive then restore it to another drive without doing a direct copy with both drives attached?


BTW, USB<->SATA devices are readily $15 and under nowadays.. So it really isn't TOO much of a burden to get another. I mean just the "cable + power" things to use a bare drive.


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## Ryan0751

My TiVO drive was already upgraded to a 1TB, and started making noise and the TiVo rebooted quite often. So, I unplugged it, and ordered a new disk. I'm now attempting to copy the original disk (hopefully it works enough to do so) to the new disk.

It seems to be going VERY VERY slowly. Average rate: 240kB/s.

This is going to take an eternity! Is there a way to just copy the OS to the new disk for the Premiere? I honestly don't care about the programming content.


----------



## jmbach

Ryan0751 said:


> My TiVO drive was already upgraded to a 1TB, and started making noise and the TiVo rebooted quite often. So, I unplugged it, and ordered a new disk. I'm now attempting to copy the original disk (hopefully it works enough to do so) to the new disk.
> 
> It seems to be going VERY VERY slowly. Average rate: 240kB/s.
> 
> This is going to take an eternity! Is there a way to just copy the OS to the new disk for the Premiere? I honestly don't care about the programming content.


Use DvrBARS and do a truncated backup followed by restore.


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## Ryan0751

jmbach said:


> Use DvrBARS and do a truncated backup followed by restore.


Oooh, cool. This looks good... giving it a whirl now.


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## Ryan0751

That worked perfectly, thanks so much! Tivo back up online.


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## ah30k

I got through 9 pages without seeing this...

I saw the drive limit was +2g. Does this mean that if a standard Premiere 4 with 75 hd hrs using a 500gb drive then I could use this tool and upgrade with a 2.5b drive and get 396 hours (317 *1.25)?

If I chose a 3gb drive would it use the size of the 2g + .5g = 2.5g then ignore the remaining 0.5g?

Thanks

edit - never mind, further reading points out that any total greater than 2tb results in a negative space bug which I assume is a display only issue.


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## jmbach

In theory the XL4 with its 2TB can add a 2TB external drive although at this point it can add only a 1TB drive since that is all that WD and TiVo conspire to have available on the market. 

You can see if a Premiere 4 can be expanded with JMFS then add an extender drive. If I recall, there was another thread on TCF that tried this and did not work. I'll see if I can find a reference again and post it.

You cannot use a 3TB drive at this time as the APM that describes the partition structure does not support drives over 2TB.


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## ah30k

Just did the upgrade on a fresh non-initialized Prem 4 to a WD20EURS.

I used the app noted in the FAQ to check the AAM acoustic settings and it seemed to be acoustic_management=enabled from the factory. I think that makes sense since that disk was labeled as a DVR drive.

I couldn't run the WD app to tell if intelli-park was enabled because it seemed to not like my OS. I couldn't tell for sure but proceeded anyway. I did a few soft-boots and it never hung so I am assuming intelli-park was disabled.

Upgrade went very smooth and the never-powered up original 500g drive is in the static bag as a backup.

Thanks for the instructions and app.


----------



## marcolisi

Hi guys, is it possible to copy/extract just specific files from the original tivo Hard Disk to an empty hard disk using jmfs Live CD ?

I wish just to back up specific recorded shows.
Thank you


----------



## mattack

No.. AFAIK, if one *pre-hacked* a Tivo, THEN one could, using special tools, extract recordings.. But that talk also isn't allowed on this forum.


----------



## marcolisi

but why I was able instead to backup the full hard disk to the 2 tb hard disk to increase the tivo capacity ?


----------



## mattack

Because that "just" copies the entire drive and does a few very specific things like changing partition sizes.

As a fairly stupid analogy, think of it you copying text from a language you can't speak to a bigger piece of paper. You can look at the original and copy it directly, but don't understand what it means.

So basically, AFAIK, people have figured out the basic partition sizing info, but the various show info is encrypted to specific hardware, so even if you knew the specific show info you couldn't just copy it "out" of the hard drive... on an unhacked tivo.


----------



## mattack

Again, you could just download the shows *from the Tivo directly* with kmttg or other tools... assuming they're not copy protected.


----------



## marcolisi

unfortunately i can not freely ask what I wish on here :-( 
maybe when i am allowed to dm
thank u for the replies


----------



## marcolisi

Wait maybe this can be answered , why when I moved my original tivo hard disk , with the recorded show on, to another tivo premiere , I can not playback the video on tv ?
thank you


----------



## lessd

marcolisi said:


> Wait maybe this can be answered , why when I moved my original tivo hard disk , with the recorded show on, to another tivo premiere , I can not playback the video on tv ?
> thank you


Each TiVo does it own encryption so a hard drive from one TiVo will only work on another TiVo of the same model *if you do a C&D all,* then you have no programs left to watch. Xfer programs to a PC is the only way that this forum can tell you how to save a program. When I get a new TiVo to replace one I have, I just xfer all the programs to the new TiVo, than sell the older TiVo.


----------



## tluxon

A week ago I upgraded one of my THD's from a failing 750GB Seagate DB35.3 drive (had replaced the original drive when first purchase in Jan '08) to a WD20EURS drive using JMFS for the copy and then WinMFS to check the partitions and expand the last one (SuperSize had already copied over from the source drive).

Here's the partition table of the source drive as reported by WinMFS:



Code:


 Partition Maps
 #:                  type name                            length base      ( size  )
  1   Apple_partition_map Apple                               [email protected]         (  31.5K)
  2                 Image Bootstrap 1                          [email protected] ( 512.0 )
  3                 Image Kernel 1                          [email protected] (   4.0M)
  4                  Ext2 Root 1                          [email protected] ( 256.0M)
  5                 Image Bootstrap 2                          [email protected] ( 512.0 )
  6                 Image Kernel 2                          [email protected] (   4.0M)
  7                  Ext2 Root 2                          [email protected] ( 256.0M)
  8                  Swap Linux swap                      [email protected] ( 128.0M)
  9                  Ext2 /var                            [email protected] ( 256.0M)
 10                   MFS MFS application region          [email protected] ( 288.0M)
 11                   MFS MFS media region             [email protected] (  65.6G)
 12                   MFS MFS application region 2        [email protected] ( 288.0M)
 13                   MFS MFS media region 2           [email protected]        (  82.0G)
 14                   MFS MFS App by Winmfs                 [email protected] (   1.0M)
 15                   MFS MFS Media by Winmfs         [email protected] ( 549.6G)

Total SA SD Hours: 780	Total DTV SD Hours: 681	  1 % Free
Software: 11.0k-01-2-652	Tivo Model: TCD652160

And here's the partition table it reported for the destination drive (WD20EURS) when finished:


Code:


Partition Maps
 #:                  type name                            length base      ( size  )
  1   Apple_partition_map Apple                               [email protected]         (  31.5K)
  2                 Image Bootstrap 1                          [email protected] ( 512.0 )
  3                 Image Kernel 1                          [email protected] (   4.0M)
  4                  Ext2 Root 1                          [email protected] ( 256.0M)
  5                 Image Bootstrap 2                          [email protected] ( 512.0 )
  6                 Image Kernel 2                          [email protected] (   4.0M)
  7                  Ext2 Root 2                          [email protected] ( 256.0M)
  8                  Swap Linux swap                      [email protected] ( 128.0M)
  9                  Ext2 /var                            [email protected] ( 256.0M)
 10                   MFS MFS application region          [email protected] ( 288.0M)
 11                   MFS MFS media region             [email protected] (  65.6G)
 12                   MFS MFS application region 2        [email protected] ( 288.0M)
 13                   MFS MFS media region 2           [email protected]        (  82.0G)
 14                   MFS MFS App by Winmfs                 [email protected] (   1.0M)
 15                   MFS MFS Expanded by Winmfs      [email protected] (   1.7T)

Total SA SD Hours: 2083	Total DTV SD Hours: 1818	 63 % Free
Software: 11.0k-01-2-652	Tivo Model: TCD652160

As you can see, the 4K alignment gets offset for good after the single 512 byte partition 5. It looks like shifting partition 6 by just 3584 bytes, would've brought all the remaining partitions into alignment. (I don't know if that's true or possible - that's just what I think I'm seeing)

For what most users would consider 'normal use', the upgrade 'seemed' to work perfectly. But the way I use a TiVo is far from normal. I record or buffer-watch TONS of sports in as little time as possible, trying to catch the 'best' parts. Even if I only have 20 minutes, it's not unusual for me to "watch" a couple football games - FF'ing through to catch the 'best' parts.

Clearly, this type of use puts much more demand on the hard drive and the interface to it than typical. As you might imagine, I noticed a significant dropoff in performance between the DB35.3 (7200 RPM, 512 byte sectors with aligned partitions) and the WD20EURS (IntelliPower (max about 5200 RPM), 4k sectors, with *un*aligned partitions). Also, when I was FF'ing through the 9 hours of ESPNHD coverage of Wimbledon yesterday, it was very sluggish, hesitated several times, and froze and the TiVoHD rebooted itself twice. I've not experienced that with other drives (512 byte).

I haven't figured out a way around this yet, but I do have a Premiere (2-tuner) in the bedroom and a THD with a WD10EVDS (512 byte sectors) drive in the living room that both perform very well. I may be able to exchanges places with one of them, but I could really benefit from the larger capacity of a 2TB drive.

Since it looks like my opportunity to get a 1+TB 512 byte HDD has passed, is there anything I can do with the WD20EURS (or any other advanced format drive, like the Seagate SV35 series drive) to at least get the media partitions to start on 4K boundaries?

To help get me back up to speed on understanding the issue with AF drives, I just finished re-reading Seagate's Transition to Advanced Format 4K Sector Hard Drives and Novell's Partition alignment of drives with internal sector size larger than 512 bytes.

The Novell knowledgebase paper says that any partition alignment must be done before creating a filesystem on it, so I'm wondering if anyone has tried doing this or if they think it's possible to do on a TiVo drive with any common utilities.

Any advice or suggestions?

Thanks!


----------



## henningspruth

Thanks for the jmfs utilities, I just successfully upgraded a friend's Tivo!

One question: I use Linux (Debian) as my desktop OS, is it possible to copy the utilities from the /root directory of the ISO and run them directly? Or, better yet, is there a .deb package?


----------



## Soapm

henningspruth said:


> Thanks for the jmfs utilities, I just successfully upgraded a friend's Tivo!
> 
> One question: I use Linux (Debian) as my desktop OS, is it possible to copy the utilities from the /root directory of the ISO and run them directly? Or, better yet, is there a .deb package?


There isn't a .deb package that I know of but you can copy the tools to a folder then add it to your PATH. Be sure to add bootpage and tivopart.


----------



## jmbach

The source code is available so you probably can compile it yourself.


----------



## Hyrax

Comer, thank you so much for creating the jmfs Live CD. I converted a 1 TB Premiere XL to 2 TB and I'm amazed how easy it was. Copying my old drive took about 8 hours, but the rest was very quick. 

Thanks!


----------



## scsiguy72

Wow, what an easy upgraded! Downloaded, burnt to disk, copied, upgraded from 500 GB to 2 TB all in about 3 hours


----------



## fuse0001

Hello, I am new to this community and my TP-4 stopped working. Continuous reboot. Can somebody help me get an image for a TCD750500 with factory drive (plan to uprade to larger drive) Thanks in advance.


----------



## ggieseke

fuse0001 said:


> Hello, I am new to this community and my TP-4 stopped working. Continuous reboot. Can somebody help me get an image for a TCD750500 with factory drive (plan to uprade to larger drive) Thanks in advance.


PM sent.


----------



## nooneuknow

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


He only had 1 post, so he'll have to contribute a bit to earn the contents of that PM, if I understand the "minimum post requirements" rules correctly...

I'd suggest the more off-topic areas, like the coffee house discussion area, or happy hour threads. I think they count...


----------



## ggieseke

I think you only have to have 10 posts to send PMs, not to receive them. If I'm wrong about that please let me know.


----------



## fuse0001

ggieseke said:


> I think you only have to have 10 posts to send PMs, not to receive them. If I'm wrong about that please let me know.


I was able to get the PM. Thank you for the support. 
I am having bad luck on DVDBARS with WIN7 x64 using admin controls. IEnumWbemClassObject::Next
Had issues with JMFS on my WIN7 machine. When booting the CD, it can't locate the controllers or something like that.
The DVDBARS would not see my original TIVO hard drive, so it must be junk. I popped in a new one and was all good (using XP) 
I fired up the old XP and did not have any issues with either program.
The guided setup will have to wait until the weekend. Hopefully I am all set.
Once again, thanks for the support.


----------



## nooneuknow

ggieseke said:


> I think you only have to have 10 posts to send PMs, not to receive them. If I'm wrong about that please let me know.


I stand corrected, since the new forum member has stated he RECEIVED it with post #2.


----------



## ggieseke

fuse0001 said:


> I was able to get the PM. Thank you for the support.
> I am having bad luck on DVDBARS with WIN7 x64 using admin controls. IEnumWbemClassObject::Next
> Had issues with JMFS on my WIN7 machine. When booting the CD, it can't locate the controllers or something like that.
> The DVDBARS would not see my original TIVO hard drive, so it must be junk. I popped in a new one and was all good (using XP)
> I fired up the old XP and did not have any issues with either program.
> The guided setup will have to wait until the weekend. Hopefully I am all set.
> Once again, thanks for the support.


Glad you got it working. I wrote DvrBARS on a Windows 7 x64 computer, so that isn't the problem but I would like to make it a bullet-proof as possible.

That error is occuring in the subroutine that finds all of the hard drives using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). Is it giving you a specific error number? If the error number is something minor I can add a few lines to ignore it and continue instead of giving up.


----------



## fuse0001

ggieseke said:


> Glad you got it working. I wrote DvrBARS on a Windows 7 x64 computer, so that isn't the problem but I would like to make it a bullet-proof as possible.
> 
> That error is occuring in the subroutine that finds all of the hard drives using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). Is it giving you a specific error number? If the error number is something minor I can add a few lines to ignore it and continue instead of giving up.


I took the liberty to take a snapshot of the error, but I can't figure out how to upload from my computer.It's asking for a http: address. Anyway Error 0X80041013(2147749907) Hope this helps!


----------



## ggieseke

fuse0001 said:


> I took the liberty to take a snapshot of the error, but I can't figure out how to upload from my computer.It's asking for a http: address. Anyway Error 0X80041013(2147749907) Hope this helps!


Thanks. It sounds like something is wonky with WMI on that PC. Here's what Microsoft has to say about that error:
---------------------------------------------
WBEM_E_PROVIDER_LOAD_FAILURE
2147749907 (0x80041013) COM cannot locate a provider referenced in the schema.

This error may be caused by many conditions, including the following:

Provider is using a WMI DLL that does not match the .lib file used when the provider was built.
Provider's DLL, or any of the DLLs on which it depends, is corrupt.
Provider failed to export DllRegisterServer.
In-process provider was not registered using the regsvr32 command.
Out-of-process provider was not registered using the /regserver switch. For example, myprog.exe /regserver. 
---------------------------------------------
MS has a WMI Diagnosis Utility at

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7684

I don't know if it will help but it might be worth a shot. Since this is the only report of that error so far I think I'll leave well enough alone for now.


----------



## kb7oeb

I successfully upgraded my 320GB premiere to a 2TB drive and I kept the original 320GB drive as a backup.

I recently purchased a second premiere with a 500GB drive and don't really need to upgrade the hard drive at this time. If I later need to replace the drive in my second premiere can I use the 320GB drive from my first premiere to load a new hard drive and then run clear and delete everything to clear out the TSN?


----------



## ggieseke

You betcha.


----------



## antalo

I'm not sure if I should post my problem here, or start a new thread.
I got my new S4 Premiere, the one with OTA tuner in it and 500GB drive. I got a WD 20EURS drive. I connected the original from the Tivo and the WD to my WIN XT system and ran the program given at the beginning of this thread. (Don't remember the name) It did not recognize the 20 TB drive as such but as a 200GB and would not procede. So I got a 2TB Toshiba drive, connected, ran the program and that was almost 2 dys ago and it has only copied about 85000KB $ 917 KBT/Sec. At this rate it's going to take about 154 hrs or 6 1/2 days. It only suppose to take a couple of hrs. I didn't do anything to the Toshiba drive DT01ACA200.
What can I do to speed up the process ? Thanks for any help.


----------



## ggieseke

antalo said:


> I'm not sure if I should post my problem here, or start a new thread.
> I got my new S4 Premiere, the one with OTA tuner in it and 500GB drive. I got a WD 20EURS drive. I connected the original from the Tivo and the WD to my WIN XT system and ran the program given at the beginning of this thread. (Don't remember the name) It did not recognize the 20 TB drive as such but as a 200GB and would not procede. So I got a 2TB Toshiba drive, connected, ran the program and that was almost 2 dys ago and it has only copied about 85000KB $ 917 KBT/Sec. At this rate it's going to take about 154 hrs or 6 1/2 days. It only suppose to take a couple of hrs. I didn't do anything to the Toshiba drive DT01ACA200.
> What can I do to speed up the process ? Thanks for any help.


I'd start by trying a different PC. If it didn't recognize a WD20EURS correctly and the Toshiba drive is taking that long something is wrong with the computer or the cabling. I'd almost think that it's really old (like late '90s old) but they didn't even have SATA drives back then.

There's a new Windows program named DvrBARS that can copy the drive, but if jmfs (the program this thread is about) can't talk to the drive correctly you probably still won't be able to expand it into the remaining 1.5TB once the copy is finished. 500GB should only take about 2 hours to copy.

If you're in the wrong thread and trying to use WinMFS on a Premiere from Windows XP it won't work. You could still copy the drive with DvrBARS but you would need to download jmfs and burn it to a boot CD in order to expand the drive.

More details please.


----------



## antalo

ggieseke said:


> I'd start by trying a different PC. If it didn't recognize a WD20EURS correctly and the Toshiba drive is taking that long something is wrong with the computer or the cabling. I'd almost think that it's really old (like late '90s old) but they didn't even have SATA drives back then.
> 
> There's a new Windows program named DvrBARS that can copy the drive, but if jmfs (the program this thread is about) can't talk to the drive correctly you probably still won't be able to expand it into the remaining 1.5TB once the copy is finished. 500GB should only take about 2 hours to copy.
> 
> If you're in the wrong thread and trying to use WinMFS on a Premiere from Windows XP it won't work. You could still copy the drive with DvrBARS but you would need to download jmfs and burn it to a boot CD in order to expand the drive.
> 
> More details please.


Thanks for your advise. It is an older PC with RAID connections. That's where I got the drives connected to, but I do or did run the jmfs . I'll stop the copying and will try again with the WD drive.

P.S. I did stop the transfer, reconnected the WD drive and now it's working fine. It already copied more than the previous 2 days. 
Keep you posted.

P.P.S. I'm up and running. Everything went well. At the first try I think I screwed up, I selected the 200MB system drive instead of the 2 TB WD.


----------



## caddyroger

I have a Premiere 2TB Elite with the hard drive going out. From what i understand the Jmfs Live CD is used going from a smaller drive to a bigger drive or am I am wrong?


----------



## antalo

caddyroger said:


> I have a Premiere 2TB Elite with the hard drive going out. From what i understand the Jmfs Live CD is used going from a smaller drive to a bigger drive or am I am wrong?


I would recommend reading the beginning of this thread. If you already expended the original drive you should use it to copy to a new drive.


----------



## caddyroger

antalo said:


> I would recommend reading the beginning of this thread. If you already expended the original drive you should use it to copy to a new drive.


I did read the the beginning, It has this

Your original Tivo disk
New disk larger than Tivo's
Computer that you can boot from CD or USB
Jmfs Live CD
My tivo came with a 2TB hard drive but by the "New disks larger then tivo's" you would have to go larger then 2TBs. What I have read you can not go past 2TB hard drives.


----------



## ggieseke

You can use jmfs to just copy the disk, or to copy and expand when going to a larger drive. In your case it would just use ddrescue to "zerox" the drive. With a SATA connection that will probably take 8-10 hours.

If you don't have a lot of recordings, you could do a Modified Full backup to your PC with DvrBARS, then do a Quick restore to the new drive.


----------



## seamonkeys1

I got the GSOD followed by a constant rebooting of my Tivo Premiere DVR.

Sounds like this is a hard drive problem. I do not have the original drive, but I do have WD GREEN 2 TB drive waiting to be installed. 

Thank You


----------



## ggieseke

seamonkeys1 said:


> I got the GSOD followed by a constant rebooting of my Tivo Premiere DVR.
> 
> Sounds like this is a hard drive problem. I do not have the original drive, but I do have WD GREEN 2 TB drive waiting to be installed.
> 
> Thank You


What's the model number of the Premiere?


----------



## seamonkeys1

Tivo Model Number is TCD746320


----------



## ggieseke

seamonkeys1 said:


> Tivo Model Number is TCD746320


PM sent.


----------



## seamonkeys1

Thanks Ggieseke Tivo is back up and running. Where do I donate?


----------



## ggieseke

seamonkeys1 said:


> Thanks Ggieseke Tivo is back up and running. Where do I donate?


In the System Information screen there's a donate button.


----------



## Junglebook456

I'm new here.

My tivo (tcd746320) hdd seems to be dying and I ordered a WD green 2tb. Is there any chance I can get a backup to install the 2tb ?


----------



## mattack

If your drive isn't actually dead yet, you can likely copy the existing OS & shows off of it, and just use that.


----------



## ggieseke

Junglebook456 said:


> I'm new here.
> 
> My tivo (tcd746320) hdd seems to be dying and I ordered a WD green 2tb. Is there any chance I can get a backup to install the 2tb ?


I sent you a PM with a link to the 746 image if mattack's suggestion doesn't work.


----------



## Junglebook456

Thanks a lot&#55357;&#56832;


----------



## cardinals41

Hope this is the right place for the question.
Upgraded using JMFS, put the new drive in a Premier and remained stuck on starting up. Can and should I redo the process or does someone have advice on how to get the drive to work?


----------



## unitron

cardinals41 said:


> Hope this is the right place for the question.
> Upgraded using JMFS, put the new drive in a Premier and remained stuck on starting up. Can and should I redo the process or does someone have advice on how to get the drive to work?


If you're seeing the very first screen only, and it's not moving on (says welcome, never gets to a few more minutes), then the TiVo and the drive are not communicating for some reason.

If it's a WD drive, have you checked to be sure Intellipark is disabled?

Double check the power and data connections between the TiVo and the drive.


----------



## cook

Hello all.

I have a 2 tuner Premiere that I was having problems with freezing, stuttering and getting stuck on recorded shows so I was trying to upgrade from an original 320gig to a 1tb WD10EURX using jmfs-rev104.

The original drive must of been bad cause I noticed after a few hours of what I thought was going well of copying I got a "Copy did not finish successfully" error when it was about 90% finished on the first stage. 

Now the new drive is recognized as a Tivo drive by JMFS and I don't really care about the shows that I had on the old drive, can I just expand and supersize without copying? I'm stuck at knowing what to do cause the copy was not 100% finished.


Thank you.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

cook said:


> Hello all.
> 
> I have a 2 tuner Premiere that I was having problems with so I was trying to upgrade from an original 320gig to a 1tb WD10EURX using jmfs-rev104.
> 
> The original drive must of been bad cause after a few hours of what I thought was going well of copying I got a "Copy did not finish successfully" error. I don't really care about the shows that I had on the old drive, can I just delete what I started on the new drive then expand and supersize without copying? I'm stuck at knowing what to do from here so any help would be appreciated.
> 
> Thank you.


Try reseating all the cables for starters.

This is why I put my original stock drive (after syncing with the Cableco) on the shelf when I upgrade.


----------



## cook

ThreeSoFar said:


> Try reseating all the cables for starters.
> 
> This is why I put my original stock drive (after syncing with the Cableco) on the shelf when I upgrade.


Thank you ThreeSoFar,
I guess I had a little power surge and was the reason for the uncompleted copy. Started the copy again last night and let it run, it's been over 12 hours with USB sata adapter for both HD's (average rate 6212kb's) and now at the "trimming failed blocks" part. My original 360gig drive is definitely bad as it has over 2,400 errors (wow!) and errsize of 325 mbs showing.

You think the Tivo will recognize the new hd and will start up with that many errors on the original?

Thanks again.

UPDATE: Now at "Splitting failed blocks" I have no idea what this means?


----------



## L David Matheny

cook said:


> UPDATE: Now at "Splitting failed blocks" I have no idea what this means?


It means the program (ddrescue?) is retrying the blocks that were originally unreadable by reading them in smaller pieces (fewer sectors) to try to recover as much data as possible as quickly as possible. It will eventually subdivide bad blocks until it's retrying the unreadable parts one sector at a time, and then finally it will give up on any individual sectors which still have errors.


----------



## ggieseke

L David Matheny said:


> It means the program (ddrescue?) is retrying the blocks that were originally unreadable by reading them in smaller pieces (fewer sectors) to try to recover as much data as possible as quickly as possible. It will eventually subdivide bad blocks until it's retrying the unreadable parts one sector at a time, and then finally it will give up on any individual sectors which still have errors.


You'll probably need a lot of patience too.


----------



## cook

ggieseke said:


> You'll probably need a lot of patience too.


Tell me about it.. 
It's been going for about 36 hours since I first pushed the copy command, still on "splitting failed blocks" but the errsize has been slowly going down from almost 400mb to now 88870 kb and the ipos & opos has been going up and both are now at 317813mb with a rescued size of 319984MB which hasn't moved. Is that good? Can I stop it now and expand, supersize or does it have to finish completely? Time from last successful read is going well past 40 min. when yesterday it was in the seconds. 
My patience is wearing a little thin. At this point I don't really care about the shows on the original drive.

Thank you for any advice and help.


----------



## ggieseke

If the damage is just in the shows, no problem. If it's in a critical part of the file system or the TiVo software itself...

There's no way to know for sure what's on the bad spots that it's trying to recover, so if you can stand the suspense just sit back and wait it out. That still won't guarantee a working TiVo but at least you gave it your best shot. If it won't boot and run correctly after that there are clean images you can download, but saving your Season Passes, thumbs ratings, shows, settings, etc is worth trying.


----------



## cook

ggieseke said:


> If the damage is just in the shows, no problem. If it's in a critical part of the file system or the TiVo software itself...
> 
> There's no way to know for sure what's on the bad spots that it's trying to recover, so if you can stand the suspense just sit back and wait it out. That still won't guarantee a working TiVo but at least you gave it your best shot. If it won't boot and run correctly after that there are clean images you can download, but saving your Season Passes, thumbs ratings, shows, settings, etc is worth trying.


Copy that, will do. Whats one more day anyway?

Thanks ggieseke, although I don't post much I do lurk around this community a lot for info (I have a couple Series 3 and a Premier) and I see your a great contributor, it's very much appreciated when a voice of reason responds.

I'll get back when it completes, hopefully by tomorrow.


----------



## ggieseke

Hope it works, but there are several options if it doesn't. I was a lurker here for almost 8 years before I made my 1st post.


----------



## nooneuknow

ggieseke said:


> Hope it works, but there are several options if it doesn't. I was a lurker here for almost 8 years before I made my 1st post.


Unfortunately, I am like you, and having not joined until I needed to post, I'm always getting those who joined 8 years before me looking down their noses at me and telling me that my join date and/or post count somehow limits what I know, and/or lowers the value of the things I post...

The way I see it, the TRUE experts are the ones who have no need for the forums, or don't find themselves needing to post a question, which negates a need to join (since you can simply Google your issue, and find the relevant posts here, often easier than trying to read a 23,456 post long thread)...


----------



## cook

SUCCESS...

After 4.5 days of grinding away the copy finally finished. I expanded and super-sized, plugged the sucker in and wahla, 1tb of Tivo goodness. 

Thank you ggieseke for talking me off the ledge, all shows were there plus season passes and cable card worked liked a charm..I'm just not used to seeing 25% on the capacity bar.

Thank you again.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

cook said:


> SUCCESS...
> 
> After 4.5 days of grinding away the copy finally finished. I expanded and super-sized, plugged the sucker in and wahla, 1tb of Tivo goodness.
> 
> Thank you ggieseke for talking me off the ledge, all shows were there plus season passes and cable card worked liked a charm..I'm just not used to seeing 25% on the capacity bar.
> 
> Thank you again.


Nice! Never give up on ddrescue, I guess.

If it booted, there's no catastrophic errors in the OS areas. Keep an eye out for any 'glitches in the matrix' when you watch those recordings...


----------



## cook

Thank you too ThreeSoFar.

My wife had no faith and since she's always right it was a really anxious few minutes for me waiting to see if it would fire up but when I saw that intro Tivo "cartoon" it was a happy day. 

I got a pat on the back and now she's cooking me her famous lasagna. 

So far the recorded shows are all looking good but I'll keep a eye on them. I don't know if it's just me but the picture looks much better too.


----------



## nooneuknow

ThreeSoFar said:


> Nice! Never give up on ddrescue, I guess.


Amen!

In my experiences, GNU DD_RESCUE never fails to complete, unless the computer itself crashes, or the source drive fails entirely (beyond being able to try again).


----------



## cook

nooneuknow said:


> Amen!
> 
> In my experiences, GNU DD_RESCUE never fails to complete, unless the computer itself crashes, or the source drive fails entirely (beyond being able to try again).


I am a fan now of dd_rescue.
With those usb adapters it was a long, slow process but the drive did have a lot of errors.

I didn't realize what I was getting into but in the end it was worth it..so far.


----------



## Hi8

cook said:


> I am a fan now of dd_rescue.
> With those usb adapters it was a long, slow process but the drive did have a lot of errors.
> 
> I didn't realize what I was getting into but in the end it was worth it..so far.


 also it's a good idea to have the PC & drives plugged into a UPS.

nothing worse than waiting a couple of days, and just before it's done... get a power glitch, just long enough to reboot your PC.

That's when a professional will be required to talk you off the ledge.


----------



## RandallW

So I'm attempting to upgrade my TiVo Premiere drive to a WD Green 1 TB drive from a restored image. The restore with DVRBARs worked fine, but now I'm stuck on the process of booting up into jmfs. (I need to expand the drive after using DVRBARS). 

I burned the .iso to a cd, and rebooting my PC starts into the process, but after two files loading, it then loads a blank black screen. I've let it sit there for about 10 minutes with no change before manually shutting off my PC.

I read earlier in the thread (Or maybe the TiVO HD jmfs Upgrade thread) that there's some issues from using a Gigabit motherboard, but I'm using a MSI motherboard. 

Any ideas on what I can do to run jmfs on my PC? Thanks!


----------



## jmbach

It is possible but rare that the iso you downloaded got corrupted during the download. Redownload it and burn it again.


----------



## RandallW

jmbach said:


> It is possible but rare that the iso you downloaded got corrupted during the download. Redownload it and burn it again.


I reburned the same jmfs iso twice on my PC and once on my Mac, then burned the prior version on my Mac all with the same results of the blank black screen after loading two files.


----------



## Soapm

RandallW said:


> I reburned the same jmfs iso twice on my PC and once on my Mac, then burned the prior version on my Mac all with the same results of the blank black screen after loading two files.


I may have missed but have you tried using jfms on the mac?


----------



## L David Matheny

RandallW said:


> I burned the .iso to a cd, and rebooting my PC starts into the process, but after two files loading, it then loads a blank black screen. I've let it sit there for about 10 minutes with no change before manually shutting off my PC.


Have you burned .ISO images before? For example, in my (older) version of Nero Express, the program asks, "What would you like to burn?", and you select "Disc Image or Saved Project", then select "Files of type: Image Files (*.nrg;*.iso;*.cue)", then select your .ISO image file. If you burn it as a data disc, you'll just end up with a copy of the .ISO on your CD. I suppose it's also possible that the .ISO image doesn't contain some driver required by your motherboard or video card, if they're unusual in some way. Does the CD go through a fairly lengthy boot process before ending up at the black screen? Does it display anything during that time?


----------



## cook

Try booting from a USB flash drive instead. I was having the same problem with the jmfs iso burned to a cd but after I used it on a usb flash it booted up fine (Don't know why)

As comer say's "To make bootable USB, search google and download "Universal USB installer", start it and follow the instructions. When asked what type of Linux, uncheck "download ISO", choose either "Other" or "Slax 6" and navigate to ISO file."





 is a Youtube tutorial.


----------



## RandallW

Soapm said:


> I may have missed but have you tried using jfms on the mac?


Haven't tried on a Mac yet, as I have the HD in my PC, and don't have a spare enclosure to attach via USB to my Mac, good thought though!



L David Matheny said:


> Have you burned .ISO images before? For example, in my (older) version of Nero Express, the program asks, "What would you like to burn?", and you select "Disc Image or Saved Project", then select "Files of type: Image Files (*.nrg;*.iso;*.cue)", then select your .ISO image file. If you burn it as a data disc, you'll just end up with a copy of the .ISO on your CD. I suppose it's also possible that the .ISO image doesn't contain some driver required by your motherboard or video card, if they're unusual in some way. Does the CD go through a fairly lengthy boot process before ending up at the black screen? Does it display anything during that time?


Pretty familiar with burning CDs and .ISO's, though I wasn't using Nero (what I was most used to on PC). I was using Toast Titanium on Mac, which I'm very familiar with now.

System starts, shows basic bios loading, then display info screen, then loading /boot/vmlinuz........ /bot/initrd.gz........ then a blank black screen.



cook said:


> Try booting from a USB flash drive instead. I was having the same problem with the jmfs iso burned to a cd but after I used it on a usb flash it booted up fine (Don't know why)
> 
> As comer say's "To make bootable USB, search google and download "Universal USB installer", start it and follow the instructions. When asked what type of Linux, uncheck "download ISO", choose either "Other" or "Slax 6" and navigate to ISO file."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> is a Youtube tutorial.


I'll try out the USB boot drive next. Just got the replacement fan in for my premiere from Newegg, so excited to get everything up and running again.

Thanks for the help guys!


----------



## nooneuknow

There are some "issues" with JMFS and some hardware.

I have a pile of various ECS boards that Fry's bundles with their CPUs, when they do the "get both for less than the cost od the CPU alone" type promos.

JMFS will boot with some of the boards, but JMFS won't (fully) recognize the VIA chipsets, so it won't recognize the SATA controllers, or anything attached, or it will do as described over the past few posts, and just not boot all the way. Yes, everything is integrated on-board. No 3rd-party boards are in use.

Since the sourcecode is available, an expert in Linux-based utilities *should* be able to add the necessary drivers, and it *should* then work fine.

Unfortunately, I'm not an "expert" on Linux, and have no clue how to do this. A step-by-step guide in adding the drivers for the hardware would be just the ticket for me. Otherwise, I'm stuck using standard Intel chipset boards to use JMFS.

Anybody willing to post a step-by-step "sticky" on this? It would be GREATLY appreciated...


----------



## RandallW

cook said:


> Try booting from a USB flash drive instead. I was having the same problem with the jmfs iso burned to a cd but after I used it on a usb flash it booted up fine (Don't know why)
> 
> As comer say's "To make bootable USB, search google and download "Universal USB installer", start it and follow the instructions. When asked what type of Linux, uncheck "download ISO", choose either "Other" or "Slax 6" and navigate to ISO file."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> is a Youtube tutorial.


Just tried the step by step for both "Other" and "Slax 7" (the only available Slax install with the latest Universal USB Installer). Didn't work on my system. After booting and attempting to start up via USB, it just goes to a blank black screen again. Hmm... Maybe I'll have to see if I can do this at work with a PC there.


----------



## L David Matheny

RandallW said:


> Pretty familiar with burning CDs and .ISO's, though I wasn't using Nero (what I was most used to on PC). I was using Toast Titanium on Mac, which I'm very familiar with now.
> 
> System starts, shows basic bios loading, then display info screen, then loading /boot/vmlinuz........ /bot/initrd.gz........ then a blank black screen.


The screens go by quickly, but I think I'm seeing the same thing from my jmfs live CD rev. 104, so your CD is probably burned correctly and starting to boot correctly. But then my screen clears and two Linux penguins appear in the upper left corner, followed a few seconds later by more text lines as the system continues to boot. My guess would be that the system doesn't have correct display drivers for your hardware.


----------



## RandallW

L David Matheny said:


> The screens go by quickly, but I think I'm seeing the same thing from my jmfs live CD rev. 104, so your CD is probably burned correctly and starting to boot correctly. But then my screen clears and two Linux penguins appear in the upper left corner, followed a few seconds later by more text lines as the system continues to boot. My guess would be that the system doesn't have correct display drivers for your hardware.


I thought of two things I'll try later today. There is an onboard video card for the Motherboard, that maybe it's trying to output to instead? (Then again, the initial boot up sequence shows up fine). The other is I'll remove my original SATA HD in the SATA 1 slot and move the TiVo HD in that same spot, as the only HD plugged in. All else fails, I'll try it here at work.


----------



## RandallW

Ended up bringing the drive to work along with the CD. Worked fine to load/boot linux with the penguins via CD and expanded the drive. Is it only supposed to take about a second to expand a drive? LOL.


----------



## ggieseke

RandallW said:


> Ended up bringing the drive to work along with the CD. Worked fine to load/boot linux with the penguins via CD and expanded the drive. Is it only supposed to take about a second to expand a drive? LOL.


Yup.


----------



## unitron

RandallW said:


> Ended up bringing the drive to work along with the CD. Worked fine to load/boot linux with the penguins via CD and expanded the drive. Is it only supposed to take about a second to expand a drive? LOL.


"Expanding", on a TiVo drive, is basically just re-writing the header on a partition to tell it that it ends further down the road than it thought it did.


----------



## RandallW

Nice, HD worked fine, now I just have to go back and connect with TiVo as my lifetime subscription doesn't seem to be working (listed as 11: Evaluation, and won't let me record anything).


----------



## ggieseke

RandallW said:


> Nice, HD worked fine, now I just have to go back and connect with TiVo as my lifetime subscription doesn't seem to be working (listed as 11: Evaluation, and won't let me record anything).


Did you do the initial DvrBARS restore with a backup from that TiVo, or my 746 image? If you used my image, run Clear & Delete Everything to "marry" the drive to the motherboard.


----------



## RandallW

ggieseke said:


> Did you do the initial DvrBARS restore with a backup from that TiVo, or my 746 image? If you used my image, run Clear & Delete Everything to "marry" the drive to the motherboard.


Ahh, missed that info. Running that process now. Thanks! Sending you a follow-up PM as well. =)


----------



## bryansee

ggieseke said:


> I sent you a PM with a link to the 746 image if mattack's suggestion doesn't work.


Just received a used TCD746320. I could really use that as well. The hard drive is bad and ddrescue is having a hard time with it.

I have a spare drive I can re-image.


----------



## Hi8

Just found this from NewEgg seems like a good deal?

Anybody try a NAS drive in a TiVo?

TOSHIBA DT01ACA200 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemail/Aug-0-2013/Weekend24/index-landing.html?nm_mc=EMC-EXPRESS082413&cm_mmc=EMC-EXPRESS082413-_-EMC-082413-Index-_-E0A-_-EditorsElite&
$79

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD


----------



## unitron

Hi8 said:


> Just found this from NewEgg seems like a good deal?
> 
> Anybody try a NAS drive in a TiVo?
> 
> TOSHIBA DT01ACA200 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
> http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemail/Aug-0-2013/Weekend24/index-landing.html?nm_mc=EMC-EXPRESS082413&cm_mmc=EMC-EXPRESS082413-_-EMC-082413-Index-_-E0A-_-EditorsElite&
> $79
> 
> Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD


It should still be good for storage in a PC if the TiVo doesn't like it.


----------



## Hi8

unitron said:


> It should still be good for storage in a PC if the TiVo doesn't like it.


 yeah, that's what I figured... I ordered one w/free shipping ...

I should know in a week or so.


----------



## Camlee98

Hi TCD652160 that has issues connecting via wireless. So I picked up a TCD746500 for a good price. So will I be able to use this process or does it only work when going from premiere to premiere (or series 4 to 4)? If it does work what about the transferring of service? Do I do that before or after I upgrade.


----------



## Camlee98

Ok so a little more digging and I found my answer. No I can not use this to go from a S3 to a S4. I kinda figured that anyway. I would still like to know if I should do the upgrade before transfering the service?


----------



## ggieseke

I don't think it really matters. Just get the 746 up & running, updated to latest software, expanded, etc and then if everything is fine pull the trigger.


----------



## Camlee98

Sounds good! So I can do all of the above without activating?


----------



## ggieseke

Yes.


----------



## haystax77

I've been reading through the thread and I think I found the answer to my question but wanted to post this to confirm. 

Based on what I read, the partitioning with the Tivo Premiere won't allow (or won't recognize/use) anything more than 2TB. Is that correct?

If that is correct than my second question of whether anyone has tried to upgrade a Premiere with the WD AV-GP 3TB AV Video Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA II, 64 MB Cache - WD30EURS, is mute. Saw this one on Amazon for ~$145 and had me curious if it would work.

Thanks.


----------



## ggieseke

haystax77 said:


> I've been reading through the thread and I think I found the answer to my question but wanted to post this to confirm.
> 
> Based on what I read, the partitioning with the Tivo Premiere won't allow (or won't recognize/use) anything more than 2TB. Is that correct?
> 
> If that is correct than my second question of whether anyone has tried to upgrade a Premiere with the WD AV-GP 3TB AV Video Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA II, 64 MB Cache - WD30EURS, is mute. Saw this one on Amazon for ~$145 and had me curious if it would work.
> 
> Thanks.


AFAIK, 2TB is still the limit for a Premiere. It might be possible someday given what we've learned from the Roamio rollout, but none of the existing tools will work.


----------



## kparcher

Hello,

I am new to posting but have been looking at this site for many years. My Premiere (TCD746320) with a 2GB drive (WD20EURS) had an s03 error. I rebooted and now it just loops with the GSOD. Running a windlg scan of the drive shows that it does have about 200 bad sectors. Western Digital will RMA the drive, but I am concerned the tivo image is corrupted. 

Can someone please share the image for that tivo and can I use DVRBARS to restore? I am not concerned with saving my shows or settings I just want to get the system back up and running.

Thanks in advance!
Kevin


----------



## ggieseke

kparcher said:


> Hello,
> 
> I am new to posting but have been looking at this site for many years. My Premiere (TCD746320) with a 2GB drive (WD20EURS) had an s03 error. I rebooted and now it just loops with the GSOD. Running a windlg scan of the drive shows that it does have about 200 bad sectors. Western Digital will RMA the drive, but I am concerned the tivo image is corrupted.
> 
> Can someone please share the image for that tivo and can I use DVRBARS to restore? I am not concerned with saving my shows or settings I just want to get the system back up and running.
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> Kevin


PM sent.


----------



## kparcher

Thank You ggieseke! The Tivo is back up and running. I am just working my way through the guided setup now.

Again, I very much appreciate your help and I am sure others do as well!

Kevin


----------



## tvmaster2

kparcher said:


> Thank You ggieseke! The Tivo is back up and running. I am just working my way through the guided setup now.
> 
> Again, I very much appreciate your help and I am sure others do as well!
> 
> Kevin


out of curiosity, how long was the WD drive running in the Tivo before it failed?


----------



## shoeboo

*Nevermind, Kickstart 57 fixed things...*

I have a premiere (with 1TB expander) that recently began a reboot loop, I ran a kickstart 54 and it came up with "fail 7" on my primary drive. I unmarried my expander hoping for some reason it would help but same result.
I then attached HDD to PC and ran extended WD diagnostic tool in dos (never connected in windows) and it didn't come back with any errors.
I have plenty of spare HDDs, so I ran JMFS CD figuring I would try and copy to new HDD but the software couldn't find my Tivo Partitions. At this point I figured drive may not be bad so I grabbed the HDD out of my other working premiere (same model but with 500gb expander) and copied that over to original HDD using JMFS. On first boot I unmarried the 500gb expander from broken Tivo, but I am still not able to boot (now get past Almost there... and a light blue one moment screen with circle comes up and then reboots) and now kickstart 54 completes with no errors.
Is copying image from married Premiere a problem? Something else I am missing? I know I would need to C&D everything once it boots up but can't get to that point.
Thanks,
Brandon


----------



## hfcsyrup

I am upgrading a stock P4 unit. I have a spare External My Book Essential 2TB WDBACW0020HBK-NESN i plan on using, dont want to have to sell this and buy a WD20eurs. I only have my laptop and one usb-sata cable. Can i upgrade with this my book in the enclosure as if it is external and once the process is done, take the drive out and put it in the tivo? I have a lot of shows to transfer so i cant transfer them to c and then to the new drive...
also i read somewhere the my book has another partition or two so not sure if that is an issue.

also what is the best way to transfer shows from my other tivohd and keep the most metadata? i wanted to use kmttg and pytivo, but have read both that direct pulling from the premiere would keep more metadata, though that is way more work. does using tivo desktop keep different metadata than kmttg?


----------



## lpwcomp

hfcsyrup said:


> <snip>also what is the best way to transfer shows from my other tivohd and keep the most metadata? i wanted to use kmttg and pytivo, but have read both that direct pulling from the premiere would keep more metadata, though that is way more work. does using tivo desktop keep different metadata than kmttg?


While the most metadata retention used to require transferrinng to a PC, then pulling from the PC via pyTivo, when the destination TiVo is a Premiere this seems to no longer be true and a direct TiVo to TiVo transfer works just as well. I would suggest trying a couple both ways and seeing what happens.

There are a some advantages to the direct xfer 
1. it generally has no problems with minor glitches that might cause a transfer to the PC to fail to complete.
2. closed captions are intact.
3. Less total time.

Using kmttg and pyTivo to transfer to PC and push to the TiVo retains the least amount of metadata.


----------



## hfcsyrup

lpwcomp said:


> While the most metadata retention used to require transferrinng to a PC, then pulling from the PC via pyTivo, when the destination TiVo is a Premiere this seems to no longer be true and a direct TiVo to TiVo transfer works just as well. I would suggest trying a couple both ways and seeing what happens.
> 
> There are a some advantages to the direct xfer
> 1. it generally has no problems with minor glitches that might cause a transfer to the PC to fail to complete.
> 2. closed captions are intact.
> 3. Less total time.
> 
> Using kmttg and pyTivo to transfer to PC and push to the TiVo retains the least amount of metadata.


ok thanks for the response, will try both, bot probably just do direct as i dont have much time.

so i used jmfs and had success transferring to my my book. this might sound crazy, but is it possible to try, before i open it up and ruin the enclosure, to hook up the new drive in the external my book via a usb-sata cable to the tivo?
also couldnt get my wdidle 3 usb flash image to boot properly, tried disabling ahci in bios but no luck


----------



## lpwcomp

hfcsyrup said:


> so i used jmfs and had success transferring to my my book. this might sound crazy, but is it possible to try, before i open it up and ruin the enclosure, to hook up the new drive in the external my book via a usb-sata cable to the tivo?


It has to be connected to the SATA port on the TiVo, so if you have an adapter that does that, try it and see.



hfcsyrup said:


> also couldnt get my wdidle 3 usb flash image to boot properly, tried disabling ahci in bios but no luck


Even if you had gotten it to boot, I don't believe wdidle3 would have worked. It cannot modify a drive connected via USB.


----------



## hfcsyrup

well that didnt work. it looks like the drive is encrypted when i configured it, jmfs doesnt recognize it being a tivo drive when i connect just it. hopefully it is only the bridge board that is encrypted 
http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=24590&start=

so i took the drive out and it looks like a normal wd20ears. problem is i only have one sata-usb cable for my laptop, i guess i need to go out and buy another one.

but then i cant even disable wdidle, which the wd20ears appears to have enabled, since i dont have a non-usb method? there's no workaround?


----------



## lickwid

Sorry, I tried searching but couldn't find an answer. Can the TivoHD support up to 2TB hard drives now? And secondly, I have a spare 2TB hard drive I pulled from my Tivo Premiere. Would I be able to swap that in and just do a Clear & Delete? Thanks in advance.


----------



## lpwcomp

lickwid said:


> Sorry, I tried searching but couldn't find an answer. Can the TivoHD support up to 2TB hard drives now?


This is the *Premiere* upgrade thread so you're looking in the wrong place, but the answer is yes.


lickwid said:


> And secondly, I have a spare 2TB hard drive I pulled from my Tivo Premiere. Would I be able to swap that in and just do a Clear & Delete? Thanks in advance.


No. If you thought this was even a possibility, you definitely didn't do any even a cursory search.


----------



## ruckus816

I have a TCD746320 with the GSOD I have a new blank hard drive and I've been looking every where trying to find a fix. ggieseke you seem like the man with the plan can you send me the magical PM that you've been sending everyone else? 

Thanks in advance!


----------



## a-hill

Hello I have a somewhat complicated question that I would really appreciate a little clarity on. Thanks in Advance if anyone has any info that can help me. 

I just upgraded 2 TiVo premiere to TiVo premiere elites (xl4's). One of the premieres is month to month the other is lifetime (not sure if it matters or not). Both of the premieres have the stock 320 GB hard drive.

I have jmfs iso burned to a disc and have two open sata and power hookups on my pc freed up.

Here are my questions 
1. Is there any way to copy all the saved shows, ratings, season passes, ect from premieres to the elites (xl4's)?

2. I also have an old TiVo hdxl that is new in box never activated. I would like to swap the hard drive between the premiere (w/lifetime) and new hdxl. I would like the hdxl to have the 320 GB drive so I can give it to my sister and I would like the premiere (w/lifetime) to have the 1tb. 

Thanks again


----------



## ggieseke

ruckus816 said:


> I have a TCD746320 with the GSOD I have a new blank hard drive and I've been looking every where trying to find a fix. ggieseke you seem like the man with the plan can you send me the magical PM that you've been sending everyone else?
> 
> Thanks in advance!


PM sent.


----------



## ggieseke

a-hill said:


> Hello I have a somewhat complicated question that I would really appreciate a little clarity on. Thanks in Advance if anyone has any info that can help me.
> 
> I just upgraded 2 TiVo premiere to TiVo premiere elites (xl4's). One of the premieres is month to month the other is lifetime (not sure if it matters or not). Both of the premieres have the stock 320 GB hard drive.
> 
> I have jmfs iso burned to a disc and have two open sata and power hookups on my pc freed up.
> 
> Here are my questions
> 1. Is there any way to copy all the saved shows, ratings, season passes, ect from premieres to the elites (xl4's)?
> 
> 2. I also have an old TiVo hdxl that is new in box never activated. I would like to swap the hard drive between the premiere (w/lifetime) and new hdxl. I would like the hdxl to have the 320 GB drive so I can give it to my sister and I would like the premiere (w/lifetime) to have the 1tb.
> 
> Thanks again


1. Any recordings that aren't copy-protected can be copied directly from TiVo to TiVO as long as they're both active on your account. The season passes can be copied with kmttg or the online season pass manager at tivo.com. Ratings cannot be copied.

2. I don't think there's an image for the HDXL that would restore to a 320GB drive since it came with a 1TB drive. You might be able to frankenstein a 160GB HD image onto the 320GB drive, expand it, and put it in the HDXL but I don't think it would work.


----------



## ruckus816

When restoring from the image I get a little over halfway done and then I get an error 0x00000017 readfile. Does anyone know what that means?


----------



## ggieseke

ruckus816 said:


> When restoring from the image I get a little over halfway done and then I get an error 0x00000017 readfile. Does anyone know what that means?


That's a CRC (cyclic redundancy check) error. If it's getting that error during a restore, the image itself may be written on a bad or failing drive.

CDs or DVDs are usually the only place I see CRC errors. Did you burn the image to a DVD?


----------



## ruckus816

The image is on the hard drive of a computer that I have here. The computer does seem to be having some disk issues though. I will try another computer.


----------



## ruckus816

I used another computer and it seems to be getting further. Now my question is, how do I divorce the internal drive and then marry it? I've seen threads that tell you how to do it on the external drives but none that say it for the internal. Is it something that will be fairly obvious?


----------



## ruckus816

Never mind! I think ggieseke answered my question in the PM he sent me for the image


----------



## ruckus816

I got the drive to copy but I'm still not getting anything when I put it back in the tivo. I just get the initial tivo splash screen and then black.


----------



## ruckus816

Ok guys I'm done! It's going through the guided setup now. After much searching on the forums I found that people have had the same problem and it was the hdmi port on their tvs. Sure enough I changed ports and it was sitting there waiting for me to select my country!


----------



## NGeorge

I have a Premiere XL I bought off Ebay a couple years back... Seems to be stuck in a reboot loop... It gets to the second screen then resets. 

I ended up just getting one of Craigslist, but I have this one sitting around and would like to give it to a friend... 

Thought it might be a drive issue... I used to uograde Tivos back in the series 1/2 days so have an idea how to set up a drive but just didn't want to mess with it since I no longer have a desktop PC in the house--all laptops now lol 

If it's the HDMI port that might be easier... Where do I get them to swap it out?


----------



## lpwcomp

NGeorge said:


> I have a Premiere XL I bought off Ebay a couple years back... Seems to be stuck in a reboot loop... It gets to the second screen then resets.
> 
> I ended up just getting one of Craigslist, but I have this one sitting around and would like to give it to a friend...
> 
> Thought it might be a drive issue... I used to uograde Tivos back in the series 1/2 days so have an idea how to set up a drive but just didn't want to mess with it since I no longer have a desktop PC in the house--all laptops now lol
> 
> If it's the HDMI port that might be easier... Where do I get them to swap it out?


If it is actually in a reboot loop, then it is unlikely to be an HDMI issue.

Unless it has lifetime service, it may not be worth the effort/expense to repair.

You could buy a pre-configured drive or use a USB-SATA adapter to DIY with your lpatop.


----------



## 39462

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


Hi ggieseke,

I'm trying to copy/expand a Premier 320GB factory image to a new 1T using Comer's tools. I bought the unit from a friend who recently upgraded to the Roamio due to this TiVo not booting beyond "Welcome, Powering Up" screen. I assumed the drive was failing and decided at $50 it was a bargain.

I'm at the point in jmfs in the first step and am seeing this on the screen of my PC:

"About to copy 320072 MBytes from yada yada

Direct: No Sparse: No Split: Yes Truncate: No

Press CTRL-C to interrupt
rescued: 320072 MB, errsize: 246kb, current rate: 0B/s
ipos: 318061 MB, errors: 53, average rate: 27072 kB/s
opos: 318061 MB, Time from last successful read: 1.1 h
Splitting failed Blocks"

I'm going out on as limb to assume his TiVo would not boot perhaps due to the failed blocks but I'm no professional.
Do you think this will ever complete and if it does will it even be useable on the 1T drive I just transferred it over to?

Been monitoring it all night and it was going great for most of the three hours, then the "Splitting Failed Blocks..." message made me feel empty inside.

Can you share the link for the image to a long-time self-upgrader? I am not currently blessed with a clean image and my new 65" Panasonic HDTV arrives Monday at between 3-6PM. I'd love to get this baby purring before then!

Thanks for all you have contributed here, I'm constantly astounded at the level of excellence this forum has ALWAYS provided on so many levels.

Thanks,
HayMoose


----------



## ggieseke

HayMoose,

I tried to send you a PM, and got this error.

1.haymoose has chosen not to receive private messages or may not be allowed to receive private messages. Therefore you may not send your message to him/her.


----------



## 39462

I just logged in and corrected that! Sorry!

Upon rising this morning, I found it is on its third attempt at "Retrying Bad Sectors&#8230;"
Thanks.


----------



## ggieseke

haymoose said:


> I just logged in and corrected that! Sorry!
> 
> Upon rising this morning, I found it is on its third attempt at "Retrying Bad Sectors"
> Thanks.


PM sent.


----------



## nab2z

I am trying to expand my new Tivo drive (WD20EURS) to fully use the 2 TB of space. After copying over the partition Greg gave me and setting up the drive, the Tivo works great. However, I am having issues with the jmfs boot cd. I have an Intel Mac Mini and when booting from the CD, I get a "JavaMFS data not found" error. I was never prompted for anything but do get a command prompt.

I unplugged all my external devices and just connected the new Tivo drive (WD20EURS) via a USB to SATA adapter. I decided to try the command line. I ran "frisk -l" and "Disk /dev/sda: 2000.3" was returned as expected. However, "hdparm -i /dev/sda" resulted in "Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table".

Any ideas on how I might get around this? is it the Mac mini, the USB to SATA adapter, or something else? I am pretty sure I used the USB to SATA adapter in the past to copy and expand a Series 3 Tivo. Thanks in advance for any help.


----------



## unitron

nab2z said:


> I am trying to expand my new Tivo drive (WD20EURS) to fully use the 2 TB of space. After copying over the partition Greg gave me and setting up the drive, the Tivo works great. However, I am having issues with the jmfs boot cd. I have an Intel Mac Mini and when booting from the CD, I get a "JavaMFS data not found" error. I was never prompted for anything but do get a command prompt.
> 
> I unplugged all my external devices and just connected the new Tivo drive (WD20EURS) via a USB to SATA adapter. I decided to try the command line. I ran "frisk -l" and "Disk /dev/sda: 2000.3" was returned as expected. However, "hdparm -i /dev/sda" resulted in "Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table".
> 
> Any ideas on how I might get around this? is it the Mac mini, the USB to SATA adapter, or something else? I am pretty sure I used the USB to SATA adapter in the past to copy and expand a Series 3 Tivo. Thanks in advance for any help.


hdparm

probably doesn't know about non-IBM/DOS/PC MBR type partition tables any more than fdisk does.

However, if you're running jmfs off of a cd-r burned from the jmfs .iso, then anything it needs it should have there on the cd.

Download it again and burn yourself another one.

I say that as someone who recently managed to create a partially working copy of the latest UBCD, so boot disc creation isn't binary (works perfectly or not at all) but is a continuum, it would seem.


----------



## telamon

So I've been searching and I think I got this straight, but I just want some verification.

The largest single drive upgrade for a Premiere 4 unit using free tools to upgrade is 2TB.

Weaknees sells a 4TB upgrade for the Premiere 4, but it's a dual drive (internal/external) setup.

No one has figured out how to do a 4TB single internal drive for the Premiere 4.


----------



## lessd

telamon said:


> So I've been searching and I think I got this straight, but I just want some verification.
> 
> The largest single drive upgrade for a Premiere 4 unit using free tools to upgrade is 2TB.
> 
> Weaknees sells a 4TB upgrade for the Premiere 4, but it's a dual drive (internal/external) setup.
> 
> No one has figured out how to do a 4TB single internal drive for the Premiere 4.


Short answer *yes*, with the Roamio now out that can take a 3Tb drive without any upgrade software the upgrade people are working on a 4Tb upgrade for that model, Weaknees has already figured out how to do the 4Tb upgrade for the Roamio.


----------



## telamon

Thanks. Upgraded successfully to 2TB a few weeks ago. Now to resist the urge to upgrade to Roamio for a few more months.


----------



## bobade

My WD20EARX (which I put in a TIVO Premiere 2 years ago) started making noise last night. I happened to have a brand new WD20EARX available, so used JMFS to copy the older drive to the newer drive. After 10 hours, 1.5 TB into the copy, the process failed, with the error message: "ddrescue; write error: no space left on device" and also "Copy did not finish successfully"

I tried to resume the copy without success, and then tried to start over, however JMFS would not recognized the drive. I tried every combination of switching SATA cables, power cables, etc. to no avail.

Then I tried looking at the new drive in Windows 7. At first, I could see it in Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management, but when I tried do anything with it, I got an error message about an I/O failure. Subsequently, it is no longer visible that way, despite again switching SATA cables, power, etc.

It certainly sounds to me like the new drive is dead. Could JMFS have killed it?

Should I be able to copy a functioning (though not original) 2TB TIVO WD20EARX to another new identical drive with JMFS?

If not, what can I do to get my TIVO working again? I don't have the original TIVO Premiere disk, as I have used it in a computer.

Thanks so much for any help!


----------



## nooneuknow

bobade said:


> My WD20EARX (which I put in a TIVO Premiere 2 years ago) started making noise last night. I happened to have a brand new WD20EARX available, so used JMFS to copy the older drive to the newer drive. After 10 hours, 1.5 TB into the copy, the process failed, with the error message: "ddrescue; write error: no space left on device" and also "Copy did not finish successfully"
> 
> I tried to resume the copy without success, and then tried to start over, however JMFS would not recognized the drive. I tried every combination of switching SATA cables, power cables, etc. to no avail.
> 
> Then I tried looking at the new drive in Windows 7. At first, I could see it in Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management, but when I tried do anything with it, I got an error message about an I/O failure. Subsequently, it is no longer visible that way, despite again switching SATA cables, power, etc.
> 
> It certainly sounds to me like the new drive is dead. Could JMFS have killed it?
> 
> Should I be able to copy a functioning (though not original) 2TB TIVO WD20EARX to another new identical drive with JMFS?
> 
> If not, what can I do to get my TIVO working again? I don't have the original TIVO Premiere disk, as I have used it in a computer.
> 
> Thanks so much for any help!


JMFS doesn't "kill" drives, unless you mix up which is the source, and which is the target, and that's still only an image kill, not the drive.

Booting into Windows and viewing the drive with disk manager has been known to "kill" images, not drives.

A guaranteed image kill if you let Windows/disk manager "initialize" the drive, still not the drive itself.

It sounds like the drive killed itself. Don't blame the software. Even if the drive hadn't self-destructed, you made plenty of mistakes a bit of research on here could have prevented.

Didn't you read the 1 million posts around here that say you shouldn't repurpose the original TiVo drive?

Thankfully, some people have made backups, and/or didn't repurpose their original TiVo drive.

Post your model number, which starts with "TCD", and I'm sure some kind soul will PM you an image. There are "image begging" threads on here, where you can post your model, which is where you really should do so.

Openly asking for and/or openly posting links to images, is frowned upon here, just so you know, and it's best to keep any hints that you need an image for your model in an appropriate thread.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=388695&highlight=need+an+image

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=503261&highlight=dvrbars

TCF: It's a magical place...


----------



## bobade

Thanks for the information, nooneuknow. It's funny; I've upgraded 2 or 3 TIVOs over the years, and have never noticed a post about saving the original drive. But I see what you mean.

Actually, though, the WD20EARX I have been using for the past 2 years in my TIVO Premiere is not yet dead; just making a noise occasionally. It seems to be working fine.

Before I waste $100 on another HD, can you please tell me: should I be able to copy my current 2TB drive to another, new 2TB drive (probably I'll buy a WD20EURS) using JMFS? 

If the only way to put a new drive in my TIVO is to get an image and burn it on a new drive, will I be able to somehow move the material from the old drive to the new one? Will putting in a new drive create problems with my lifetime TIVO contract, or my cablecard connections?

Thanks so much!


----------



## ggieseke

Copying it byte for byte using ddrescue on the JMFS disk should work fine. If there are enough bad spots on the source drive it may take a LONG time to complete.

You could also try DvrBARS using the Modified Full method. Since it only reads the sectors actually in use by the OS and recordings you might get lucky and avoid bad spots altogether. The downside is that you need enough free space on your PC for the temporary backup image (it doesn't do disk-to-disk).

If you start over from scratch you will lose your CableCARD pairing and all settings. Lifetime is on the motherboard, not the disk. You can copy the recordings to your computer with kmttg, pyTivo or TiVo Desktop first if they aren't copy protected.


----------



## unitron

bobade said:


> Thanks for the information, nooneuknow. It's funny; I've upgraded 2 or 3 TIVOs over the years, and have never noticed a post about saving the original drive. But I see what you mean.
> 
> Actually, though, the WD20EARX I have been using for the past 2 years in my TIVO Premiere is not yet dead; just making a noise occasionally. It seems to be working fine.
> 
> Before I waste $100 on another HD, can you please tell me: should I be able to copy my current 2TB drive to another, new 2TB drive (probably I'll buy a WD20EURS) using JMFS?
> 
> If the only way to put a new drive in my TIVO is to get an image and burn it on a new drive, will I be able to somehow move the material from the old drive to the new one? Will putting in a new drive create problems with my lifetime TIVO contract, or my cablecard connections?
> 
> Thanks so much!


You should have run WD's own diagnostic software long test on that brand new EARX before putting it into service, and you should do the same on that EURS if you get it.

The original drive with the software that came on it from the factory or whatever it had been updated to by TiVo while it was in and operating the TiVo is known to work properly in the TiVo (if you upgraded before it went bad) and therefore is an invaluable troubleshooting tool, and source of image in case it's replacement has to be replaced.

That's why you set it aside somewhere safe.

You might have been better off to have wrapped some paper towel around the failing drive and put it in the freezer overnight while you ran the long test on it's replacement, and had some ice packs ready as well to keep it cooled while trying to copy it.

The paper towel absorbs condensation and protects your hands from the cold metal when you take it out of the freezer.


----------



## nooneuknow

unitron said:


> You should have run WD's own diagnostic software long test on that brand new EARX before putting it into service, and you should do the same on that EURS if you get it.
> 
> The original drive with the software that came on it from the factory or whatever it had been updated to by TiVo while it was in and operating the TiVo is known to work properly in the TiVo (if you upgraded before it went bad) and therefore is an invaluable troubleshooting tool, and source of image in case it's replacement has to be replaced.
> 
> That's why you set it aside somewhere safe.
> 
> You might have been better off to have wrapped some paper towel around the failing drive and put it in the freezer overnight while you ran the long test on it's replacement, and had some ice packs ready as well to keep it cooled while trying to copy it.
> 
> The paper towel absorbs condensation and protects your hands from the cold metal when you take it out of the freezer.


*Drive chilling should be a LAST RESORT* measure, and the drive never used for anything important again.

Paper towels only protect against condensation on the parts of the drive you can see, which are the parts least affected by condensation.

You are the only person I see who is often dishing out a method that most recovery sites no longer advise to use (or they now advise against). They have changed to recommending peltier cooling devices and/or heatsinks, with a non-electrically-conductive thermal-pad (at least when used on the circuit board).

Sometimes a fan blowing over the drive is all that is needed, when running a drive in a place where you would not usually use one (bench-tops, and other places where there's no continuous forced airflow), and that it's usually best to position the drive circuit-board-side-up.

Yet, you are so careful not to post how to use hdparm in public postings...

You can do equal, or greater, damage to a drive with the "freezer method" or anything else that can create condensation.

I wish you'd be equally careful, and clear, with the risks as you are with the use of hdparm...

I've successfully used the freezer & other condensation-risking measures, but not in over 3 years. All attempts to use it in the last 3 years have failed for me.

Of course, YMMV.

I'm not picking on you, or trying to start anything. I jump in when people give advice about inspecting power supplies, but fail to give basic general electrical safety advice, as well.


----------



## bobade

Thank you all for your assistance.

ggieseke, I ran DvrBARS which showed my drive to have a size of 1.82 TB (my recollection; I didn't write it down). When I set up a Modified Full copy, DvrBARS was ready to copy 1.845 TB; more than the size of my EARX.

I didn't actually do a Modified Full copy because I didn't have the disk space. A truncated copy worked fine, and was 3.45 GB.

My question: I realize that DvrBARS is not JMFS, but since DvrBARS is viewing my drive as having more data than the size of the drive, is it even possible that JMFS could copy it onto an identical, new EARX? I'm wondering if this is what caused the JFMS copy to fail the first time I tried.

Any additional thoughts would be appreciated.


----------



## ggieseke

1.82TB on the first screen sounds right. I have never seen it report a number higher than that after analyzing the disk for a Modified Full or Truncated backup.

During the analysis phase I set up an array of zeroes in memory (one for every sector on the source drive). As it spots sectors in use it changes the appropriate zero to a one, and at the final screen I just add them up and display the projected maximum backup file size.

It's impossible for it to try to write more sectors than the source drive during a restore so it probably would have worked anyway, but I'll have another look at that part of the code. The difference may be due to the overhead of the VHD file format or just a stupid mistake on my part.

When the Premiere is running do you have anything in the Recently Deleted folder, or is it chock full of actual recordings?


----------



## bobade

The Recently Deleted folder is full of actual deleted recordings, having been in action for more than 2 years.


----------



## unitron

nooneuknow said:


> *Drive chilling should be a LAST RESORT* measure, and the drive never used for anything important again.


If one is having to resort to a multi-pass, byte by byte, "Xeroxing" attempt, it's because the drive is circling the drain anyway and the goal is to save what's written on it while that might still be possible, and not the drive itself.



nooneuknow said:


> Paper towels only protect against condensation on the parts of the drive you can see, which are the parts least affected by condensation.
> 
> You are the only person I see who is often dishing out a method that most recovery sites no longer advise to use (or they now advise against). They have changed to recommending peltier cooling devices and/or heatsinks, with a non-electrically-conductive thermal-pad (at least when used on the circuit board).
> 
> Sometimes a fan blowing over the drive is all that is needed, when running a drive in a place where you would not usually use one (bench-tops, and other places where there's no continuous forced airflow), and that it's usually best to position the drive circuit-board-side-up.


People trying to do this at home, and needing to come here for advice, do not generally have easy access to "...peltier cooling devices and/or heatsinks, with a non-electrically-conductive thermal-pad...", or the experience to know how and why to use them.

Now if someone wants to pay some data recovery outfit a few thousand dollars instead I'm all in favor of stimulating the economy and I'm sure it'll give them a greater chance at success.

I can only offer up what has sometimes worked for me.


----------



## nooneuknow

unitron said:


> If one is having to resort to a multi-pass, byte by byte, "Xeroxing" attempt, it's because the drive is circling the drain anyway and the goal is to save what's written on it while that might still be possible, and not the drive itself.
> 
> People trying to do this at home, and needing to come here for advice, do not generally have easy access to "...peltier cooling devices and/or heatsinks, with a non-electrically-conductive thermal-pad...", or the experience to know how and why to use them.
> 
> Now if someone wants to pay some data recovery outfit a few thousand dollars instead I'm all in favor of stimulating the economy and I'm sure it'll give them a greater chance at success.
> 
> I can only offer up what has sometimes worked for me.


My post was for the many others that may come here in the future, not just one person.

If you read the posts from the person originally inquiring, they were saying the drive was working in the TiVo, just making questionable noises.

I sure wouldn't freeze/chill a drive that I could possibly use for unimportant, other-type uses, unless I had to.

There are currently several "DIY data recovery sites" and/or "purveyors of tools for DIY hard drive repair" sites. These are the sites I speak of. They will sell you tools that even allow you to change-out your actuator/heads, clamp the platters in place to swap the platters, sell "donor circuit boards", and so much more.

I don't appreciate the implication of being a data-recovery industrial complex shill, trying to get people to send their drives in. Never was the case, never will be.

I guess I'm a real freak, that I actually have a drawer full of all the heatsinks I've pulled out of service, and/or removed from assemblies that I discarded, also a real freak that I have multiple drawers of fans, and a cornucopia of various non-conductive thermal pads, grease, and epoxies.

Some DIY enthusiasts DO have these things around, some don't. I feel that for future thread browsers, it's best that some things have a balanced amount of input, as well as not assuming one size fits all.

As I expected, others did contribute on the parts I didn't have the time to go into detail about, at the time.

If you are going to assume things about people, I feel it's best to assume from one extreme, to the other extreme. Like I said, who knows the full skill-level of one person inquiring, and/or that of everybody who will see these posts in this discussion in the future.

Sigh... Why doesn't anybody pay any attention to the deliberately included comments I add, stating that I'm not trying to pick a fight, and just trying to contribute, like this:



nooneuknow said:


> *Of course, YMMV.
> 
> I'm not picking on you, or trying to start anything. I jump in when people give advice about inspecting power supplies, but fail to give basic general electrical safety advice, as well.*


----------



## N2UMK

When I booted up the linux jmfs CD it's seeing the tivo drive (320) and the internal computer drive but not the other new WD20EZRX (2T).
It wants to use the internal computer drive as the target. Yikes!

My hardware setup is a HPG71 LT connected to a dual drive esata box with external power via USB. It's a Thermaltake; BlacX box. 

Using disk management in Win7 it sees all 4 drives (internal, CD, tivo and 2T). 
JMFS is not seeing the EZRX.

Is the ezrx not a viable upgrade drive?

What am I doing wrong?

My Tivo is a premiere with lifetime service.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Pat


----------



## ggieseke

N2UMK said:


> When I booted up the linux jmfs CD it's seeing the tivo drive (320) and the internal computer drive but not the other new WD20EZRX (2T).
> It wants to use the internal computer drive as the target. Yikes!
> 
> My hardware setup is a HPG71 LT connected to a dual drive esata box with external power via USB. It's a Thermaltake; BlacX box.
> 
> Using disk management in Win7 it sees all 4 drives (internal, CD, tivo and 2T).
> JMFS is not seeing the EZRX.
> 
> Is the ezrx not a viable upgrade drive?
> 
> What am I doing wrong?
> 
> My Tivo is a premiere with lifetime service.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.
> 
> Pat


I have a BlacX dual dock and Windows sees both drives IF it's on an eSATA port that supports the port multiplier function. On USB it only supports one drive at a time. I haven't tried it with jmfs yet, but there are a lot of variables involved.

Have you tried DvrBARS? It was designed for Windows and Premieres, and in your case it should see the new EZRX drive. You will still have to use jmfs to expand it, but backing up the 320 and restoring it to the 2TB operation should be a piece of cake. Then you can load one drive in the dock and expand it with jmfs.


----------



## unitron

N2UMK said:


> When I booted up the linux jmfs CD it's seeing the tivo drive (320) and the internal computer drive but not the other new WD20EZRX (2T).
> It wants to use the internal computer drive as the target. Yikes!
> 
> My hardware setup is a HPG71 LT connected to a dual drive esata box with external power via USB. It's a Thermaltake; BlacX box.
> 
> Using disk management in Win7 it sees all 4 drives (internal, CD, tivo and 2T).
> JMFS is not seeing the EZRX.
> 
> Is the ezrx not a viable upgrade drive?
> 
> What am I doing wrong?
> 
> My Tivo is a premiere with lifetime service.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.
> 
> Pat


When booting from a cd-r that's designed to do stuff to hard drives, it's not the worst idea in the world to disconnect the hard drives to which you don't want anything done.


----------



## N2UMK

unitron said:


> When booting from a cd-r that's designed to do stuff to hard drives, it's not the worst idea in the world to disconnect the hard drives to which you don't want anything done.


Understand, however it's not easy to do with a laptop.
I also swapped drives in the dual drive with the same result.
It's odd to me that jmfs ap does not see the wd20ezrx drive in either port.

still interested in the forum's ideas.
Pat


----------



## jmbach

When I had an issue like that, I used another USB drive adapter. 
Another thing to try is to exit out of JMFS, insert each drive separately a minute apart and restart JMFS.


----------



## N2UMK

Thanks I will try that.
Does anyone know if the WD20EZRX drive is compatible with TIVO/jmfs?
Also it appears to have an issue when you disable the head park feature (not mine specifically - this model drive in general).
Does anyone know about this?

Pat


----------



## nooneuknow

N2UMK said:


> Thanks I will try that.
> Does anyone know if the WD20EZRX drive is compatible with TIVO/jmfs?
> Also it appears to have an issue when you disable the head park feature (not mine specifically - this model drive in general).
> Does anyone know about this?
> 
> Pat


They work fine, in both respects, as well as working very well.

Only issue is that you can not adjust the drive acoustic management setting.

They can be rather noisy when they are hard at work, from my experience.

Some say they are quiet. I'm never close enough to care, when watching TV. I actually turn AAM off, on drives that allow adjustment, because it provides a small amount of added seeking performance (even according to the drive's full specification documentation). But, I doubt it matters in a TiVo. I like to be able to put my ear up close to my TiVos and hear just how busy the drives are.

If anybody has found a way to adjust the acoustics, or has found an EZRX with firmware that allows it, now would be a good time to speak up.

I have a suspicion the chip that would normally exist for AAM, is not present on these drives.


----------



## N2UMK

nooneuknow - 
Appreciate the info.
Waiting for an opportunity to pull the 320 from the premiere (again) and try jmfs again.
This site is helpful; glad tivo-ites are willing to help.
Thanks.

Pat


----------



## lukinsj

I have a TCD746320 that has the GSOD. It appears the Hard Drive is dead. I am running out to get a new 1TB WD Green drive. Could you please send me the PM to re-image my drive?

Thanks in advance


----------



## unitron

lukinsj said:


> I have a TCD746320 that has the GSOD. It appears the Hard Drive is dead. I am running out to get a new 1TB WD Green drive. Could you please send me the PM to re-image my drive?
> 
> Thanks in advance


For that 1TB drive you're going to pay a very large fraction of the cost of a 2TB drive.

Hint, hint.


----------



## lukinsj

unitron said:


> For that 1TB drive you're going to pay a very large fraction of the cost of a 2TB drive.
> 
> Hint, hint.


I know, but it's all that was in stock near me. At least it was on sale, so I didn't feel like I was getting totally screwed.


----------



## ggieseke

lukinsj said:


> I have a TCD746320 that has the GSOD. It appears the Hard Drive is dead. I am running out to get a new 1TB WD Green drive. Could you please send me the PM to re-image my drive?
> 
> Thanks in advance


PM sent.


----------



## rich14au

I have a TCD746320 that is stuck on the initial "Welcome! Starting up..." screen. I think the HDD is the problem because I am able to swap out the drive with the HDD in my other Premiere and it boots up normally. Likewise, putting the dead drive into the other Premiere results in the same problem, it stays on the "Welcome" screen. The weird thing is that I can hookup the dead drive to my PC and run SpinRite on it. SpinRite did find and recover a handful of bad sectors but that means the drive is not really dead. After running SpinRite and putting it back into the Premiere, it still won't boot. Perhaps too much of the drive has been corrupted?

So my question is, can I still use this drive with the JMFS utility to copy to a brand new 2TB HDD or will the corruption just copy over to the new HDD? And if copying the bad HDD is not recommended, could I make a copy of my good Premiere HDD to use in the other Premiere. I understand that I'd be losing the shows on the bad HDD but would it even work to copy a HDD from different Premiere box?


----------



## unitron

rich14au said:


> I have a TCD746320 that is stuck on the initial "Welcome! Starting up..." screen. I think the HDD is the problem because I am able to swap out the drive with the HDD in my other Premiere and it boots up normally. Likewise, putting the dead drive into the other Premiere results in the same problem, it stays on the "Welcome" screen. The weird thing is that I can hookup the dead drive to my PC and run SpinRite on it. SpinRite did find and recover a handful of bad sectors but that means the drive is not really dead. After running SpinRite and putting it back into the Premiere, it still won't boot. Perhaps too much of the drive has been corrupted?
> 
> So my question is, can I still use this drive with the JMFS utility to copy to a brand new 2TB HDD or will the corruption just copy over to the new HDD? And if copying the bad HDD is not recommended, could I make a copy of my good Premiere HDD to use in the other Premiere. I understand that I'd be losing the shows on the bad HDD but would it even work to copy a HDD from different Premiere box?


You can try try copying the supposedly screwed up drive to something at least as big with jmfs and see if it works or not.

If it doesn't, you can copy your other known good Premiere drive to that 2TB, and then do a Clear & Delete Everything to get it to sync up with the change in TiVo Service Number, just the same as owners of older TiVos.

This will leave the "problem" drive unwritten to in case there's any hope in the future of saving the shows on it.


----------



## rich14au

unitron said:


> You can try try copying the supposedly screwed up drive to something at least as big with jmfs and see if it works or not.
> 
> If it doesn't, you can copy your other known good Premiere drive to that 2TB, and then do a Clear & Delete Everything to get it to sync up with the change in TiVo Service Number, just the same as owners of older TiVos.
> 
> This will leave the "problem" drive unwritten to in case there's any hope in the future of saving the shows on it.


Last night I got my "dead" 320GB HDD to upgrade onto a new 2TB HDD. The JMFS copy encountered 1 error along the way and had to retry some sectors before it reported the copy was successful. I then expanded and suspersized the new HDD. Both operations reported success. So then I installed the new HDD in my TiVo Premiere and powered it up. After a couple of minutes the "Welcome" screen went away and it was replaced by a "Installing Update. This may take a few minutes" screen. After about 10 minutes or so the TiVo was back up and running. Yes! I went to the System Info to confirm my additional storage and it reported the expected 318 hours of HD. What I also noticed was that the software version was at 20.3.8. I guess it was the 20.3.8 update that failed and caused the original HDD to get into an un-bootable state. Thankfully the JMFS tools was able to work around this problem and I'm all set now. Thanks for the help.


----------



## unitron

rich14au said:


> Last night I got my "dead" 320GB HDD to upgrade onto a new 2TB HDD. The JMFS copy encountered 1 error along the way and had to retry some sectors before it reported the copy was successful. I then expanded and suspersized the new HDD. Both operations reported success. So then I installed the new HDD in my TiVo Premiere and powered it up. After a couple of minutes the "Welcome" screen went away and it was replaced by a "Installing Update. This may take a few minutes" screen. After about 10 minutes or so the TiVo was back up and running. Yes! I went to the System Info to confirm my additional storage and it reported the expected 318 hours of HD. What I also noticed was that the software version was at 20.3.8. I guess it was the 20.3.8 update that failed and caused the original HDD to get into an un-bootable state. Thankfully the JMFS tools was able to work around this problem and I'm all set now. Thanks for the help.


All mad props to comer for jmfs and all that, but to be perfectly nitpicky about it, it was Antonio Diaz Diaz's

ddrescue

(which is what comer included in jmfs to handle the copying part)

more properly referred to as Gnu ddrescue, which worked around your problem.

Of course comer gets full credit for the part that did the expanding, which the older MFS Tools/MFS Live and WinMFS couldn't handle on S4s because of changes TiVo made.


----------



## jmbach

With a little help from ggeiseke finally figured out why JMFS does not work on the OLED S3s. They use a 32bit MFS layout and JMFS looks for a 64bit MFS layout that is found in the 65x series S3s and newer. 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk


----------



## jetcobra

I have a THD that I got in 2009 - I used winmfs to upgrade the unit with a 1 TB drive at that time. Last night I got the Welcome! Powering Up screen forever so I figured it may be the HDD, so I replaced it with the original 160 GB drive and it worked. So I would like to put another upgrade drive in it but would like to use 2 TB this time.

From this thread I gather that Comer's jmfs rev 104 would work for that purpose. It that correct? Also, is there any chance I could use the failed drive to to the upgrade such as rich14au did above? Or should I use the 160 GB original drive to do so? But if I do this I will not have the latest TIVO software, correct? I really don't care about recordings on the failed drive.

I would like to order a WD AV-GP 2 TB drive today to get here for the weekend if possible so any inputs or suggestions welcomed.

Thanks


----------



## unitron

jetcobra said:


> I have a THD that I got in 2009 - I used winmfs to upgrade the unit with a 1 TB drive at that time. Last night I got the Welcome! Powering Up screen forever so I figured it may be the HDD, so I replaced it with the original 160 GB drive and it worked. So I would like to put another upgrade drive in it but would like to use 2 TB this time.
> 
> From this thread I gather that Comer's jmfs rev 104 would work for that purpose. It that correct? Also, is there any chance I could use the failed drive to to the upgrade such as rich14au did above? Or should I use the 160 GB original drive to do so? But if I do this I will not have the latest TIVO software, correct? I really don't care about recordings on the failed drive.
> 
> I would like to order a WD AV-GP 2 TB drive today to get here for the weekend if possible so any inputs or suggestions welcomed.
> 
> Thanks


I'm going to overstep my (non-existant) authority and suggest that any answers to jetcobra's post be placed in this S3 forum thread

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=513592

instead of here, so as to keep it all corralled.


----------



## oneill25

I downloaded the file and burnt it to a disc. When I put in computer to boot from it, it doesn't work correctly. My computer starts and it goes to blank screen where stuff comes up like it is booting from disc, it is a couple lines with a lot of dots "........" after it, then another line of words and more dots, then comp reboots and same thing happens again. Maybe I did something wrong when making the disc, but I made a second disc and it does the same. 


What am I doing wrong, or will it just not work for me? I really hope I can get it working, I have a Premier XL, and my hard drive is going bad, and I really dont want to have to loose everything and buy a new TiVo.

So please anyone, know how to get it working??


----------



## lpwcomp

oneill25 said:


> I downloaded the file and burnt it to a disc. When I put in computer to boot from it, it doesn't work correctly. My computer starts and it goes to blank screen where stuff comes up like it is booting from disc, it is a couple lines with a lot of dots "........" after it, then another line of words and more dots, then comp reboots and same thing happens again. Maybe I did something wrong when making the disc, but I made a second disc and it does the same.
> 
> What am I doing wrong, or will it just not work for me? I really hope I can get it working, I have a Premier XL, and my hard drive is going bad, and I really dont want to have to loose everything and buy a new TiVo.
> 
> So please anyone, know how to get it working??


What file did you download and how did you burn it to disk?


----------



## oneill25

lpwcomp said:


> What file did you download and how did you burn it to disk?


I downloaded the "jmfs-rev104.iso.zip". And used the burn image option on my comp. I have a windows 8 comp that I made disc with, and I right clicked on it and said burn image. I also tried making a copy with "DVD decrypter" set in the mode to burn iso files to disc.

Oh and I of course unzipped/ extracted it first, then tried the methods above to burn the iso.


----------



## jmbach

What kind of computer do you have. Make and model.


----------



## oneill25

the computer I made the disc with is an Asus laptop with with windows 8.1 on it, model not sure.....

the comp I am trying to use the disc with, to copy hard drive, is a custom built desktop.... it has an asus motherboard, um.... with it being custom built not sure what info would be helpful


----------



## jmbach

Might try to download the iso again and burn that to a cd. Does the current disc boot in any computer you have?


----------



## oneill25

the only comp i have tried to boot it on is my desktop... my only other comp is my laptop, havent tried to boot on it, as I have no way to hook the harddrives up, so my if it boots on it, it wont help



and it does boot (sorta) on the desktop. It bots and a few lines of text appear and a lot of periods "........", followed by another line of text and periods "........" then says "Ready" and then comp reboots, and it goes through same process again.


I could try and downloading the same file again, but before I waste another disc I would like to see what else might be the issue. I have tried installing the same version I already downloaded a couple of different ways. One was on a CD, the other 2 were on DVDs, as the first one I did was on the only blank CD I had. I have lots of blank DVDs, but dont wont to keep using them and getting nowhere.


I have even updated the BIOS on my desktop to see if it would help.


----------



## unitron

Sounds like you might have gotten a corrupted download.

I had the same thing happen a few months ago on the UBCD .iso

The resulting cd-r would sort of try to boot up.

See if comer supplies one of those checksum things for that file and then look for deccheck or one of the other free checksum verifier programs and make sure your next jmfs download matches up.

Pick up a pack of halfway decent cd-r's, so you can make yourself a copy of the UBCD as well, it's handy to have, if for no other reason than the manufacturer's diagnostic software to run the long test on the new drive you want to put in the TiVo before you put it into service.

I don't know enough to know if burning cd .iso's, even "as an image", to a DVD blank works out or not when you want something bootable, but I do know that it works if you use a cd-r blank.


----------



## oneill25

i'll try that I guess..... i have no idea what a checksum is tho...... I also just tried puting the iso on a flash drive and booting from it..... I did not make it a bootable copy, just a iso on the flash drive and told my comp to boot from it, and I got the same result, where it acts like it boots, says ready, then reboots the comp.... and the version on the flash drive, i redownloaded to try with a different copy, but still downloaded same way


I even tried to download the older version, 68 or whatever, put it on a disc and it tried to boot, then said failed to boot


----------



## oneill25

well I just tried to PM comer to see his thoughts and I was told I cant PM anyone but a select few until I have at least 10 post, now that is just stupid, but looks like this one issue may get me there soon. So for now unless he gets on and reads these posts and comments, he will be of no help.

So anyone else have anything I can try?


----------



## lessd

oneill25 said:


> well I just tried to PM comer to see his thoughts and I was told I cant PM anyone but a select few until I have at least 10 post, now that is just stupid, but looks like this one issue may get me there soon. So for now unless he gets on and reads these posts and comments, he will be of no help.
> 
> So anyone else have anything I can try?


I guess someone could send you a already made bootable CD.


----------



## oneill25

lessd said:


> I guess someone could send you a already made bootable CD.


well I guess they could, but now in all my trials, I have somehow managed to break my desktop  

It wont even power on now, so looks like i might just have to forget about my shows and season passes etc.... and just buy a new TiVo altogether ...... Not What I wanted to do, looks like I bought a 2 TB hard drive for no reason, just flushing more money down the drain

I really hope I can fix it, I dont want this to have to cost me another $150 as well for a new motherboard for the desktop too


----------



## jmbach

Why can you not use your laptop?


----------



## lpwcomp

jmbach said:


> Why can you not use your laptop?


I'm assuming that he is directly connecting them to SATA ports and not using docks.


----------



## unitron

oneill25 said:


> well I guess they could, but now in all my trials, I have somehow managed to break my desktop
> 
> It wont even power on now, so looks like i might just have to forget about my shows and season passes etc.... and just buy a new TiVo altogether ...... Not What I wanted to do, looks like I bought a 2 TB hard drive for no reason, just flushing more money down the drain
> 
> I really hope I can fix it, I dont want this to have to cost me another $150 as well for a new motherboard for the desktop too


What's the model number of the Asus motherboard in the desktop?


----------



## oneill25

I didnt think it would work as well on my laptop.. but I just checked and the disc will boot from it...... now the problem is, I have to go fine a SATA to USB device/ cable..... anyone know where I can get one cheap and quick?

yes for desktop, i was using SATA cables, for laptop now I need USB or dock.....

the ASUS motherboard model is M5A99FX PRO R2.0


----------



## jmbach

A USB3 dock would be handy. However if you use JMFS, plug it in a USB2 port. 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk


----------



## oneill25

Wait, it has to be USB 2???, my laptop only has USB 3 ports...


----------



## jmbach

Most of the time in my experience it works fine. I did have one computer that it didn't. Plugging it in a USB2 is just insurance on it working. 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk


----------



## unitron

oneill25 said:


> I didnt think it would work as well on my laptop.. but I just checked and the disc will boot from it...... now the problem is, I have to go fine a SATA to USB device/ cable..... anyone know where I can get one cheap and quick?
> 
> yes for desktop, i was using SATA cables, for laptop now I need USB or dock.....
> 
> the ASUS motherboard model is M5A99FX PRO R2.0


Okay, that motherboard is too new for my theory about what might be wrong to be of any use.


----------



## oneill25

Well SATA didnt work with my desktop. I finally got a dock to hook up the two harddrives, now the program does not recognize that a TiVo is hooked up... guess I'll have to try and copy another way


----------



## lpwcomp

oneill25 said:


> Well SATA didnt work with my desktop. I finally got a dock to hook up the two harddrives, now the program does not recognize that a TiVo is hooked up... guess I'll have to try and copy another way


You say "a dock". Is this a dual drive dock? That does not always work. See if JMFS recognizes the TiVo drive if it is the only drive in the dock.


----------



## oneill25

yes a dual dock....well what do ya know, it recognizes it, if only the TiVo drive is in it..... now I have to get it to recognize it with the blank drive as well


----------



## oneill25

well it recongizes the tivo drive, but says "the MFS structure can not be verified on this drive - probably due to an error" I can still copy it tho.... is that a big issue? Should I still be fine to copy it?


----------



## oneill25

finally, it is copying.... thank goodness I made an error with the first dock I ordered, and have not sent it back yet and have second dock..... so two dual docks each with one drive..... tho if I only would have known the dock might not have worked, would have tried something else (on another positive note, geek squad at best buy was able to determine I didnt screw up my motherboard, my graphics card was messed up and still under warranty)...... and st this rate (copying a 1TB drive to a 2 TB drive, i thin it is gonna take awhile, i think I saw someone (either in the comments here or on the youtube video that told me to come here) say it took them 15 hrs


----------



## jmbach

What the brand of dock do you have. 
How is it connected to the computer: USB3, USB2, eSata. 

Is the TiVo drive you are trying to recognize a working drive or one that is having problems. 

What is the history of the image on the drive. Native image, downloaded image, expended image.


----------



## oneill25

the brand is EZO Ware... it is what I could find on amazon.... well it is made to be able to do usb 3, but using with usb 2 on comp.....

yes the TiVo drive started having reboot issues the other day

history of image of drive??

i have another brand dock i am using for the blank drive, so usine 2 docks and it seemed to be working, until it said "Copy did not finish successfully" and ask if i want to retry when i say yes, it tries again but quickly displays same message

message:
ddrescue: write error: input/output error
Copy did not finish successfully. Wold you like to retry?


----------



## lpwcomp

oneill25 said:


> the brand is EZO Ware... it is what I could find on amazon.... well it is made to be able to do usb 3, but using with usb 2 on comp.....
> 
> yes the TiVo drive started having reboot issues the other day
> 
> history of image of drive??
> 
> i have another brand dock i am using for the blank drive, so usine 2 docks and it seemed to be working, until it said "Copy did not finish successfully" and ask if i want to retry when i say yes, it tries again but quickly displays same message
> 
> message:
> ddrescue: write error: input/output error
> Copy did not finish successfully. Wold you like to retry?


You may need to install a fresh image on the new drive. You'll lose all of the settings and recordings, but it is better than nothing.


----------



## oneill25

and how would I do a fresh image? I would I get access to it?


I would up exiting out of it, to try again. Now I cant get the software to recognize the new drive, i even tried formatting it, to see if that would allow it to be recognized..... this has become such a hassle... it seems like so many people had no problems, and i have just had one after another


i guess ill try a bit more..... but i may just have to call tivo and see about getting a new one  

I think they said, with me being out of warranty for almost a year, i could get a new one same model for like 150, plus 200 to transfer my lifetime service


----------



## lpwcomp

oneill25 said:


> and how would I do a fresh image? I would I get access to it?


Go to this thread and ask for a link to an image for your model.

You'll also need to acquire the DvrBARS software. It's free.


----------



## ggieseke

oneill25 said:


> and how would I do a fresh image? I would I get access to it?


PM sent.


----------



## oneill25

ok i got both things.... the DVrBARS software says it copies a tivo drive..... if i am using the fresh image, how do i need to put it on the blank drive?


Also the fresh image is a zip file and when i click on it to open it says it is invalid, and when i try to extract it, it says it is empty


----------



## lpwcomp

oneill25 said:


> ok i got both things.... the DVrBARS software says it copies a tivo drive..... if i am using the fresh image, how do i need to put it on the blank drive?
> 
> Also the fresh image is a zip file and when i click on it to open it says it is invalid, and when i try to extract it, it says it is empty


DvrBaRS stands for Digital Video Recorder Backup _*And Restore*_ Software.

You use DvrBARS to restore the compressed image (that was created by using DvrBARS to backup someone else's working drive) to the new drive. You do not unzip it.

Attach the new drive to your computer. Run DvrBARS. Select the "Restore" option, enter the location of the image file and the drive to which you wish it restored. After it completes, put it in your TiVo, start it up and run a "Clear & Delete Everything".


----------



## oneill25

so after doing that, do i still need to run the jmfs program to expand or supersize.... the new drive is 2 TB


----------



## lpwcomp

oneill25 said:


> so after doing that, do i still need to run the jmfs program to expand or supersize.... the new drive is 2 TB


Presumably, the image is from a stock drive, so the answer is yes, you need to use JMFS to expand and supersize.

Do that before putting it in the TiVo.

Also, sorry to ask if you posted this earlier, but what is the make and model of the new drive?


----------



## oneill25

make and model of new drive is: WD 20EUEX - 63T0FY0, it is an AV drive



edit: Well now this DvrBARS software is not recognizing the new drive


----------



## lpwcomp

oneill25 said:


> make and model of new drive is: WD 20EUEX - 63T0FY0, it is an AV drive
> 
> edit: Well now this DvrBARS software is not recognizing the new drive


Greg is probably going to have to help you at this point. You might try closing DvrBARS, unplugging the drive and plugging it back in and then restarting DvrBARS or even rebooting your computer. Or doing it with your laptop.


----------



## ggieseke

You do have to unzip the download to extract the .VHD file that DvrBARS uses. If Windows won't recognize it as a valid zip file try downloading a fresh copy. The MD5 hash for that particular zip file should be 392401741E1865E15DFEF8B26BA6034F.

DvrBARS will recognize any drive that Windows Disk Manager can see as an uninitialized blank drive. If you already hooked up the 2TB and let Disk Manager initialize it you will have to delete any volumes or partitions in DM. There's an option to show mounted drives in DvrBARS, but as a safety precaution it won't overwrite one - you have to do that manually. I took the coward's approach so that nobody would say "that &#% Greg wiped my files. 

The TCD748000 image that I sent you came from my own factory fresh XL and it was never powered up. You might even be able to skip the C&DE step, but you will still have to use jmfs to expand it from 1TB to 2TB.


----------



## lpwcomp

Sorry for putting out the misinformation. I thought the vhd file was already compressed and that zipping it wouldn't reduce the size. My bad.


----------



## cfcubed

Last week the 2- or 3-yr old 1TB WD DVR expander on my Premiere died so I ordered another (the newest 1TB model). But not a big fan of the external drive thing & unsure of the life left in my Tivo's internal 320GB drive, decided I'd pull the new 1TB expander HD & fit it into the Tivo. Did something similar to an S2 years back using tools directly (mfslive?).

Having migrated to Macs in 2009 only have an old eMachines & a $75 ebay Dell for my CNC setup to work with. Problems: both had only 2 MB SATA ports, eMachine's CD/DVD drive is shot, Dell's HD power cable way too short & connected to buried HD. Found longish SATA cables BUT neither PC could do the job alone, so power from the eMachines + SATA/CD-ROM from Dell did the trick:










Of course taking ESD precautions... About 4 hrs later popped the 1TB in and if I'd WAITED 15-30 mins for Tivo to boot all the way to LiveTV then all would be well. Important to wait for full Tivo reboot, I didn't at first & hit the Tivo button after 15 mins or so when it had a blank screen - Got to view settings & it spontaneously rebooted. All was fine after that only because I let it boot all the way until it showed LiveTV.

Tossed comer some $$, of course, for this nice utility - easier & less stress than I remember my DT upgrade being


----------



## turbo327

My apology in advance if this is OBE info and is here somewhere, or there is an updated procedure the OP has provided?? 

Searches return zip for me... re: the new WD 2TB drive WD20EURX, which is the WD replacement/follow-on to the WD20EURS. I understand the WD20EURS's after January 2013 are said to be coming from WD with the Intellipark featured disabled. So... any need to run WDIdle3 utility on a the 'newer' WD20EURX? (Darn WD... I cannot keep up here)

Thanks in advance to the OP (Comer) and all who have piled on here since!! PayPal sent to ya Comer. Get it ice cold and let me know!  

(Going to update my Premiere 4 XL to 2TB, its got 4 years on it and just want to be sane... )

Gerry-


----------



## turbo327

cfcubed said:


> Problems: both had only 2 MB SATA ports, eMachine's CD/DVD drive is shot, Dell's HD power cable way too short & connected to buried HD. Found longish SATA cables BUT neither PC could do the job alone, so power from the eMachines + SATA/CD-ROM from Dell did the trick.
> 
> Tossed comer some $$, of course, for this nice utility - easier & less stress than I remember my DT upgrade being


Seems like an essential jury rig to me.  Old PCs just sometimes have to serve some purpose!

Comer hopefully will be chillin' some cool ones from me tonight as well.


----------



## scoombs

I would appreciate some guidance on best approach to upgrade a 746320 for my in-laws, that is not geographically near to me. Basically, which will be simplest (mainly for them), though I see no way to eliminate their need to open the box and swap drives:

-	Have them ship me the original drive, copy/expand and ship new drive back to them.
-	Get a donor base image, restore/expand and ship to them, C&DE.
-	Get a donor 2TB image (if available), restore and ship to them, C&DE.
-	Any way to use my Elite as a donor image, ship to them, C&DE?

Thanks


----------



## jmbach

The simplest for them is to ship you the whole unit and let you dismantle and upgrade it.
The second simplest is let them buy you a plane ticket so you can fly to them or wait until you are ready to visit them for another reason. (the last option is what my parents choose all the time)


----------



## scoombs

jmbach said:


> The simplest for them is to ship you the whole unit and let you dismantle and upgrade it.
> The second simplest is let them buy you a plane ticket so you can fly to them or wait until you are ready to visit them for another reason. (the last option is what my parents choose all the time)


Cannot argue with a single point you make, as that would be easiest for them. 

Having the whole unit was my original plan as well, but it is an international shipping scenario and the weight/size of the entire device and associated outrageous fees though feasible, make it an unpalatable option. On the plus side they have children local to them who can be indentured to be my hands for the local labor if the technical details are taken care of in advance.


----------



## Cybernut

scoombs said:


> ... but it is an international shipping scenario ...


I didn't know TiVo had service available outside US.


----------



## scoombs

Puerto Rico, so only barely International. 

I also believe Tivo was available in Canada and the UK at one time if not still.


----------



## jmbach

If cost is a factor and they don't mind not saving their shows, I would use DvrBARS and make a truncated backup of your elite image and do a quick restore to a 2TB drive and then c&de. Mail it to them and let someone there put it in for them. It seems that a newer S4 image can be run on an older S4 model as a few people have experimented with and have demonstrated. Not sure about the reverse. However YMMV. If it doesn't work, then have them mail both drives to you and do it the normal way. Your other option is to go to the DvrBARS thread and see if you can get the correct image for that model. Then use DvrBARS to put it on a drive and JMFS to expand.


----------



## ggieseke

I could cook up a pre-expanded 2TB 746 image and upload it to Dropbox. If you want to go that route, let me know what model of drive you plan to use so it doesn't exceed the actual number of sectors on your drive.

Depending on the hardware and expertise available at your in-laws you could write it to a drive and ship it to them, or let them do the entire procedure locally.


----------



## jmbach

If ggieseke makes you a 2TB image then this makes it even easier. As long as your in-laws have a windows based computer, you could both install a program called TeamViewer which allows you to remotely control their computer. DvrBARS is a windows based program. They can buy the drive and an external dock. Then you can tell them or whomever how to hook everything up. Then remotely you can download the image ggieseke gives you to their computer and download DvrBARS as well. Remotely run the program and place the image on the drive. Since you did not have to pay for the drive or shipping, spend that money and buy ggieseke several beers for helping you.


----------



## scoombs

Thanks all very much for the responses. I decided to go the safe route and get my hands on the unit and do it all myself so I can fully test and ensure it is functional.

I appreciate the feedback.


----------



## jthomas

Bringing this conversation from another thread... I am trying to use JMFS to expand a WD30EURX to get it to the 2.1 tb so I can work my way up from there. When booting the JMFS from CD my computer (HP Elitebook 8460p, it has a Intel Core i5 vPro, with a Mobile Intel QM67 Express Chipset) the 3tb drive is not recognized at all. It will recognize any other drive I plug in. I'm using a sata to usb adapter with power supply for the hard drive. I am using usb 2.0. I gave it a shot on a usb 3.0 port but that didn't work either. Any help would be appreciated.


----------



## jmbach

What SATA to USB adapter are you using. One other thing to try is with the drive connected, boot JMFS and drop to the command line and run fdisk -l (lower case L) and see if the Linux OS sees the drive. 

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> What SATA to USB adapter are you using. One other thing to try is with the drive connected, boot JMFS and drop to the command line and run frisk -l (lower case L) and see if the Linux OS sees the drive.
> 
> Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk


I'm predicting jmbach's post will be edited to change that from

frisk -l

to

fdisk -l


----------



## jmbach

Edited ;-D
Can't trust spell check.


----------



## jthomas

I'll try the fdisk, the frisk didn't work well. I'll have to wait until tomorrow though. I tried expanding the max size of the vhd and then expand it with the jmfs tools in a virtual machine. Right now it is restoring with DVRBars. It's running slow since the vhd is on my NAS and it's running over the network. If that works out should get me up to the 2.1 tb. If I'm wrong and wasting my time someone please tell me.


----------



## jmbach

After the image is restored to the drive. Run it in the TiVo to make sure it works and has the latest OS. Then take it out and make a backup of that image. 
If you are using a virtual machine to run JMFS, then make sure the VHD you are expanding on has the correct number of sectors.


----------



## jmbach

Again, if the image you are working with does not have the latest OS on it, if you place it on a 3TB (even if the image is not expanded) you will boot loop.


----------



## jmbach

I would recommend placing the image on a 1TB drive first. Run it in the TiVo, make sure it has the latest OS, then use JMFS to expand that image to 1TB. Put it back in the TiVo to make sure it works. Transfer that image to the 3TB drive. Swap the area on the drive where partition 10 and 12 lie and put it back in the TiVo to make sure it works and is operational. Then we can work in expanding it to 3TB.


----------



## jthomas

jmbach said:


> I would recommend placing the image on a 1TB drive first. Run it in the TiVo, make sure it has the latest OS, then use JMFS to expand that image to 1TB. Put it back in the TiVo to make sure it works. Transfer that image to the 3TB drive. Swap the area on the drive where partition 10 and 12 lie and put it back in the TiVo to make sure it works and is operational. Then we can work in expanding it to 3TB.


The image I'm using does have the latest OS, it is 20.3.8, I made sure my TiVo was updated before I took the image with DVRBars. Unfortunately, the only other drives I have around the house that size are my drives in my NAS. To work with I have a 320 from a 746320 TiVo drive (Doesn't work in the TiVo, I accidentally mounted it in disk manager), a 500 from a 746500 TiVo drive from my other premiere and a 500 from my 750500 that is untouched. I'm "practicing" on my 320 gb drive since before I mess with my new 750500. The 3tb with the image from the 500 gb drive does work in the TiVo, it is just only using 500 gb of the drive.


----------



## Bierce

Hi all - 
I'm having a heck of a time getting JMFS to just run. On two different systems/motherboards, using either a CD burned from the .iso and/or a USB stick made with Universal USB Installer (1.9.5.2), I boot up, but right after seeing either two or four penguins, and the "Running Linux Live scripts.." loads (all 10 stars), the cursor does a carriage return then stops flashing and everything's frozen.
Really odd that this happens on two different systems.
Any ideas?

System 1 - both CD and USB boot - is: 
Asus P5Q Pro Mobo
Intel Core2Quad Q6600 CPU

System 2 - USB boot - is:
IBM Thinkcentre M58p
Intel Core2Duo E8500 CPU

I have a new Premiere 4 with 500Gb (courtesy of TiVo's [email protected]#$ 11.3x firmware upgrade that bricked my 1.5 Tb expanded HD) and just need to expand that puppy.

Thanks in advance!


----------



## jmbach

What other peripherals / ports does the system have. How is the TiVo drive connected to the system. Is it connected while the system is booting.


----------



## Bierce

jmbach said:


> What other peripherals / ports does the system have. How is the TiVo drive connected to the system. Is it connected while the system is booting.


Other than the monitor, keyboard, mouse, no peripherals connected. Both systems have serial ports that I turned off in BIOS.

The Asus system had the original TiVo drive as well as the new WD20EURS attached to SATA ports on the motherboard, while the IBM had original Tivo HD in an eSATA dock attached to eSATA port, and the new disk connected to the SATA port on MB.
Each computer's original HDDs were disconnected. Only the DVD-ROM (IDE on Asus, SATA on IBM) remained attached on each, and I'm pretty sure at least one of the times with using the USB I disconnected that as well, but I will try that again to make sure.

On the Asus P5Q, BIOS showed the drives connected under SATA info. And for both, the drives were connected during system boot.

I imagine there might be some log file during the boot and Linux Live load, but with the frozen cursor, I can't even get to to a prompt to poke around the RAM disk I think it forms when booting.

Speaking of, the Asus system has 4Gb RAM and the IBM has 2Gb, but I don't think the JMFS needs very much, correct?


----------



## d_bondi

I have 2 TiVo Premieres and am going to upgrade one of them to 2TB HDD. I have purchased and received a WD20 EURX (from Amazon direct, not a 3rd party vendor), as well as two USB to SATA adapters (no PC with SATA, only an old Dell P4 desktop with IDE only, and two laptops w/o SATA).

My 1st question..... unitron, has noted many times in this forum that any new HDD should be scanned/checked issues before it is used. I kind of assume that the utility I need to do this is on the Ultimate Boot CD, but am not sure which utility it is, or how to go about it. I think I have read in this forum that connecting the new EURX via the USB/SATA adaptor to Win7 is a BAD thing, so I want to make sure I don't mess it up before I even get started.

Any detailed (step by step) guidance you can provide will be appreciated.

Follow up question..... should I use the old Dell desktop with its USB 2.0 ports or one of the two laptops that only have USB 3.0 ports to do this?

I'm sure there will be more questions once I get to the actual jfms part, but this will get me going for now.

Thanks in advance !!!


----------



## unitron

d_bondi said:


> I have 2 TiVo Premieres and am going to upgrade one of them to 2TB HDD. I have purchased and received a WD20 EURX (from Amazon direct, not a 3rd party vendor), as well as two USB to SATA adapters (no PC with SATA, only an old Dell P4 desktop with IDE only, and two laptops w/o SATA).
> 
> My 1st question..... unitron, has noted many times in this forum that any new HDD should be scanned/checked issues before it is used. I kind of assume that the utility I need to do this is on the Ultimate Boot CD, but am not sure which utility it is, or how to go about it. I think I have read in this forum that connecting the new EURX via the USB/SATA adaptor to Win7 is a BAD thing, so I want to make sure I don't mess it up before I even get started.
> 
> Any detailed (step by step) guidance you can provide will be appreciated.
> 
> Follow up question..... should I use the old Dell desktop with its USB 2.0 ports or one of the two laptops that only have USB 3.0 ports to do this?
> 
> I'm sure there will be more questions once I get to the actual jfms part, but this will get me going for now.
> 
> Thanks in advance !!!


See where it says HDD?










Use the down arrow key to get to that and hit Enter.

Then arrow down to Diagnosis and hit Enter

Then arrow down to Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS v5.20 (Western Digital) and hit Enter.

After you've verified that it can find the drive you want to test, select it and run the short test and then the long test if it passes the short test.

You can run that with the drive hooked up via USB.

It's only disabling Intellipower with

wdidle3.exe

(to get to it go to Device Info and Management instead of Diagnosis)

where you have to be connected directly to a SATA or IDE port on the motherboard (you can use a SATA/IDE adapter and connect a SATA drive directly to an IDE header if necessary, provided that that motherboard that's too old to have SATA is still new enough to be able to handle a drive as big as 2TB)

The EURX probably comes from the factory with Intellipark disabled, so you probably shouldn't need to worry about that.

Use the USB2 ports on the Dell.

Chances are the SATA/USB adapters you got aren't USB3 anyway, and you may or may not have BIOS support for the USB3 ports--they may require loading a driver in Windows before they'll work, and if you boot from the UBCD that's not going to happen since you won't be in Windows.

Windows XP SP3 or newer (Vista, 7) shouldn't automatically do anything to a new, blank drive it happens to notice is hooked up (although any TiVo drive with its Apple Partition Map would be interpreted as blank as well because Windows doesn't recognize the patterns of those as patterns).

However, there's nothing I can think of that Windows can do for a TiVo drive or a drive that's going to be used in a TiVo that needs doing.

While the long test is running, you can read the jmfs and DvrBARS threads so you know what you need to do to turn it into a Premiere drive once it passes the test.


----------



## d_bondi

Thanks unitron!

The old Dell (P4, 512MB RAM) is a real pig running XP SP3, but as you noted, it won't be running windows, so likely not an issue.


----------



## d_bondi

I have run into a bump in the road.....

I connected the WD20EURX to my USB/SATA adapter (Sabrent from Amazon) and the USB/SATA adapter to a USB2.0 port on the rear of my old Dell Dimension 3000 (assume that the rear ports are motherboard direct). Then I booted with the UBCD, and navigated to the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS v5.21 (Western Digital) and received the following:

NO WESTERN DIGITAL DRIVES FOUND...

DLGDIAG 5.21 - Data Lifeguard Diagnostics
NON-WD DRIVE

ERROR/STATUS CODE: 0201
(C) Copyright 1996-2013 Western Digital Corportation

Hit ANY KEY to continue...​
so, then I figured, maybe I better disconnect the Dell's HDD. I did that and repeated the procedure. This time I received the following message:

NO WESTERN DIGITAL DRIVES FOUND...

DLGDIAG 5.21 - Data Lifeguard Diagnostics
NO DRIVE FOUND

ERROR/STATUS CODE: 0120
(C) Copyright 1996-2013 Western Digital Corportation

Hit ANY KEY to continue...​
Any suggestions on how to proceed?


----------



## Cybernut

d_bondi said:


> I have run into a bump in the road.....
> 
> ...


Why don't you try running the diagnostics in Windows? The Windows diagnostics (as well as the DOS version) is available here -> http://support.wd.com/product/download.asp?groupid=610&sid=3&lang=en. Not sure if the drive will be visible when in Windows, but it'll be easier to do all this in Windows I'd think.

Also, I noticed that you are under the impression that connecting the disk in Win 7 is bad. Well, that would be true if this was a drive with Tivo software already on it. But in this case you are simply running diagnostics on a brand new drive. There is no possibility of harming a brand new drive as long as it's not your existing tivo drive. You can even connect an existing tivo drive under Win 7...just don't open Disk Management under Device Manager....that's only when it's bad. I connect my stock tivo drive in Windows 7 during upgrades all the time - doesn't damage anything just by connecting the drive.


----------



## d_bondi

Thanks for the quick response Cybernut.

The old boat anchor Dell Dimension 3000 is Windows XP/SP3, I'm assuming that makes no difference, but it is soooo slow.

Since you are suggesting running the diagnostics in windows, and I won't need to use the UBCD (laptop has no optical drive), I'll give the USB/SATA Adapter to the WD20EURX a whirl with the Win7/64 laptop.

Do you think that the fact that the Dell, booted with UBCD couldn't see the WD20EURX with USB/SATA Adapter means that the jfms boot disk won't be able to see it either?

Thanks!


----------



## jmbach

Probably not. The JMFS iso has many drivers for different USB chipsets already. The UBCD works better when drives are connected via IDE or SATA.


----------



## d_bondi

Good to know, thanks!


----------



## d_bondi

OK, got the WD20EURX connected (via USB/SATA Adapter, I am using a USB 3.0 port, because that is all my laptop has and the device (USB/SATA Adapter) was recognized right away) to my Win7/64 laptop, and ran the WD Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows (v1_25).

It passed the Quick Test.

*52 Minutes (about 6%) into the Extended Test, it failed and said "Too many bad sectors detected". Before the fail, it seemed to stall out once (Current Sector counter stopped) started back up, and then stopped completely and displayed the error message.* 

I powered down and have re-run the Quick Test, passed again.

I am currently re-running the Extended Test. As with the first run, it is saying it will take just under 14 hours.

Is there possibly something I'm doing wrong?

My purchase was direct from Amazon (not a 3rd party vendor on Amazon) and appeared to be new in WD packaging. Build date is 23 Dec 2013.


----------



## unitron

d_bondi said:


> OK, got the WD20EURX connected (via USB/SATA Adapter, I am using a USB 3.0 port, because that is all my laptop has and the device (USB/SATA Adapter) was recognized right away) to my Win7/64 laptop, and ran the WD Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows (v1_25).
> 
> It passed the Quick Test.
> 
> *52 Minutes (about 6%) into the Extended Test, it failed and said "Too many bad sectors detected". Before the fail, it seemed to stall out once (Current Sector counter stopped) started back up, and then stopped completely and displayed the error message.*
> 
> I powered down and have re-run the Quick Test, passed again.
> 
> I am currently re-running the Extended Test. As with the first run, it is saying it will take just under 14 hours.
> 
> Is there possibly something I'm doing wrong?
> 
> My purchase was direct from Amazon (not a 3rd party vendor on Amazon) and appeared to be new in WD packaging. Build date is 23 Dec 2013.


I wouldn't put the drive in the trash until I'd tested it on another computer or three, but your results so far are not encouraging and illustrate why I say always run the manufacturer's long test on any new (or new to you) drive before putting it into service.

You may have done everything right and just wound up with a bad one. It doesn't happen really often, but it does happen.


----------



## d_bondi

I for one am glad that you have driven that point home, unitron. As disappointing as it is to know that I likely need to return this to Amazon and get a new one, it would be a thousand times more frustrating to have gotten through the process of the upgrade and then later had the problem after it was in service in the Premiere. Not to mention, by that time, the 30 day return/exchange at Amazon would have expired.

As noted above, I did re-start the Extended Test. It is now 9 hours and 45 minutes in and about 72% complete, and still running with about 3 hours 45 minutes remaining. *It did experience some stalling, several times at about the same time point and Current Sector count as when the failure occurred during my first Extended Test, but did continue and since then has been running smoothly so far as I know. During that stalling period, there was notably more noise coming from the HDD, like rubbing or even light grinding sound. That can't be good.
*
I'll update upon completion of the Extended Test.


----------



## d_bondi

After 13 hours and 28 minutes, the second Extended Test completed. *Failed with "Too many bad sectors detected." message.*

Called Amazon, and they are overnighting a replacement so I'll have it tomorrow, and emailed USP return shipping label, all at no additional charge to me. You gotta love Amazon's customer service.

Thanks again to unitron for driving home the Extended Test of any new HDD before installing in a TiVo, and to Cybernut for pointing me to the Win7 version of the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics.

Crossing my fingers that WD20EURX #2 passes the Extended Test with no incident.


----------



## murryamorris

unitron said:


> I wouldn't put the drive in the trash until I'd tested it on another computer or three, but your results so far are not encouraging and illustrate why I say always run the manufacturer's long test on any new (or new to you) drive before putting it into service.
> 
> You may have done everything right and just wound up with a bad one. It doesn't happen really often, but it does happen.


I just got the same drive last week from Amazon and I agree. The EURX is working well and I just put it in my OLED a few hours ago. Sometimes they ship drives with problems.


----------



## d_bondi

*The 2nd WD20EURX from Amazon passed both Quick and Extended Tests. Yippie! On to the next step.....*

Cracking open one of my babys... to pull out its stock 320GB HDD.

I'll review the beginning of this thread (jfms) before starting, but is there anything glaring that I need to know? From my first pass throuth it seemed like a relatively simple process, mostly completely automated (as long as the jfms tool can see my drives through the USB/SATA adapters).


----------



## unitron

d_bondi said:


> *The 2nd WD20EURX from Amazon passed both Quick and Extended Tests. Yippie! On to the next step.....*
> 
> Cracking open one of my babys... to pull out its stock 320GB HDD.
> 
> I'll review the beginning of this thread (jfms) before starting, but is there anything glaring that I need to know? From my first pass throuth it seemed like a relatively simple process, mostly completely automated (as long as the jfms tool can see my drives through the USB/SATA adapters).


You might want to familiarize yourself with the DvrBARS thread as well and make a backup image as long as you've got the drive hooked to a PC.


----------



## d_bondi

Good idea unitron. I'll do that, and I think DvrBARS works with Win7 and the USB/SATA Adapter right? (no DOS boot disk stuff).

The jfms went smoothly, just under 6 hours using the old Dell and 2 USB/SATA adapters. I have not put the new WD20EURX in the TiVo yet.

*I don't have a PC with SATA, so I can't run wdidle3 to check/disable Intellipark. Is that a big deal with the new WD20EURX? If so, I can see if I can get access to a friend's PC for a bit.
*
*Last question (for this post anyway). What about the Acoustic Management stuff? Is that something I should do on the new WD20EURX? If so, which is the best utility to use and what settings?*


----------



## ggieseke

I wouldn't worry too much about wdidle on a new EURX. I have about half a dozen recent EURS and EURX drives, and none of them needed it.

Pretty much the same goes for acoustic management, though your mileage may vary. I'm running my 4TB XL and a factory 3TB Roamio Pro with the covers off and I can't hear anything from about 9 feet away.

DvrBARS will read any drive that Windows can see (USB, SATA, eSATA etc). The only requirement is XP (SP2) or later and the drivers to support your chosen method of connection. If you have something weird like my ASUS USB3/SATA combo card it may take additional drivers, but in general it's just Plug & Play.

Snapping at least a truncated backup after your initial setup as unitron suggested is a good idea. You never know when a drive might die, and when it does that 2GB backup may come in handy.


----------



## d_bondi

When running DvrBARS on my laptop (Win7/64 Enterprise) I got CreatFile (Error 0x00000005 (5). Not sure why, but couldn't get DvrBARS to run.

So I ran it on my wife's laptop(Win7/64 Home) and it had a hiccup the first time, but restarted and it ran fine. Took a little over 2.5 hours to do a Truncated Backup of the new 2TB WD20EURX and created a file about 250GB. Why is this file so big if it doesn't have any of my shows on it? Did it count the zeros it writes where the shows are? Now I just need to zip it and store it somewhere. Was hoping for a much smaller file. 

*The new WD20EURX is installed back in the TiVo Premiere and working *(haven't recorded anything yet, got "The Walking Dead" S4 Finale tonight to test it though) *and shows 318 Hours HD Recording and only 7% full...*


----------



## ggieseke

d_bondi said:


> When running DvrBARS on my laptop (Win7/64 Enterprise) I got CreatFile (Error 0x00000005 (5). Not sure why, but couldn't get DvrBARS to run.
> 
> So I ran it on my wife's laptop(Win7/64 Home) and it had a hiccup the first time, but restarted and it ran fine. Took a little over 2.5 hours to do a Truncated Backup of the new 2TB WD20EURX and created a file about 250GB. Why is this file so big if it doesn't have any of my shows on it? Did it count the zeros it writes where the shows are? Now I just need to zip it and store it somewhere. Was hoping for a much smaller file.
> 
> *The new WD20EURX is installed back in the TiVo Premiere and working *(haven't recorded anything yet, got "The Walking Dead" S4 Finale tonight to test it though) *and shows 318 Hours HD Recording and only 7% full...*


That error is "access denied". Must be a permissions issue.

The oversize file on a truncated backup is something I'm still working on. TiVo has changed something in the latest OS that seems to invalidate the code that I use to to exclude recordings. It's a moving target and right now it's moving faster than I can keep up. Sorry about that, but when it comes to giving away free software or the job that pays my mortgage work comes first.


----------



## d_bondi

Hey, No Worries, I was just curious. The good thing is that I have a backup if I ever need it. With 12 TB of external back up capacity, I'm sure I can find a place to stash it away.

As for the permissions, my laptop is a work PC so, while I think I have administrator access, who really knows. My wife's is personal and I KNOW I have administrator rights.

Thanks!!


----------



## riise317

i just finished the process of using jmfs to upgrade my 320gb hd in my premiere 4. everything went very smoothly, took about 2.5 hours total to copy, expand and supersize. i put the hd back in the tivo and everything booted normally and showed the extra capacity as expected. i was browsing around a little and watching live tv then out of nowhere...GSOD. 

also, before running the copy i used the WD quick and extended tests which passed with no errors.

should i just let the drive stay on and see what happens? maybe repeat the copy process?

UPDATE: after 4 hours of GSOD it is now just boot looping to the welcome start up screen. I'm thinking I should pull the hd out and re-run the WD diagnostic tests again?

any help would be greatly appreciated...thanks


----------



## jmbach

I would run the WD diagnostics again. It wouldn't be the first time that a drive failed after installation.


----------



## riise317

jmbach said:


> I would run the WD diagnostics again. It wouldn't be the first time that a drive failed after installation.


thanks...running it now.

if it passes, do I just try another copy or is some type of format recommended? maybe boot into Linux gparted and erase the partition?


----------



## jmbach

Just redo the copy. It will overwrite anything currently on the drive.


----------



## riise317

jmbach said:


> Just redo the copy. It will overwrite anything currently on the drive.


well that was quick, the test stopped about 20 mins in with the message "too many errors found". back to amazon it goes.

since it passed the first time and failed after, do you think it's worth it to do the tests next time? I kind of feel like it was a waste of 5 hours.

is the WD20EURX still my best option or have people had better success with other drives?


----------



## unitron

riise317 said:


> well that was quick, the test stopped about 20 mins in with the message "too many errors found". back to amazon it goes.
> 
> since it passed the first time and failed after, do you think it's worth it to do the tests next time? I kind of feel like it was a waste of 5 hours.
> 
> is the WD20EURX still my best option or have people had better success with other drives?


The predecessor, the WD20EURS (3Gb/s, instead of 6, but still plenty fast for a TiVo) is probably the most successfully used 2TB upgrade drive so far, and up until you and the other guy, the X has seemed to be an acceptable replacement.


----------



## d_bondi

riise317, I'm the other guy.....

I had a WD20EURX that tested OK (both QUICK and EXTENDED), installed in the same Premiere unit you have and it worked OK for a day, then got stuck in a loop of trying to connect to TiVo service and update hung... It would communicate with other TiVos, the iPad App, KMTTG, but would never record a complete show, it always truncated them. (Technically, this was the 2nd WD20EURX, because the 1st one Amazon sent passed the QUICK test but failed the EXTENDED test.)

I pulled the drive, and per unitron's coaching, re-ran the WD Diagnostics, and it failed both QUICK and EXTENDED tests. It was still in the 30 days for Amazon so I sent it back and they overnighted me a new one. That one tested good (both) and is currently in the Premiere. 2 Days and still OK. It has connected to TiVo Service and updated successfully several times.

*Cross your fingers for me.*

I also purchased a WD30EURX for my Roamio (yep Amazon). It tested good (both) and I will install it later this week. Just wanted to get the Roamio set up and functioning with the stock 500GB Seagate drive, give it a few days to make sure it is A-Okay, records with all 4 tuners, etc..... before "cracking it open".

*Good Luck !!!*


----------



## riise317

d_bondi said:


> riise317, I'm the other guy.....
> 
> I had a WD20EURX that tested OK (both QUICK and EXTENDED), installed in the same Premiere unit you have and it worked OK for a day, then got stuck in a loop of trying to connect to TiVo service and update hung... It would communicate with other TiVos, the iPad App, KMTTG, but would never record a complete show, it always truncated them. (Technically, this was the 2nd WD20EURX, because the 1st one Amazon sent passed the QUICK test but failed the EXTENDED test.)
> 
> I pulled the drive, and per unitron's coaching, re-ran the WD Diagnostics, and it failed both QUICK and EXTENDED tests. It was still in the 30 days for Amazon so I sent it back and they overnighted me a new one. That one tested good (both) and is currently in the Premiere. 2 Days and still OK. It has connected to TiVo Service and updated successfully several times.
> 
> *Cross your fingers for me.*
> 
> I also purchased a WD30EURX for my Roamio (yep Amazon). It tested good (both) and I will install it later this week. Just wanted to get the Roamio set up and functioning with the stock 500GB Seagate drive, give it a few days to make sure it is A-Okay, records with all 4 tuners, etc..... before "cracking it open".
> 
> *Good Luck !!!*


good luck!!!

i returned the WD20EURX to amazon and ordered a WD20EZRX. it just passed the quick test and i'm now running the extended. i also ran wdidle3.exe and disabled the timer. i'm hoping this drive works out because i could really use the space!

side note: the reason i tried the EZRX is because Amazon kept listing the EURX as "OEM/Bulk". i'm sure the drives are new but i just wanted to make sure.

i'll report back...thank for everyone's help


----------



## neo_ny

d_bondi said:


> riise317, I'm the other guy.....
> 
> I had a WD20EURX that tested OK (both QUICK and EXTENDED), installed in the same Premiere unit you have and it worked OK for a day, then got stuck in a loop of trying to connect to TiVo service and update hung... It would communicate with other TiVos, the iPad App, KMTTG, but would never record a complete show, it always truncated them. (Technically, this was the 2nd WD20EURX, because the 1st one Amazon sent passed the QUICK test but failed the EXTENDED test.)
> 
> I pulled the drive, and per unitron's coaching, re-ran the WD Diagnostics, and it failed both QUICK and EXTENDED tests. It was still in the 30 days for Amazon so I sent it back and they overnighted me a new one. That one tested good (both) and is currently in the Premiere. 2 Days and still OK. It has connected to TiVo Service and updated successfully several times.
> 
> *Cross your fingers for me.*
> 
> I also purchased a WD30EURX for my Roamio (yep Amazon). It tested good (both) and I will install it later this week. Just wanted to get the Roamio set up and functioning with the stock 500GB Seagate drive, give it a few days to make sure it is A-Okay, records with all 4 tuners, etc..... before "cracking it open".
> 
> *Good Luck !!!*


I am receiving the same error you did when using the ultimate boot cd, were you able to fix it or did you do the diagnostics on windows? I got the 3TB for my roamio as well and need to run the tests. Also, how long did it take for the extended test to run on the 3TB? TIA


----------



## riise317

d_bondi said:


> riise317, I'm the other guy.....
> 
> I had a WD20EURX that tested OK (both QUICK and EXTENDED), installed in the same Premiere unit you have and it worked OK for a day, then got stuck in a loop of trying to connect to TiVo service and update hung... It would communicate with other TiVos, the iPad App, KMTTG, but would never record a complete show, it always truncated them. (Technically, this was the 2nd WD20EURX, because the 1st one Amazon sent passed the QUICK test but failed the EXTENDED test.)
> 
> I pulled the drive, and per unitron's coaching, re-ran the WD Diagnostics, and it failed both QUICK and EXTENDED tests. It was still in the 30 days for Amazon so I sent it back and they overnighted me a new one. That one tested good (both) and is currently in the Premiere. 2 Days and still OK. It has connected to TiVo Service and updated successfully several times.
> 
> *Cross your fingers for me.*
> 
> I also purchased a WD30EURX for my Roamio (yep Amazon). It tested good (both) and I will install it later this week. Just wanted to get the Roamio set up and functioning with the stock 500GB Seagate drive, give it a few days to make sure it is A-Okay, records with all 4 tuners, etc..... before "cracking it open".
> 
> *Good Luck !!!*


ok, so everything is up and running (thank god). i got my new WD20EZRX and ran both quick and extended test twice this time and both times it passed. i did have to run WDIDLE3.EXE to disable intellipark, i set it to 300.

copied, extended and supersized...took about 2.5 hours. popped the unit back in and everything booted right up with the added space as expected. did a couple of connections to the tivo service and recorded on both tuners for about 2 hours straight, everything seems fine.

now i can go enjoy my tivo instead of staring at the inside of it


----------



## neo_ny

Can someone please confirm that the JMFS works with roamio? As I mentioned before UBCD wasn't able to recognize the WD drive to run diagnostics but I was able to run it from windows and the drive checked out ok. When I am trying to run JMFS, it doesn't recognize either my new drive or the stock drive I took off from Tivo.. running out of ideas of what to try .. any help will be appreciated .. thanks!


----------



## jmbach

JMFS rev 104 will not work with the Series 5 TiVos


----------



## neo_ny

jmbach said:


> JMFS rev 104 will not work with the Series 5 TiVos


Thanks for letting me know! Would you be able to recommend to me the best way I can transfer shows/setting from the stock hard drive to the new drive? TIA


----------



## jmbach

If all you want to do is copy the drive, you can use any variant of dd. You can use DvrBARS to make a backup and restore it to another drive. You have to use the full backup option. Nothing at this time will expand the drive to use any extra space.


----------



## lpwcomp

neo_ny said:


> Thanks for letting me know! Would you be able to recommend to me the best way I can transfer shows/setting from the stock hard drive to the new drive? TIA


There is no method to do this for a Roamio. It's being worked on but no estimate on when it will be available.


----------



## ggieseke

jmbach said:


> If all you want to do is copy the drive, you can use any variant of dd. You can use DvrBARS to make a backup and restore it to another drive. You have to use the full backup option. Nothing at this time will expand the drive to use any extra space.


DvrBARS is limited to 2TB drives, even in the Full backup mode.


----------



## neo_ny

Thanks for your input guys, appreciate it!


----------



## jetcobra

I recently bought a new basic Premiere from TIVO for a very good deal and was able to transfer one of my TIVOHD lifetime services to it for free.

I hooked it up, connected to FIOS and paired my MCARD and tried it out for a week. Today, I wanted to add a larger HDD, so I used a WD 3TB drive - it was the only one I have so I used it instead of a 2TB. 

I used JMFS version 104 and did the Copy, Expand and Supersize.

When I got everything back up and running I checked the System Info. and it showed 430 HD hours - I was surprised - I thought that 317 HD hours was the limit, but I am happy to have the larger space. I will run it for a while now to make sure everything works okay, but I have already contacted TIVO and recorded programs.

So, I guess you can use 3TB HDD's!


----------



## jmbach

You can use up to a 4TB drive and get 640 HD hours but depending on the initial image, it might take a little partition rearranging first.


----------



## Cybernut

jetcobra said:


> When I got everything back up and running I checked the System Info. and it showed 430 HD hours...
> 
> So, I guess you can use 3TB HDD's!


You are not making full use of your 3TB currently - the full 3TB should yield 479 HD hours like here:










Steps to upgrade to full 3TB drive were developed by jmbach and can be found here -> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=512153

And as jmbach mentioned above, you can even upgrade to 4TB with a bit of work.


----------



## jetcobra

Thanks for the inputs. I did Copy, Expand and Supersize all in one shot, so to get the full 479 do I follow the process from JMBach below step for step again on the same drive? I am not a super user of TIVO but can follow directions well, so I only want to do this if there is no possibility of messing up. When you say 1TB image you mean the original Premiere image right? My Premiere was a basic so its HDD is 500GB. Thanks again for the help. 

"For what ever reason, Cybernut's original expansion did not use all the sectors available. So we reset his image by modifying the partition map to indicate the original expansion partition was gone and let the TiVo divorce the partition. Once that was done, used JMFS to expand and supersize. This time it used all the space available and we finally got the expected result.

Not sure why JMFS did not do it correctly the first time. Perhaps because the copy and expansion occurred in one session versus doing the copy and expansion in separate sessions. 

FWIW, this was the process I used when I made the 3TB image:
a) copied my 1TB image to the 3TB drive
b) shut down the computer with JMFS and removed the drive
c) boot the 1TB image on the 3TB drive in my TiVo and once I made sure the image was fully operational, via the menu options, restarted the TiVo and pulled the power upon restart
d) restarted JMFS and did the expansion and supersize. 
e) placed the drive back in the TiVo and booted up"


----------



## jmbach

Is that 1TB image a previously expanded one or one that is 1TB from TiVo.


----------



## jmbach

Never mind. Reread your post and you have a 500GB native image. To get the full 3TB of storage, you will have to expand to 1TB first and then do a little rearranging of the partitions and then do another expansion with JMFS. There are tools available to do this and they are found here.


----------



## jetcobra

jmbach said:


> Is that 1TB image a previously expanded one or one that is 1TB from TiVo.


The 1TB referred to in my reply above was the one that Cybernut was doing. My premiere has a 500GB HDD original in the TIVO. I used this as a baseline for the 3TB and did the Copy, Expand and Supersize all in one shot and got 430 hours of HD.

My question is do I redo the whole process including all of the steps below on my already supersized 3TB in order to get the full 479 hours?

a)the copy from the original 500GB to the 3TB drive
b) shut down the computer with JMFS and remove the drive
c) boot the 500GB image on the 3TB drive in my TiVo and make sure the image is fully operational, then, via the menu options, restart the TiVo and pull the power upon restart
d) restart JMFS and do the expansion and supersize. 
e) place the drive back in the TiVo and booted up"


----------



## jmbach

The easiest way is to:
1) Copy your 500GB image to the 3TB drive.
2) Use hdparm on the JMFS iso to limit the drive to about 1TB temporarily and then use JMFS to expand. 
3) Put the drive in the TiVo to make sure it works. (EDIT: By power cycling the drive when it is removed from the computer and placed in the TiVo, it removes the hdparm setting and places it back to its normal setting. This holds true as long as you do not use the permanent setting for the number of visible sectors. If you do then you will have to use hdparm to revert the changes. Just make sure you note the original sector count.) 
4) Remove the drive from the TiVo and use the scripts in the thread I pointed to in an earlier post to rearrange and coalesce the partition structure.
5) Expand the drive again with JMFS. It will now have the full 3TB recording space. 

Read the whole thread I pointed to in my previous post as this is what you are trying to do to get the whole 3TB. 

If JMFS gets patched, then you could use the same method using a 2TB drive as an interim to expand onto a 4TB drive. Currently JMFS has a bug in it that limits its usefulness to images that are under 1.5TB in size.

To try to expand your current 2.5TB image to 3TB will require you to slide the added partition to the end of the drive and use a secondary interim drive to create a partition about 500GB in size to slip on to the 3TB drive in the space you opened up by sliding the added partition down. Much easier to do it the first way.


----------



## unitron

jmbach said:


> The easiest way is to copy your 500GB image to the 3TB drive. Use hdparm on the JMFS iso to limit the drive to about 1TB temporarily and then use JMFS to expand. Put the drive in the TiVo to make sure it works. Remove the drive from the TiVo and use the scripts in the thread I pointed to earlier to rearrange and coalesce the partition structure followed by expanding again with JMFS. Read the whole thread as this is what you are trying to do to get the whole 3TB. If JMFS gets patched, then you could use the same method using a 2TB drive as an interim to expand onto a 4TB drive. Currently JMFS has a bug in it that limits its usefulness to images that are under 1.5TB in size.
> To try to expand your current 2.5TB image to 3TB will require you to slide the added partition to the end of the drive and use a secondary interim drive to create a partition about 500GB in size to slip in the 3TB drive in the space you opened up by sliding the added partition down. Much easier to o it the first way.


Did you leave out the step where you go back and undo adding an HPA with hdparm?


----------



## jmbach

Actually I did not. There are two ways to limit the sectors on a drive. One way survives a power cycle of a drive and the other does not. The method I used in the 4TB DIY is the temporary method. When you run that hdparm command, the limitation of sectors remains as long as the drive is not powered off. Once it is powered off and powered back on, the drive returns to its normal state. So once you remove the drive from your computer and put it back in the TiVo for testing, the drive has been power cycled and now back to its normal state.


----------



## nooneuknow

jmbach said:


> Actually I did not. There are two ways to limit the sectors on a drive. One way survives a power cycle of a drive and the other does not. The method I used in the 4TB DIY is the temporary method. When you run that hdparm command, the limitation of sectors remains as long as the drive is not powered off. Once it is powered off and powered back on, the drive returns to its normal state. So once you remove the drive from your computer and put it back in the TiVo for testing, the drive has been power cycled and now back to its normal state.


I apologize, then.

I use hdparm, so infrequently, that I forgot not using the persistence option reverts the values on power cycle.

Hitachi Feature Tool can also create both temporary and permanent changes in the available LBA count (although "permanent" implies irreversible, which it is NOT). It does explain that the temporary one won't stay if the drive is power-cycled. It does do the same thing as setting a HPA.

There are some minor downsides with using HFT. It has two modes, one being select a drive size (which doesn't work on very large drives), and set by LBA (which is offset by 1 LBA unit, due to how it treats the first LBA as being LBA 0 or 1, which I can't recall which one it is). So, one needs to be aware of it doing it in a way that no other tool does. HFT also requires a power-cycle, before making any more changes to the visible LBAs, without being very clear that is the case (leading to the changes seeming permanent).

It would have been good for everybody, if you'd stated your explanation (setting those of us that didn't know/remember straight), for everybody to know, within the directions. It's always good to know if/when a power cycle may undo the changes (so people don't allow a power cycle, or make sure to do a power cycle, depending on what which one is needed and which is to be avoided).

Some who have read previous posts, in the many other threads, and here, about testing the drive before going further, which is almost always stated as being "optional", could assume it is optional in this instance, and find themselves wondering why things didn't work (because they skipped the installing drive in the TiVo to see that it works at that point in the process).

Your help, and willingness to help, has always been appreciated. I hope you understand what I've just said, and take it for what it truly is, rather than feeling anybody was jumping on you, just because they thought you excluded something, and saw a chance to point out a (incorrectly) perceived error of omission.

So, that said, if I had posted what you did, I'd go back and add-in the explanation about persistent hdparm and non-persistent hdparm changes, perhaps giving a direction subset for not testing the drive in the TiVo first (simply inserting that a power-cycle is required, to proceed without that step). However, if the installed test is required for a reason (beyond being thorough), then I'd just make sure to state not to skip that step.

I also feel it's worth noting that a true power cycle is required, and a reboot is not the same as a drive power cycle. I know this. But, some might not, or may just forget/overlook this important difference.


----------



## jmbach

No apology needed. 

Point taken for the need for more clarification concerning the non persistance of the hdparm changes with a power cycle. Will adjust the write up accordingly. 

The install test is just being thorough. I have seen to many times when something went wrong with the copy and expand process and it had to be repeated. So it provides a check point if the process fails elsewhere. I tend to, as a practice, do one mod and test for operational ability of the mod. Easier to debug the process. Especially if I am helping someone else with the process.


----------



## jmbach

Edited the post.


----------



## cykotix

jmbach said:


> If JMFS gets patched, then you could use the same method using a 2TB drive as an interim to expand onto a 4TB drive. Currently JMFS has a bug in it that limits its usefulness to images that are under 1.5TB in size.


Do we know what part specifically needs patching?


----------



## lgnad

Just used JMFS and upgraded a lifetimed Premiere 320gb to 2TB WD20EURX to gift to my parents... copied, expanded, supersized... got it all back together, waiting for the tv to become available in a few minutes to test it! <fingers crossed>


----------



## randomtech

I succeeded in reviving my Premiere XL and expanding to 2TB. I can't get the WD Align tool to do anything with the drive though and find the other instructions daunting. If anyone has a short cheat sheet on how to align a working drive I would attempt it. Anyway, I made asmall donation tot he cause. Keep up the good work!


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## jmbach

If you want to align the drive you will have to use the tools found in the 4TB DIY thread or in the 320GB > 1TB > 2TB thread. There is a copy and rearrange tool that will 4k align the drive while copying. You can use the recommended copy order or keep the normal order 1, 13, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 10, 12, 11. Once you use that tool, you can expand with JMFS. The WD Align tool does not recognize the TiVo partition.


----------



## lessd

jmbach said:


> If you want to align the drive you will have to use the tools found in the 4TB DIY thread or in the 320GB > 1TB > 2TB thread. There is a copy and rearrange tool that will 4k align the drive while copying. You can use the recommended copy order or keep the normal order 1, 13, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 10, 12, 11. Once you use that tool, you can expand with JMFS. The WD Align tool does not recognize the TiVo partition.


Why does TiVo use require or (help the TiVo system) if any 3Tb or bigger drive is aligned ??


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> Why does TiVo use require or (help the TiVo system) if any 3Tb or bigger drive is aligned ??


Less Read-Change-Write operations = longer drive lifespan, or so the industry and "experts" claim. I tend to agree.

Due to the large bulk writes TiVo uses (for recording/buffering), it would be the database housing and other non A/V partitions where the alignment would help the most.

I doubt we'll ever be able to measure any performance gain with a TiVo (or know any exists). Even the drive lifespan consideration is something that will be hard for anybody to prove (outside of TiVo's research division).

I'd prefer to be aligned. TiVo's stock Roamio layouts are fully aligned. The 2TB Premiere XL4/Elites were mostly aligned. TiVo doesn't tend to change things unless they feel they need to, have to, or are told to. Maybe WD or Seagate told TiVo to get aligned, or potentially suffer shortened drive life.


----------



## lessd

nooneuknow said:


> Less Read-Change-Write operations = longer drive lifespan, or so the industry and "experts" claim. I tend to agree.
> 
> Due to the large bulk writes TiVo uses (for recording/buffering), it would be the database housing and other non A/V partitions where the alignment would help the most.
> 
> I doubt we'll ever be able to measure any performance gain with a TiVo (or know any exists). Even the drive lifespan consideration is something that will be hard for anybody to prove (outside of TiVo's research division).
> 
> I'd prefer to be aligned. TiVo's stock Roamio layouts are fully aligned. The 2TB Premiere XL4/Elites were mostly aligned. TiVo doesn't tend to change things unless they feel they need to, have to, or are told to. Maybe WD or Seagate told TiVo to get aligned, or potentially suffer shortened drive life.


So if you put a blank 3Tb drive into a Roamio, will the TiVo built in format system do the drive alignment itself ? My understanding of this alignment stuff is reading a disk near partition boundaries. Does not seem that would happen very much to reduce the life of the drive, but I not any drive expert.


----------



## nooneuknow

lessd said:


> So if you put a blank 3Tb drive into a Roamio, will the TiVo built in format system do the drive alignment itself ? My understanding of this alignment stuff is reading a disk near partition boundaries. Does not seem that would happen very much to reduce the life of the drive, but I not any drive expert.


Yes, the Roamios will completely align the structures they create. I got this information from ggieseke.

It's not just near boundaries. If the start boundary is misaligned, all the sectors in that partition will be offset (misaligned).

It's hard to explain it when talking TiVo, other than the large and long writes TiVos use when writing A/V data, mostly nullify the need for alignment (in the partitions dedicated for A/V data). Since these writes tend to be consecutive, as well, there's generally little or no R-C-W operations. When it comes to the partitions that get small/quick/random writes, there's the same issues that misalignment in a PC can cause, and excessive R-C-W operations can wear-down sectors being written to excessively, as well as the added seek operations wearing the head actuator mechanism.

It's important to remember that the *physical* sector is 4K, divided into 8 * 512 byte *logical* sectors (emulated sectors), and misalignment can result in two physical sectors having to be R-C-W, when alignment can make just one physical sector get a R-C-W operation, or a single write operation, without the Read-Change part being needed.

I'm no expert, either. I just compare notes from manufacturers, standards, wikipedia, ggieseke, and "experts" I trust.


----------



## Cap'n Preshoot

*PREMIER THREAD:* I'd like to say Thank You for the recommendation to run the WD Extended diagnostics. Yes, it indeed takes an awfully long time, over 12 hours, but the point is it *FAILED* about 3/4 of the way into the new 2TB drive (WD20-EURX) from Amazon, so they're getting this one back. However, I'm a little peeved w/Amazon regarding the replacement. Even though this drive was ordered via Prime w/2-day delivery, according to their replacement/return page the replacement drive won't be here until some unspecified date between July 2 and July 17th. *That's not good customer service* - at least not in my opinion. The drives are not out of stock, so why is it going to take anywhere from 3 to 5 weeks to get a replacement? I think it's time to give them a call.


----------



## Cap'n Preshoot

*PREMIER THREAD:* As a follow-up to my previous, after speaking with a (live) customer service person it seems that although I bought the original drive from them late week B4 last, it was at that time available from internal Amazon stock and thus available via PRIME.

Unfortunately the 2TB drive is (currently) no longer available through Prime and orders are now being fulfilled by one of Amazon's channel partners, specifically in this case, Tiger Direct.

Yes, you can specify expedited shipping (at your own expense) and TD will in fact use expedited shipping if you so specify, but it's still going to take 10 days to 2 weeks or longer for it to ship. Once it ships, it will go via overnight, or 2-day, etc. The logjam is in getting it shipped! Appearances are that there is an internal breakdown with Tiger Direct's order fulfillment dept. in that it's taking an unacceptably long time to process orders.

This squares with my own (limited) experience w/ordering from Tiger Direct. It seems to take forever to receive the mdse.

So as the saying goes, "Buyer Beware" if you're ordering a drive that's not available via "Prime" be sure to check to see who the ultimate vendor is. If it's Tiger Direct and you're in a hurry for it, you'll generally get it much sooner from NewEgg.

Only my 2¢ on the matter.


----------



## nooneuknow

Cap'n Preshoot said:


> *PREMIER THREAD:<snip>
> 
> Only my 2¢ on the matter.*


*

Why not just go through WD warranty then? You can get an "Advanced RMA", where they expedite you a new drive, and charge the full price to your credit/debit card, which is refunded when they receive your bad drive. Not perfect, but I'd go through WD directly, if I understand your sitrep correctly.

I sounds like even the no-cost standard WD warranty RMA process may be better for you.

What you are dealing with is just wrong...

Some may be interested in switching to NewEgg, with a "Premier" annual membership, with free pre-paid shipping returns for full refund and no restocking charges, or no-cost replacement within a minimum of 30 days (often much longer, depending on the product category).

Back to WD: WD product users should register the drive S/N through WD's support portal on their website. Once registered, all the options are fully automated, no proof of purchase required, no human interaction required, or having to prove the drive is bad. This has been my experience over the last couple years. They just redecorated the support portal, so a few things might have changed (or they just may have re-designed the website, for a new look).*


----------



## Cap'n Preshoot

Tnx for tip on WD warranty registration.  NewEgg drive arrived this afternoon, no pain, no strain. Have DLGDIAG running in Extended mode now. Fingers crossed. I've previously expanded 1 of my Premieres using a 2TB Caviar/Black drive & was cautioned about heat, but in operation is only slightly warm to the touch. I/R thermal gun aimed directly on the drive indicates 42 deg C. I realize too that it's not an AV drive, but again no issues & it's been a year. Anxious to try this 2TB WD20-EURX in my other Premier. Also have a base model Roamio running a WD20-EURS, but that's too recent an upgrade to comment on yet. Also really miss the OTA tuner. - yeah it's an option to use OTA vs Cable, but not together like the Premier (grrr...)

I also realize that all disk drives no matter the brand, no matter the cost, will eventually someday fail...


----------



## Cap'n Preshoot

As addt'l follow up, the WD20-EURX that I rec'd yesterday from Newegg is defecive also, only moreso. It fails even the Quick test. To be thorough, I also ran HD-Tune Pro (trial version) on it and it immediately failed there too, literally within the first minute. Finally, just as a control test to verify methods), I ran the same tests WD DLGDIAG and HD Tune Pro on a WD2003FZEX (2TB Caviar/Black) with success. Bottom line, I'm beginning to get somewhat burned-out on these cheap drives. 2 for 2 from two different vendors and both junk. I plan to contact WD tomorrow to try the advance replacement route direct from the manufacturer. Maybe they have a good one in stock.

Finally, for the benefit of those nay-sayers who caution against using the Caviar/Black drives in your TIVO because of HEAT concerns, you will be interested to learn that the *difference* between the drives is only 7 degrees C. The WD20-EURX runs consistent 35 degrees (C) while the WD2003FZEX (Black) runs consistent 42 degrees (C) (both per HD-Tune Pro)


----------



## CoxInPHX

nooneuknow said:


> Why not just go through WD warranty then? You can get an "Advanced RMA", where they expedite you a new drive, and charge the full price to your credit/debit card, which is refunded when they receive your bad drive. Not perfect, but I'd go through WD directly, if I understand your sitrep correctly.
> 
> I sounds like even the no-cost standard WD warranty RMA process may be better for you.


The problem with the WD Warranty process is that WD ships you a Re-Certified HDD that only has a 90 day Warranty, so you just lost your 3 Year Warranty.

My last WD RMA a WD20EURS has a warranty of 230 days (283 days from the date on the label = 9 months - not sure why the difference, perhaps you get the remainder of the warranty of the origianl HDD. That would make sense in the case of my last RMA.

EDIT: Warranty on the replacement product is shorter than the warranty on the original product
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1058

I have never received a bad HDD from Amazon or Newegg.


----------



## nooneuknow

CoxInPHX said:


> The problem with the WD Warranty process is that WD ships you a Re-Certified HDD that only has a 90 day Warranty, so you just lost your 3 Year Warranty.
> 
> My last WD RMA a WD20EURS has a warranty of 230 days (283 days from the date on the label = 9 months - not sure why the difference, perhaps you get the remainder of the warranty of the origianl HDD. That would make sense in the case of my last RMA.
> 
> EDIT: Warranty on the replacement product is shorter than the warranty on the original product
> http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1058
> 
> I have never received a bad HDD from Amazon or Newegg.


How long ago did this happen, and which option(s) did you choose?

Also, was there any human interaction involved, and did you register online before getting an RMA?

I returned six WD20EADS drives on an RMA acquired literally 3 days before the warranty was up. The drive label dates indicated they should have been out of warranty, by ~6 months. The online registration portal said in-warranty, well over 6 months beyond the on-drive date would indicate, and was based on the date I told the product registration portal on the website, that I had bought the drives. I was never required to provide any proof of purchase while registering, or for the standard RMA process. They were OEM bulk drives, purchased from NewEgg. In the end, I got at least 3 months more warranty than my actual purchase date should've allowed, and much more than the drive label would lead one to think.

I chose standard RMA, because I couldn't send all six in at time for advance RMA. WD20EADS drives were well out of production, so I received WD recerts, which sometimes even NewEgg sells (when available).

I've used the advanced RMA on individual drives. I got new drives when I did, when they were still being made. I received new ones, sometimes newer model, sometimes larger, if what I was returning under advance RMA was no longer made, or was out of stock.

They can't charge full-on retail price (literally their MSRP) for an advance RMA, then send you a used, or recertified drive. The full amount is refunded when they receive the bad drive back.

I'd like to compare notes, and see if your experiences have differing variables, and if your experiences are newer, or older, than mine.

I have seen multiple posts, in the not so distant past, from reputable members stating that standard RMA gets you recerts, while advance RMA gets you new drives. I was also given that advice when I asked how the WD warranty processes had worked for people.

Most of all, I want any advice I give to be as accurate and up-to-date as possible, and include potential variable factors.

I've been lucky, and never received a bad drive from NewEgg, in the nearly 7 years I've been buying from them. The reviews on NewEgg sometimes make it seem like I almost get all the good drives, and almost everybody else gets bad ones. I have to admit they used to ship drives loose, making it a miracle they survived. Now, they have the best packaging for drives I've ever seen.

I'd suggest watching the NewEgg reviews for spikes in bad drive reports, where the reviewers seem to make clear cases that it's not user-error.

It seems like nearly all the WD drive reviews have gone to hell again, with reports of people buying 7 drives and getting 5 DOAs, and then receiving replacements either DOA or only working for a short time before failing.

If I wanted drives right now, I'd hold-off and wait for it to pass. If I absolutely needed drives, I'd buy more than I need, and expect there to be some bad ones in the shipment.


----------



## unitron

Ditto on newegg's current excellent packaging for OEM-style bare drives.

They should sell those bubble wrap shells by themselves.

(also they should have come up with them a lot sooner and save themselves and many of their customers a lot of grief)


----------



## nooneuknow

Helpful tips & explanations for all:

Use my trick of using 00000 zip code, Tiny TiVo as provider, run a C&DE on the updated image, pull the plug on the reboot once the C&DE operation has completed, which self-triggers a reboot (preferably before the KS [kickstart] window of opportunity, or before the "almost there" screen at the latest), make a backup of that, and upload it for distribution, or just use for yourself, if that's how you roll.

The 00000 zip code & Tiny TiVo provider trick only downloads one channel worth of empty guide data, keeping the new backup image small as can be, and saves time. A cablecard can be paired in this setup, but the channels can only be tested using "test channels using M-card" via DVR Diagnostics screens. This is just a FYI, for those who may use this trick for the many other uses I've found for it, like purging out corrupted data related to an existing zip and provider's guide data.

The reason for the C&DE with timed power-pull is to stop the drive from becoming married to the TSN of the board it is updated on, eliminating image recipients from having to repeat guided setup twice, with a C&DE between the two, to remove any existing host board TSN-to-drive marriage.

Once the software has reached a certain version number, the second screen of GS, where you select demo/home setup, has a "press enter for advanced options" option, which adds Installer Express mode to the choices, saving a big chunk of time, by only doing the absolute minimum GS needs to, leaving all the little personalized preferences to be set later through the menus.

If you want to see what software version is on a drive that boots into GS, without running it, press Info button on the very first GS screen (Select Country). It's at the bottom of the screen, when displayed.

*EDIT/ADD*: I had left out it is best that the only things connected, until done, are:

1. Power cord/supply.
2. Ethernet cable (or wireless, if you absolutely can't do RJ45 ethernet).

What absolutely should NOT be connected:
1. Coaxial cable for cable or antenna.

Why: If a video source is available, the TiVo will continuously process and buffer all tuners, making the resulting image larger for every zeroed-sector that is changed to in the process. A C&DE does not re-zero the sectors that get changed. Even though the buffer, per tuner, is 30 minutes, it still moves forward though more sectors for as long as the TiVo is on, and has a coax connection providing cable or antenna connectivity. For the cleanest and smallest backup image, this is a big deal.

I suppose (theoretically) somebody who insists on using MoCA, could just remove the cable/antenna input coax to the MoCA, and just use the coax for networking only.


----------



## 172pilot

Please forgive me if this has been answered.. I've done a lot of reading over the last couple days, but admittedly, the info I'm looking for is likely in one of the 85 pages of this thread. Even so, with how fast technology changes, I'd be a little worried that the answer I read may not be current..

My issue is that although I've ALWAYS taken out my original hard drives and put them on a shelf for safe keeping, I unfortunately recently had a house fire, and lost my whole shelf of original drives, and now I've got a premiere tcd746320 with an expanded 1tb drive that is giving me some trouble, and I'd like to install a new drive...

I don't really care if I keep my recordings - I guess the easiest thing would be to just dd one drive to another, but I would like to expand again - I bought a 2tb AV drive in hopes that my problems are related to my last choice of buying the cheapest drive I could..

SO.. My questions are.. Can an already expanded premiere drive be expanded again, or am I going to have to go back to an unexpanded image and start over? If I do need to start over, can someone point me to an appropriate image? In years past, I've bought InstantCake images when I needed to help out friends, but that doesn't seem to be an option anymore, especially for premiere. 

If I can use my image, do I have to do anything special because the drive is already expanded? I see talk of rearranging partitions, etc.. and although I'm comfortable with all the command-line stuff, I can't say I've read enough to understand the "why" well enough to understand if I need to do that or not..

Since I don't care about my recordings (too much.. it would be better, but not urgent to keep), could I do the above described 00000 zipcode, Tiny Tivo, C&DE, and the backup/restore to do what I want?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.. especially to know what is state of the art vs. "Last years" best new thing..

Thanks!
-Steve
9 Tivos in 13 years, ranging from 13gb series 1 to Premiere..


----------



## nooneuknow

172pilot said:


> <snip>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.. especially to know what is state of the art vs. "Last years" best new thing..
> 
> Thanks!
> -Steve
> 9 Tivos in 13 years, ranging from 13gb series 1 to Premiere..


Image begging thread: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=388695

The newest in TiVo backup/restore (DVRBARS): http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=503261

PM ggieseke http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/member.php?u=207112 (author of DVRBARS) for a download link of an un-expanded image to start with, which may require the trick I detailed, if it came from a TiVo that had been booted before being backed-up (requires doing guided setup twice with a C&DE in-between to "marry" the image to your TSN).


----------



## jmbach

172pilot said:


> SO.. My questions are.. Can an already expanded premiere drive be expanded again, or am I going to have to go back to an unexpanded image and start over?


The answer is a definite maybe depending on your current setup. Sooo, what is your setup. If it is doable it will more than likely require for part of the process working with a hex editor on the drive.



172pilot said:


> If I do need to start over, can someone point me to an appropriate image? In years past, I've bought InstantCake images when I needed to help out friends, but that doesn't seem to be an option anymore, especially for premiere.


I would start here at Dvr Backup And Restore Software for Windows (DvrBARS) 



172pilot said:


> If I can use my image, do I have to do anything special because the drive is already expanded? I see talk of rearranging partitions, etc.. and although I'm comfortable with all the command-line stuff, I can't say I've read enough to understand the "why" well enough to understand if I need to do that or not..


Need to start with your setup. Is the internal drive original size with an expanded drive or is it something else. What are the sizes of the drives in question.

If you do not have a WeaKnees drive and expansion for the unit and you are working with the original size drive and an official TiVo extender drive, it is possible to combine your recordings on the 2TB AV drive and subsequently expand it to get the full 2TB of recordings.


----------



## sharepoint

ggieseke said:


> PM sent. Welcome to the community.


Would you please PM me with the image (TiVo TCD748000 Premiere XL). I'm in a bind and could desperately use your help. Thanks a million!


----------



## ggieseke

sharepoint said:


> Would you please PM me with the image (TiVo TCD748000 Premiere XL). I'm in a bind and could desperately use your help. Thanks a million!


Sent.


----------



## sharepoint

ggieseke said:


> Sent.


Thanks a million! Saved me a whole lot of cash and grief!


----------



## Brent W

It's been a few years since I've been around. I came back to find this thread. I used this process 3+ years ago on one of my premieres, and it worked great going from the stock drive to a 2tb drive. I want to now expand a 2nd tivo I have. Without going through and re-reading 86 pages of post, are we still limited at 2tb? or can I use a 3 or 4tb drive. Again, I'll be starting with a stock tivo drive, but may also be interested in upgrading the 2tb tivo as well, if I can go bigger.


----------



## jmbach

The short answer is that you can go up to 4TB.... But it is not straight forward yet.


----------



## magnumis

I burned the ISO from this thread and the pc continues to reboot and the Linux boot up never completes.

Any suggestions? I have also tried the iso linked from http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/tivo_upgrade/ with the same reboot issue.

When the pc starts I can see Linux starting up but it never completes.

I have a Tivo premier with a bad drive. A good image thanks to TivoCommunity and a new hard drive ready to use. I would appreciate any suggestions to help get this tivo working again. Thanks


----------



## lpwcomp

magnumis said:


> I burned the ISO from this thread and the pc continues to reboot and the Linux boot up never completes.
> 
> Any suggestions? I have also tried the iso linked from http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/tivo_upgrade/ with the same reboot issue.
> 
> When the pc starts I can see Linux starting up but it never completes.
> 
> I have a Tivo premier with a bad drive. A good image thanks to TivoCommunity and a new hard drive ready to use. I would appreciate any suggestions to help get this tivo working again. Thanks


I've no idea what the problem is, but if it is a Premiere "image" that you acquired separately, then you almost certainly need to use DvrBARS, which is a wndows program. JMFS is for copying an existing drive to a new one (and expanding if the new drive is larger) and can neither create nor restore an image.


----------



## magnumis

lpwcomp said:


> I've no idea what the problem is, but if it is a Premiere "image" that you acquired separately, then you almost certainly need to use DvrBARS, which is a wndows program. JMFS is for copying an existing drive to a new one (and expanding if the new drive is larger) and can neither create nor restore an image.


It worked perfect! Thank you for pointing me to the correct program to use.


----------



## jefeuno

I'm in the process of running JFMS to upgrade from 320 gb Premiere to a 2tb wd20eurs, with a mfg date of September 2014. I am about 1/2 way through the process. JFMS is reporting 2 errors so far during the "non-tried blocks copying", one I think was approx. 83000kb and the other was 152kb.
1. Do these errors matter or are they expected? 
2. Do I need to do anything after I reinstall the drive into the Premiere? (Like marry the drive - could someone explain that process (if necessary)?
3. Do I need to use the wdidle program to turn off the drive head parking (or is it already off due to the late mfg date)?
Thanks in advance for your help!


----------



## jmbach

Errors are not expected unless the drive is going bad. Whether they are significant, you won't know until you boot the drive up. Chances are if the original drive boots okay, the copy will also. Consider doing a KS 57 on the new drive upon boot up. If it passes, then chances are that the errors may only show up as a glitch in a recording. 
As long as the drive is going into the same machine the source drive came from, nothing else is needed. 
Would not expect to need to use wdidle3 on an AV drive.


----------



## jefeuno

Thanks jm!

Can you tell me how long each retry to recover bad sectors? The total of errors were 7. Right now it is on pass 1, and it has been 25 minutes since the last sector was successfully read? I understand that it will make 3 attempts to recover. Thanks!


----------



## jefeuno

Thanks everyone I successfully upgraded using JFMS, went from a 320gb to 2tb. I also learned how to create a bootable USB stick with JFMS, as my computer refused to load it from a bootable cd. (Something about javaMFS and SATA issues, which I found the answers to at about page 50 of this thread.

:up:


----------



## jud1929

Firstly , thank you so much for all your instructions and help on these pages.

I'm working on a Premiere XL which I purchased refurbished and had previously been expanded to 1Tb.

The problem I'm having is expanding the new 2Tb to actually be available to record 2Tb. Right now it shows 1Tb.

I used ddrescue to copy the failing 1Tb disk to a 2Tb disc. This worked beautifully. Strangely it showed no errors but the original disk had been looping during guided setup.


When I use Winmfs I can select the tivo disc but then Mfsinfo and Mfsadd show 'no tivo disc'. 

I can't boot a Mfslive Cd. The error message is something along the lines of 'can not turn on cooling device, although the fan is whirling away.

My computer is a Presario SR1500NX with WinXP and the discs are connected to Ide thru a Sata adaptor when necessary.

Thanks so much for any help you can give.

P.S. I purchased the Premeire XL refurbished and didn't realize the hard drive had been changed until I opened the Tivo.


----------



## jmbach

If you used WinMFS on the image, more than likely you buggered up the image. However, if the 2TB boots and run just fine you have at least a good image to work with. A Premiere XL image comes natively a 1TB in size. To expand a Premiere image you have to use JMFS.


----------



## lpwcomp

WinMFS doesn't work on Premieres. That's why the subject of this thread - JMFS - was created..


----------



## jud1929

Well, duh. Thanks so much. 

I ran jmfs with no problem and the Tivo looks like it is running just fine. My only excuse is that I upgraded a Series 2 last week and was following the same instructions - not a good idea.

Again, thank you very much.


----------



## nooneuknow

jud1929 said:


> *Well, duh. Thanks so much.*
> 
> I ran jmfs with no problem and the Tivo looks like it is running just fine. My only excuse is that I upgraded a Series 2 last week and was following the same instructions - not a good idea.
> 
> Again, thank you very much.


The point is: If you let WinMFS even try to look at a Premiere drive, historically the drive will tend to be never be right again. WinMFS tends to do something which corrupts Premiere drives (without doing more than running WinMFS, even if all it does is report it doesn't recognize it).

If you tried using WinMFS, and the drive seems to work. You may be very lucky, or you will have issue in the future, likely upon the next software update TiVo sends out, if not before then. If I had accidentally run WinMFS on a Premiere drive, I would not trust it came out unscathed, regardless of if it seems fine.

So, the takeaway is: Never run WinMFS on a Premiere drive (and don't be snarky with those who are trying to be helpful).


----------



## lpwcomp

nooneuknow said:


> The point is: If you let WinMFS even try to look at a Premiere drive, historically the drive will tend to be never be right again. WinMFS tends to do something which corrupts Premiere drives (without doing more than running WinMFS, even if all it does is report it doesn't recognize it).
> 
> If you tried using WinMFS, and the drive seems to work. You may be very lucky, or you will have issue in the future, likely upon the next software update TiVo sends out, if not before then. If I had accidentally run WinMFS on a Premiere drive, I would not trust it came out unscathed, regardless of if it seems fine.
> 
> So, the takeaway is: Never run WinMFS on a Premiere drive (and don't be snarky with those who are trying to be helpful).


I interpreted his reply as self-criticism rather than snarky.


----------



## unitron

The "Well, duh." should have been a HomerSimpson-esque "Doh!"


----------



## lpwcomp

I propose a new emoticon:

O'\

hand slapping forehead


----------



## unitron

lpwcomp said:


> I propose a new emoticon:
> 
> O'\
> 
> hand slapping forehead


Let's see how it works right-handed.

/'O


----------



## lpwcomp

unitron said:


> Let's see how it works right-handed.
> 
> /'O


I should've used 0 instead of O. I was envisioning it as seen fom the side. Your way, one is hitting oneself in the temple, not the forehead.


----------



## unitron

lpwcomp said:


> I should've used 0 instead of O. I was envisioning it as seen fom the side. Your way, one is hitting oneself in the temple, not the forehead.


My way is just the mirror image of your way, so any defect in mine is present in yours.


----------



## lpwcomp

unitron said:


> My way is just the mirror image of your way, so any defect in mine is present in yours.


Not true. While the graphic itself is a mirror image, the accompanying text (right-handed) makes it clear that yours is as viewed from the front, thus the "hand" is hitting the right temple. I specifically stated forehead.


----------



## rlpowell

Hey all. I have a premiere (TCD746320, judging by the service number) with one of the official Western Digital external drives. The drive in question appears to be getting wonky, and I want to replace it (it's waaaay past the MTBF, for sure).

I'm fully prepared to do whatever technical craziness I need to do (I'm a linux sysadmin by trade), but what I'm wondering is: what's my best upgrade path here? Can I upgrade the external drive and preserve its data? Do I need to copy everything off and divorce the drive? What would you suggest?


----------



## ggieseke

rlpowell said:


> Hey all. I have a premiere (TCD746320, judging by the service number) with one of the official Western Digital external drives. The drive in question appears to be getting wonky, and I want to replace it (it's waaaay past the MTBF, for sure).
> 
> I'm fully prepared to do whatever technical craziness I need to do (I'm a linux sysadmin by trade), but what I'm wondering is: what's my best upgrade path here? Can I upgrade the external drive and preserve its data? Do I need to copy everything off and divorce the drive? What would you suggest?


Here's what I would do...

1. Copy everything you can to your computer and divorce the external drive.

2. Use jmfs to copy the 320GB internal to a 2TB drive, then expand it.

3. Copy the shows back to the TiVo at your leisure.

When you're shows copying to the computer, use the transport stream method. In TiVo Desktop that means having the "Use fastest transport method" box checked. There's a similar option in kmttg but I don't remember exactly where it is. When you copy them back to the TiVo, pull them from the TiVo menus instead of pushing them from the PC.

If you have a lot of copy-protected shows it's possible to copy and consolidate both drives onto a single new drive. That's MUCH more complicated and I would send a PM to jmbach begging for assistance.


----------



## rlpowell

That's great, thank you!


----------



## blankscrew

My hard drive crashed. In need of an image for a TCD748000.


----------



## ggieseke

blankscrew said:


> My hard drive crashed. In need of an image for a TCD748000.


PM sent.


----------



## sangahm

I finally had success going from the original 350G drive on my Premiere to the new WD WD20PURX 2T drive. I wasn't able to locate the WD20EURX or older WD20EURS so went with the Purple drive. The salesperson said it was the new AV standard for WD and the others were being discontinued.

I wish I could say the process was smooth, but it wasn't due to issues apart from the great jmfs tools. I had issues with the USB Sata cables and had to replace twice. Even tried to use DrvBars but it didn't help. Toasted my host drive in the process, probably from an invalid selection I must have made even though I tried to be extra careful. The whole process took 2 days.

I'm now left with a nice 2TB Tivo (and am recovering my deleted partition and drives from the host computer).


----------



## nooneuknow

sangahm said:


> I finally had success going from the original 350G drive on my Premiere to the new WD WD20PURX 2T drive. I wasn't able to locate the WD20EURX or older WD20EURS so went with the Purple drive. The salesperson said it was the new AV standard for WD and the others were being discontinued.


What salesperson, from what (re)seller, said that?

WD told me that the EURX is still being produced, and is NOT at the end of life point, and far from it. I was also told by WD that the WD Purple PURX is NOT designed for use on non-RAID controllers, or in any PVR/DVR that only has one drive, without the controller supporting RAID. No TiVo on the market has a RAID controller, making it an unsupported use of the drive, which WD will not provide any support for, should you seek support from WD (but getting a warranty replacement is not an issue, as WD is not enforcing their own policies, *at this time*).

So far, only Newegg's automatic webpage notice is falsely flagging it as the AV-GP EURX "newer model", and a few marketplace sellers have assumed that is true.

Weaknees is using them in their upgraded TiVos, and upgrade drive kits. But, I suspect they might have found a way to disable the problematic TLER RAID function.

If I were forced to pick a drive other than an AV-GP EURX drive, I'd pick the WD Red (which I use), with over 2x the TB/yr rating (and the same TLER issues with non-RAID controllers). The Purple PURX is only rated 60TB/yr workload (long enough to live through WK 180-day warranty, and at a higher profit margin).


----------



## nooneuknow

NEWS: WD renames "AV-GP" line of drives to "AV".

There are two WD Product SpecSheet PDFs now.

One PDF (old) is for "AV-GP", which only goes to 3TB.

The second (new) one is for "AV", which is the new name for the product refresh cycle. They dropped the "-GP". Includes 4TB model.
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800015.pdf

I guess "AV" sounds sportier that "AV-GP". This is further proof that they are refreshing the line. I doubt it will bring anything good to the discussions here, likely more confusion, than anything.

*From the new PDF:*
WD AV (formally WD AV-GP) SATA hard drives store more
hi-def audio and video than ever before - up to 4 TB. They
are optimized with SilkStream™
technology to capture data
from up to 16 simultaneous HD video streams. With 24x7
operation, low temperature, and best-in-class reliability,
WD AV hard drives are ideal for DVR/PVR and IPTV
applications. 3-year limited warranty


----------



## rlpowell

*UGH*. Told TiVO to disconnect the external WD thingy, and now it won't finish booting.

Will this be fixed by doing the JMFS tools thing to make the new drive, or is there another workaround?, and regardless can someone pretty please send me the bare image for the TCD746320 please?


----------



## rlpowell

rlpowell said:


> *UGH*. Told TiVO to disconnect the external WD thingy, and now it won't finish booting.
> 
> Will this be fixed by doing the JMFS tools thing to make the new drive, or is there another workaround?, and regardless can someone pretty please send me the bare image for the TCD746320 please?


Phew. It booted, *eventually*; took like an hour.


----------



## rlpowell

Everything worked out in the end! Thank you so much for the great tool!


----------



## skaggs

comer said:


> *USAGE BASIC*
> 
> Download CD disk image (ISO). For basic usage you only need the "jmfs-*.iso.zip" file. Sources (jmfs-src*.zip) are also in the folder for those who want to build themselves. (download link above)
> Unzip the ISO and burn it on CD
> Connect a Tivo disk and a new large disk to a computer. SATA or USB - does not matter, it will work either way, but SATA is faster.
> Boot that computer from the CD burned in step #2.
> The guide will be started automatically, follow the prompts.
> If you are upgrading from stock drive, you will need to do: _Copy_, _Expand_, _Supersize_ - in that order.
> If you are supersizing an already expanded drive, just do _Supersize_.
> 
> ]​




I burned the ISO to CD
Connected original Premiere HD via USB Sata
Put JMFS CD in CD Drive
Rebooted Desktop computer
Hit F12 during startup (Win7)
Selected CD Drive with JMFS CD

Windows started up

What am I doing wrong?​


----------



## ThreeSoFar

skaggs said:


> I burned the ISO to CD
> Connected original Premiere HD via USB Sata
> Put JMFS CD in CD Drive
> Rebooted Desktop computer
> Hit F12 during startup (Win7)
> Selected CD Drive with JMFS CD
> 
> Windows started up
> 
> What am I doing wrong?


Most likely forgot to save your BIOS settings. Re-do.

Next most likely: You have it in the DVD drive not the CD.

I know....pretty basic issues, and odds are you already ruled these outp But they are the most likely (with users overall, not you specifically).


----------



## skaggs

I burnt the ISO image again and it booted fine.

I only have one USB Sata cable. Am I able to copy the original premiere HD to the internal HD on my desktop PC and then transfer the image to the new HD?

I know I can set the destination of the copy to my internal HD, I just want to make sure I am not making my internal HD a TiVo drive permanently.


----------



## jmbach

You cannot do that with JMFS guided copy and expand. You will bugger up your internal drive.


----------



## jmbach

If you are handy with Linux, you can manually copy the TiVo drive to a file image on your internal drive and then copy it to the final destination drive. Not for the feint of heart. Alternatively if you have an external drive that does not have anything worth keeping that is at least as big as your TiVo drive, copy your TiVo drive to that and from that to your destination drive.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

skaggs said:


> I burnt the ISO image again and it booted fine.
> 
> I only have one USB Sata cable. Am I able to copy the original premiere HD to the internal HD on my desktop PC and then transfer the image to the new HD?
> 
> I know I can set the destination of the copy to my internal HD, I just want to make sure I am not making my internal HD a TiVo drive permanently.


If your windows drive is SATA (likely), then burn the Linux ISO instead (available at http://mfslive.org). Then just unplug your Windows drive--that gives you two SATA cables, one on board and one USB. Plug the source and destination drives into those and boot the CD. It walks you through the rest quite easily.


----------



## lpwcomp

skaggs said:


> I burnt the ISO image again and it booted fine.
> 
> I only have one USB Sata cable. Am I able to copy the original premiere HD to the internal HD on my desktop PC and then transfer the image to the new HD?
> 
> I know I can set the destination of the copy to my internal HD, I just want to make sure I am not making my internal HD a TiVo drive permanently.


If you have enough space on your computer hard drive, you can use DvrBARS to create a compressed image and restore it to the new drive. Then use JMFS to expand and supersize.


----------



## unitron

skaggs said:


> I burned the ISO to CD
> Connected original Premiere HD via USB Sata
> Put JMFS CD in CD Drive
> Rebooted Desktop computer
> Hit F12 during startup (Win7)
> Selected CD Drive with JMFS CD
> 
> Windows started up
> 
> What am I doing wrong?


Quite possibly you did not burn the cd "as an image" which means that although it has all of the software of a jmfs cd on it, it doesn't have the right stuff in the right places to make it bootable, and even if you have the PC set to boot from optical drive first, and only try the hard drive second (like if you don't have a cd in the drive), it's not seeing a bootable cd in the drive, so it's going on to the hard drive.

I made a coaster or two myself before I learned about that.


----------



## skaggs

Thank you everyone for your help. I was able to burn a new CD and get it to boot properly. I took ThreeSoFar's advice and disconnected my PC's Hard drive and connected to the new destination drive. Worked like a charm.

My 2tuner Premiere w/PLS and a new 1TB drive is now for sale on eBay. (My XL4 is, too).


----------



## nephorm

My google-fu is failing me, and I'm not sure I have the most current information. Could someone do me a big favor and point to the latest procedure for taking a 2TB Premiere XL4 drive and copying it to a 3TB drive (preserving the TV shows)?


----------



## jmbach

Why not go to 4TB? It is just as easy to go to 4TB as to 3TB. If you have an original 2TB XL4 image you can use a modified JMFS to copy and expand directly. Go to here and read several of the following post. All the information you need is there.


----------



## nephorm

jmbach said:


> Why not go to 4TB? It is just as easy to go to 4TB as to 3TB. If you have an original 2TB XL4 image you can use a modified JMFS to copy and expand directly. Go to here and read several of the following post. All the information you need is there.


You're right, there's no reason not to go to 4TB. I canceled my order for the 3TB drive, although reading farther in the thread you linked I am now concerned about buying a Red drive. I know that when I built my FreeNAS box, there was a lot of back and forth as to whether the TLER setting of the Red drives would interfere with ZFS's own self-healing.

I had read that thread, and I have to admit that I got confused. It looked like there was a problem backing up drives >= 2TB, but it looks like I might not have read far enough in.

Thanks for your help.


----------



## jmbach

If you get the iso that the posts mentioned, then there is not an issue. All you have to do is copy the 2TB drive to the 4TB drive, then use the modified JMFS on the iso to expand (and super-size if you wish)

There are some theoretical reasons to disable TLER. In practice I have done it both ways and have not had any issues with either setting inside a Premiere or Roamio. There has been some discussion in some of the threads with more details if you are interested.


----------



## jimlau

basic question - how do you burn an ISO on a cd - "burn image" or burn "data disc" or make "boot disc"?


----------



## ggieseke

In Windows, right-click the ISO file and choose "Burn disc image".


----------



## jimlau

ggieseke said:


> In Windows, right-click the ISO file and choose "Burn disc image".


thanks!


----------



## jackthejester

I have a Premiere XL4 TCD758250 that I swapped the HDD in last summer up to a 2TB, since then ive had lots of 'sticky' TV / Live and playback, leading me to think I've got a drive issue again.

I used the recommended jmfs boot disk and was able to clone it to a different 3TB that I had available, but then the jmfs expand failed.

I think I read that I can boot the Tivo with this disk, let it get up and flying then - shut it down and try the expand on a second run, after the tivo writes it's 'signature' to the newly cloned drive.

Or did I also see somewhere that I couldnt clone and expand from a cloned HDD (not original)

As a backup - any chance someone might have a bare image for this box, should I need to go that route and start over?

Thanks in advance..
David


----------



## ggieseke

jackthejester said:


> I have a Premiere XL4 TCD758250 that I swapped the HDD in last summer up to a 2TB, since then ive had lots of 'sticky' TV / Live and playback, leading me to think I've got a drive issue again.
> 
> I used the recommended jmfs boot disk and was able to clone it to a different 3TB that I had available, but then the jmfs expand failed.
> 
> I think I read that I can boot the Tivo with this disk, let it get up and flying then - shut it down and try the expand on a second run, after the tivo writes it's 'signature' to the newly cloned drive.
> 
> Or did I also see somewhere that I couldnt clone and expand from a cloned HDD (not original)
> 
> As a backup - any chance someone might have a bare image for this box, should I need to go that route and start over?
> 
> Thanks in advance..
> David


Factory image sent via PM.

I don't understand the part about previously swapping up to 2TB. That's what comes in a 758.


----------



## jackthejester

ggieseke said:


> Factory image sent via PM.
> 
> I don't understand the part about previously swapping up to 2TB. That's what comes in a 758.


You're right .. I think I went 2TB > 2TB when my original drive started acting flaky.

I have an update, but still not resolved .. problem seems to be the same.

Unable to expand the drive from a jmfs copy.

I originally did a 2TB > 3TB full Copy and jmfs failed on the 3TB expand - I inserted this drive into the Tivo Box and it worked, as if it was a 2TB drive.

I tried a DVRBARS truncated copy (of the original 2TB Tivo drive i located) to the C: of my laptop and then restored that to a fresh 5TB drive hoping that the truncated copy from the original TivO box would be enough to get me expanded and flying.

No Go .. I'm not going to be surprised if the 2TB limit is where I'm getting hung, but think I'm close with several drives.

Any ideas or commands I'm missing that will help me expand either of these drives?

I have jmfs boot disk, WINMFS and DVRBARS at my disposal and while the packaged tools seem to work and do what they are supposed to, the expand step has hung me on each one..

THANKS for the PM, GG! I'll take a look at it now .. can I restore this to the 3TB or 5TB straight up? probably needs an expand, maybe?

I think I have additional 2TB drives if thats the max for this unit - but Im hopeful that I can use the 3 or 5 if Im going to re-roll it at this point.

Mainly just a lurker, but appreciate the help and insight from others who have been down this road more often than i do ..

Cheers!
David


----------



## ITGrouch

Hello all!

The hard drive in my Premier XL4 has been flaky for some time. I purchased a 2TB WD AV drive to replace the flaky drive. I kept putting off cloning the hard drive and today, the drive is now totally kaput. I put the drive in my PC to attempt to run some tests but the drive tries to spin up and then dies. 

TiVo wants to charge me an arm and a leg to send the XL4 to them and have them replace it with a refurbished one. I am retired and cannot shell out the major bucks to get the XL4 replaced. I am a noob when it comes to the TiVo cloning. Is it a possibility of getting a factory XL4 image so that I can resurrect the XL4 and which tool do I need to restore the factory image to the new WD drive?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.


----------



## mikeynv

ggieseke said:


> Factory image sent via PM.
> 
> I don't understand the part about previously swapping up to 2TB. That's what comes in a 758.


Hi Greg, Could you PM me the same 758250 image link as well please? My drive is failing and I am nervous to clone from it so I am going to try a bare upgrade.

Thank you!

-Michael


----------



## jmbach

jackthejester said:


> You're right .. I think I went 2TB > 2TB when my original drive started acting flaky.
> 
> I have an update, but still not resolved .. problem seems to be the same.
> 
> Unable to expand the drive from a jmfs copy.
> 
> I originally did a 2TB > 3TB full Copy and jmfs failed on the 3TB expand - I inserted this drive into the Tivo Box and it worked, as if it was a 2TB drive.
> 
> I tried a DVRBARS truncated copy (of the original 2TB Tivo drive i located) to the C: of my laptop and then restored that to a fresh 5TB drive hoping that the truncated copy from the original TivO box would be enough to get me expanded and flying.
> 
> No Go .. I'm not going to be surprised if the 2TB limit is where I'm getting hung, but think I'm close with several drives.
> 
> Any ideas or commands I'm missing that will help me expand either of these drives?
> 
> I have jmfs boot disk, WINMFS and DVRBARS at my disposal and while the packaged tools seem to work and do what they are supposed to, the expand step has hung me on each one..
> 
> THANKS for the PM, GG! I'll take a look at it now .. can I restore this to the 3TB or 5TB straight up? probably needs an expand, maybe?
> 
> I think I have additional 2TB drives if thats the max for this unit - but Im hopeful that I can use the 3 or 5 if Im going to re-roll it at this point.
> 
> Mainly just a lurker, but appreciate the help and insight from others who have been down this road more often than i do ..
> 
> Cheers!
> David


You need to use the modified version of JMFS in order to expand the image. The original version of JMFS does not expand images that are about 1.2TB or larger in size. Has to do with using a signed value for the sector count.

My post here will direct you to the modified JMFS.


----------



## julieknits

After reading just about all of this thread plus the HD version, I'm going to try upgrading the drive in my Tivo HD, followed by the Premiere if I can complete the HD. A couple of issues though:

1) WD Drive Utilities for Mac (all Mac household here) doesn't see the new drive. Run Verify from Disk Utility? I'm not sure that either see the drive except as an unformatted drive that it offers to erase. I can't run the DOS or Windows utilities. Just trust the new drive is OK?

2) It's connected to my MacBook Air via an Anker USB to SATA adapter. That's the adapter that JMFS could see with my Tivo hard drive connected to the laptop. I'm sending back the Cable Matters SATA dock as JMFS couldn't see the Tivo drive in it. It was surprising to me that the Anker small adapter seemed to work better than a single dock.

3) Any there have some hints on getting this done on the Mac? I can boot to the JMFS CD so that's the first step completed.


----------



## ggieseke

jackthejester said:


> You're right .. I think I went 2TB > 2TB when my original drive started acting flaky.
> 
> I have an update, but still not resolved .. problem seems to be the same.
> 
> Unable to expand the drive from a jmfs copy.
> 
> I originally did a 2TB > 3TB full Copy and jmfs failed on the 3TB expand - I inserted this drive into the Tivo Box and it worked, as if it was a 2TB drive.
> 
> I tried a DVRBARS truncated copy (of the original 2TB Tivo drive i located) to the C: of my laptop and then restored that to a fresh 5TB drive hoping that the truncated copy from the original TivO box would be enough to get me expanded and flying.
> 
> No Go .. I'm not going to be surprised if the 2TB limit is where I'm getting hung, but think I'm close with several drives.
> 
> Any ideas or commands I'm missing that will help me expand either of these drives?
> 
> I have jmfs boot disk, WINMFS and DVRBARS at my disposal and while the packaged tools seem to work and do what they are supposed to, the expand step has hung me on each one..
> 
> THANKS for the PM, GG! I'll take a look at it now .. can I restore this to the 3TB or 5TB straight up? probably needs an expand, maybe?
> 
> I think I have additional 2TB drives if thats the max for this unit - but Im hopeful that I can use the 3 or 5 if Im going to re-roll it at this point.
> 
> Mainly just a lurker, but appreciate the help and insight from others who have been down this road more often than i do ..
> 
> Cheers!
> David


Premieres wouldn't even boot with drives over 2TB until they made a change in the OS. I think that happened around 20.3.8 but I wouldn't count on anything less than 20.4.x.

Normally you have to start with a 2TB drive, let it update to the latest OS in the TiVo, image that drive, and restore the image to the larger drive. I'm sending you a link to a 758 image with 20.4.1 but I haven't tested it.

Edit: As noted by jmbach, you will have to use the modified jmfs to expand it.


----------



## ggieseke

ITGrouch said:


> Hello all!
> 
> The hard drive in my Premier XL4 has been flaky for some time. I purchased a 2TB WD AV drive to replace the flaky drive. I kept putting off cloning the hard drive and today, the drive is now totally kaput. I put the drive in my PC to attempt to run some tests but the drive tries to spin up and then dies.
> 
> TiVo wants to charge me an arm and a leg to send the XL4 to them and have them replace it with a refurbished one. I am retired and cannot shell out the major bucks to get the XL4 replaced. I am a noob when it comes to the TiVo cloning. Is it a possibility of getting a factory XL4 image so that I can resurrect the XL4 and which tool do I need to restore the factory image to the new WD drive?
> 
> Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.


PM sent. Use DvrBARS to restore the image.


----------



## ggieseke

mikeynv said:


> Hi Greg, Could you PM me the same 758250 image link as well please? My drive is failing and I am nervous to clone from it so I am going to try a bare upgrade.
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> -Michael


PM sent.


----------



## ITGrouch

ggieseke said:


> PM sent. Use DvrBARS to restore the image.


Thanks ggieseke for your assistance. The Premier XL4 is back in operation! One quick question...will DvrBARS work with a Roamio DVR?

Thanks again!

:up:


----------



## emanonii

Can I get the image for a TCD748000 please? Thanks in advance!


----------



## ggieseke

emanonii said:


> Can I get the image for a TCD748000 please? Thanks in advance!


PM sent.


----------



## ggieseke

ITGrouch said:


> Thanks ggieseke for your assistance. The Premier XL4 is back in operation! One quick question...will DvrBARS work with a Roamio DVR?
> 
> Thanks again!
> 
> :up:


Glad to hear it!

DvrBARS doesn't speak Roamio yet, and due to the 2TB limit of the Microsoft VHD file format it can't image anything larger than that. If you have a 500GB basic Roamio or a 1TB Plus drive you can use the Full backup option to capture a byte-for-byte image of the drive if that helps. If the drive has already been in use for very long the backup file will probably take that much disk space.

Note: If you try to do a full image of a drive over 2TB it will seem to work, but the resulting file will be crap. When I released it drives over 2TB and the entire Roamio line didn't exist. If work ever slows down I'll get back to new projects.


----------



## jackthejester

jmbach said:


> You need to use the modified version of JMFS in order to expand the image. The original version of JMFS does not expand images that are about 1.2TB or larger in size. Has to do with using a signed value for the sector count.
> 
> My ==removed, due to post count== post here will direct you to the modified JMFS.


BINGO!! - took me a bit to find the modified image and get it going - was a little thrown when it didnt come up to the Copy/Expand/Supersize - then getting it run the guide - but it was successful in expanding my original 3TB disk with the full image I'd dumped from my current drive.

Th guide with the commands was great - i just had to figure out how/where to jump in and pick it up, since I'd already copied my drive once (1.5 days!).

Thanks again to you guys - I'll find a good use for the leftover 5TB drive, I'll let the wife catch back up on the shows she hadn't watched and see if the new drive remedies the original tv-sticky-pixel issue. I have a fresh image thanks to Greg! THANKS! and can get back in business again if needed! Another successful Upgrade - woo hoo !

I think my record hours are up to 497 - I'll grab a screenshot tonight!

THANKS AGAIN!


----------



## emanonii

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


Thanks! New drive is imaged, and tivo is rockin' again. Just some notes in case it helps anyone:

Done with laptop using USB-SATA connection, and external power for the new drive. DVRBars for the restore, and then used jmfs to expand and supersize the drive.

- first restore died with the error 0x00000002 WriteFile about 10 minutes into the restore. Powered down the drive, and reseated connections. Second restore worked with no issues.
- restore took a little longer than 8 hours
- Tivo software update took 1.5 hours (I was actually coming to ask how long it takes when it finished.


----------



## ITGrouch

ggieseke said:


> Glad to hear it!
> 
> DvrBARS doesn't speak Roamio yet, and due to the 2TB limit of the Microsoft VHD file format it can't image anything larger than that. If you have a 500GB basic Roamio or a 1TB Plus drive you can use the Full backup option to capture a byte-for-byte image of the drive if that helps. If the drive has already been in use for very long the backup file will probably take that much disk space.
> 
> Note: If you try to do a full image of a drive over 2TB it will seem to work, but the resulting file will be crap. When I released it drives over 2TB and the entire Roamio line didn't exist. If work ever slows down I'll get back to new projects.


I have a Roamio Plus and I used DvrBARS to do a full backup of the 1TB drive and restored it without issues. I just upgraded The Roamio Plus to a 3TB drive and I have a licensed copy of Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5, which will do sector by sector backups and restore image of unrecognized file systems. I will give it a try with the 3TB drive, first trying with the Windows software and if that fails, booting with the Acronis recovery boot media and report on the success or failure. Having a backup image of the 3TB drive would be great so I don't have to go through the headache of dealing with Charter to unpair/repair the CableCard when the 3TB drive dies and have to replace it. Maybe sometime in the future, there will be an easy way to backup the CableCard pairing data on the Roamio series.


----------



## lessd

ITGrouch said:


> I have a Roamio Plus and I used DvrBARS to do a full backup of the 1TB drive and restored it without issues. I just upgraded The Roamio Plus to a 3TB drive and I have a licensed copy of Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5, which will do sector by sector backups and restore image of unrecognized file systems. I will give it a try with the 3TB drive, first trying with the Windows software and if that fails, booting with the Acronis recovery boot media and report on the success or failure. Having a backup image of the 3TB drive would be great so I don't have to go through the headache of dealing with Charter to unpair/repair the CableCard when the 3TB drive dies and have to replace it. Maybe sometime in the future, there will be an easy way to backup the CableCard pairing data on the Roamio series.


Are you sure a copy of the drive will not take out the pairing as any new drive has a new S/N, never tried it myself. If you do test the pairing and the new drive takes out the pairing you can't put the original drive back in and still have the cable card paired. (at least for Comcast in Hartford CT). Once the card get unpaired it will stay that way until you re-pair with Comcast itself.


----------



## Technogod

I have a TiVo Premiere that has been upgraded to 2TB. Can I use the modified JMFS CD to expand it to 3TB?


----------



## jmbach

Yes. You could go to 4TB as well. You will need to use TiVotools found on the iso first before using the modified JMFS to expand again. Read the DIY 4TB premiere thread for more details.


----------



## jimlau

using jmfs on my windows 7 64 bit. I get the Linux boot screen and to the line it asked for copy, expand, etc...

unfortunately, my keyboard can't communicate. it's on, but even the cap lock button won't respond. does the boot disc not recognize a windows keyboard?


----------



## unitron

jimlau said:


> using jmfs on my windows 7 64 bit. I get the Linux boot screen and to the line it asked for copy, expand, etc...
> 
> unfortunately, my keyboard can't communicate. it's on, but even the cap lock button won't respond. does the boot disc not recognize a windows keyboard?


It should.

Is the keyboard connected via PS/2 or the old full size DIN socket, or USB or wireless or both?


----------



## ggieseke

jimlau said:


> using jmfs on my windows 7 64 bit. I get the Linux boot screen and to the line it asked for copy, expand, etc...
> 
> unfortunately, my keyboard can't communicate. it's on, but even the cap lock button won't respond. does the boot disc not recognize a windows keyboard?


Make sure the keyboard is plugged into a USB 2.0 port (one without the SS logo).


----------



## jimlau

ggieseke said:


> Make sure the keyboard is plugged into a USB 2.0 port (one without the SS logo).


yeah, wireless usb keyboard worked. thanks.

during the process of copying there were 3 errors. can't check my TiVo yet, but can it still work with 3 errors?


----------



## ggieseke

jimlau said:


> during the process of copying there were 3 errors. can't check my TiVo yet, but can it still work with 3 errors?


Depends on where the errors were. If a critical portion of the OS was damaged it might fail, but with only 3 errors the odds are in your favor. The only way to know for sure is to try it.


----------



## lpwcomp

The custodian of my remote Premiere with a stock 320GB drive called me this morning to inform me that she turned on her TV and was presented with the *Just a few minutes more* screen which soon changed to the *severe error, will try to fix* screen. I won't know for sure until she gets back from work this evening, but I am anticipating failure so i have two questions:

1. The only drive I have immediately available is a 3TB WD Red. Anyone think it is a bad idea to use this drive in a Premiere?

2. Would a DvrBARS created image from December 2013 support a 3TB drive?

Actually, depending on the answer to question 1, I could upgrade my local Premiere that I upgraded to 2TB last year and use the 2TB drive for hers.


----------



## ggieseke

lpwcomp said:


> The custodian of my remote Premiere with a stock 320GB drive called me this morning to inform me that she turned on her TV and was presented with the *Just a few minutes more* screen which soon changed to the *severe error, will try to fix* screen. I won't know for sure until she gets back from work this evening, but I am anticipating failure so i have two questions:
> 
> 1. The only drive I have immediately available is a 3TB WD Red. Anyone think it is a bad idea to use this drive in a Premiere?
> 
> 2. Would a DvrBARS created image from December 2013 support a 3TB drive?
> 
> Actually, depending on the answer to question 1, I could upgrade my local Premiere that I upgraded to 2TB last year and use the 2TB drive for hers.


1. I had a 4TB Red in my 748 for almost a year and it ran great.

2. Hopefully jmbach will jump in, but you would have to put my 746 image on a 2TB drive and let it upgrade to the current OS. You can expand it with jmfs before or after that stage, then you would have to use copy it to the 3TB drive and use the scripts from there.


----------



## lpwcomp

ggieseke said:


> 1. I had a 4TB Red in my 748 for almost a year and it ran great.
> 
> 2. Hopefully jmbach will jump in, but you would have to put my 746 image on a 2TB drive and let it upgrade to the current OS. You can expand it with jmfs before or after that stage, then you would have to use copy it to the 3TB drive and use the scripts from there.


Thanks for the response. I'm currently in really bad shape. In trying to get my Dell Inspirion 660 to boot from CD, I apparently changed the wrong thing in the BIOS and now I have nothing. Power light comes on but I get no display.

Edit: Fixed it (apparently it created a display problem but the HDMI out still worked to my TV).


----------



## lpwcomp

OK. I was confused. I thought you could go directly to 3TB using just the new JMFS and that the extra steps were only necessary for 4TB. Looks like I need to get another drive. She doesn't really need 3TB.


----------



## jmbach

To expand to 3TB use TiVotools on cykotix iso and copy and rearrange from your 2TB to the 3TB with the order 1,11,12,13,15,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,14,10 or 1,11,12,13,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,14,10,15. Then use the coalesce script and coalesce 12 and 13. Boot it in the TiVo and let it divorce. Then use the modified JMFS on that iso to expand to 3TB.


----------



## jmbach

lpwcomp said:


> OK. I was confused. I thought you could go directly to 3TB using just the new JMFS and that the extra steps were only necessary for 4TB. Looks like I need to get another drive. She doesn't really need 3TB.


At this time you can only add a maximum of a 2TB partition and the end of the last partition of the image you are expanding has to allow the beginning of the new extended partition to start under 2.2TB. So for 3TB you have to have start with a minimum 1TB image. For 4TB you have to start with a 2TB image.


----------



## ggieseke

lpwcomp said:


> OK. I was confused. I thought you could go directly to 3TB using just the new JMFS and that the extra steps were only necessary for 4TB. Looks like I need to get another drive. She doesn't really need 3TB.


The problem is that the linux OS on my 320 image is too old to boot at all on a drive over 2TB.


----------



## lpwcomp

jmbach said:


> At this time you can only add a maximum of a 2TB partition and the end of the last partition of the image you are expanding has to allow the beginning of the new extended partition to start under 2.2TB. So for 3TB you have to have start with a minimum 1TB image. For 4TB you have to start with a 2TB image.





ggieseke said:


> The problem is that the linux OS on my 320 image is too old to boot at all on a drive over 2TB.


Ah. Gotcha.

In any case, I've decided to just acquire a 1TB WD Green drive from Walmart even though it's a PITA to attach it to an internal SATA so I can run wdidle3.


----------



## jmbach

And you can only use JMFS to expand properly if the total number of partitions prior to expanding is 14. That is why we have to set up the new drive so that we can successfully coalesce 2 partitions into one if the drive has been expanded once already.


----------



## jmbach

So you could copy your 2TB to the 3TB. Since it has the latest OS on it, it will accept and boot the 3TB drive. You can then put ggieseke 320 image on the 2TB and expand that for the other premiere.


----------



## fobia79

So I just finished expanding my default Premiere 4 drive (500gb) to a 4tb drive and I notice that it shows the recording capacity variable up to 429 HD hours. I was hoping to be around 600. Did I do something wrong? I copied expanded and supersize with no errors.


----------



## lpwcomp

fobia79 said:


> So I just finished expanding my default Premiere 4 drive (500gb) to a 4tb drive and I notice that it shows the recording capacity variable up to 429 HD hours. I was hoping to be around 600. Did I do something wrong? I copied expanded and supersize with no errors.


You needed to read this thread. You can't use JMFS alone to go from 500GB to 4TB as JMFS will only add a max 2.2TB partition. You ended up with 2.7TB being used.


----------



## jmbach

+1


----------



## Brent W

Any thought on this? I did the upgrade 3-4 years ago on one of our Premiere's to a 2TB drive. No issues. I have a 2nd premiere I wanted to do that same thing to. I had a new 3TB drive laying around, and wanted to use it. I read the other threads about upgrading to 3 or 4TB, and it seems a bit over my head. I was fine only getting the 2.2TB out of the 3TB drive, so I did the upgrade from this thread. All was fine for about a week. Then the tivo started doing random reboots. and got stuck power cycling itself every 5 minutes. I was sometimes able to get it to fully boot up, but rarely. twice now I have see the following screen. (Most times it just sticks on the standard "starting up" screen

I'm going to go install the originally drive back in, just curious what may have gone wrong with my 3TB (2.2TB usable) drive.


----------



## jmbach

Run the manufacturer diagnostic on the drive as well as a program like HDD Guardian that will report problems that the manufacturer diagnostics may ignore. (have to hook the drive up to a computer)


----------



## bobrt6676

My only PC with SATA drive has a Gigabyte MB. My older PC's have IDE drives. How difficult will the upgrade be on a Gigabyte MB? Can it be done by a "novice" upgrader?


----------



## jmbach

Some gigabyte MBs put an HPA on the drive which mucks up the upgrade. The newer Docks (not enclosure) seem to be able to do the upgrade without issue. Just a little slower.


----------



## bobrt6676

jmbach said:


> Some gigabyte MBs put an HPA on the drive which mucks up the upgrade. The newer Docks (not enclosure) seem to be able to do the upgrade without issue. Just a little slower.


Thanks, I will give it a try. If it doesn't work I'll just have to start over.


----------



## unitron

bobrt6676 said:


> My only PC with SATA drive has a Gigabyte MB. My older PC's have IDE drives. How difficult will the upgrade be on a Gigabyte MB? Can it be done by a "novice" upgrader?


If your GigaByte board is one of the ones that create Host Protected Areas, they only do it, as far as I've been able to learn or to determine from what a couple of them did to me, to what they consider the "first" hard drive.

For example, if it has both one or more IDE headers *and* one or more SATA ports, it'll do it to the drive that's the IDE primary master.

If there's not one connected that way, it'll go down the line--primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave, and then on to the SATA ports, from 1-4, or 0-3, or however they're numbered.

So if you'd be hooking up the drive you want to "jmfs" to a SATA port, and already have the boot drive (the one with Windows on it, or Linux, or whatever OS you're running) connected to a lower number SATA port, you should be okay.

But if you disconnect that boot drive for some reason, now the other drive becomes the first one in line and it'll get HPA'ed faster than you can say "Oh Sh*t".

So boot the PC with the jmfs cd, but without the drive intended for the TiVo attached or installed, bypass the jmfs stuff, like copying or expanding, and go straight to the command line.

Then

hdparm -N /dev/hda

if you have any PATA/IDE drives hooked up, or

hdparm -N /dev/sda

if you're running only SATA

and if you get a return showing

x/y

where x and y are not equal (it'll make sense when you see it), you'll know that there's already a drive connected that's been HPA'ed, and if you hook up the new drive "further down the count", it should be protected.

I think

poweroff

should get you out of that jmfs cd's command line safely, if not, then

reboot

should do it and you just kill the power when it starts to.


----------



## bobrt6676

unitron said:


> If your GigaByte board is one of the ones that create Host Protected Areas, they only do it, as far as I've been able to learn or to determine from what a couple of them did to me, to what they consider the "first" hard drive.
> 
> For example, if it has both one or more IDE headers *and* one or more SATA ports, it'll do it to the drive that's the IDE primary master.
> 
> If there's not one connected that way, it'll go down the line--primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave, and then on to the SATA ports, from 1-4, or 0-3, or however they're numbered.
> 
> So if you'd be hooking up the drive you want to "jmfs" to a SATA port, and already have the boot drive (the one with Windows on it, or Linux, or whatever OS you're running) connected to a lower number SATA port, you should be okay.
> 
> But if you disconnect that boot drive for some reason, now the other drive becomes the first one in line and it'll get HPA'ed faster than you can say "Oh Sh*t".
> 
> So boot the PC with the jmfs cd, but without the drive intended for the TiVo attached or installed, bypass the jmfs stuff, like copying or expanding, and go straight to the command line.
> 
> Then
> 
> hdparm -N /dev/hda
> 
> if you have any PATA/IDE drives hooked up, or
> 
> hdparm -N /dev/sda
> 
> if you're running only SATA
> 
> and if you get a return showing
> 
> x/y
> 
> where x and y are not equal (it'll make sense when you see it), you'll know that there's already a drive connected that's been HPA'ed, and if you hook up the new drive "further down the count", it should be protected.
> 
> I think
> 
> poweroff
> 
> should get you out of that jmfs cd's command line safely, if not, then
> 
> reboot
> 
> should do it and you just kill the power when it starts to.


Thanks, that is a big help. I have my main C drive and hooking the new TiVo drive as a secondary drive. I needed a new image so I received that and DL'd DVRBARS.


----------



## bobrt6676

Thanks to ggieseke, Unitron and JMBach. I successfully replaced my Premiere XL drive. Funds are short so I just replaced the 1TB drive with another 1TB drive, so no expanding or supersizing needed.

1. Purchased 1TB drive on Amazon for $52.
2. Read this thread 3 times. 
3. DL'd new image and DVRBARS from ggieseke Thanks
4. Read this thread 3 more times.
5. Hooked up new drive as 2nd drive on my gigabyte MB.
6. Ran diagnostics(2hrs) no errors
7. extracted DVRBARS and Premiere image to C drive.
8. Opened DVRBARS. WOW how easy. Selected source, selected destination.
9. Took a few hours. Complete. Pulled drive, back to Premiere installed.
10. Loaded to Guided setup, chatted with TWC to re-pair CC. 
11. Allowed SW to update overnight. This morning all working GREAT!!!

Thanks to all that contribute to the forums. Had TiVo's since 2000 and W/O the forums they would be outdated/bricks a lot sooner W/O all of you.


----------



## ggieseke

bobrt6676 said:


> Thanks to ggieseke, Unitron and JMBach. I successfully replaced my Premiere XL drive. Funds are short so I just replaced the 1TB drive with another 1TB drive, so no expanding or supersizing needed.
> 
> 1. Purchased 1TB drive on Amazon for $52.
> 2. Read this thread 3 times.
> 3. DL'd new image and DVRBARS from ggieseke Thanks
> 4. Read this thread 3 more times.
> 5. Hooked up new drive as 2nd drive on my gigabyte MB.
> 6. Ran diagnostics(2hrs) no errors
> 7. extracted DVRBARS and Premiere image to C drive.
> 8. Opened DVRBARS. WOW how easy. Selected source, selected destination.
> 9. Took a few hours. Complete. Pulled drive, back to Premiere installed.
> 10. Loaded to Guided setup, chatted with TWC to re-pair CC.
> 11. Allowed SW to update overnight. This morning all working GREAT!!!
> 
> Thanks to all that contribute to the forums. Had TiVo's since 2000 and W/O the forums they would be outdated/bricks a lot sooner W/O all of you.


Glad to hear it. If you had used the Quick Restore option step 9 would probably have only taken a few minutes, but anything that works is a success.


----------



## peters_pa

Hi all, first post here. When I unzip then burn the iso image and boot my PC from the CD, I'm getting an error:

Fatal error occurred JavaMFS data not found 

It then suggests copying the JavaMFS from your boot device to a IDE/SATA disk 

What should my next steps be?


----------



## L David Matheny

peters_pa said:


> Hi all, first post here. When I unzip then burn the iso image and boot my PC from the CD, I'm getting an error:
> 
> Fatal error occurred JavaMFS data not found
> 
> It then suggests copying the JavaMFS from your boot device to a IDE/SATA disk
> 
> What should my next steps be?


I don't know specifically what that error means, but I suspect that if you didn't burn the ISO image correctly (as an image), it wouldn't even try to boot. Recently I downloaded and burned a different ISO image, and it started to boot but couldn't find the main program to load. I downloaded it again, and the new image was a few megabytes larger than the first one. WTH?! In the 21st Century, you would think that we should be past such problems, but an ISO image has no way of detecting corruption, so you need to validate it by using md5sum or some similar program to compute a checksum which you can then compare to the published correct value. I did that, the new image passed, and it booted correctly. (For downloads in the form of a ZIP file, the unzipping process should detect any corruption.)


----------



## ggieseke

L David Matheny said:


> I don't know specifically what that error means, but I suspect that if you didn't burn the ISO image correctly (as an image), it wouldn't even try to boot. Recently I downloaded and burned a different ISO image, and it started to boot but couldn't find the main program to load. I downloaded it again, and the new image was a few megabytes larger than the first one. WTH?! In the 21st Century, you would think that we should be past such problems, but an ISO image has no way of detecting corruption, so you need to validate it by using md5sum or some similar program to compute a checksum which you can then compare to the published correct value. I did that, the new image passed, and it booted correctly. (For downloads in the form of a ZIP file, the unzipping process should detect any corruption.)


Sh*t still happens. My DvrBARS Premiere images are hosted on a really reliable paid 1GB Dropbox account, but at least 5 out of 1000 still fail in some way, resulting in PMs.


----------



## peters_pa

L David Matheny said:


> I don't know specifically what that error means, but I suspect that if you didn't burn the ISO image correctly (as an image), it wouldn't even try to boot. Recently I downloaded and burned a different ISO image, and it started to boot but couldn't find the main program to load. I downloaded it again, and the new image was a few megabytes larger than the first one. WTH?! In the 21st Century, you would think that we should be past such problems, but an ISO image has no way of detecting corruption, so you need to validate it by using md5sum or some similar program to compute a checksum which you can then compare to the published correct value. I did that, the new image passed, and it booted correctly. (For downloads in the form of a ZIP file, the unzipping process should detect any corruption.)


I've downloaded from the link on the first post, unzipped and got an file with the name jmfs-rev104.iso, right clicked, selected Burn ISO Image and got a CD with 2 directories, boot with 2 more directories, 2 files and another compressed file, initrd.gz, the other directory JavaMFS has a modules directory and one other file.

Am I missing something?


----------



## L David Matheny

peters_pa said:


> I've downloaded from the link on the first post, unzipped and got an file with the name jmfs-rev104.iso, right clicked, selected Burn ISO Image and got a CD with 2 directories, boot with 2 more directories, 2 files and another compressed file, initrd.gz, the other directory JavaMFS has a modules directory and one other file.
> 
> Am I missing something?


It doesn't sound like you're missing anything, and your burned CD sounds exactly like mine. It's been a long time since I downloaded JMFS, so I downloaded again from the current download link. That file is identical to the one I downloaded 12/24/2010, and the MD5 checksum is correct. You could still run a checksum to compare with the values shown, but for a ZIP file any corruption should be detected during the unzipping process. I suppose you could try using a different burning program to rule out an error during the burn process, but that seems unlikely. Do other CDs boot OK on your computer? Can you try booting the CD on a different computer? Have you disconnected all hard drives except the TiVo drive?


----------



## peters_pa

L David Matheny said:


> It doesn't sound like you're missing anything, and your burned CD sounds exactly like mine. It's been a long time since I downloaded JMFS, so I downloaded again from the current download link. That file is identical to the one I downloaded 12/24/2010, and the MD5 checksum is correct. You could still run a checksum to compare with the values shown, but for a ZIP file any corruption should be detected during the unzipping process. I suppose you could try using a different burning program to rule out an error during the burn process, but that seems unlikely. Do other CDs boot OK on your computer? Can you try booting the CD on a different computer? Have you disconnected all hard drives except the TiVo drive?


Thanks for the suggestion on trying on another PC. I tried one of the CDs I've burnt on an older laptop and was able to get the program to boot properly. I then went back to the desktop I was using and swapped out the DVD drive for one I had lying around. Not sure why, but the "new" DVD drive worked fine. Copying the disks now.....


----------



## marbordom

I came accrross the same error: Java MFS not found.
and this is what I had to do
1) Do not use a USB flash drive at all but write to a good ole CD-R
2) Do not use a USB3 input but USB
3) Use my old IDE DVD- ROM in its USB2 case connected to USB2
4)) Not making sense, maybe irrelevant: switch SATA mode from AHCI to IDE
5) Connect the source and destination HDD to USB3 and not SATA (how annoying)

Anyway the copy process is going with "blazing" 17MB/s now ...

I hope this will help someone !

- Marc



Gregor said:


> OK here's what's on screen:
> 
> picture of 2 penguins
> pci 0000:00:03.4: BAR 0: can't allocate resource
> i804Z.c: No controller found
> Running Linux Live scripts <http://www.linux-live.org> [*** Fatal error occurred - Java MFS not found.
> You are maybe using an unsuppported boot device(eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA).
> Workaround: Copy the directory JavaMFS from your boot device to an IDE/SATA
> disk, eg. /mnt/hda1/JavaMFS or c:\JavaMFS. Then try to boot again.


----------



## ggieseke

marbordom said:


> 4)) Not making sense, maybe irrelevant: switch SATA mode from AHCI to IDE


I have to do that on some PCs to get SpinRite to run.


----------



## viperjuice

Thank you very much for the info and walk thru. New to TiVo and this made it super easy to expand and supersize the new 2TB HD after loading an image on it. Thanks again.


----------



## turbo327

marbordom said:


> I came accrross the same error: Java MFS not found.
> and this is what I had to do
> 1) Do not use a USB flash drive at all but write to a good ole CD-R
> 2) Do not use a USB3 input but USB
> 3) Use my old IDE DVD- ROM in its USB2 case connected to USB2
> 4)) Not making sense, maybe irrelevant: switch SATA mode from AHCI to IDE
> 5) Connect the source and destination HDD to USB3 and not SATA (how annoying)
> 
> Anyway the copy process is going with "blazing" 17MB/s now ...
> 
> I hope this will help someone !
> 
> - Marc


USB3 ports are reported to have issues when booting Windows 8/8.1 recovery boots. What the disconnect is do not know, just confirming there is a known strangeness. Reports also want to tie this to USB3 ports that are on machines running UEFI bios.

Just another data point.

I did my upgrade last year with a boot CD on a trusted old Intel socket 775 machine with a SATA DVD/CD drive. Solid and most satisfying! Another thanks to everyone here for this info and the setups.


----------



## tluxon

I've been too busy to upgrade any drives in a couple years, but I've done 4 upgrades on our 2 TiVoHDs over the years and would like to bump up the drive on our 500GB Premiere as I transition out the TiVoHDs for a Roamio. Is upgrading the Premiere to 2TB essentially the same as when I upgraded the TiVoHDs? Do I use the same DVD (a JMFS (preferred) and MFSLive I burned in '13) I used for that?

Does it make much sense to stop there or should I just keep going on up to 3 or 4TB while I've got the drive out of the Premiere?

Thanks!


----------



## tluxon

tluxon said:


> Does it make much sense to stop there or should I just keep going on up to 3 or 4TB while I've got the drive out of the Premiere?


Upon review, it looks like a 2TB upgrade is a step on the way to a 4TB upgrade anyway, so I guess I'll just got to that for now.

The WD20EURS's I used in the TiVoHDs a couple years ago are still running great, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to find one now. Will the WD20EURX be just about the same?


----------



## turbo327

tluxon said:


> I've been too busy to upgrade any drives in a couple years, but I've done 4 upgrades on our 2 TiVoHDs over the years and would like to bump up the drive on our 500GB Premiere as I transition out the TiVoHDs for a Roamio. Is upgrading the Premiere to 2TB essentially the same as when I upgraded the TiVoHDs? Do I use the same DVD (a JMFS (preferred) and MFSLive I burned in '13) I used for that?
> 
> Does it make much sense to stop there or should I just keep going on up to 3 or 4TB while I've got the drive out of the Premiere?
> 
> Thanks!


I believe the 2tb is a good step. My 1tb was hovering at 85% and now the 2tb sits at about 50%. I recall a similar WD suffix issue, i.e. 2TB EURX vs EURS as above, went with what Newegg had in that series last spring. I took my Tivo Premier XL from 1tb to 2tb very easily with the Comer instructions and jmfs version 1.04 boot cd. You have done this before so you likely 'know' the drill. Me? Being a bit 'retentive' I used my 'bench' PC with just the two drives, i.e. original 1tb and new 2tb on the SATA bus. Booted from a sata bus driven CD drive, with the CD made from the jmfs 1.04 iso, and it was CAKE. A nod again to ALL those here who make this work!!! :up:

Gerry-


----------



## Donarmand

Thanks for all the great info guys! I want to go with a WD 2t drive. I know you guys rave about the WD20EURS and I have seen that the new purple drive is not a good choice. Can you guys give me a few options on a 2T drive thats from WD that will work besides the WD20EURS? Also will a 7200rpm drive improve performance? 

Thanks again, this info is awesome.


----------



## jmbach

WD20EURX and WDEURS are the drives that are the WD AV series drives. To sum up the majority of the posts about drives, faster drives like the 7.2k do not add any improvement in performance but generate more heat and uses more power and are not recommended in general. It is not that they will not work but do not provide enough benefit.


----------



## unitron

tluxon said:


> Upon review, it looks like a 2TB upgrade is a step on the way to a 4TB upgrade anyway, so I guess I'll just got to that for now.
> 
> The WD20EURS's I used in the TiVoHDs a couple years ago are still running great, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to find one now. Will the WD20EURX be just about the same?


I just recently replaced a WD20EURS that was still working fine with a WD20EURX in a Series 3, and have seen no difference in performance, so I'd say go ahead and use an X where you would have used an S.


----------



## Donarmand

Ok thanks folks, a huge help i will go with the eurx or S depending on price, but the X is prefered. Thanks a million, huge help.


----------



## unitron

Donarmand said:


> Ok thanks folks, a huge help i will go with the eurx or S depending on price, but the X is prefered. Thanks a million, huge help.


It's preferred in that it's the current model and if you find anyone selling the older one it's probably of dubious origin and the warranty is probably already expired.

Never buy a hard drive from newegg or Amazon unless you're buying it directly from them and not from some "partner" using their site.

newegg and Amazon both currently have the X for $90, which is a reasonable price.


----------



## Donarmand

unitron said:


> It's preferred in that it's the current model and if you find anyone selling the older one it's probably of dubious origin and the warranty is probably already expired.
> 
> Never buy a hard drive from newegg or Amazon unless you're buying it directly from them and not from some "partner" using their site.
> 
> newegg and Amazon both currently have the X for $90, which is a reasonable price.


Thanks for the great advice, I will have the X by tomorrow morning from amazon directly. I will get started as soon as it arrives. Looking forward to it.:up:


----------



## tluxon

unitron said:


> I just recently replaced a WD20EURS that was still working fine with a WD20EURX in a Series 3, and have seen no difference in performance, so I'd say go ahead and use an X where you would have used an S.


The EURX arrived today and I've just finished the replacement. TCF was moving to another server just as I completed the WD Diagnostic Quick Test, so I was kinda flying blind, but JMFS is so easy to use I had a copied, expanded, and supersized TiVo drive in just over 3 hours! Didn't even need to re-pair the CableCARD.

Thanks again 'comer' and all other contributors!

Now that I'm planning on the TiVos trading places with each other, I've got to get all the season passes moved around. There's no shortcut for that, is there?


----------



## ggieseke

tluxon said:


> Now that I'm planning on the TiVos trading places with each other, I've got to get all the season passes moved around. There's no shortcut for that, is there?


kmttg


----------



## tluxon

ggieseke said:


> kmttg


Thanks for the tip. I've been using kttmg ever since Kevin began posting it, but I had never delved very deeply into the Remote functions. I see that it can copy Season Passes from a TiVoHD to a Premiere, but it doesn't seem able to copy a Premiere's SP to a TiVoHD.


----------



## tluxon

tluxon said:


> Thanks for the tip. I've been using kttmg ever since Kevin began posting it, but I had never delved very deeply into the Remote functions. I see that it can copy Season Passes from a TiVoHD to a Premiere, but it doesn't seem able to copy a Premiere's SP to a TiVoHD.


I found the simplest way to transfer Season Passes is to log into my account on Tivo.com. It doesn't seem to have a problem copying the passes to a TiVoHD.


----------



## Donarmand

I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for making this such a smooth an easy upgrade. Did both my Tivo's over this weekend with 2TB HD's EURX and there were no errors, and no problems. Cant thank you folks enough.


----------



## ZenMasta

How long is this supposed to take. It is going incredibly slow for me. I haven't exactly been keeping track of time but I feel like it has only copied over 3GB within about 40 minutes or so. The far right side that shows the rate is never goes very high, basically copying only a few hundred kB to only a few MB/s

With SATA drives I should be seeing much higher transfer rates. At this rate, I'm going to have to leave my pc on for a week.


----------



## unitron

ZenMasta said:


> How long is this supposed to take. It is going incredibly slow for me. I haven't exactly been keeping track of time but I feel like it has only copied over 3GB within about 40 minutes or so. The far right side that shows the rate is never goes very high, basically copying only a few hundred kB to only a few MB/s
> 
> With SATA drives I should be seeing much higher transfer rates. At this rate, I'm going to have to leave my pc on for a week.


Are both drives hooked directly to SATA ports on the motherboard?

It sounds like

ddrescue

(which is the "Xeroxing" utility that the jmfs cd uses for the copy part of the copy and expand)

has run into problems reading the original (or source) drive and is dropping back to taking smaller bites at a time than the maximum, which it's designed to do in those circumstances. This increases the chances of getting a good copy.

As long as it shows that it's still running and the amount copied keeps increasing, even if slowly, let it keep going, 'cause this may be the last gasp of the old drive.


----------



## ZenMasta

Yes they are and it does actually rescue. It's been around 13 hours now and only at only 300GB.

errsize is currently 25MB and 222 errors.


----------



## unitron

Too late, perhaps, depending on method, since you've already started, but taking steps to provide additional cooling for the source drive can help with a problem copy.

I've gone so far as to wrap the drive with paper towel, put it in the freezer overnight, along with several ziploc bags filled with water, and then put an ice bag underneath and above the still wrapped drive, changing them for fresh ones as they thaw, during the copy process.

In your case, perhaps you could rig a fan to blow on it.


----------



## mattack

OK, I looked at the first page of this thread and hadn't seen it updated.. so I'll ask this FAQ-ies of FAQs..

Is 3 TB now/still the biggest I can use in a Premiere 4 (without even more really high end hacking)? I put a 3 TB in my Roamio last fall sometime (via the "just plop it in and it sets it up").. and even though I have moved most of my SPs/OnePasses to the Roamio, I still may upgrade the P4, even just to move stuff manually to it (instead of downloading to a computer). I mean offload stuff from the Roamio, or have some "lower" OnePasses on it. Even with 6 tuners, once in a while I am having conflicts, because I have padding on both ends of virtually all of my OPs..

My P4 has the orig stock drive!


----------



## unitron

mattack said:


> OK, I looked at the first page of this thread and hadn't seen it updated.. so I'll ask this FAQ-ies of FAQs..
> 
> Is 3 TB now/still the biggest I can use in a Premiere 4 (without even more really high end hacking)? I put a 3 TB in my Roamio last fall sometime (via the "just plop it in and it sets it up").. and even though I have moved most of my SPs/OnePasses to the Roamio, I still may upgrade the P4, even just to move stuff manually to it (instead of downloading to a computer). I mean offload stuff from the Roamio, or have some "lower" OnePasses on it. Even with 6 tuners, once in a while I am having conflicts, because I have padding on both ends of virtually all of my OPs..
> 
> My P4 has the orig stock drive!


Have you read the

DIY 4TB Premiere

thread yet?

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=513785


----------



## mattack

Thanks.. looks fairly complex.. I skimmed through the whole first and whole last page.. I *think* I can actually do the stock P4 to 4 TB WITHOUT an interim drive? (The orig page talks a lot about doing it as two steps..)

Heck, I almost certainly HAVE a drive I could sacrifice, I just don't want to.. (it's probably a previous tivo drive sitting around that I want to keep as a backup just in case.)

though I did see the recent additions about working on 6 TB.. oooh!!!


----------



## videobruce

I did a search here, but it really didn't turn up anything substantial other than the 'S' was supposedly better. 

According to Newegg & Amazon listings for a WD 2TB AV-GP drive The X is up to $30 less expensive on Newegg, close to the same price on Amazon, but the S may be in short supply. The X has IntelliPower, the 'S' doesn't.

So the question, is IntelliPower something to stay away from?


----------



## CoxInPHX

videobruce said:


> I did a search here, but it really didn't turn up anything substantial other than the 'S' was supposedly better.
> 
> According to Newegg & Amazon listings for a WD 2TB AV-GP drive The X is up to $30 less expensive on Newegg, close to the same price on Amazon, but the S may be in short supply. The X has IntelliPower, the 'S' doesn't.
> 
> So the question, is IntelliPower something to stay away from?


Both will have IntelliPower, all AV drives do.

The WD EURS models were discontinued over a year ago, so any purchase it most likely a Re-certified HDD or new old stock. I would not purchase an EURS unless I knew for sure it was new factory sealed, or seller had a generous return policy. Also, since the HDD manufacture date will be over a year old, you will need to register the HDD right away, and provide an invoice to prove that it was just purchased in order to receive the full 3 year warranty.

The WD EURX is the current model, and is your best option


----------



## Wiked

I use the WD EURX in my Tivo upgrades I sell to customers. 
I have 5 Tivo's in my house and the last 2 I upgraded earlier this year have the EURX in them and haven't missed a beat.

EDIT: 
Today a friends 2TB EURX that he just installed came up with this error. Any thoughts? He has rebooted 5 times already and it still appears. 
I have never had this error on any of mine etc.


----------



## videobruce

Isn't that IntelliPower a issue, or am I thinking of that IntelliPark?
That was my main concern.


----------



## Wiked

Not sure...I have never turned off anything on my 2TB EURX HDD's I have used in my TiVo's and they work fine. Strange his one has done this.


----------



## jmbach

videobruce said:


> Isn't that IntelliPower a issue, or am I thinking of that IntelliPark?
> That was my main concern.


IntelliPark. This is what the wdidle3 program adjusts.


----------



## ggieseke

That looks like an error 51 issue, which will happen if you take a drive (or a copy of a drive) from one TiVo and put it in a different one. You have to run Clear & Delete Everything to "marry" the drive to the motherboard.

The Media Access Key will also show up as all zeros.


----------



## jmbach

Wiked said:


> Today a friends 2TB EURX that he just installed came up with this error. Any thoughts? He has rebooted 5 times already and it still appears.
> I have never had this error on any of mine etc.


Never had that error either. Would start by checking the drive with the manufacturers diagnostic. If that is okay you might consider checking the error logs. You can try the codes from this thread here to access the logs on the TiVo to see if any light can be shed on the error.


----------



## HerronScott

ggieseke said:


> That looks like an error 51 issue, which will happen if you take a drive (or a copy of a drive) from one TiVo and put it in a different one. You have to run Clear & Delete Everything to "marry" the drive to the motherboard.
> 
> The Media Access Key will also show up as all zeros.


This!

Scott


----------



## jmbach

ggieseke said:


> That looks like an error 51 issue, which will happen if you take a drive (or a copy of a drive) from one TiVo and put it in a different one. You have to run Clear & Delete Everything to "marry" the drive to the motherboard.
> 
> The Media Access Key will also show up as all zeros.


Now that ggieseke brought it up, that is likely the issue. It has been such a long time since I had an error 51 issue that I do not remember what the error screen looks like.


----------



## ggieseke

The actual error message is misleading, but they never expected us to be copying drives. No amount of reboots will fix it until you run C&DE.


----------



## Wiked

Ok thanks for letting me know its C&DE. I have passed this info on to him.
I have a 160gb TiVo drive I use to copy over to the 2TB HDD's for friends. That 160 just boots up to the guided setup start screen asking you to choose country etc. I never thought it would need another C&DE once guided setup was done but obviously I am mistaken. 
You learn something every day.

EDIT: He did the C&DE and it is all working now. I will just have to advise any further people that wants a upgrade to do the C&DE.


----------



## unitron

Wiked said:


> Ok thanks for letting me know its C&DE. I have passed this info on to him.
> I have a 160gb TiVo drive I use to copy over to the 2TB HDD's for friends. That 160 just boots up to the guided setup start screen asking you to choose country etc. I never thought it would need another C&DE once guided setup was done but obviously I am mistaken.
> You learn something every day.
> 
> EDIT: He did the C&DE and it is all working now. I will just have to advise any further people that wants a upgrade to do the C&DE.


I thought the Australian flavored S3 HD came with a 320GB drive?


----------



## jmbach

Does the community have access to an Australian image? I think last year someone was looking for one to repair their unit.


----------



## Wiked

Yes the Australian ones started originally with 160gb and then moved up to 320gb and then offered a 1TB model before the whole TiVo thing fell apart.


----------



## videobruce

Sitting at this prompt, typing in 'mstools_1.4' did nothing. 
Exactly what is suppose to be typed to get something to run?


----------



## jmbach

MFSTools 3.2 is the only one that works with Premiere and newer


----------



## Anotherpyr

Newegg is showing the WD20PURX as the latest version. Anyone tried these? Or is it worth buying the older EURX version?


----------



## captdave_ca

Hi all,

I just bought a 1TB drive and need to start from scratch on my TCD746320. I have an image from ggieseke, but I think that's for a 320MB only? 

Is there a separate image for a 1TB drive or do I have to expand it using one of the tools out there?

Thanks!


----------



## jmbach

You can use the image with DvrBARS to restore it to the drive and then use JMFS to expand.


----------



## videobruce

jmbach said:


> MFSTools 3.2 is the only one that works with Premiere and newer


I must be missing something, why is this program listed as working??


----------



## jmbach

Currently you will have to compile it from source but it does work. An ISO will be out eventually.


----------



## Anotherpyr

Anotherpyr said:


> Newegg is showing the WD20PURX as the latest version. Anyone tried these? Or is it worth buying the older EURX version?


Found the answer in a thread on hard disks. Purple (PURX) bad, green (EURX) good.


----------



## calvinko

Have an already expanded 2TB using Ross Walked method in a TIVO Premier. Just purchased a 4TB WD40EZRX drive. Tried to use the same method, copied fine. However, cannot expand. Got message "expand did not finish successfully"

What do I need to do? 


Any help is appreciated.


Thank you


----------



## lexsar

I am attempting to clone over, expand and supersize my 320GB drive from a Premiere to a 2TB WD20EURX. Using jmfs version 104. I started it last night. It went through the copy and is now on "Retrying bad sectors ... Retry 1". It has been about 22 hours. Errsize: 450kb, errors: 94.

I ran WD Diagnostics on the WD20EURX prior to starting this and it checked out OK.

I am stuck here, any advice?


----------



## philco782

I tried this jmfs boot cd to upgrade my Premier4 500gb drive to a 4tb drive. I got a WD40PURX drive, and it seems to be working fine, even though I hear people not liking the Purple drives. I dunno, seemed like a good choice at the time I bought it, so I'm going to just go with it. So far its been in the Tivo for about a week and its running great.

Well, the way the JMFS method worked was, apparently, to do what amounts to a block by block copy from the old 500gb drive to the 4tb drive. Then the new 4tb drive has the exact same 14 partition layout that the old 500gb drive has. Running the Expand operation, it creates a 15th MFS partition of 2 TB. So now, the drive has roughly 2.5 TB of usable space. 1.5 TB is just vacant, unused, and unusable at the moment.

My current interpretation of how the JMFS method works for going 500gb -> 4tb, please correct me if wrong, is that I need a 2tb "intermediate" drive, where I run the JMFS disc to copy the 500tb to the 2tb drive. Then Expand. Then rearrange and copy partitions from 2tb to 4tb. Then coalesce two partitions. Then install 4tb into Premiere. Boot premiere. Tivo divorces a partition. Put 4tb back into computer. Run expand operation again.

Somewhere, I think I read that MFSTools 3.2 can do this without an intermediate drive step. The MFSTools 3.2 live CD has gone missing, but I managed to find the source code and get it compiled in an Ubuntu Live USB key. So I have this MFSTools 3.2 available to use right now.

The trick is, the documentation is quite sparse on MFSTools. Does anyone know what commands would be necessary to go directly from 500gb to 4tb with MFSTools?


----------



## jmbach

mfstool copy - a /dev/sdX /dev/sdY. This will copy and save recordings.


----------



## jmbach

As far as the JMFS expansion to 4TB, you will need a 2TB intermediate drive as you indicated.


----------



## lexsar

lexsar said:


> I am attempting to clone over, expand and supersize my 320GB drive from a Premiere to a 2TB WD20EURX. Using jmfs version 104. I started it last night. It went through the copy and is now on "Retrying bad sectors ... Retry 1". It has been about 22 hours. Errsize: 450kb, errors: 94.
> 
> I ran WD Diagnostics on the WD20EURX prior to starting this and it checked out OK.
> 
> I am stuck here, any advice?


Update: I ran DvrBARS to make a backup image of my original drive and it ran into errors and did not complete. The Tivo Premiere itself, seems to have no apparent issues but I now, more than ever, want to get this 2TB drive working in it. I am thinking now that my best bet is to get a TCD746320 image somewhere and start fresh. Ideas?


----------



## jmbach

Several ideas. 

- Run spinrite on the drive level 4 (May take a couple of days to finish) when the drive is connected either via SATA or eSata then retry the above. 

-Run MFSTools 3.2 to copy the 320GB to the 2TB. Use the command mfstool copy -a /dev/sdX /dev/sdY if you want to try and save recordings. Leave the -a out if you do not want to save recordings.

-With the drive connected via SATA or eSata, use HDD Raw Copy Tool to copy the drive.


----------



## lexsar

I have Spinrite so I will give this a shot and report back. Thanks!!


----------



## philco782

Well I tried the MFSTools method tonight. Unfortunately the process core dumped and then made the destination drive, which had a jmfs copy on it, unreadable to the TiVo. So I'm jmfs'ing the original drive over again :-(.

I guess the mfstools live disc was pulled for a very good reason!



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


----------



## philco782

:-(









Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


----------



## jmbach

philco782 said:


> Well I tried the MFSTools method tonight. Unfortunately the process core dumped and then made the destination drive, which had a jmfs copy on it, unreadable to the TiVo. So I'm jmfs'ing the original drive over again :-(.
> 
> I guess the mfstools live disc was pulled for a very good reason!
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


So MFSTools is copying from a drive to a destination drive that has your JMFS copy on it? So what does your source drive has on it?


----------



## philco782

jmbach said:


> So MFSTools is copying from a drive to a destination drive that has your JMFS copy on it? So what does your source drive has on it?


The source drive is the original 500gb TiVo factory installed drive. The destination drive is the new 4tb drive. I've been using the 4tb in the TiVo for the past week, which was created with jmfs, and only has 2.5tb usable space on it. I was hoping that since MFSTool crashed during what seemed like the "analyzing source drive" step, it would have left my 4tb drive alone but it didn't, it must've wiped the layout of the 4tb drive and then crashed trying to write. So to get the 4tb back into operation again, I has to do another jmfs copy from the 500gb to the 4tb.

I may just have to wait till I have free cash to buy a 2tb drive to do the intermediate drive method using jmfs.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


----------



## lexsar

jmbach said:


> Several ideas.
> 
> - Run spinrite on the drive level 4 (May take a couple of days to finish) when the drive is connected either via SATA or eSata then retry the above.
> 
> -Run MFSTools 3.2 to copy the 320GB to the 2TB. Use the command mfstool copy -a /dev/sdX /dev/sdY if you want to try and save recordings. Leave the -a out if you do not want to save recordings.
> 
> -With the drive connected via SATA or eSata, use HDD Raw Copy Tool to copy the drive.


Success!!!

I couldn't locate my copy of Spinrite and MFTools wouldn't fully boot, it seemed, so I went with your third suggestion. I copied the drive over with HDD Raw Copy Tool then ran jmfs to expand then supersize. After reinstalling the 2TB drive into my Tivo Premiere, it booted up fine with 318hrs of HD space!

Thanks for your help, jmbach!!


----------



## jmbach

You are welcome. Since it booted up, the bad spots on the original drive were in non critical areas. Consequently, you may have some recordings with glitches in them.


----------



## lexsar

jmbach said:


> You are welcome. Since it booted up, the bad spots on the original drive were in non critical areas. Consequently, you may have some recordings with glitches in them.


No worries, there were only about 10 episodes of a single in standard def transferred from an old S2 that are expendable. Thanks again!


----------



## philco782

Thanks JMBach for your advice and help. I got your message but cant reply until I have x number of postings so id like to express my thanks. I will keep posted as to how the future upgrade goes, once I can find the free time


----------



## krausswilliam

? regarding using images instead of copying drives

I think I know the answer.

copy tivo image (*.vhd) onto drive using dvrbars 
then use jmfs to expand, supersize.

is there any way to do this all in jmfs? or mfstools? without having to work in windows at all and avoiding one step altogether?

thanks,


----------



## jmbach

You could make a backup with MFSTools 3.2 and then restore from that backup. MFSTools 3.2 will automatically expand the backup while restoring to make use of the whole drive.


----------



## TiVoJimmy

I attempted to upgrade my Premiere 746320 from 1 TB to 3TB last weekend but failed.

Originally, this was a 320GB which I copy and expanded to the 1TB. So I treated the 1 TB as the intermediate drive.

I used JMFS 1.05 using the following:



Code:


./tivo_copy_rearranged.sh /dev/1TB_drive /dev/3TB_drive 1 11 12 13 15 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 14 10

Then verified:



Code:


./mfslayout.sh /dev/3TB_drive

Then coalesce partitions:



Code:


./tivo_coalesce.sh /dev/DestinationDrive 12 13

That was all okay. Then removed the 3TB drive from the PC and installed in the TiVo to divorce the missing partition. Once it was divorced and the TiVo *started* rebooting, I pulled the plug. I did not wait for it to be completely up.

Next I put the 3TB back in the PC and booted JMFS. I walked away from my PC for a minute, when I returned I found that the PC booted into WIN 7, not JMFS off the CD.

*When I tried to run JMFS to expand, JMFS stated it could not find a TiVo drive.*

I verified the drive was there by finding the name, device location:



Code:


dmesg | less

Could it have failed because I pulled the drive from the TiVo before it was completely up after the divorce and reboot? Or could it be because the PC booted into WIN 7 while the drive was connected?

Anyways, I plan on trying again tomorrow. If anyone could point out something I missed it would be appreciated.

Oh, forgot to mention, I tried putting the 3TB in the TiVo after JMFS could not find it. The TiVo this time was stuck on Starting Up screen. I waited 20 minutes before pulling the plug.

Thanks,

Jim


----------



## ducker

isn't the cap on a Premier 2TB?


----------



## ggieseke

ducker said:


> isn't the cap on a Premier 2TB?


No, that limit went away somewhere around the 20.3.x software. 4TB is fairly easy these days and I think jmbach has built a 6TB Premiere.


----------



## jmbach

TiVoJimmy said:


> I attempted to upgrade my Premiere 746320 from 1 TB to 3TB last weekend but failed.
> 
> Originally, this was a 320GB which I copy and expanded to the 1TB. So I treated the 1 TB as the intermediate drive.
> 
> I used JMFS 1.05 using the following:
> 
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> ./tivo_copy_rearranged.sh /dev/1TB_drive /dev/3TB_drive 1 11 12 13 15 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 14 10
> 
> Then verified:
> 
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> ./mfslayout.sh /dev/3TB_drive
> 
> Then coalesce partitions:
> 
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> ./tivo_coalesce.sh /dev/DestinationDrive 12 13
> 
> That was all okay. Then removed the 3TB drive from the PC and installed in the TiVo to divorce the missing partition. Once it was divorced and the TiVo *started* rebooting, I pulled the plug. I did not wait for it to be completely up.
> 
> Next I put the 3TB back in the PC and booted JMFS. I walked away from my PC for a minute, when I returned I found that the PC booted into WIN 7, not JMFS off the CD.
> 
> *When I tried to run JMFS to expand, JMFS stated it could not find a TiVo drive.*
> 
> I verified the drive was there by finding the name, device location:
> 
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> dmesg | less
> 
> Could it have failed because I pulled the drive from the TiVo before it was completely up after the divorce and reboot? Or could it be because the PC booted into WIN 7 while the drive was connected?
> 
> Anyways, I plan on trying again tomorrow. If anyone could point out something I missed it would be appreciated.
> 
> Oh, forgot to mention, I tried putting the 3TB in the TiVo after JMFS could not find it. The TiVo this time was stuck on Starting Up screen. I waited 20 minutes before pulling the plug.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jim


The steps look correct. Not sure what went wrong. I would let the TiVo boot back up completely after the divorce and then navigate to the screen to initiate a restart. Pull the plug after all the lights flash.

If your Windows machine automatically initializes any new drive it sees, then that could have done it as well.


----------



## telemark

JMFS is not as informative when things go wrong.

Posting the Block0, APM, and MFS superblock, would probably tell us much about what happened or didn't.

Block0, I use:
dd if=/dev/sdX count=1 | hexdump -C

APM, I use:
pmdmp /dev/sdX
but i think pdisk/tdisk is probably on most iso's


----------



## TiVoJimmy

Today I retried with success, almost. First, the TiVo takes 20+ minutes to get past the "Starting Up" screen. With the 3TB in the TiVO, divorced, not expanded, it works as a 1TB, but takes forever to get booted up. 

After expanding and back in the TiVo, I can't get past the "Starting Up" screen. 

Telemark- if I hook up my newly expanded 3TB to the PC and run pdisk, will that get you any info that could help?

Thanks,

Jim


----------



## telemark

So there's a long chain / series of events to get to a successful boot with any one piece missing causing the whole thing to fail.

Sounds like something weird to me in MFS or a bad drive. I think the best step would be into a Linux PC to check the logs and whether JMFS thinks it's valid right now.


----------



## mattack

Darn, so my Premiere 4 just has the stock drive it came with.. I expanded my Roamio Plus last year (and am yes, almost perpetually full, and I realize this will happen with a new drive.. heh)..

So it sounds like I _can't_ just expand to a 4 TB drive with jmfs..


----------



## jmbach

I can attest that MFSTools 3.2 can expand your image to 4TB and keep your recordings. I will work you, depending on how many recordings you have, it might take a couple of days for it to do it.


----------



## Anotherpyr

Can I go from 320gb to 3tb without an intermediate drive on a premiere?


----------



## jmbach

Anotherpyr said:


> Can I go from 320gb to 3tb without an intermediate drive on a premiere?


If you use MFSTools 3.2 you can. You can go up to a 4TB drive with a straight forward copy command.


----------



## lpwcomp

jmbach said:


> If you use MFSTools 3.2 you can. You can go up to a 4TB drive with a straight forward copy command.


Especially if it's showing a red circle next to the entry for next Wednesday night.


----------



## Anotherpyr

jmbach said:


> If you use MFSTools 3.2 you can. You can go up to a 4TB drive with a straight forward copy command.


Assuming it worked. But it fails to recognize the drive using USB to SATA adapters. JMFS sees the drive and detects it as a TiVo drive. I haven't been able to get a successful copy to the 3tb drive yet. I haven't had or needed a desktop computer in years.


----------



## jmbach

I use a laptop with all my TiVo projects. Only time I had an issue with USB to SATA adapter not being recognized was when the ISO I was using did not have the USB3 driver for that port. 
What set up are you using and are you compiling from source or using the ISO I made?


----------



## Anotherpyr

jmbach said:


> I use a laptop with all my TiVo projects. Only time I had an issue with USB to SATA adapter not being recognized was when the ISO I was using did not have the USB3 driver for that port.
> What set up are you using and are you compiling from source or using the ISO I made?


The only source I could find was mfstool 2.0. I was using your iso. I've managed to get jmfs to see the 3tb drive.

Mfstool attempts to do things with /dev/sdx10 and udev only creates the /dev/sdx device file.


----------



## jmbach

Anotherpyr said:


> The only source I could find was mfstool 2.0. I was using your iso. I've managed to get jmfs to see the 3tb drive.
> 
> Mfstool attempts to do things with /dev/sdx10 and udev only creates the /dev/sdx device file.


When you go to the link in the OP. Click on the code tab and download the snapshot. That will give you 3.2.


----------



## tivodude007

I need to upgrade my Premiere which is failing before it dies completely. I have a 746 Premiere. 
I think that I used WinMFS to upgrade my TiVo HD series 3. It was not too bad a project because the software was dummy friendly. (Not command lines that I can remember) I understand that WinMFS is not good for Premiere. What software is using a GUI for TiVo upgrading? The old software I had used Dot Net (I think) to operate.


----------



## ggieseke

tivodude007 said:


> I need to upgrade my Premiere which is failing before it dies completely. I have a 746 Premiere.
> I think that I used WinMFS to upgrade my TiVo HD series 3. It was not too bad a project because the software was dummy friendly. (Not command lines that I can remember) I understand that WinMFS is not good for Premiere. What software is using a GUI for TiVo upgrading? The old software I had used Dot Net (I think) to operate.


DvrBARS lets you back up and restore. The Windows GUI is very TiVo user friendly, but it doesn't expand if you want to upgrade to a bigger drive.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=503261

If you want to expand, use jmfs. It's a Java-based Linux boot CD.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=455968


----------



## izee888

Looking for a 746320 image for the Premiere to restore a failing drive.


----------



## lpwcomp

izee888 said:


> Looking for a 746320 image for the Premiere to restore a failing drive.


Unless the drive has completely failed, you're better off backing it up yourself and restoring the backup to the new drive.


----------



## izee888

lpwcomp said:


> Unless the drive has completely failed, you're better off backing it up yourself and restoring the backup to the new drive.


I attempted to copy the original drive onto a new 2tb drive using mfstools 3.2. Each run would seem to fail at around the 50% mark.

My setup for the transfer is simple. Just a barebone computer with the tivo drive connected and the new drive. Just can't seem to complete the transfer.

Sent from my A0001 using Tapatalk


----------



## ggieseke

izee888 said:


> Looking for a 746320 image for the Premiere to restore a failing drive.


PM sent.


----------



## izee888

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


Much thanks

Sent from my A0001 using Tapatalk


----------



## lpwcomp

izee888 said:


> I attempted to copy the original drive onto a new 2tb drive using mfstools 3.2. Each run would seem to fail at around the 50% mark.
> 
> My setup for the transfer is simple. Just a barebone computer with the tivo drive connected and the new drive. Just can't seem to complete the transfer.
> 
> Sent from my A0001 using Tapatalk


I was suggesting using DVRBaRS to create a limited backup then restoring that to the new drive to at least retain your settings.


----------



## philco782

Anotherpyr said:


> The only source I could find was mfstool 2.0. I was using your iso. I've managed to get jmfs to see the 3tb drive.
> 
> Mfstool attempts to do things with /dev/sdx10 and udev only creates the /dev/sdx device file.


I had the exact error message when trying to use jmbach's mfstools 3.2 ISO. I had to run su with password of Linux to get mfscopy to run without that error.

It was driving me nuts for a while there! I am also using a laptop with Usb to Sata adapters.

I'm running the copy from the original 500gb TiVo drive to a brand new WD40PURX right now. I had to wait a while to save up enough money to buy another hard drive since the first copy I made with jmfs is running in the TiVo right now, albeit with just 2.5tb usable due to the limitation of jmfs.

I'll keep posted on how well this works  big thanks to everyone here especially jmbach putting the live mfstools 3.2 ISO online 

It worked where the version of the mfstools source code that I compiled on a live Ubuntu USB key failed.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


----------



## philco782

It worked! It worked! Thanks so much everyone! 

p.s. I opted not to run the Supersize option after noticing the default size limit thing in the help text, maybe looking like it wasn't ready for such a large drive (4tb).


----------



## tivodude007

I have accomplished the upgrade to 3TB, but don't know where the WDiddle disk software is located to fix the Seagate that I am building. I suspect I should change the setting to ensure that the going to sleep doesn't mess the drive up at some time in the future.


----------



## lpwcomp

tivodude007 said:


> I have accomplished the upgrade to 3TB, but don't know where the WDiddle disk software is located to fix the Seagate that I am building. I suspect I should change the setting to ensure that the going to sleep doesn't mess the drive up at some time in the future.


Why would you even attempt to run a Western Digital utility on a Seagate disk?


----------



## tivodude007

I guess I really want to know where to get the Park/Sleep Disable on Seagate 3TB Drives... Seagate did not seem to give much details on what is on the SeagateTools software. The drive is working fine without sound or park tweak for now, but it sounds like I will ultimately need to do the tweak.\

I was wandering why it was called W Didle... ( The Western Digital prg )

Yes the Premiere will upgrade to 3TB using DVRBars to copy or backup to a 1.5TB or other drive and then copying the 320GB of partition to the 3TB (using jmfs) then Expanding in a jif to 2.3TB??? then SuperSizing to the next level in a second Jif. It was much easier than I expected. KUDOs to the team for putting together such efficient and relatively easy to use software. It looks rough in the instructions if you envision doing coding in Linux, but it is simply a simple, easy to use, menu in DOS or Linux. I copied and Expanded, and Supersized in nothing flat once I realized that my USB drives were not 3TB compatible and put the 3TB in my Gigabyte i5 system. It just occurred to me that you may want to disconnect other 3TB Drives in your desktop computer. The Seagate that I TiVo'ed was a match for my Data Drive and I had to shut down and disconnect it to ensure that it did not get SuperSized instead of the TiVo Drive.... Just a Thought. The External USB drives were giving me fits until I thought about the possibility that they were not useful over 2TB... They Weren't....

Back to current issue... What software is recommended for sleep on the Seagates?


----------



## unitron

tivodude007 said:


> I guess I really want to know where to get the Park/Sleep Disable on Seagate 3TB Drives... Seagate did not seem to give much details on what is on the SeagateTools software. The drive is working fine without sound or park tweak for now, but it sounds like I will ultimately need to do the tweak.\
> 
> I was wandering why it was called W Didle... ( The Western Digital prg )
> 
> Yes the Premiere will upgrade to 3TB using DVRBars to copy or backup to a 1.5TB or other drive and then copying the 320GB of partition to the 3TB (using jmfs) then Expanding in a jif to 2.3TB??? then SuperSizing to the next level in a second Jif. It was much easier than I expected. KUDOs to the team for putting together such efficient and relatively easy to use software. It looks rough in the instructions if you envision doing coding in Linux, but it is simply a simple, easy to use, menu in DOS or Linux. I copied and Expanded, and Supersized in nothing flat once I realized that my USB drives were not 3TB compatible and put the 3TB in my Gigabyte i5 system. It just occurred to me that you may want to disconnect other 3TB Drives in your desktop computer. The Seagate that I TiVo'ed was a match for my Data Drive and I had to shut down and disconnect it to ensure that it did not get SuperSized instead of the TiVo Drive.... Just a Thought. The External USB drives were giving me fits until I thought about the possibility that they were not useful over 2TB... They Weren't....
> 
> Back to current issue... What software is recommended for sleep on the Seagates?


If you're doing the work with a GigaByte brand motherboard, be sure you've taken precautions against the board putting a Host Protected Area on the drive you've taken out of the TiVo or the one you're going to be putting in it.


----------



## tivodude007

jmbach said:


> If you use MFSTools 3.2 you can. You can go up to a 4TB drive with a straight forward copy command.


I thought that only jmfs would expand and supersize a Premiere drive. 
How do you get MFSTools 3.2?


----------



## tivodude007

unitron said:


> If you're doing the work with a GigaByte brand motherboard, be sure you've taken precautions against the board putting a Host Protected Area on the drive you've taken out of the TiVo or the one you're going to be putting in it.


I have never heard of a Host Protected Area. What is that?


----------



## unitron

tivodude007 said:


> I have never heard of a Host Protected Area. What is that?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

It results in the drive reporting itself as slightly smaller than it actually is.

In the case of Gigabyte brand motherboards, it's an area at the end of the drive they set aside for some backup scheme they have.

I don't know if they still do it or not, or if they still do it but offer an option in BIOS to turn it off, but my circa 2008 or so P4 and AMD boards by them do it with no notice or warning and no way to defeat it.

They do it to what the board considers the "first" hard drive.

If the board has PATA/IDE headers, then it starts with the Primary Master and goes through all the possibilities (Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave) and then starts with the lowest number SATA port.

First place it finds a drive, that's where it assumes you're going to boot Windows from and that's the drive it monkeys with.

As long as you have a "sacrificial" drive (and it can be your boot drive) attached "upstream" of any other drives you hook to the board for any reason, it'll see that it's already done it and not do it again. But if it gets to another drive before it gets to the one it already put an HPA on, it's not smart enough to not put one on that other drive. It does this automatically every time you boot the computer.

It doesn't bother to check to see if there's already a partition which includes the area it wants to set aside--it just does it.

If you're using a drive larger than the size the TiVo originally came with, then the HPA won't mess up putting an image on the drive, you'll just wind up with a little less space than you would have had once you expand the drive (which you should do as a separate process from copying or restoring no matter what brand motherboard you have for reasons that have nothing to do with HPAs).


----------



## gespears

unitron said:


> It results in the drive reporting itself as slightly smaller than it actually is.


Does it normally have a setting in BIOS to turn it off?

One would hope so.


----------



## SVTarHeel

I'm currently in the process of using jmfs to copy a Premiere's WD10EURX to a WD20EURS. Previously, I've only copied the small OEM drive to the 1TB and then expanded and supersized it.

This copy has been running for over 24 hours and shows a little over 129,000MB copied. Is that within the expected range? I'm not really in a hurry but don't want to invest unnecessary time either.

Thanks in advance for any help.


----------



## jmbach

SVTarHeel said:


> I'm currently in the process of using jmfs to copy a Premiere's WD10EURX to a WD20EURS. Previously, I've only copied the small OEM drive to the 1TB and then expanded and supersized it.
> 
> This copy has been running for over 24 hours and shows a little over 129,000MB copied. Is that within the expected range? I'm not really in a hurry but don't want to invest unnecessary time either.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.


If I understand you correctly, this 1TB WD10EURX has been expanded already. If this is the case, you cannot use JMFS to expand it again without a lot of prep fist during the copy process. You would be better off using MFSTools 3.2 to do the copy as it will expand while it copies. For a 1TB drive expect about a day to copy with MFSTools 3.2 and make sure you use USB3 or SATA. Otherwise expect it to take a lot longer.


----------



## unitron

gespears said:


> Does it normally have a setting in BIOS to turn it off?
> 
> One would hope so.


Well, there's nothing in then BIOSes of either of my Gigabyte boards that'll let me disable it.

Maybe they added it to later models, but I'm not going to risk any money to find out.


----------



## SVTarHeel

jmbach said:


> You would be better off using MFSTools 3.2 to do the copy as it will expand while it copies.


Thanks - that's hugely helpful info. I'm not sure if my MFSTools disc is booting properly. After all of the typical Linux live scrolling text, I'm left with the following:

[email protected]:~$

Is that where I start? If so, can someone share the command line syntax for copying my 1TB drive to my 2TB one? And, do I need to wipe the aborted jmfs copy attempt from the 2TB drive first?


----------



## jmbach

Did you download the iso I posted in that thread?


----------



## SVTarHeel

jmbach said:


> Did you download the iso I posted in that thread?


I have an iso of 3.2 that I downloaded back on July 9th. I don't remember if that came from SF or not and I'm also not sure I saw the thread post you're referring to.
_
Edited to add:_
I just found a post in a 3.2 thread with links to the isos you made. Getting that now...


----------



## jmbach

SVTarHeel said:


> I have an iso of 3.2 that I downloaded back on July 9th. I don't remember if that came from SF or not and I'm also not sure I saw the thread post you're referring to.


The basic instructions and the downloads are found here.

The command would be "mfstool copy -a /dev/sdX /dev/sdY"


----------



## jmyshral

jmbach said:


> The basic instructions and the downloads are found here.
> 
> The command would be "mfstool copy -a /dev/sdX /dev/sdY"


I have a naive question since I have never run MFS Tools (2.0 or 3.2) before. I tried both jmbach's ISO and USB bootable versions - both can get to the SUSE startup screen when I boot my PC, but after I select a version from the menu, I get a black screen and then a bunch of incomprehensible messages but the PC just seems to hang at that point. It never actually makes it to a command prompt.

Am I supposed to run "su" at this point and put in a password (tivo or Linux), or does the ISO just not work on my configuration?

Will the program hang at this stage if I don't have any recognized tivo drives connected? (I am basically just trying to run the MFStool first to see if it works before I connect my tivo drives).

A Youtube video showing how to use the program would be most effective at this stage I think.

Ultimately I would like to copy my original 320GB drive to a new 3TB drive for a Premiere. Is it recommended to use the "i" switch in the copy command as well?

mfstool copy -ai /dev/sdX /dev/sdY


----------



## jmbach

jmyshral said:


> I have a naive question since I have never run MFS Tools (2.0 or 3.2) before. I tried both jmbach's ISO and USB bootable versions - both can get to the SUSE startup screen when I boot my PC, but after I select a version from the menu, I get a black screen and then a bunch of incomprehensible messages but the PC just seems to hang at that point. It never actually makes it to a command prompt.
> 
> Am I supposed to run "su" at this point and put in a password (tivo or Linux), or does the ISO just not work on my configuration?
> 
> Will the program hang at this stage if I don't have any recognized tivo drives connected? (I am basically just trying to run the MFStool first to see if it works before I connect my tivo drives).
> 
> A Youtube video showing how to use the program would be most effective at this stage I think.
> 
> Ultimately I would like to copy my original 320GB drive to a new 3TB drive for a Premiere. Is it recommended to use the "i" switch in the copy command as well?
> 
> mfstool copy -ai /dev/sdX /dev/sdY


If it never makes it to the command prompt, then it is hanging up on something. Usually it is a device and driver issue. You do not need any TiVo drives connected for it to boot up to the command prompt. I think there are other boot choices on the start up screen. You might try those to see if you can get it to boot to the command prompt. What system are you using to boot it up with? It is by trial and error but sometimes disabling devices in the BIOS will allow it to boot. Other than that, you may have to try a different computer.


----------



## jmyshral

jmbach said:


> If it never makes it to the command prompt, then it is hanging up on something. Usually it is a device and driver issue. You do not need any TiVo drives connected for it to boot up to the command prompt. I think there are other boot choices on the start up screen. You might try those to see if you can get it to boot to the command prompt. What system are you using to boot it up with? It is by trial and error but sometimes disabling devices in the BIOS will allow it to boot. Other than that, you may have to try a different computer.


Success! I was able to run the MFSTools 3.2 USB version on another PC and booted the "recovery" boot option on the alternate boot menu (or whatever it is called). Anyway, I booted from USB and successfully copied and expanded my original 320GB drive to a new 3TB drive yielding 479 HD hours. The only thing that didn't seem to copy over was my channel lineup and the guide info.

Thanks jkozee for MFS Tools 3.2 and thanks jmbach for creating the images.


----------



## SVTarHeel

jmbach said:


> The command would be "mfstool copy -a /dev/sdX /dev/sdY"


I was able to successfully burn your image and get logged in (I'm at a red linux:/home/tivo # with blinking cursor, so I'm hoping that's where I need to be.)

I'm assuming your command line above is intended to have my drive letters substituted for X and Y. I'm using one drive directly connected drive and another in a dock. How do I verify how MFSTools has allocated the drive letters to the 1TB & 2TB drives?


----------



## jmbach

You can run 'fdisk -l' (lower case L) and that will tell you information about the drive. Things like drive letter and size. Now if only one is a TiVo drive and the other is blank. You can use the command 'mfstool info /dev/sdX' to see which one is the TiVo drive.


----------



## jmbach

You might need to go to super user at which case type 'su' at the command prompt and then 'Linux' for the password.


----------



## SVTarHeel

jmbach said:


> You can run 'fdisk -l' (lower case L) and that will tell you information about the drive.


Perfect. Thanks so much!

My 1TB drive is sda. So, to copy he 1TB drive to the 2TB drive, my command line entry is "mfstool copy -a /dev/sda /dev/sdb" correct?

Since I aborted the eternal copying from 1TB > 2TB that I attempted under jmfs, do I need to wipe the 2TB drive somehow, or will MFSTools just overwrite anything it finds? And you mentioned earlier that it will expand as it copies - do I need to add a command for that or is it automagic?


----------



## jmbach

It should overwrite the destination without issue. You might try using 'mfstool copy - ai /dev/sdX /dev/sdY' . Some one has mentioned that it did not copy over channel information. The 'i' copies over extra stuff that might prevent that. I am not sure as I have not tested the difference.


----------



## SVTarHeel

jmbach said:


> You might try using 'mfstool copy - ai /dev/sdX /dev/sdY'


I took out the space between - and ai and started it. It's running like a champ. We'll see what happens.

I appreciate your help.


----------



## jmbach

Excellent


----------



## SVTarHeel

SVTarHeel said:


> It's running like a champ. We'll see what happens.


I let it run for a bit. After it started displaying the remaining time, it was showing something like 250 hours, so I killed that, wiped the 2TB drive and restarted the process with both of the WD Green SATA drives attached to the same computer and booting to the MFSTools disc from the PATA optical drive. It's been running about 3 hours and shows about 4 to go, so I should be able to check the success or failure when I have time Sunday afternoon.

Since the expansion is taking place as it copies, is there anything else I should do to either drive while they're attached and MFSTools is booted and running?


----------



## jmbach

Nope. You should be good to go.


----------



## lukinsj

My hard drive totally failed and I am unable to create an image from my old drive. Does anyone know where I can get a standard image for my tivo to get it back up and running? Thanks.


----------



## ggieseke

lukinsj said:


> My hard drive totally failed and I am unable to create an image from my old drive. Does anyone know where I can get a standard image for my tivo to get it back up and running? Thanks.


PM sent.


----------



## mattack

FAQ type question: The limit for this is 2 TB, right?

and mfstool can go to 4 TB?

If so, I think that info (2 TB limit + link to the mfstool thread) should be added to the first message in the thread. (Links to other info about > 4 TB would be good too, but AFAIK from my looking around my subscribed threads, that's ONLY for Roamios with even more advanced hacking.)


----------



## jonahlee

Am having issues with jmfs tools 104.

I have Premiere XL and the hard drive us failing. It has been stuttering, and the drive got loud, so i shut down my Tivo.

I have a MacPro, and can't get Jmfs tools to boot from the CD, so I have used Parallels to run jmfs tools. It works, but unfortunately I can't get any of the SATA drives to mount (My OWC SSD in pci shows up, but no SATA drives internally or extenally via my Sonnet Tempo), but I can get them to mount via Firewire 800. I had been using external firewire 800 insertable housings, but on each Copy attempt it failed, so i put the 2 hard drives in external OWC housings with firewire 800. Previously the copy had made it to about 500000 MB before failing, but the last attempt made it to 875000 MB before failing, though it did show 5 small errors. I am trying the copy again, but am doubtful it will make it all the way. I am not sure how to access the log file in the parallels mount as it doesn't show up on my mac. Would that file help? 

I tried using the same method to try the Ubuntu rescue CD (using parallels) but i couldn't get any drives except my SSD to show up, so I couldn't try a straight ddrescue.


----------



## unitron

jonahlee said:


> Am having issues with jmfs tools 104.
> 
> I have Premiere XL and the hard drive us failing. It has been stuttering, and the drive got loud, so i shut down my Tivo.
> 
> I have a MacPro, and can't get Jmfs tools to boot from the CD, so I have used Parallels to run jmfs tools. It works, but unfortunately I can't get any of the SATA drives to mount (My OWC SSD in pci shows up, but no SATA drives internally or extenally via my Sonnet Tempo), but I can get them to mount via Firewire 800. I had been using external firewire 800 insertable housings, but on each Copy attempt it failed, so i put the 2 hard drives in external OWC housings with firewire 800. Previously the copy had made it to about 500000 MB before failing, but the last attempt made it to 875000 MB before failing, though it did show 5 small errors. I am trying the copy again, but am doubtful it will make it all the way. I am not sure how to access the log file in the parallels mount as it doesn't show up on my mac. Would that file help?
> 
> I tried using the same method to try the Ubuntu rescue CD (using parallels) but i couldn't get any drives except my SSD to show up, so I couldn't try a straight ddrescue.


Is there a way to take the innards out of one of your external enclosures so you can hook up the source drive but still have it sitting out in the open air?

It's a drastic, time-consuming, lot-of-work measure, but I've had some success using the

ddrescue

utility which is on the jmfs cd (and is what jmfs uses for the copy part of what it does), but bypassing the jmfs automated part and invoking

ddrescue

from the command line with the most conservative, or extreme, depending on how you look at it, options with regard to how big a chunk it tries to copy at a time, how many re-tries it does, etc.

That's in conjuction with putting the drive in the freezer overnight and also preparing a number of ziploc-type bags as ice packs.

You wrap the drive in paper towel before putting it in the freezer to prevent condensation on it or leaving any skin on it when you take it out, and you put the drive on top of an ice pack on top of a pad of paper toweling with another ice pack on top of it, and change them out (and pop them back in the freezer) as they melt. Obviously you want bags that you can be sure are perfectly sealed so no melt water escapes at all.

One time it did this, I think it was with a 2TB drive, and it took about a day and a half or longer, and many ice pack changes, but in the end it was sufficiently successful.


----------



## jonahlee

I had a couple of external housings, but it kept failing in those. I put them in OWC metal cases and aimed a vornado at them, and it finally worked after about 30 hours! And it expanded and supersized! Saved my shows and added trippled my Capacity! Could not be happier! Thanks for the help, and especially the tools!


----------



## philco782

A very long time ago, back in the days of ultra-reliable Maxtor drives, I would leave the entire computer in the freezer, and run the monitor and keyboard wires through the door seals to recover data.

I recall an issue back then where a particular brominated fire retardant used in the encapsulation of the drive controller's main microchip was faulty and the repeated expansion and contraction due to temperature cycling would break the little wires connecting the chip to the leads.

Anyway, with this method, you don't need to worry about condensation. Worked like a champ!


----------



## ncvaun

Ok, please be gentle.... It's been awhile since i upgraded any of my tivo units... the last one I did was an HD (652 model; 2 tuners) w/ a 1TB WD-HD back in 2007. Im sure a lot has changed since then ( or at least i hope  ). Anyhow, it looks like there are a bunch of better ways now to do this instead of using InstantCake (back in 2007). Wanted to know if someone can point me to a page where it has all of the instructions (and software downloads) to upgrade one of my Tivo Premier (746 model; 2 Tuners) with a 3TB WD-HD?

Also, does anyone know what WD-HD works best these days? (I remember awhile back certain WD-HD would work but you have to do a physical power cycle on the unit to get it to work after each reboot. )

Thank you all in advance and I appreciate any and all feedback.


----------



## azroadie

I'm attempting to preemptively replace a failing HD in a TIVO Premier XL. I'm hoping to use the instructions in the beginning of this thread but with it originating in 2010 with nearly 3000 posts I'm hoping someone can review my plan and let me know if I'm on the correct path or may have any issues. I'm particularly concerned with the software version my tivo is currently running and if this will cause and issue. 

Here some info (I'm a new member so can't post a screen shot or links to the items so I described as best possible.):

1. Tivo system info Tivo series 4, software version 2035.6.RC14-01-2-748
2. A laptop computer 
3. A new HD (A Western Digital 2 TB WD AV-GP SATA III Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM AV Hard Drive WD20EURX) 
4. Dual eSATA docking station (Thermaltake BlacX) 

Thanks for all the help!


----------



## unitron

azroadie said:


> I'm attempting to preemptively replace a failing HD in a TIVO Premier XL. I'm hoping to use the instructions in the beginning of this thread but with it originating in 2010 with nearly 3000 posts I'm hoping someone can review my plan and let me know if I'm on the correct path or may have any issues. I'm particularly concerned with the software version my tivo is currently running and if this will cause and issue.
> 
> Here some info (I'm a new member so can't post a screen shot or links to the items so I described as best possible.):
> 
> 1. Tivo system info Tivo series 4, software version 2035.6.RC14-01-2-748
> 2. A laptop computer
> 3. A new HD (A Western Digital 2 TB WD AV-GP SATA III Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM AV Hard Drive WD20EURX)
> 4. Dual eSATA docking station (Thermaltake BlacX)
> 
> Thanks for all the help!


If you can burn yourself a bootable copy of the jmfs cd, you can do the same with the Ultimate Boot CD.

Do so, then use the most recent version of the WD diagnostic software to run the long test on that EURX before you put it into service.

How does that docking station connect to the laptop? Does the laptop have an eSATA port? If the bytes gettting "Xeroxed" by jmfs using

ddrescue

have to go from the source drive down the cable into the laptop to be turned around and sent back up that same cable to the target drive, that's going to increase the time necessary to do it.


----------



## azroadie

unitron said:


> If you can burn yourself a bootable copy of the jmfs cd, you can do the same with the Ultimate Boot CD.
> 
> Do so, then use the most recent version of the WD diagnostic software to run the long test on that EURX before you put it into service.
> 
> How does that docking station connect to the laptop? Does the laptop have an eSATA port? If the bytes gettting "Xeroxed" by jmfs using
> 
> ddrescue
> 
> have to go from the source drive down the cable into the laptop to be turned around and sent back up that same cable to the target drive, that's going to increase the time necessary to do it.


Thanks for the reply!  The laptop does not have a eSATA port. So my option was to buy 2 individual eSATA to USB adapters or one that has docks for 2 eSATA drives. The latter option is less expensive and won't require so many USB ports or power sources. Since I can't post the link, here's the description of the dock (I'll be using USB3.0 as I do not have a eSATA port.) (In my last post, I listed a USB 2.0 dock, but found a USB 3.0 version so updating the post accordingly)

"Turn any Serial ATA hard drive into an external USB 3.0 storage device in minutes with the Thermaltake BlacX 5G hard drive docking station. The support for USB 3.0 SuperSpeed technology enables lighting data transfer speed of up to 5 Gbps."

Any foreseen issues so far with my tivo software version? Thanks again!


----------



## andydumi

So I successfully used this tool a couple of years ago to upgrade a Premiere to 2TB. Now I have a Roamio, so I want to put the original 500GB back in the Premiere and reclaim the 2TB drive for other uses.

Does the same process outlined in the original post apply? I have only about 50GB worth of recordings on the 2TB, so they should transfer to the 500 without issue.

Also, any market for a Premiere? Tivo is offering to make it a lifetime one for $100.


----------



## unitron

azroadie said:


> Thanks for the reply!  The laptop does not have a eSATA port. So my option was to buy 2 individual eSATA to USB adapters or one that has docks for 2 eSATA drives. The latter option is less expensive and won't require so many USB ports or power sources. Since I can't post the link, here's the description of the dock (I'll be using USB3.0 as I do not have a eSATA port.) (In my last post, I listed a USB 2.0 dock, but found a USB 3.0 version so updating the post accordingly)
> 
> "Turn any Serial ATA hard drive into an external USB 3.0 storage device in minutes with the Thermaltake BlacX 5G hard drive docking station. The support for USB 3.0 SuperSpeed technology enables lighting data transfer speed of up to 5 Gbps."
> 
> Any foreseen issues so far with my tivo software version? Thanks again!


Have you run in to any problems with that WD20EURX?


----------



## azroadie

unitron said:


> Have you run in to any problems with that WD20EURX?


I just ordered it and it should be here in a few days. I've seen that drive recommended for the Premiers so don't expect any problems, but will let you know.


----------



## unitron

azroadie said:


> I just ordered it and it should be here in a few days. I've seen that drive recommended for the Premiers so don't expect any problems, but will let you know.


Save all the paperwork, recently manufactured versions of that drive seem to have a problem getting "TiVo'ed" which they didn't used to have.


----------



## rkrenicki

--


----------



## jrtroo

andydumi said:


> So I successfully used this tool a couple of years ago to upgrade a Premiere to 2TB. Now I have a Roamio, so I want to put the original 500GB back in the Premiere and reclaim the 2TB drive for other uses.
> 
> Does the same process outlined in the original post apply? I have only about 50GB worth of recordings on the 2TB, so they should transfer to the 500 without issue.
> 
> Also, any market for a Premiere? Tivo is offering to make it a lifetime one for $100.


Just put the old drive back in. Done (may need to update settings and such).

Have not heard of lifetime of $100 offering for a few months. Only worth it if you were looking to use it, gift it, or would want to deal with selling it. Check craigslist for local pricing.


----------



## unitron

andydumi said:


> So I successfully used this tool a couple of years ago to upgrade a Premiere to 2TB. Now I have a Roamio, so I want to put the original 500GB back in the Premiere and reclaim the 2TB drive for other uses.
> 
> Does the same process outlined in the original post apply? I have only about 50GB worth of recordings on the 2TB, so they should transfer to the 500 without issue.
> 
> Also, any market for a Premiere? Tivo is offering to make it a lifetime one for $100.


I'm seeing 2 tuner lifetimed Premieres on a couple of Craigslist sites for $150.

You can't use jmfs to copy the 2TB to the 500, even if there are no recordings on it.

Perhaps the new version of the MFS Tools can do it.

But that's a different thread.

This is the jmfs thread.

jmfs is designed to copy the original drive to another, larger one, and then expand into the extra space by doing some partition voodoo.

The expansion part of it understands TiVo partitions somewhat, but the copy part just "Xerox'es" bytes from one location to another.


----------



## cmh62

Is jmfs only for Series 4 (Premiere) upgrades or will it work on Series 3 (652160) also? Which is the best software to use on the 652160? 

I tried upgrading my 652160 with jmfs and although jmfs reported the 160GB drive successfully copied to a 1TB drive and that the 1TB was successfully expanded and super sized, my TiVo would not recognize the extra storage space on the larger drive even after a Clear and Delete. Thank you.


----------



## unitron

cmh62 said:


> Is jmfs only for Series 4 (Premiere) upgrades or will it work on Series 3 (652160) also? Which is the best software to use on the 652160?
> 
> I tried upgrading my 652160 with jmfs and although jmfs reported the 160GB drive successfully copied to a 1TB drive and that the 1TB was successfully expanded and super sized, my TiVo would not recognize the extra storage space on the larger drive even after a Clear and Delete. Thank you.


jmfs was designed to work with the Premiere, and it apparently happened that some of the changes to the file system that were going to be introduced in the Premiere actually made it to the later Series 3 models, the HD (652) and HD XL (658), so it's usable on them as well, as long as you start with the original factory hard drive.

There's a whole thread about using it on the HD

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462179

although it doesn't hurt to also read the "using it on a Premiere" thread (the one we're in now) as well.

I used the jmfs cd v1.04 to do my first 2TB 652, although I since moved to using WinMFS, as it's more versatile on pre-Premiere TiVos.


----------



## lpwcomp

cmh62 said:


> Is jmfs only for Series 4 (Premiere) upgrades or will it work on Series 3 (652160) also? Which is the best software to use on the 652160?
> 
> I tried upgrading my 652160 with jmfs and although jmfs reported the 160GB drive successfully copied to a 1TB drive and that the 1TB was successfully expanded and _*super sized*_, my TiVo would not recognize the extra storage space on the larger drive even after a Clear and Delete. Thank you.





unitron said:


> jmfs was designed to work with the Premiere, and it apparently happened that some of the changes to the file system that were going to be introduced in the Premiere actually made it to the later Series 3 models, the HD (652) and HD XL (658), so it's usable on them as well, as long as you start with the original factory hard drive.
> 
> There's a whole thread about using it on the HD
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462179


From the first post of that thread:


> If you want to supersize the drive for the Tivo HD, then DO NOT USE the JMFS menu option to Supersize!!! This option will only work with Premiere drives. Instead, shutdown and then connect the new drive to a computer with WinMFS and use WinMFS to "turn on supersize". On a 2TB drive, the WinMFS supersize will increase your recording time from 288 hrs to 318 hrs.


----------



## unitron

Ever since the S3 software got up to 11.0h and could handle 2TB drives, if you're going ot use WinMFS to Supersize on an HD, you might as well just use it to do it all.

But when WinMFS says you have extra space and asks if you want to expand, tell it NO, check the target drive with 

mfsinfo

(if there was a source drive, you'll have to change which drive is selected)

and only then expand with 

mfsadd.


----------



## cmh62

Thanks Unitron. I used WinMFS tonight as you instructed to get 143 hrs on my 1TB WD green drive with my 652. To get over 150 hrs, is there an additional "Supersize" checkbox on the mfsadd option that maybe I missed or is it elsewhere in the menu structure of the program which I guess I didn't see? Thx again.


----------



## andydumi

jrtroo said:


> Just put the old drive back in. Done (may need to update settings and such).
> 
> Have not heard of lifetime of $100 offering for a few months. Only worth it if you were looking to use it, gift it, or would want to deal with selling it. Check craigslist for local pricing.


I used the 500gb in a PC already.



unitron said:


> I'm seeing 2 tuner lifetimed Premieres on a couple of Craigslist sites for $150.
> 
> You can't use jmfs to copy the 2TB to the 500, even if there are no recordings on it.
> 
> Perhaps the new version of the MFS Tools can do it.
> 
> But that's a different thread.
> 
> This is the jmfs thread.
> 
> jmfs is designed to copy the original drive to another, larger one, and then expand into the extra space by doing some partition voodoo.
> 
> The expansion part of it understands TiVo partitions somewhat, but the copy part just "Xerox'es" bytes from one location to another.


So what would be a good mechinism to get a 500GB to be a "stock" Tivo drive? If I am willing to lose recordings and all. Essentially I want to salvage the 2TB drive for a PC, but be able to give away/sell a fully functioning Premiere rather than without a hard drive.


----------



## jmbach

What was the size of the original drive before expanding to 2TB and how was it expanded? If it was 500GB or less using JMFS, use something like dd to copy the first 500GB of the 2TB image to the 500GB drive. Modify the APM to delete partition 15 entry. Then let it boot in the TiVo and divorce the nonexistent partition. Do a c&de and you are done. 
Alternatively, go the the DvrBARS thread and ask for an image and write it to the 500GB drive. Do a c&de and you are done.


----------



## azroadie

azroadie said:


> Thanks for the reply!  The laptop does not have a eSATA port. So my option was to buy 2 individual eSATA to USB adapters or one that has docks for 2 eSATA drives. The latter option is less expensive and won't require so many USB ports or power sources. Since I can't post the link, here's the description of the dock (I'll be using USB3.0 as I do not have a eSATA port.) (In my last post, I listed a USB 2.0 dock, but found a USB 3.0 version so updating the post accordingly)
> 
> "Turn any Serial ATA hard drive into an external USB 3.0 storage device in minutes with the Thermaltake BlacX 5G hard drive docking station. The support for USB 3.0 SuperSpeed technology enables lighting data transfer speed of up to 5 Gbps."
> 
> Any foreseen issues so far with my tivo software version? Thanks again!


I finally have the HD and 2 port dock. This dock has an "Offline Clone Function." Has anyone tried this? Will it allow an exact copy of the current TIVO drive? Or should I still use the jmfs tools process?

Next, if I try any of the the above copy methods, will it have an impact on the original TIVO drive? Basically, if I fail on my first try, will my original TIVO drive be able to be put back in and still work normally? Thanks!


----------



## unitron

azroadie said:


> I finally have the HD and 2 port dock. This dock has an "Offline Clone Function." Has anyone tried this? Will it allow an exact copy of the current TIVO drive? Or should I still use the jmfs tools process?
> 
> Next, if I try any of the the above copy methods, will it have an impact on the original TIVO drive? Basically, if I fail on my first try, will my original TIVO drive be able to be put back in and still work normally? Thanks!


As long as you get the right drive in the right slot, that "offline clone" function should treat the drive it's copying from (the source) as read-only, and only make changes in the target drive.

As to whether it can actually "Xerox" a drive, that is, copy it byte for byte without regard to what any of those bytes stand for, or whether it's higher level than that and expects to see a DOS Master Boot Record on the source drive (which means it likely will think an Apple Partition Map drive, such as a TiVo drive, is not formatted at all and has no partitions and therefore there's nothing to copy), I couldn't say without being able to play with it or at least read a halfway technical owner's manual for it.


----------



## rif

Hi all

Are the instructions on page 1 still current? I've done this a few times with several series 2 and TivoHD's so just need to be pointed to the latest download and steps.

I hope this isn't rude, but I can't get through the 90+ pages on the thread.

At a minimun, I'm looking to replace my failing premier xl's 1tb drive with another.

I am a longtime tivo owner, 10+ years, but new to the forum so PM won't work.

-david


----------



## videobruce

unitron said:


> As to whether it can actually "Xerox" a drive, that is, copy it byte for byte without regard to what any of those bytes stand for, or whether it's higher level than that and expects to see a DOS Master Boot Record on the source drive (which means it likely will think an Apple Partition Map drive, such as a TiVo drive, is not formatted at all and has no partitions and therefore there's nothing to copy), I couldn't say


Why can't the numerous software programs do the same thing? Isn't that what they do; byte for byte copy?


----------



## unitron

videobruce said:


> Why can't the numerous software programs do the same thing? Isn't that what they do; byte for byte copy?


I guess they can't (if they can't--I haven't tried any of them but in reading about them it seems some can't or don't or won't) because they were written differently with just PC drives in mind.

For the rest of us there's always

dd

or

ddrescue

or

dd_rescue

on the Linux command line if we need something that ignores anything higher level than the 1s and 0s of the bytes.


----------



## mattack

Is 2T still the maximum size? (I did read the first article again..)

If so, then I guess MFSTools is still the solution for (1) pre-Roamio, and/or (2) non-Windows for > 2 TB.. right?

I've been saying I'd upgrade my P4 for a long time, but the simple drop in Roamio upgrade to 3 TB was so easy.. and I filled it up quite a while ago (I've been essentially at full for a long time, don't think I've lost any if not many programs.. but I manually cull things)..

I finally changed _most_ primetime SPs to HD, so really do need more space.. (yes I know that's insane... 3 TB is huge..)

Even though I am comfortable with command line programs of course, jmfs was nice/easy to use.

But here's the mfstools thread:
http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=529148


----------



## wood252ota

I have 2 Tivo Premieres, one that I upgraded with a 2TB drive and one that had the original 320GB drive. The tivo with the 320GB drive is getting disk errors and failed kickstart 54. The tivo still boots up and works, but sometimes it restarts when it is booting and sometimes hesitates when playing back recorded programs. I tried using jmfs to copy the 320GB drive to a wd20eurs, but it was getting lots of errors doing the copy. Then the wd20 got kicked (don't ask) during the copying and the jmfs ended when the wd20 got a write error. Since I have to redo the copy again, I'm wondering what would be the best way to do this. I don't need any of the recordings on the 320GB drive. Below is what I thought my options are.
1) Try jmfs again with a new wd20. But I don't know what the jmfs does when it gets a read error and what it then writes to the target drive.
2) Do a "mfstools copy /dev/sda /dev/sdb" to just copy the tivo base code to the wd20. Hopefully there are no read errors when it does that.
3) Do a jmfs with the 320GB drive that was taken out of the first tivo when it was upgraded to 2TB. That drive didn't have any errors and hopefully still doesn't after sitting unused for a few years. The bad part of this is it will have a very old build on it.
Does anyone have any recommendations or other suggestions on what is the best way to go to bring the tivo back to life ? Thanks for the help.


----------



## ggieseke

wood252ota said:


> I have 2 Tivo Premieres, one that I upgraded with a 2TB drive and one that had the original 320GB drive. The tivo with the 320GB drive is getting disk errors and failed kickstart 54. The tivo still boots up and works, but sometimes it restarts when it is booting and sometimes hesitates when playing back recorded programs. I tried using jmfs to copy the 320GB drive to a wd20eurs, but it was getting lots of errors doing the copy. Then the wd20 got kicked (don't ask) during the copying and the jmfs ended when the wd20 got a write error. Since I have to redo the copy again, I'm wondering what would be the best way to do this. I don't need any of the recordings on the 320GB drive. Below is what I thought my options are.
> 1) Try jmfs again with a new wd20. But I don't know what the jmfs does when it gets a read error and what it then writes to the target drive.
> 2) Do a "mfstools copy /dev/sda /dev/sdb" to just copy the tivo base code to the wd20. Hopefully there are no read errors when it does that.
> 3) Do a jmfs with the 320GB drive that was taken out of the first tivo when it was upgraded to 2TB. That drive didn't have any errors and hopefully still doesn't after sitting unused for a few years. The bad part of this is it will have a very old build on it.
> Does anyone have any recommendations or other suggestions on what is the best way to go to bring the tivo back to life ? Thanks for the help.


Post the model number(s) and I'll send you links to clean Premiere images that you can restore with DvrBARS and expand with jmfs. Your original drive might get you there, but since you don't care about the recordings it's probably a lot easier and quicker to start over from scratch.


----------



## mattack

I admit I haven't done it in a while, but #2 seems like it should work.. You should even be able to go to 4 TB. (I bought a 6 TB drive with the mention that the tools may eventually support 6 TB..) I'll likely upgrade this weekend.


----------



## monsjic

ggieseke said:


> Post the model number(s) and I'll send you links to clean Premiere images that you can restore with DvrBARS and expand with jmfs. Your original drive might get you there, but since you don't care about the recordings it's probably a lot easier and quicker to start over from scratch.


@ggieseke Would love to get the clean image for TCD748000.


----------



## ggieseke

monsjic said:


> @ggieseke Would love to get the clean image for TCD748000.


PM sent.


----------



## Dr_Zoidberg

mattack said:


> I admit I haven't done it in a while, but #2 seems like it should work.. You should even be able to go to 4 TB. (I bought a 6 TB drive with the mention that the tools may eventually support 6 TB..) I'll likely upgrade this weekend.


I am replacing the 2TB drive with a 3TB unit in my Premiere XL4. I could've done the work on a Mac with a USB dock, but I an trying the PC/Linux track first. Once I got a working PC with SATA ports that recognized the drives (and a functioning PATA DVD rom drive), I'm off and running with the Copy Portion of the process.

I'll update later after I've done the other steps.


----------



## unitron

Dr_Zoidberg said:


> I am replacing the 2TB drive with a 3TB unit in my Premiere XL4. I could've done the work on a Mac with a USB dock, but I an trying the PC/Linux track first. Once I got a working PC with SATA ports that recognized the drives (and a functioning PATA DVD rom drive), I'm off and running with the Copy Portion of the process.
> 
> I'll update later after I've done the other steps.


Unless things have changed, jmfs needs to start with an unexpanded source drive, does it not?


----------



## Dr_Zoidberg

unitron said:


> Unless things have changed, jmfs needs to start with an unexpanded source drive, does it not?


Yes...? My Premiere XL4 came with a 2TB drive.

I'm doing the Copy part of "Copy, Expand, Supersize". According to my calculations, it'll be done around 2-3AM, aka 12 1/2 hours to copy 2TB. Then I'll do the next two things.


----------



## jmbach

Dr_Zoidberg said:


> I am replacing the 2TB drive with a 3TB unit in my Premiere XL4. I could've done the work on a Mac with a USB dock, but I an trying the PC/Linux track first. Once I got a working PC with SATA ports that recognized the drives (and a functioning PATA DVD rom drive), I'm off and running with the Copy Portion of the process.
> 
> I'll update later after I've done the other steps.


If memory serves me and you are using comer's unmodified JMFS 1.04, you will not successfully expand your drive because of a signed 32 bit variable issue. There is a modified version that you can find in the DIY 4TB thread. The alternative would be to use MFSTools 3.2 to do the copy.


----------



## Dr_Zoidberg

jmbach said:


> If memory serves me and you are using comer's unmodified JMFS 1.04, you will not successfully expand your drive because of a signed 32 bit variable issue. There is a modified version that you can find in the DIY 4TB thread. The alternative would be to use MFSTools 3.2 to do the copy.


The copy finished overnight (12 hours), and the expand does fail, so I'd like to find the right thread and do the right process rather than guess. Which thread would the 4TB DIY be? I did some searching and found these two - is it one of these or another?

This one is for Roamio (and XP?):
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=528428&highlight=4tb

or should I use the steps in the generic MFStools thread?
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=529148&highlight=4tb

gonna put the original, working drive back in, for now, because I won't be able to work on this for a couple days, now.


----------



## jmbach

Start here and go to the deprecated method to find the modified JMFS. You will not have to copy the drive again but just do the expand. MFSR is only for Roamio and does not copy anything. You can use the MFSTool to redo the whole copy. MFSTool with expand while it copies.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


----------



## Dr_Zoidberg

jmbach said:


> Start here and go to the deprecated method to find the modified JMFS. You will not have to copy the drive again but just do the expand. MFSR is only for Roamio and does not copy anything. You can use the MFSTool to redo the whole copy. MFSTool with expand while it copies.
> 
> Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


I think you're offering two options via mfstools.

1. Using the copied drive, run "mfsadd -x /dev/sdX" with X being the new drive's letter, and it'll create a new 1TB media partition with the remaining space on the new drive.

2. Redo copy, and the mfstools 'copy' will expand as necessary.

Do I understand it right?


----------



## jmbach

No. One method uses MFSTools copy command and the other is using a modified JMFS. The post has a couple of links in it.

You cannot use MFSAdd to expand a premiere image.


----------



## Dr_Zoidberg

jmbach said:


> No. One method uses MFSTools copy command and the other is using a modified JMFS. The post has a couple of links in it.
> 
> You cannot use MFSAdd to expand a premiere image.


Thanks for the clarification! Obviously, I thought MFStools worked for the Premiere, too. Now, I know better. I was going to ask comer to update the first post to reflect the larger disk sizes for the Premieres, but it seems comer hasn't posted since 2011.

In any case, I downloaded the deprecated 1.05 version and was able to do the expansion and ran the Supersize. I now have 477 HD hours available, total!


----------



## jmbach

Good 

Just to clarify. You can use MFSTools 3.2 on a premiere. It expands while copying by increasing the size of the two media zones and not by adding an additional partition like JMFS does.


----------



## DeekayLBC

Was upgrading from a 2TB to 3TB. Using WD "Purple" line of HD. Copy was successful but when I went to EXPAND I got the return error in red letters "expand did not finish successfully".

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.


----------



## jmbach

Sounds like you are using JMFS 1.04 to do the expansion. You will have to find version 1.05 which that bug corrected. Alternatively you can use MFSTools 3.2 to copy the 2TB to the 3TB. MFSTools 3.2 will expand while it copies.


----------



## DeekayLBC

Thank you SO much for your quick response! Any idea on where to find JMFS 1.05? I was able to locate MFSTools. Thanks again!


----------



## jmbach

You can start here.


----------



## ciscokid516

My Premier XL 1TB drive died on me, looking for a copy of the factory image that I can use with DVRBars to make a new drive as a replacement. Can anyone help with a link to the software? Thanks in advance, I'll get this baby running again hopefully.


----------



## ggieseke

ciscokid516 said:


> My Premier XL 1TB drive died on me, looking for a copy of the factory image that I can use with DVRBars to make a new drive as a replacement. Can anyone help with a link to the software? Thanks in advance, I'll get this baby running again hopefully.


PM sent.


----------



## rif

Since the 1TB EURX drive isn't available on amazon, what drive is recommended.? A WD Red (WD10ERFX)?

I'm looking to replace my premiere xl's 1TB drive with another 1TB.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

rif said:


> Since the 1TB EURX drive isn't available on amazon, what drive is recommended.? A WD Red (WD10ERFX)?
> 
> I'm looking to replace my premiere xl's 1TB drive with another 1TB.


Just in case you hadn't considered it, you might consider a Roamio instead. The performance difference between the two is worth the expense, IMO.


----------



## ggieseke

Newegg just put the WD10EFRX on sale for $54.99 with promo code ESCEKGF26.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...-_-DesktopInternalHardDrives-_-22236342-S1A2D


----------



## rif

ThreeSoFar said:


> Just in case you hadn't considered it, you might consider a Roamio instead. The performance difference between the two is worth the expense, IMO.


Yes, but there's the expense of another lifetime contract. But I'll keep a watch on craigslist. I still have a series 3 HD in service...

As long as the basic method in the first post is valid, im fine with just replacing the drive too.


----------



## mattack

why do a 1 TB drive when it's so easy to go bigger?


----------



## rif

mattack said:


> why do a 1 TB drive when it's so easy to go bigger?


Current drive never goes past 50%, can use the extra $30 elsewhere


----------



## MJedi

Hello all,

It's been a long time since I did upgrades on my TiVos, the last one on my Series 3. I have a Premiere with its original drive that I want to upgrade to the largest drive it can support. I read the OP, and it looks pretty straightforward. I'm a bit confused as to what drive size I can use. Can I put 4TB in there? Or only 2TB or 3TB? Any caveats or warnings I need to know? I'm looking at this drive:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EHBEUZO/

Is this a good one to use?

Thanks in advance!


----------



## jmbach

MJedi said:


> Hello all,
> 
> It's been a long time since I did upgrades on my TiVos, the last one on my Series 3. I have a Premiere with its original drive that I want to upgrade to the largest drive it can support. I read the OP, and it looks pretty straightforward. I'm a bit confused as to what drive size I can use. Can I put 4TB in there? Or only 2TB or 3TB? Any caveats or warnings I need to know? I'm looking at this drive:
> 
> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EHBEUZO/
> 
> Is this a good one to use?
> 
> Thanks in advance!


Well the largest you can put in the Premiere as long as it is currently running the latest OS is 6TB. You can follow the instructions here.

Although green drives can be used most prefer WD A/V drives or WD Red drives. Some people have found that the WD A/V drive may have PUIS enabled and so you will have to use a program like HDAT2 to disable it. Lately it seems that all the WD drives do not have the wdidle3 timer issue anymore. (The timer was set to 8 seconds and not 5 minutes)


----------



## klyde

I have only a dvd drive on my desktop, I burned the jmfs-rev68.iso to a dvd disk.
I hook up my working 320gb hard drive with a working premier image on it, I hook up a new 1tb hard drive. I boot from the dvd. I see two lines of linux code run by then a quick ready then the screen goes blank and nothing else happens.
I have tried about 10 times now, several different burns, always the same thing.
What am I doing wrong?


----------



## L David Matheny

klyde said:


> I have only a dvd drive on my desktop, I burned the jmfs-rev68.iso to a dvd disk.
> I hook up my working 320gb hard drive with a working premier image on it, I hook up a new 1tb hard drive. I boot from the dvd. I see two lines of linux code run by then a quick ready then the screen goes blank and nothing else happens.
> I have tried about 10 times now, several different burns, always the same thing.
> What am I doing wrong?


Try burning the .ISO image to a CD-R disk instead of a DVD-R. If that's not the problem, my guess would be that the Linux system doesn't have correct display drivers for your hardware.


----------



## klyde

I tried some cd disks and got the same thing, Im going to try a usb drive tomorrow, if that doesn't work I will try in another computer. Do I really have to upgrade from the smaller to the larger? Can't I put the smaller image on a 1tb drive and just expand that drive?
I did have problems again with the image, I went through all the setup screens and backed up that image, then when I was playing with the expansion that disk got corrupted again and I had to start all over with the new image and complete set up. I have no idea what is corrupting my image when I only do a backup, unless its hot plugging in the drives. Im going to try and shut the computer down before I hook the drive up next time. I will also try to use a USN dock.


----------



## jmbach

Yes you can do that. Just clone the smaller to the larger drive. However you still have to boot JMFS to expand the Premiere image. 

Alternatively, you can try MFSTools 3.2. It's image is newer and it is less likely to be a driver issue.


----------



## rthurlow

@ggieseke or anyone else, could I get a link to a clean image for TCD746320?

Thanks so much,
Rob T


----------



## rthurlow

I posted this in Tivo Help, but might as well drag it over here. I have Spinrite looking at the 320Gb drive now. I found a WD20EFRX Red 2Tb drive on Amazon. I have downloaded the tools. Getting there!

----

Hi folks,

I have searched the forums some, but have some questions to which I don't see recent answers.

My TCD746320 Premiere was dead when I got back from vacation in July, and I revived it when I replaced the power supply. Sadly, it's dead again with a GSOD reboot loop, so I am assuming I will be putting a new drive in it. I assume I will be making friends with my new friends DvrBARS, MFS Tools and jmfs (many thanks to the authors!). I am pretty fearless, have the right Torx, a USB-to-SATA adapter, etc. I'm glad the power supply should not be a concern.

I use Tivo Desktop pretty heavily, so there isn't much lost except Svengoolie showing the original STTOS pilot, "The Cage", which I didn't pull over. The saved preferences are the biggest loss. Not earth shattering.

First, what should I look at when choosing a drive? Is there a list of good choices anywhere? I expect to get a 1Tb or 2Tb drive. I think I even have a spare 1Tb on hand.

Second, what are the odds I can pull off Onepasses and such from the old drive? I haven't connected it to see how pooched it is, and I guess I might see what Spinrite thinks of it.

Third, where can I get an image for my TCD746320?

Fourth, with the above-named tools, what would be the best path to get back on the air?


----------



## klyde

rthurlow said:


> @ggieseke or anyone else, could I get a link to a clean image for TCD746320?
> 
> Thanks so much,
> Rob T


pm sent


----------



## ggieseke

rthurlow said:


> I posted this in Tivo Help, but might as well drag it over here. I have Spinrite looking at the 320Gb drive now. I found a WD20EFRX Red 2Tb drive on Amazon. I have downloaded the tools. Getting there!
> 
> ----
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> I have searched the forums some, but have some questions to which I don't see recent answers.
> 
> My TCD746320 Premiere was dead when I got back from vacation in July, and I revived it when I replaced the power supply. Sadly, it's dead again with a GSOD reboot loop, so I am assuming I will be putting a new drive in it. I assume I will be making friends with my new friends DvrBARS, MFS Tools and jmfs (many thanks to the authors!). I am pretty fearless, have the right Torx, a USB-to-SATA adapter, etc. I'm glad the power supply should not be a concern.
> 
> I use Tivo Desktop pretty heavily, so there isn't much lost except Svengoolie showing the original STTOS pilot, "The Cage", which I didn't pull over. The saved preferences are the biggest loss. Not earth shattering.
> 
> First, what should I look at when choosing a drive? Is there a list of good choices anywhere? I expect to get a 1Tb or 2Tb drive. I think I even have a spare 1Tb on hand.
> 
> Second, what are the odds I can pull off Onepasses and such from the old drive? I haven't connected it to see how pooched it is, and I guess I might see what Spinrite thinks of it.
> 
> Third, where can I get an image for my TCD746320?
> 
> Fourth, with the above-named tools, what would be the best path to get back on the air?


I replied in your Help forum post.


----------



## disolve

klyde said:


> pm sent


I have a TCD746320 and the hard drive went bad. I'm hoping to format a new drive for replacement, but can't find an image file? Help would be appreciated.
Thanks
EM


----------



## ggieseke

disolve said:


> I have a TCD746320 and the hard drive went bad. I'm hoping to format a new drive for replacement, but can't find an image file? Help would be appreciated.
> Thanks
> EM


PM sent.


----------



## wevets

I got a new 2 TB hard drive to replace a dead original hard drive. I put an image on it and, not understanding the way the universe works, applied supersize to it and not expand. It all works well in my resurrected premiere, but only has a capacity of an original 320 GB drive. The instructions at the head of this thread explicitly say run expand before supersize, and I didn't really snap to that before I ran just supersize. I'm going to try it anyway if I don't get a reply to this before I get a chance to do the job (because I know how to recover if it doesn't go well) but will running expand after supersize screw anything up? And will then running supersize after expand screw anything up?
Thanks.
wevets


----------



## jmbach

You should be fine. AFAIK, the only thing that might happen is that you cannot reverse the supersize. Although if I recall, that option is not present in JMFS.


----------



## hayfzj

I have also have TCD746320 and the hard drive went bad. Would it be possible to get an image so I can replace the hard drive? Thank you.


----------



## ggieseke

hayfzj said:


> I have also have TCD746320 and the hard drive went bad. Would it be possible to get an image so I can replace the hard drive? Thank you.


PM sent.


----------



## wood252ota

I have a TCD746320 and I need some guidance. A few years ago I upgraded the drive from 320 GB to 1 TB using JMFS Live CD Ver 1.04. Everything worked fine for years, but I think the 1 TB drive is now starting to fail. Can I use the JMFS CD to copy a 1 TB to another 2TB or should I be using some other software like MFS tools.
Thanks for the help.


----------



## ggieseke

I'd use MFSTools 3.2 It will copy your existing drive to a new 2TB drive and keep the standard "two pair" MFS drive layout, ensuring future expansion with an external drive.


----------



## HerronScott

TCD746320 said:


> I thought we were supposed to use WD's "Purple" Drives?


No, most people here will recommend to not use Purple drives despite NewEgg indicating they are the replacement for the older AV-GP drives. WD Red drives are the most recommended drive line now.

Scott


----------



## m_jonis

I apologize in advance (I really didn't want to read all 143 pages, only read the last 4 or 5). I've replaced/upgraded many Tivo drives in the past. Last time was with the Series 3 units with WinMFS tools.

I find myself with a Premiere XL 4 (2 TB drive I believe) with lifetime service and I suspect the drive is starting to go bad (randomly reboots more often than it should since there's not a software update lately).

I want to replace (not upgrade) the hard drive, so it seems that the WD "red" series 5400 rpm would be sufficient. 2 TB (same size, I don't need bigger). I am using a cable card. I *do* want to transfer the shows over.

In the past, I think I'd just copy over via WinMFS tools (I have the other equipment such as pc's and external SATA connectors and all that jazz).

But seems that software doesn't work anymore on Premieres? So I'll need to use the new MFS tools? Since I'm doing a strict clone/copy, I shouldn't have to re-pair the cable card (going in same unit as the original), correct?

Have I missed anything?


----------



## jmbach

m_jonis said:


> I apologize in advance (I really didn't want to read all 143 pages, only read the last 4 or 5). I've replaced/upgraded many Tivo drives in the past. Last time was with the Series 3 units with WinMFS tools.
> 
> I find myself with a Premiere XL 4 (2 TB drive I believe) with lifetime service and I suspect the drive is starting to go bad (randomly reboots more often than it should since there's not a software update lately).
> 
> I want to replace (not upgrade) the hard drive, so it seems that the WD "red" series 5400 rpm would be sufficient. 2 TB (same size, I don't need bigger). I am using a cable card. I *do* want to transfer the shows over.
> 
> In the past, I think I'd just copy over via WinMFS tools (I have the other equipment such as pc's and external SATA connectors and all that jazz).
> 
> But seems that software doesn't work anymore on Premieres? So I'll need to use the new MFS tools? Since I'm doing a strict clone/copy, I shouldn't have to re-pair the cable card (going in same unit as the original), correct?
> 
> Have I missed anything?


Since you are doing a direct clone, I would use a dual drive dock that is a drive duplicator. That way you do not have to fool with any program and/or computer issues.


----------



## m_jonis

jmbach said:


> Since you are doing a direct clone, I would use a dual drive dock that is a drive duplicator. That way you do not have to fool with any program and/or computer issues.


Oh, I did not know that the duplicators would work with Tivo drives. Good to know.


----------



## LancerJSN

Looking for an image for a 750500, screwed up my old drive trying to upgrade to 2tb. Thanks


----------



## ggieseke

LancerJSN said:


> Looking for an image for a 750500, screwed up my old drive trying to upgrade to 2tb. Thanks


PM sent.


----------



## tcook

I'm in the same boat as many here. My old hard drive crashed and I'm trying to find a image to put on a new drive.

Looking for a ink for 746320.tbk

Thanks for the work you guys are doing here.


----------



## ggieseke

tcook said:


> I'm in the same boat as many here. My old hard drive crashed and I'm trying to find a image to put on a new drive.
> 
> Looking for a ink for 746320.tbk
> 
> Thanks for the work you guys are doing here.


PM sent. There aren't any "TBKs" for Series 4 units since WinMFS doesn't work on them, but you can restore the image I sent you with DvrBARS.


----------



## tcook

ggieseke said:


> PM sent. There aren't any "TBKs" for Series 4 units since WinMFS doesn't work on them, but you can restore the image I sent you with DvrBARS.


Thank so much. Looking forward to testing this out this weekend!


----------



## Wiked

You guys in the US are lucky. TiVo is ending here in Australia on Oct 31st. 

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk


----------



## tasse

Hello folks!

My Premiere XL (TCD748000) just died this morning. 
It's been several years since I have performed an upgrade, so I'm very rusty.
Can get some help me with getting an image?


----------



## mrcowboy99

My Premiere XL - TCD748000 - went belly up today. Can someone please send me an image as it would be greatly appreciated.  (wish they would allow a upgrade like a Series 2/3 that just came out... grrrr)


----------



## ggieseke

tasse said:


> Hello folks!
> 
> My Premiere XL (TCD748000) just died this morning.
> It's been several years since I have performed an upgrade, so I'm very rusty.
> Can get some help me with getting an image?


PM sent.


----------



## ggieseke

mrcowboy99 said:


> My Premiere XL - TCD748000 - went belly up today. Can someone please send me an image as it would be greatly appreciated.  (wish they would allow a upgrade like a Series 2/3 that just came out... grrrr)


PM sent.


----------



## DRich

So this weekend, my Tivo Premiere XL4 wouldn't even power on, so I have ordered a new Power Supply and figured I would go ahead and upgrade my hard drive.

If you don't mind, I have a few questions?

1. I believe this drive would work, correct? WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD40EFRX-Newegg.com

2. Can I use a Drive Duplicator on a 2TB drive and 4TB drive and then just expand the drive?

3. If I Clone the drive, will I have any configuration issues with my cable card or will I have to ask my cable company to come out like they typically would to setup?

4. Does the new drive need to be formatted?

5. Is there a better way? What would you experts recommend?

Thanks in advance!


----------



## LandoG

My Premier 4 (TCD746320) died on me the other day. I'm trying to find an image file to put on a new drive. Can anyone help with a link to the software?

Thank you all in advance.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

LandoG said:


> My Premier 4 (TCD746320) died on me the other day. I'm trying to find an image file to put on a new drive. Can anyone help with a link to the software?


I have a HD TiVo image from 2010. I'm not sure whether it's compatible, but I'd guess not.


----------



## ggieseke

LandoG said:


> My Premier 4 (TCD746320) died on me the other day. I'm trying to find an image file to put on a new drive. Can anyone help with a link to the software?
> 
> Thank you all in advance.


PM sent.


----------



## tortugapir8

Hard drive just failed spectacularly on my Series 4 (TCD746500) and would greatly appreciate any help on finding an image I can use for my replacement (2 TB WD Blue seemed like a good fit). Thanks!

Editied correct model designation


----------



## lpwcomp

tortugapir8 said:


> Hard drive just failed spectacularly on my Premier 4 (TCD746500) and would greatly appreciate any help on finding an image I can use for my replacement (2 TB WD Blue seemed like a good fit). Thanks!


While a TCD746500 is a _*Series 4 *_Tivo, it is not a _*Premiere 4*_. The Premiere 4 is a 4-tuner, digital cable only model while the TCD746500 is a 2-tuner OTA and cable model.

I post this not to be pedantic but because the s/w for one will not work on the other.


----------



## tortugapir8

Correct, my mistake! Big difference


----------



## ggieseke

tortugapir8 said:


> Hard drive just failed spectacularly on my Series 4 (TCD746500) and would greatly appreciate any help on finding an image I can use for my replacement (2 TB WD Blue seemed like a good fit). Thanks!
> 
> Editied correct model designation


PM sent.


----------



## jsjurek

Hi - first timer here. Being doing a LOT of research and now getting confused. My specifics: Tivo Premiere (2-tuner) purchased in 2011; product lifetime service. Original 320GB drive is starting to fail. Still works but I get freezing a lot when watching recordings. Going to purchase a WD AV-GP 2TB drive and use JMFS to copy/expand/supersize.

Hardware Setup: I only have access to a MAC and cannot boot the JMFS CD. However I have parallels and I can boot the JMFS ISO from within my virtual machine. My mac has USB 2.0 ports. It's a MAC PRO (3,1 from early 2008) and I can open up the case and connect the drives with SATA. However, my research would seem to indicate that the drives won't be recognized this way, so I would be better off using USB 2.0 to SATA adapters. I know you can buy some that only cost 8-10 bucks, but on amazon they've gotten some bad reviews and some have fried their drives. So, I'm willing to invest about 18 bucks in a Cables to Go adapter which looks to be a little higher quality. But I don't want to purchase two of them if I don't have to -- see below.

I already have a dock that says it's USB 3.0 (and I understand USB 3 causes problems with JMFS because the drivers are only for 2.0). I'd like to at least try and use this dock, given that hooking it up to USB 2.0 ports effectively renders it a 2.0 dock, right? But, I don't want to be left in a situation where I'm ready to rock and roll but realize I need to purchase an additional USB to SATA adapter because my dock cannot be seen. And I don't want to take my Tivo apart any sooner than I have to (to minimize amount of time it's out of commission).

I am thinking of doing the following BEFORE taking apart my Tivo. Purchase *one* USB to SATA adapter and the 2TB drive. Then, running JMFS from the ISO in parallels and when I get the message "no tivo drive detected", to hot plug in my existing USB dock with the new/blank drive inserted. Then in JMFS, exiting out to the command prompt and typing fdisk -l to see if my drive can be "seen" (this has been a sticking point for others using docks in their hookups).

My thought is that fdisk should tell me in advance whether or not I can use my dock. If I can see a /dev/sdX entry for the blank drive, then I should be able to use that dock for the copy process. If I do not see a /dev/sdX entry, then I will have to revert to purchasing 2 (not 1) basic USB 2.0 to SATA adapters. I am on a limited budget and trying to save myself a little money.

Can anybody offer any insights whether my intended process is likely to succeed or any watch-outs? (Mac Pro, running Parallels, booting from JMFS ISO, using USB 2.0 to SATA adapters). I've done enough research that I'm confident in the JMFS process itself (ie: hooking both original & upgrade drive up at one time w/ USB ports); I just want to make sure my set-up can read & access the drives. Thanks in advance.


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## BillJohnston

XL4 TCD758250 20.7.1 has WD20EURS going to WD40EURX AV-GP

I'm awaiting the 4TB drive to be shipped from CA to GA by Newegg through E.O.L, some days now though not yet shipped.

When I first looked at the rosswalker Guide to Upgrading the Tivo it seemed straight forward using the premiere_linux_inc_supersize_jmfs-rev104.iso.

Further reading seems to say the jmfs-rev104 won't get that job done but it's not clear if that failure is true on the 758 or just earlier. I've also read some threads that indicate I'll need a second 2TB drive.

Just to see if the CD would boot properly on my machine, a Maximus VI and the CD in an external USB CD drive, it did and promptly told me there was no Tivo drive in the system.

Further reading on TivoCommunity seems to indicate that to move from the 2TB, which is at 93% capacity just now, to the 4TB, not yet shipped, I would be better off using MFSTools_3.2 so I downloaded and burned the jmbach version. I did boot to this as well but found no files. In the root directory I only found bin and nothing in that directory. I wonder if the program would better execute if there were a Tivo drive in the system.

For now, while at the >90% of the 316 HD hours, I wonder if I should run Supersize on the native 2TB drive for more space while waiting for the 4TB. If I do, will this change effect my migration to the 4TB drive, e.g. would I be better served not supersizing before the migration?

Will the rosswalker Guides suggestion of using the jmfs-rev104 get the job done?

Thanks for advice on this. I appreciate the website and work you guys put in.

--------------

Going back I see post 2819 and a few before seem to address this.

-------------
On the MFSTools_3.2, I found I was in a subdirectory. linux:/cd .. got me to the root directory.


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## jmbach

BillJohnston said:


> XL4 TCD758250 20.7.1 has WD20EURS going to WD40EURX AV-GP
> 
> I'm awaiting the 4TB drive to be shipped from CA to GA by Newegg through E.O.L, some days now though not yet shipped.
> 
> When I first looked at the rosswalker Guide to Upgrading the Tivo it seemed straight forward using the premiere_linux_inc_supersize_jmfs-rev104.iso.
> 
> Further reading seems to say the jmfs-rev104 won't get that job done but it's not clear if that failure is true on the 758 or just earlier. I've also read some threads that indicate I'll need a second 2TB drive.
> 
> Just to see if the CD would boot properly on my machine, a Maximus VI and the CD in an external USB CD drive, it did and promptly told me there was no Tivo drive in the system.
> 
> Further reading on TivoCommunity seems to indicate that to move from the 2TB, which is at 93% capacity just now, to the 4TB, not yet shipped, I would be better off using MFSTools_3.2 so I downloaded and burned the jmbach version. I did boot to this as well but found no files. In the root directory I only found bin and nothing in that directory. I wonder if the program would better execute if there were a Tivo drive in the system.
> 
> For now, while at the >90% of the 316 HD hours, I wonder if I should run Supersize on the native 2TB drive for more space while waiting for the 4TB. If I do, will this change effect my migration to the 4TB drive, e.g. would I be better served not supersizing before the migration?
> 
> Will the rosswalker Guides suggestion of using the jmfs-rev104 get the job done?
> 
> Thanks for advice on this. I appreciate the website and work you guys put in.
> 
> --------------
> 
> Going back I see post 2819 and a few before seem to address this.
> 
> -------------
> On the MFSTools_3.2, I found I was in a subdirectory. linux:/cd .. got me to the root directory.


I don't think rosswalker even addresses a 4TB Premiere. jmfs-rev104 will not get the job done cleanly and more than likely you are going to have to find the modified jmfs to attempt a 4TB Premiere image. Your best bet is to use MFSTools 3.2. The tools are located in the /usr/local/bin directory but you can run them from any directory on the ISO.


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## BillJohnston

Yes, I have the MFSTools 3.2 you posted and thanks. It's ready to go when the drive arrives. On that score, Newegg said the drive would be shipped by end of day Wednesday May 10th. But turns out they're just reselling for another company, E.O.L. Tech, also in California. Newegg sent me a shipping label for tracking yesterday, Friday, but that was nothing more than intent to get it to the USPS. And today there has been no further movement on that tracking number. No answer to a telephone call to Newegg either. Maybe they're at the beach surfing and will do something Monday. I'm tempted to cancel the order and get a 3TB from Amazon or Staples asap.


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## jcondon

BillJohnston said:


> Yes, I have the MFSTools 3.2 you posted and thanks. It's ready to go when the drive arrives. On that score, Newegg said the drive would be shipped by end of day Wednesday May 10th. But turns out they're just reselling for another company, E.O.L. Tech, also in California. Newegg sent me a shipping label for tracking yesterday, Friday, but that was nothing more than intent to get it to the USPS. And today there has been no further movement on that tracking number. No answer to a telephone call to Newegg either. Maybe they're at the beach surfing and will do something Monday. I'm tempted to cancel the order and get a 3TB from Amazon or Staples asap.


I just upgraded one of my original 320GB Tivo Premiers to a 3TB WD 30EFRX using the JMFS 1.04 DVD. Took 3 hours or so to copy an almost full drive, extend and then Supersize. I also downloaded and ran the WD tool that tests the drive and let that run overnight.

For me 401 HD hours (3515 SD hours) should be enough for a while and I didn't want to deal with the extra expense and work required to go to 4TB.

If I need more space I would probably just upgrade my other Premiere's 320GB drive.

I had replaced the fan on the one I upgraded last year. Still made a bit of noise. Thought maybe it was the HD. Nope still the fan. Will have to order a new one at some point. Fan works fine just a bit noisy.

Anyway JMFS 1.04 software worked great for me.


----------



## jmbach

jcondon said:


> I just upgraded one of my original 320GB Tivo Premiers to a 3TB WD 30EFRX using the JMFS 1.04 DVD. Took 3 hours or so to copy an almost full drive, extend and then Supersize. I also downloaded and ran the WD tool that tests the drive and let that run overnight.
> 
> For me 401 HD hours (3515 SD hours) should be enough for a while and I didn't want to deal with the extra expense and work required to go to 4TB.
> 
> If I need more space I would probably just upgrade my other Premiere's 320GB drive.
> 
> I had replaced the fan on the one I upgraded last year. Still made a bit of noise. Thought maybe it was the HD. Nope still the fan. Will have to order a new one at some point. Fan works fine just a bit noisy.
> 
> Anyway JMFS 1.04 software worked great for me.


At best using JMFS only will gain you 2 TB of recording space. If you had the whole 3 TB of recording space you would have 479 hours of HD. By the capacity you report, you obviously are not using the whole 3TB capacity. More than likely you have 320GB plus 2 TB for about 2.3 TB recording space.


----------



## jcondon

jmbach said:


> At best using JMFS only will gain you 2 TB of recording space. If you had the whole 3 TB of recording space you would have 479 hours of HD. By the capacity you report, you obviously are not using the whole 3TB capacity. More than likely you have 320GB plus 2 TB for about 2.3 TB recording space.


Yeah looking at screen shots in the various threads here I think I ended up with more then 2TB but less then 3TB. Not sure it is worth the effort to redo all this though. If end up doing this again I would try the MFS 3.2 Tool I guess.


----------



## jmbach

jcondon said:


> Yeah looking at screen shots in the various threads here I think I ended up with more then 2TB but less then 3TB. Not sure it is worth the effort to redo all this though. If end up doing this again I would try the MFS 3.2 Tool I guess.


That would be your best bet. It really all depends on how full your drive is on a regular basis. Might be a reasonable thing to do if it is over 80% . If you another drive of equal or more capacity, you could clone your current TiVo drive to that drive and use MFSTools 3.2 to copy the content back to the original drive.


----------



## jcondon

jmbach said:


> That would be your best bet. It really all depends on how full your drive is on a regular basis. Might be a reasonable thing to do if it is over 80% . If you another drive of equal or more capacity, you could clone your current TiVo drive to that drive and use MFSTools 3.2 to copy the content back to the original drive.


Thanks for the info. I don't have another 3TB or larger drive I can use. Perhaps if down the road I decide to upgrade the other Premiere I will do as you say.

Both Premiere's with the original 320GB were at 80-90% full. Now we can move some stuff off the smaller Tivo. I am hoping this will buy us a few more years. Maybe by then it will be time for us to get new machines anyway.

Even with the lost space our nearly full Premiere is like 90% empty now.


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## SalemCat

I've owned a TiVo Premiere 320GB TCD746320 for a few years now. Despite the fact I record everything in SD (I freely admit I can barely tell the difference between it and the far more demanding HD), it's nearly filled.

Now, all together I have (5) Premieres: (4) 320GB, (1) 500GB. And I'm real tired of transferring the shows around as I run out of space. I also have a computer HD filled with 3TB of TiVo shows.

To address this situation I'm upgrading all of them.

I began with a TCD746320 (20.7.1.RC2-01-2-746). I removed the original 320GB, and used JMFS-rev104 to copy and supersize the original HD to a used 1TB HD I bought on eBay It was a WD Green sold as being formatted for a TCD652160. I ignored the formatting the Seller may have placed on it, and a few hours later had a fully functional 1TB TCD746320.

Elated, I then purchased a brand new 4TB WD Purple Drive, and used JMFS-rev104 to copy the 1TB HD to it.

Then the weirdness began.

As it started up, the TiVo believed it was missing an External HD. Perhaps the Seller of the used HD had one ? Anyhow, I instructed the TiVo to remove it. It finally booted, I had all my shows, BUT there was only 1TB available !

So I took the 4TB HD and ran JMFS-rev104 on it to expand and supersize it.

Again the TiVo believed it was missing an External HD. I instructed the TiVo to remove it. It finally booted, I had all my shows, BUT there was STILL only 1TB available !

ADVICE ? PLEASE ?


----------



## jmbach

SalemCat said:


> I've owned a TiVo Premiere 320GB TCD746320 for a few years now. Despite the fact I record everything in SD (I freely admit I can barely tell the difference between it and the far more demanding HD), it's nearly filled.
> 
> Now, all together I have (5) Premieres: (4) 320GB, (1) 500GB. And I'm real tired of transferring the shows around as I run out of space. I also have a computer HD filled with 3TB of TiVo shows.
> 
> To address this situation I'm upgrading all of them.
> 
> I began with a TCD746320 (20.7.1.RC2-01-2-746). I removed the original 320GB, and used JMFS-rev104 to copy and supersize the original HD to a used 1TB HD I bought on eBay It was a WD Green sold as being formatted for a TCD652160. I ignored the formatting the Seller may have placed on it, and a few hours later had a fully functional 1TB TCD746320.
> 
> Elated, I then purchased a brand new 4TB WD Purple Drive, and used JMFS-rev104 to copy the 1TB HD to it.
> 
> Then the weirdness began.
> 
> As it started up, the TiVo believed it was missing an External HD. Perhaps the Seller of the used HD had one ? Anyhow, I instructed the TiVo to remove it. It finally booted, I had all my shows, BUT there was only 1TB available !
> 
> So I took the 4TB HD and ran JMFS-rev104 on it to expand and supersize it.
> 
> Again the TiVo believed it was missing an External HD. I instructed the TiVo to remove it. It finally booted, I had all my shows, BUT there was STILL only 1TB available !
> 
> ADVICE ? PLEASE ?


Use MFSTools 3.2 to to copy the 1TB image to your 4TB drive.


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## SalemCat

jmbach said:


> Use MFSTools 3.2 to to copy the 1TB image to your 4TB drive.


I'm baffled.

I managed to get to the # prompt.

FDISK -L identifies my discs. I only have the 320GB Source and the 4TB Destination.

mfscopy -ai /dev/sda/dev/sdb

and many, many variations of the command shown above fail to initiate any results.


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## SalemCat

My command line was missing the SPACES.

mfstool_copy_-ai_/dev/sda_/dev/sdb

DO NOT type in underscores. But DO use spaces where I have shown underscores.

It is now running.


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## SalemCat

If I simply place a 5TB HD in my BOLT, is it going to automatically install itself ?


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## jmbach

SalemCat said:


> I'm baffled.
> 
> I managed to get to the # prompt.
> 
> FDISK -L identifies my discs. I only have the 320GB Source and the 4TB Destination.
> 
> mfscopy -ai /dev/sda/dev/sdb
> 
> and many, many variations of the command shown above fail to initiate any results.


Login with user root and password tivo 
fdisk -l identifies sda as 320 GB and sdb as 4 TB
mfscopy-ai /dev/sda /dev/sdb (ensure there is a space between the two drives)

Can you do two things. One let's carry this conversation in the MFSTools thread. And two post screen shots of the output or lack there of.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## jmbach

SalemCat said:


> If I simply place a 5TB HD in my BOLT, is it going to automatically install itself ?


Not exactly. It will act like it is going to auto format it but the result is a smaller recording space. However you can then take that auto formatted drive and run MFSR on it and it will correct the issues and give you full use of the drive.


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## jmbach

SalemCat said:


> My command line was missing the SPACES.
> 
> mfstool_copy_-ai_/dev/sda_/dev/sdb
> 
> DO NOT type in underscores. But DO use spaces where I have shown underscores.
> 
> It is now running.


I see you figured it out before my post posted.


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## SalemCat

jmbach said:


> I see you figured it out before my post posted.


Yes - Thanks !
I can get pretty stubborn and determined when it comes to computers.

IT WORKED !!

I've got 640 HD Hours now, which is the full 4TB.

I let MFSTOOL run overnight, but I believe it took only 2-1/2 hours.

And boy does this Premiere boot FAST now !

This time I used the ORIGINAL 320GB HD as the Source. No EXTERNAL DRIVE message appeared at all. It seems clear to me the Seller of the 1TB HD must have had an External Drive on his TiVo at one time, and most likely did not remove it properly.

Maybe when I re-use that 1TB HD on another Premier of mine I will ATTACH a WD Ext HD, and then remove it properly, and hope that message disappears. But I bet it won't.


----------



## SalemCat

SalemCat said:


> If I simply place a 5TB HD in my BOLT, is it going to automatically install itself ?


Ok, I just bought a *Seagate 5TB Barracuda Sata 6GB/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 15mm Internal Bare/OEM Hard Drive (ST5000LM000)* for my 1TB BOLT for $199.88 shipped from Amazon.

Can't wait to install it.

I want my days of endless TRANSFERS (which are actually COPIES) to be over !


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## jmbach

SalemCat said:


> Yes - Thanks !
> I can get pretty stubborn and determined when it comes to computers.
> 
> IT WORKED !!
> 
> I've got 640 HD Hours now, which is the full 4TB.
> 
> I let MFSTOOL run overnight, but I believe it took only 2-1/2 hours.
> 
> And boy does this Premiere boot FAST now !
> 
> This time I used the ORIGINAL 320GB HD as the Source. No EXTERNAL DRIVE message appeared at all. It seems clear to me the Seller of the 1TB HD must have had an External Drive on his TiVo at one time, and most likely did not remove it properly.
> 
> Maybe when I re-use that 1TB HD on another Premier of mine I will ATTACH a WD Ext HD, and then remove it properly, and hope that message disappears. But I bet it won't.


The issue was with using JMFS. It expands the drive by adding another partition to the drive. JMFS has an issue with drives over 2TB. Probably what was happening was something was not right with the added partition. So when the TiVo detected that it offered to divorce the partition. TiVo thinks that any added partition always lies on an external drive. Hence the divorce external drive message.

MFSTools 3.2 expands by increasing the two media partitions and not by adding a partition.


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## jmbach

SalemCat said:


> Ok, I just bought a *Seagate 5TB Barracuda Sata 6GB/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 15mm Internal Bare/OEM Hard Drive (ST5000LM000)* for my 1TB BOLT for $199.88 shipped from Amazon.
> 
> Can't wait to install it.
> 
> I want my days of endless TRANSFERS (which are actually COPIES) to be over !


I would run several passes of Seagates diagnostic on it both read and write before installing it. It seems that most people do not have good luck with Seagate drives. However to be fair, it might be only the people with problems who are posting and not the ones without problems.


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## HerronScott

SalemCat said:


> Ok, I just bought a *Seagate 5TB Barracuda Sata 6GB/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 15mm Internal Bare/OEM Hard Drive (ST5000LM000)* for my 1TB BOLT for $199.88 shipped from Amazon.


Others have recommended not using SMR drives and have reported issues with Seagate drives in the Bolt as Jim indicated above.

Seagate Introduces BarraCuda 2.5" HDDs with Up to 5 TB Capacity

Scott


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## SalemCat

HerronScott said:


> Others have recommended not using SMR drives and have reported issues with Seagate drives in the Bolt as Jim indicated above.
> 
> Seagate Introduces BarraCuda 2.5" HDDs with Up to 5 TB Capacity
> 
> Scott


The reviews are very, very good - and 600+ of them.

Amazon.com: Seagate 5TB Barracuda Sata 6GB/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 15mm Internal Bare/OEM Hard Drive (ST5000LM000): Computers & Accessories

Obviously there is no way to know how many are being used in a TiVo Bolt.

What large 2.5" HD might you recommend ?

I could probably still cancel.


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## SalemCat

SalemCat said:


> The reviews are very, very good - and 600+ of them.
> 
> Amazon.com: Seagate 5TB Barracuda Sata 6GB/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 15mm Internal Bare/OEM Hard Drive (ST5000LM000): Computers & Accessories
> 
> Obviously there is no way to know how many are being used in a TiVo Bolt.
> 
> What large 2.5" HD might you recommend ?
> 
> I could probably still cancel.


Ok, there was ONE TiVo review:

Five Stars 
Worked perfectly in my new Tivo Bolt! 
By Matthew I. on January 29, 2017


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## jmbach

It would be nice to know if it is still working well.


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## SalemCat

jmbach said:


> It would be nice to know if it is still working well.


Yes - it would.
Fortunately TiVo recorded TV Shows are not as important as past Tax Returns, Family Photos, Business Data, etc.
A TV Show can always be found on the Internet someplace, though I freak when I'm asked to pay for them.
I already pay Comcast $250 a month - and that should be sufficient.

I will do my best to update my experience with this 5TB Seagate.


----------



## HerronScott

SalemCat said:


> The reviews are very, very good - and 600+ of them.
> 
> Amazon.com: Seagate 5TB Barracuda Sata 6GB/s 128MB Cache 2.5-Inch 15mm Internal Bare/OEM Hard Drive (ST5000LM000): Computers & Accessories
> 
> Obviously there is no way to know how many are being used in a TiVo Bolt.
> 
> What large 2.5" HD might you recommend ?
> .


Sorry I meant not recommended here for TiVo's versus for other uses (SMR drives that is). I don't really have a recommendation myself as our primary TiVo is a Roamio Pro. I did get a Bolt with their recent promotion to replace my son's HD but in going to stick with a 2TB WD drive.

Scott


----------



## HerronScott

SalemCat said:


> I will do my best to update my experience with this 5TB Seagate.


Definitely let us know how it goes! It would be nice to have a larger drive option. It seems like people are usually hit with the 4 flashing lights issue after a few months of use if its going to be a problem.

Scott


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## SalemCat

Crap.

I have my 5TB HD, but no T10 SECURITY.

I ordered a few on eBay from Asia. It may be a few weeks (sigh).


----------



## SalemCat

HerronScott said:


> Definitely let us know how it goes! It would be nice to have a larger drive option. It seems like people are usually hit with the 4 flashing lights issue after a few months of use if its going to be a problem.
> 
> Scott


After reading more ports, I have decided I'm not as brave as I thought I was.

I'm returning the 5TB HD.


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## bobatkins

I finally figured out the solution (months ago). This thread and everywhere else I looked always reference JMFS v104 which seems to be the version that is talked about everywhere. So I would like to pass forward the fruits of my labor to all.

*JMFS v104 WILL NOT WORK to supersize an existing clean install on a larger (>1TB ) drive.*

*You MUST get JMFS v105*. It will do the job correctly! v104 does not work to enlarge an already configure TiVo drive that is >1TB!.

With JMFS v105, just plug the large TiVo drive into your PC and boot it up with JMFS v105. Follow the instructions and presto - JMFS will work its magic on your larger drive and make it entirely available for recording!

As for where to get JMFS v105 - that was a real chore since it seems nobody posts any links to it. So here are the 2 essential tools that anyone who wants to upgrade a larger TiVo drive using a PC will need to get the task done.

JMFS v105 Boot CD ISO

MFS Tools 3.2 OpenSUSE Boot CD ISO

---
Bob


----------



## kdavis508

bobatkins said:


> I finally figured out the solution (months ago). This thread and everywhere else I looked always reference JMFS v104 which seems to be the version that is talked about everywhere. So I would like to pass forward the fruits of my labor to all.
> 
> *JMFS v104 WILL NOT WORK to supersize an existing clean install on a larger (>1TB ) drive.*
> 
> *You MUST get JMFS v105*. It will do the job correctly! v104 does not work to enlarge an already configure TiVo drive that is >1TB!.
> 
> With JMFS v105, just plug the large TiVo drive into your PC and boot it up with JMFS v105. Follow the instructions and presto - JMFS will work its magic on your larger drive and make it entirely available for recording!
> 
> As for where to get JMFS v105 - that was a real chore since it seems nobody posts any links to it. So here are the 2 essential tools that anyone who wants to upgrade a larger TiVo drive using a PC will need to get the task done.
> 
> JMFS v105 Boot CD ISO
> 
> MFS Tools 3.2 OpenSUSE Boot CD ISO
> 
> ---
> Bob


I am trying to upgrade 1TB drive, that was already upgraded using JFMS v104, in a Premiere 320, to a new 2TB. I have some copy protected recordings that I cannot archive, so I would like to copy over what is in the 1TB drive the 2TB drive. When I try JFMS v105 copy, expand, supersize I the Tivo asks me for an external drive. If three thumbs down, I can get the drive to work, but I am stuck with only 1TB to work with.

I have also tried a whole mess of things to get MFSTools 3.2 to copy, and I get a corrupt inode error message every time. I am guessing MFSTools does not play nice with drives originally written via JFMS.

I still have the original 320gb hard drive, but I would prefer to not have to start over. Is there any way I can clone the 1TB to the 2TB, keeping my recordings, and giving me the full 2TB capacity?


----------



## jmbach

kdavis508 said:


> I am trying to upgrade 1TB drive, that was already upgraded using JFMS v104, in a Premiere 320, to a new 2TB. I have some copy protected recordings that I cannot archive, so I would like to copy over what is in the 1TB drive the 2TB drive. When I try JFMS v105 copy, expand, supersize I the Tivo asks me for an external drive. If three thumbs down, I can get the drive to work, but I am stuck with only 1TB to work with.
> 
> I have also tried a whole mess of things to get MFSTools 3.2 to copy, and I get a corrupt inode error message every time. I am guessing MFSTools does not play nice with drives originally written via JFMS.
> 
> I still have the original 320gb hard drive, but I would prefer to not have to start over. Is there any way I can clone the 1TB to the 2TB, keeping my recordings, and giving me the full 2TB capacity?


With that error from MFSTools 3.2, the inode problem has to be fixed first. Would clone the drive first and then try MFSTools on the clone. If there or persists, try a Kickstart 58 and/or 57 on the clone. If this puts you in a boot loop, you still have the original that boots. Then run MFSTools on the clone. If that does not work, then save as much as you can with kmttg. You will more than likely need to use your original TiVo drive.


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## kdavis508

jmbach said:


> With that error from MFSTools 3.2, the inode problem has to be fixed first. Would clone the drive first and then try MFSTools on the clone. If there or persists, try a Kickstart 58 and/or 57 on the clone. If this puts you in a boot loop, you still have the original that boots. Then run MFSTools on the clone. If that does not work, then save as much as you can with kmttg. You will more than likely need to use your original TiVo drive.


Thanks again for the quick reply. Do you recommend a particular tool for cloning? I used DDRescue to copy the drive over to an intermediate drive and got the same inode error when trying to copy from the intermediate to 2TB target drive. The log in DDRescue showed zero errors, which leads me to believe it is an incompatibility issue with using a JFMS cloned drive with MFSTools.


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## jmbach

kdavis508 said:


> Thanks again for the quick reply. Do you recommend a particular tool for cloning? I used DDRescue to copy the drive over to an intermediate drive and got the same inode error when trying to copy from the intermediate to 2TB target drive. The log in DDRescue showed zero errors, which leads me to believe it is an incompatibility issue with using a JFMS cloned drive with MFSTools.


I have used MFSTools to copy several JMFS expanded drives without that error. My guess is that either the TiVo hiccupped when it wrote the inode data or the drive SMART detected that a sector was going bad and remapped it causing corruption of the inode. The latter more likely.

Try a Kickstart 57 and 58 on the clone to see if the TiVo can fix the corrupted inode.


----------



## ggieseke

If ddrescue copied the drive to an intermediate with zero errors and MFSTools 3.2 still thinks it has a corrupt inode it's not a bad spot (although that could have caused it).

I concur with jmbach's recommendation to try KS57 and KS58. Only TiVo knows exactly what those programs do, but any repair program like that should be able to ignore one bad inode and continue.


----------



## Shagger

So my Premiere's 2TB HD appears to be failing, freezing up, pixelations, glitching, jumping ahead, etc... So I am thinking to buy a new HD and copy the old 2TB drive into the new drive. It's been a while since I did this, I used JMFS last time. Doing some reading about the MFS tools, and had a few questions:

1) Drive recommendations, what's a good one these days?
2) Can I easily upgrade from my 2TB drive to a 4TB drive without too much effort?
3) I have an external USB 3.0 dock that I plan on using to copy the data over, will the MFS Tools be able to copy between drives in the same dock, or do I need 2 docks?


----------



## kdavis508

jmbach said:


> I have used MFSTools to copy several JMFS expanded drives without that error. My guess is that either the TiVo hiccupped when it wrote the inode data or the drive SMART detected that a sector was going bad and remapped it causing corruption of the inode. The latter more likely.
> 
> Try a Kickstart 57 and 58 on the clone to see if the TiVo can fix the corrupted inode.


Success!!! After running Kickstart 57 and 58 (and just for "kicks" a 54 check for errors) on the intermediate drive, I was finally able to copy the source drive successfully to a larger drive with MFSTools. Thanks so much to jmbach (are you by chance related to J.S. Bach?) and ggieseke, this little project has been a thorn in my side for two months.

If anyone is going through a similar experience, I would be more than happy to provide any input.


----------



## toomuchtodo

Hello everyone.

My Premiere XL (TCD748000) died this weekend.
Can get some help me with getting an image?

thanks!


----------



## ggieseke

toomuchtodo said:


> Hello everyone.
> 
> My Premiere XL (TCD748000) died this weekend.
> Can get some help me with getting an image?
> 
> thanks!


PM sent.


----------



## jcondon

jmbach said:


> That would be your best bet. It really all depends on how full your drive is on a regular basis. Might be a reasonable thing to do if it is over 80% . If you another drive of equal or more capacity, you could clone your current TiVo drive to that drive and use MFSTools 3.2 to copy the content back to the original drive.


4 months later and I ordered another WD 3TB Red Drive.

I assume I can use mfstools to copy the 2.3TB I ended up with to the new 3.0 TB drive and then just use the new drive in THAT Premiere. Later copy the original 320GB in my other Tivo Premier to the 4 month old WD 3TB drive. And get the full 3TB of space on both Tivos while keeping all the shows and settings?

Looking at the mfstool thread the proper command (assuming source is sda and destination is sdb) would be

mfstool copy -ai /dev/sda /dev/sdb

Probably will do this later in the week.

Thanks as always for your help.


----------



## jmbach

jcondon said:


> 4 months later and I ordered another WD 3TB Red Drive.
> 
> I assume I can use mfstools to copy the 2.3TB I ended up with to the new 3.0 TB drive and then just use the new drive in THAT Premiere. Later copy the original 320GB in my other Tivo Premier to the 4 month old WD 3TB drive. And get the full 3TB of space on both Tivos while keeping all the shows and settings?
> 
> Looking at the mfstool thread the proper command (assuming source is sda and destination is sdb) would be
> 
> mfstool copy -ai /dev/sda /dev/sdb
> 
> Probably will do this later in the week.
> 
> Thanks as always for your help.


Your analysis is impeccable.

The command is correct for what you want to accomplish.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


----------



## jcondon

jmbach said:


> Your analysis is impeccable.
> 
> The command is correct for what you want to accomplish.
> 
> Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


Thanks for all your help original Premiere upgraded to 3TB on the new drive. Will do the other Tivo probably tomorrow. Lots lets programs on there so should go faster. In fact will copy as much as I can to the first Premiere.

479 HD hours with 391 available


----------



## BosCyclist

My Premiere XL (TCD748000) hard drive die. (Won't clone unfortunately.) If there's an compatible image for this model, let me know. At least, I can put the new drive to use. Thanks.


----------



## ggieseke

BosCyclist said:


> My Premiere XL (TCD748000) hard drive die. (Won't clone unfortunately.) If there's an compatible image for this model, let me know. At least, I can put the new drive to use. Thanks.


PM sent.


----------



## faxpaper

TiVo Premier XL model TCD748000 image please.


----------



## lart2150

I'm planning on replacing the 500GB drive in my bolt vox with a 3TB drive. I know I could just put the new drive in and let the tivo format and setup the drive, however I want to keep my recordings and it would be nice to keep all the other settings like my cable card pairing. I know mfs tools 3.2 does notwork with bolt (vox) based tivos but would jmfs 105 work for copying and expanding?

Or could I use jmfs/dd to copy and then mfsr to expand from 500GB to 3TB?


----------



## jmbach

lart2150 said:


> I'm planning on replacing the 500GB drive in my bolt vox with a 3TB drive. I know I could just put the new drive in and let the tivo format and setup the drive, however I want to keep my recordings and it would be nice to keep all the other settings like my cable card pairing. I know mfs tools 3.2 does notwork with bolt (vox) based tivos but would jmfs 105 work for copying and expanding?
> 
> Or could I use jmfs/dd to copy and then mfsr to expand from 500GB to 3TB?


No on all counts. Your only option is using kmttg/pytivo to copy non copy protected recordings to a computer drive and the copy them back after the new drive is installed.

Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk


----------



## lart2150

jmbach said:


> No on all counts. Your only option is using kmttg/pytivo to copy non copy protected recordings to a computer drive and the copy them back after the new drive is installed.
> 
> Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk


I was afraid that was the answer. Do you know if the bolt vox be downgraded as pytivo does not work with hydra. I might just pull the recordings with kmttg and use plex to play back the recordings I want to keep.


----------



## jmbach

Apparently you can roll back but the process loses all your recordings 


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


----------



## ggieseke

You should be able to downgrade from Hydra, but I think you have to switch the remote control into IR mode.


----------



## makracing36

I just copied an already upgraded failing 1.5T drive to a 2T drive useing 1.04. Everything copied fine and the drive works. I am not about to get it to use the other 500gb of the new drive though. I then found JMFS 1.05 and it said it expanded the drive to 2T but when i place it back in the Tivo it sees it as an external drive and removes it.

Any ideas on how to get my drive to expand correctly to get the other 500gb that is not is use at the moment?


----------



## jmbach

makracing36 said:


> I just copied an already upgraded failing 1.5T drive to a 2T drive useing 1.04. Everything copied fine and the drive works. I am not about to get it to use the other 500gb of the new drive though. I then found JMFS 1.05 and it said it expanded the drive to 2T but when i place it back in the Tivo it sees it as an external drive and removes it.
> 
> Any ideas on how to get my drive to expand correctly to get the other 500gb that is not is use at the moment?


The best and easiest way is to use MFSTools 3.2 to copy the image to another drive.

The issue is that the drive has been upgraded once already and has maxed out the allowed partition count. You can try to run 8TBPrep found on the MFSTools 3.2 ISO and if it finishes without error, you can then expand the drive.

Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk


----------



## NWATX

Attempting to recover Tivo Premier using JMFS live copy. Copy running _very_ slowly with some errors accumulating (looks like it will copy 320GB in 3 days). My model # is TCD746320. I think I need an image from which to build the new 1 TB replacement drive.


----------



## ggieseke

NWATX said:


> Attempting to recover Tivo Premier using JMFS live copy. Copy running _very_ slowly with some errors accumulating (looks like it will copy 320GB in 3 days). My model # is TCD746320. I think I need an image from which to build the new 1 TB replacement drive.


PM sent.


----------



## findbenjamin

It looks like my drive too, is hosed. 4 errors with only 8 Gig copied. Can someone send a link for image? Many thanks!

EDIT:

Premiere XL.

Thanks!


----------



## ggieseke

findbenjamin said:


> It looks like my drive too, is hosed. 4 errors with only 8 Gig copied. Can someone send a link for image? Many thanks!
> 
> EDIT:
> 
> Premiere XL.
> 
> Thanks!


PM sent.


----------



## findbenjamin

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


Thanks ggieseke. Much appreciated!


----------



## NWATX

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


Thank you! My TiVo Premiere is resurrected!


----------



## BosCyclist

BosCyclist said:


> My Premiere XL (TCD748000) hard drive die. (Won't clone unfortunately.) If there's an compatible image for this model, let me know. At least, I can put the new drive to use. Thanks.


Everyone,
The Holidays and a ski trip delayed me repairing my TiVo. Unfortunately after building a new hard drive with an image, my machine is stuck in a startup loop. Here are the steps that I did using a laptop. If anyone sees anything wrong, please let me know:

a) Laptop: Ubuntu 17.10; new drive: WD 2TB AV-GP WD20EURX
b) Mount image (Ubuntu)
$ sudo vhdimount -X allow_root ~/TiVo/TCD748000.vhd /mnt/vhd
c) Copy image to new drive (Ubuntu, takes ~2.5 hours, finishes successfully)
$ sudo ddrescue -f -n /mnt/vhd/vhdi1 /dev/sda
d) Boot into MFS Tools 3.2 (to expand 1TB image to fill 2TB)
# mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/sda
Successful: initial 1175 hours, now 2374 hours
e) Install drive into TiVo. Power up. Initiate Kickstarter 57.
f) Blue 'External Storage Missing' screen appears which is a surprise. Press CLEAR since I never had an external drive. (Maybe the image had an external drive?) Follow-up Blue 'Warning! ...permanently deleting external storage device' screen. Press THUMBS DOWN 3x then ENTER to confirm removing external drive. TiVo screen confirming deletion. Lasts for ~10 minutes. Reboots.
g) Re-initiate Kickstarter 57. Successful. Green Screen. After ~20 minutes. Reboots.
h) 'Welcome! Starting Up..." screen appear. After ~3 minutes, screen goes blank. 'Almost there...' screen appears. After ~10 minutes, all lights flash (green, yellow, red, blue) at once. Goes back to 'Welcome! Starting Up' screen and the cycles repeats forever.

I looked at my Power supply board. None of the capacitors were bulging. Again if anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Thanks.


----------



## lpwcomp

You can't just copy the image file to the new drive. You need to use DvrBARS.


----------



## jmbach

BosCyclist said:


> Everyone,
> The Holidays and a ski trip delayed me repairing my TiVo. Unfortunately after building a new hard drive with an image, my machine is stuck in a startup loop. Here are the steps that I did using a laptop. If anyone sees anything wrong, please let me know:
> 
> a) Laptop: Ubuntu 17.10; new drive: WD 2TB AV-GP WD20EURX
> b) Mount image (Ubuntu)
> $ sudo vhdimount -X allow_root ~/TiVo/TCD748000.vhd /mnt/vhd
> c) Copy image to new drive (Ubuntu, takes ~2.5 hours, finishes successfully)
> $ sudo ddrescue -f -n /mnt/vhd/vhdi1 /dev/sda
> d) Boot into MFS Tools 3.2 (to expand 1TB image to fill 2TB)
> # mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/sda
> Successful: initial 1175 hours, now 2374 hours
> e) Install drive into TiVo. Power up. Initiate Kickstarter 57.
> f) Blue 'External Storage Missing' screen appears which is a surprise. Press CLEAR since I never had an external drive. (Maybe the image had an external drive?) Follow-up Blue 'Warning! ...permanently deleting external storage device' screen. Press THUMBS DOWN 3x then ENTER to confirm removing external drive. TiVo screen confirming deletion. Lasts for ~10 minutes. Reboots.
> g) Re-initiate Kickstarter 57. Successful. Green Screen. After ~20 minutes. Reboots.
> h) 'Welcome! Starting Up..." screen appear. After ~3 minutes, screen goes blank. 'Almost there...' screen appears. After ~10 minutes, all lights flash (green, yellow, red, blue) at once. Goes back to 'Welcome! Starting Up' screen and the cycles repeats forever.
> 
> I looked at my Power supply board. None of the capacitors were bulging. Again if anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Thanks.


Some of the WD20EURS you need to either disable wdidle3, PUIS, or both for them to work in a TiVo.

Consider mounting the VHD and use mfscopy command to copy the VHD to the new drive. It can copy and expand at the same time. However, if this is the virgin image from ggieseke, it may not work. You may have to copy the image to a drive and let it boot and update first before it can be expanded and/or copied successfully.

If you are going to copy the image to the drive via dd or ddrescue and want to use mfsadd to add recording space to a premiere image, you will need to run apmfix utility on that latest MFSTools iso to fix the image to work in the Premiere. You might still get a divorce screen but that is OK. If you do not run apmfix, the Premiere will report that you have space available but when it tries to use that space it will error out.

Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk


----------



## lpwcomp

How can either mfscopy or dd/ddrescue create a bootable TiVo drive from a VHD? Don't you need to use DvrBARS?

Maybe PUIS, but Intellipark (which is what the wdidle3 command disables) only comes into play on a soft boot. In any case, you cannot disable either one of these with a laptop. You should be able to disable PUIS (if indeed enabled) via jumpers on the drive.


----------



## jmbach

lpwcomp said:


> How can either mfscopy or dd/ddrescue create a bootable TiVo drive from a VHD? Don't you need to use DvrBARS?
> 
> Maybe PUIS, but Intellipark (which is what the wdidle3 command disables) only comes into play on a soft boot. In any case, you cannot disable either one of these with a laptop. You should be able to disable PUIS (if indeed enabled) via jumpers on the drive.


If the VHD is appropriately virtualized inside the OS, it will appear as a drive to the OS and can be used just like a 'real' connected drive. So dd and MFSTools can use it.

I use a laptop to modify PUIS and wdidle3 on a drive when needed. My development and TiVo modding is all done on a laptop.

Not every drive will have a jumper to disable PUIS so it has to be done via software (HDAT2).


----------



## ggieseke

Using dd/ddrescue in a VM is slow as hell because it copies the entire virtual "drive" on a byte-for-byte basis, but it should work. VHD is a published standard that most virtualization software understands these days (one of the reasons I chose it) but the DvrBARS Quick Restore mode is usually a lot faster because it only writes the sectors that actually contain data. In MFSTools 3.2, mfscopy does basically the same thing because it only copies what it thinks is relevant.


----------



## mee081224

So I bought a new 1tb after my tivo drive took a crap. Turns out it is a 1.5 TB drive and not 1TB. So I then bought a used 320gb tivo premiere drive to copy. Sucks to know i could have asked for an image first. I had issues using a usb stick, so i finally burned an image of 1.4 from first post, but its not accepting any keyboad keystrokes. I then tried to use the 1.5 but its all command line access and i dont know the commands to run. I did the fdisk and the make writable but running into an issue copying since i dont know the syntax to make a drive input vs output.
What can i do?

Edit. Looks like my target drive had something on it. So I ran ddrescue from the command line instead of copydisk so I could force the write from source to target.

So far my steps have been
fdisk -l (to identify drives a was source & b was target)
chmod o+rw on target
chmod o+r on source
ddsrescue --force "/dev/sda" "/dev/sdb"


I assume my next steps will be to expand (mfsadd), but i dont see how to supersize (remove commericals)


----------



## L David Matheny

mee081224 said:


> So I bought a new 1tb after my tivo drive took a crap. Turns out it is a 1.5 TB drive and not 1TB. So I then bought a used 320gb tivo premiere drive to copy. Sucks to know i could have asked for an image first. I had issues using a usb stick, so i finally burned an image of 1.4 from first post, but its not accepting any keyboad keystrokes. I then tried to use the 1.5 but its all command line access and i dont know the commands to run. I did the fdisk and the make writable but running into an issue copying since i dont know the syntax to make a drive input vs output.
> What can i do?
> 
> Edit. Looks like my target drive had something on it. So I ran ddrescue from the command line instead of copydisk so I could force the write from source to target.
> 
> So far my steps have been
> fdisk -l (to identify drives a was source & b was target)
> chmod o+rw on target
> chmod o+r on source
> ddsrescue --force "/dev/sda" "/dev/sdb"
> 
> I assume my next steps will be to expand (mfsadd), but i dont see how to supersize (remove commericals)


Read this: How To Clone Your Failing TiVo Drive With ddrescue
[Edit] OK, maybe you're already past that point, but it's still a good read.


----------



## jmbach

mee081224 said:


> So I bought a new 1tb after my tivo drive took a crap. Turns out it is a 1.5 TB drive and not 1TB. So I then bought a used 320gb tivo premiere drive to copy. Sucks to know i could have asked for an image first. I had issues using a usb stick, so i finally burned an image of 1.4 from first post, but its not accepting any keyboad keystrokes. I then tried to use the 1.5 but its all command line access and i dont know the commands to run. I did the fdisk and the make writable but running into an issue copying since i dont know the syntax to make a drive input vs output.
> What can i do?
> 
> Edit. Looks like my target drive had something on it. So I ran ddrescue from the command line instead of copydisk so I could force the write from source to target.
> 
> So far my steps have been
> fdisk -l (to identify drives a was source & b was target)
> chmod o+rw on target
> chmod o+r on source
> ddsrescue --force "/dev/sda" "/dev/sdb"
> 
> I assume my next steps will be to expand (mfsadd), but i dont see how to supersize (remove commericals)


First make sure your image boots in the TiVo just fine. 
The issue would if your initial image you copied was already expanded once, it cannot be expanded again. If that is the case, copy the image over to a spare drive and then use MFSTools 3.2 to copy the image back to the 1.5 TB drive. If the image has never been expanded, then you can use JMFS to expand the image. (or use mfsadd from the MFSTools 3.2 ISO followed by running apmfix from the same ISO on the image)


----------



## tivodude007

ggieseke said:


> PM sent.


I wish I had read this old post about my upgrade for my Premiere. I had the same problem trying to work on 3-4 TB drives with an older USB2.0 exteranal with a cap of 2TB which caused lots of grief again :-( ...

I have a problem with my TiVo HDDs and need a TCD 746320 image to fix the problem can I get a PM on this problem?
Thanks in advance for your help...


----------



## ggieseke

tivodude007 said:


> I wish I had read this old post about my upgrade for my Premiere. I had the same problem trying to work on 3-4 TB drives with an older USB2.0 exteranal with a cap of 2TB which caused lots of grief again :-( ...
> 
> I have a problem with my TiVo HDDs and need a TCD 746320 image to fix the problem can I get a PM on this problem?
> Thanks in advance for your help...


Sent.


----------



## Hardcore Legend

This may be the dumbest question ever posed in this thread but:

When upgrading the drive, will it copy ALL of the recordings over to the new drive (including copy protected ones)? I've always understood it simply does a bit for bit copy but the only other time I had to copy a TIVO drive, none of the recordings were copy protected so it didn't dawn on me. 

I have a 2TB Premiere XL that I want to take up to 4TB (which is probably the easiest thing to do, right?). What is the go to drive right now for making that upgrade?

Thanks!


----------



## jmbach

Hardcore Legend said:


> This may be the dumbest question ever posed in this thread but:
> 
> When upgrading the drive, will it copy ALL of the recordings over to the new drive (including copy protected ones)? I've always understood it simply does a bit for bit copy but the only other time I had to copy a TIVO drive, none of the recordings were copy protected so it didn't dawn on me.
> 
> I have a 2TB Premiere XL that I want to take up to 4TB (which is probably the easiest thing to do, right?). What is the go to drive right now for making that upgrade?
> 
> Thanks!


I would recommend using Mfstools 3.2 to copy and expand the drive especially since your current drive has been expanded once already.


----------



## mattack

the answer is yes...


----------



## jmbach

The other answer is a WD Red (not pro) drive is one of the recommended drives.


----------



## Hardcore Legend

Thank you both for the quick and helpful responses. 

Just to clear one thing up: I've never upgraded this TIVO's hard-drive, so I assume it is stock. 

I will look for a Red drive. Thanks again .


----------



## jmbach

Hardcore Legend said:


> Thank you both for the quick and helpful responses.
> 
> Just to clear one thing up: I've never upgraded this TIVO's hard-drive, so I assume it is stock.
> 
> I will look for a Red drive. Thanks again .


What is the model number of the TiVo? A Premiere XL as far as I know came with a 1TB drive.


----------



## Hardcore Legend

jmbach said:


> What is the model number of the TiVo? A Premiere XL as far as I know came with a 1TB drive.


It is an XL4, TCD758250. I actually have 3 of them.

Looking back, I see I put XL in the original post. My apologies.


----------



## jmbach

Hardcore Legend said:


> It is an XL4, TCD758250. I actually have 3 of them.
> 
> Looking back, I see I put XL in the original post. My apologies.


That makes sense now.

You would best use MFSTools 3.2 for your copy. You will need a patched version of JMFS for it to expand your drive which I think you can find somewhere in this thread.


----------



## Hardcore Legend

I searched the word patch in this thread and came up empty (except a post talking about cabbage!). 

I have the WD Red drive and want to make sure I don't Bork these drives. After making sure my TIVO has the most up-to-date software, I should:
-unplug it
-remove drive
-place image of mfs 3.2 disc in dvd drive
-plug both current drive and upgrade drive in an empty pc tower
-boot from DVD and follow on screen instructions?

I'm just looking to take current drive (2TB), copy it bit-for-bit to new 4TB drive with new increased space. Are there any tricks or special steps I should take to ensure I don't ruin either drive and get this right on the first try?


----------



## jmbach

Hardcore Legend said:


> I searched the word patch in this thread and came up empty (except a post talking about cabbage!).
> 
> I have the WD Red drive and want to make sure I don't Bork these drives. After making sure my TIVO has the most up-to-date software, I should:
> -unplug it
> -remove drive
> -place image of mfs 3.2 disc in dvd drive
> -plug both current drive and upgrade drive in an empty pc tower
> -boot from DVD and follow on screen instructions?
> 
> I'm just looking to take current drive (2TB), copy it bit-for-bit to new 4TB drive with new increased space. Are there any tricks or special steps I should take to ensure I don't ruin either drive and get this right on the first try?


It is not as menu driven as JMFS. Read the first few posts of MFSTools 3.2 thread and the post with the links to the ISO of MFSTools 3.2. Will answer any questions in the MFSTools 3.2 thread.


----------



## sskraly

Can someone point me to the latest procedure for upgrading a Premiere which has the WD External Expander in use? I assume that there is still a way to use both drives as the source for a new, single expansion drive, but couldn't easily find that procedure here. Given that my Premiere has 500GB original + 1TB Expander, I'm hoping to bump up to a 4TB+ single drive config (I believe max is 8TB per other threads, right?) and preserve recordings if possible.

Thanks!


----------



## jmbach

sskraly said:


> Can someone point me to the latest procedure for upgrading a Premiere which has the WD External Expander in use? I assume that there is still a way to use both drives as the source for a new, single expansion drive, but couldn't easily find that procedure here. Given that my Premiere has 500GB original + 1TB Expander, I'm hoping to bump up to a max single drive config (I believe that's 8TB per other threads, right?) and preserve recordings if possible.
> 
> Thanks!


You will need to use MFSTools 3.2 and follow the instructions in the 8 TB Premier thread.


----------



## sskraly

jmbach said:


> You will need to use MFSTools 3.2 and follow the instructions in the 8 TB Premier thread.


Thanks! If I just want to go to 4TB (seems like that's a sweet spot for price/capacity at the moment), do I want to be using jmfs, MFSTools 3.2, or something else? Trying to find the relevant commands for this case somewhere...


----------



## jmbach

sskraly said:


> Thanks! If I just want to go to 4TB (seems like that's a sweet spot for price/capacity at the moment), do I want to be using jmfs, MFSTools 3.2, or something else? Trying to find the relevant commands for this case somewhere...


If you want to combine two drives into one you will need MFSTools 3.2


----------



## Homer1313

I'm going to sound stupid here but I'm not a programmer or well versed in Linux etc. but I can follow instructions (usually). I can't by step one. When I'm unzipping the jmfs.rev104.iso there is no .iso file. I read through several dozen posts and saw there may be an issue with bootable DVD versus CD. Have no CDs so I went with the USB version. When I use the UUI and browse for the .iso file there is none. I'm totally lost here, can't even get through the first step to boot to .iso. Anyone have a suggestion or am I just an idiot?


----------



## jmbach

Homer1313 said:


> I'm going to sound stupid here but I'm not a programmer or well versed in Linux etc. but I can follow instructions (usually). I can't by step one. When I'm unzipping the jmfs.rev104.iso there is no .iso file. I read through several dozen posts and saw there may be an issue with bootable DVD versus CD. Have no CDs so I went with the USB version. When I use the UUI and browse for the .iso file there is none. I'm totally lost here, can't even get through the first step to boot to .iso. Anyone have a suggestion or am I just an idiot?


What is the complete file name you are downloading

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


----------



## Homer1313

jmbach said:


> What is the complete file name you are downloading
> 
> Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


jmfs-rev104.iso.zip

I'm using the download link from the first page of this thread.


----------



## kemac

I was able to download the zip file and unpack with WinRAR successfully.


----------



## Homer1313

So was I and it still doesn't show up in UUI.


----------



## jmbach

Homer1313 said:


> So was I and it still doesn't show up in UUI.


Are you able to unzip the file successfully.

If you are, do you have windows set to show the full filename and extension.


----------



## Homer1313

Question 2 is a yes but I think the problem lies in #1. Everything I unzip goes another level to unzip and there is no .iso extension for UUI to find. Something's not right (obviously).


----------



## kemac

You should only be unzipping the .zip file to a location on your hard drive and leaving the ISO intact, it sounds like your also opening the ISO file which will not work. (Obviously) It sounds like whatever tool you are using to unzip is unapcking both the zip and the ISO.

What tool are you using to unzip? Have you tried using WinRar?

If I misunderstood it might be better to post some screen shots so we can see what you see.


----------



## HerronScott

Homer1313 said:


> Question 2 is a yes but I think the problem lies in #1. Everything I unzip goes another level to unzip and there is no .iso extension for UUI to find. Something's not right (obviously).


What is UUI and what kemac indicates as you don't want to uncompress the ISO (which it sounds like is happening)?

Scott


----------



## kemac

I am assuming UUI is "Universal Unix Installer" which Homer1313 is trying to use, to create a bootable USB with the ISO.


----------



## dadrepus

Did things change I can't get to any of the downloads. Are we using something else?


----------



## tivomolly

Hi, I hope someone can help me out of a jam. I had previously upgraded and expanded a Premiere 320 to my "Vault" of saved videos. Sadly, the drive recently crashed (scraping noise when powering-up) and I lost everything. I'm starting over with a new WD 2.0 b drive. I made a virgin copy from an image I had saved. Then put in the TiVo, "Blessed" it by C&DE. I then went through the setup and recorded a few shows over a couple of days to ensure it was working properly. Then went back to JMFS Live (All-in One) to expand and then Supersize it. All went well with no errors; JMFS said I had 67 hrs before, 687 hrs after the expand and 708 hrs after the SuperSize. When I re-mounted it in the TiVo, I got a blue screen "No external drive found" and a choice to remove the drive permanently or to reconnect it. After reading a couple of posts here, I chose to permanently remove the external drive. The 2Tb drive works, but TiVo reports only 67 hrs available (each of the 3 attempts). I have repeated all of the above 2 more times, each time ensuring I was following Ross Walker's instructions for a Premier using JMFS All-In One. I can't figure-out what I'm doing incorrectly or missing. Can anyone shed any light on this issue? Thank you in advance. Also: Will this method support a 4 Tb drive in a Premiere?


----------



## jmbach

tivomolly said:


> Hi, I hope someone can help me out of a jam. I had previously upgraded and expanded a Premiere 320 to my "Vault" of saved videos. Sadly, the drive recently crashed (scraping noise when powering-up) and I lost everything. I'm starting over with a new WD 2.0 b drive. I made a virgin copy from an image I had saved. Then put in the TiVo, "Blessed" it by C&DE. I then went through the setup and recorded a few shows over a couple of days to ensure it was working properly. Then went back to JMFS Live (All-in One) to expand and then Supersize it. All went well with no errors; JMFS said I had 67 hrs before, 687 hrs after the expand and 708 hrs after the SuperSize. When I re-mounted it in the TiVo, I got a blue screen "No external drive found" and a choice to remove the drive permanently or to reconnect it. After reading a couple of posts here, I chose to permanently remove the external drive. The 2Tb drive works, but TiVo reports only 67 hrs available (each of the 3 attempts). I have repeated all of the above 2 more times, each time ensuring I was following Ross Walker's instructions for a Premier using JMFS All-In One. I can't figure-out what I'm doing incorrectly or missing. Can anyone shed any light on this issue? Thank you in advance. Also: Will this method support a 4 Tb drive in a Premiere?


JMFS has an issue expanding more than 1.5 TB of space.

You can use MFSTools 3.2 and above to expand when you use the ancillary tools to coalesce the added partitions.

From that drive, use MFSTools to copy and expand to a 4TB drive.


----------



## tivomolly

Thank you! Do you know if I can expand the 2 Tb drive in its current status already expanded state but which TiVo reports as 67 Hrs with MFSTools, or do I need to start all over yet again?


----------



## jmbach

Run mfsadd followed by apmfix on the drive.

You may get a notice to divorce an external drive when you boot it up. Go ahead and do so. You should be left with the correct recording space.


----------



## tivomolly

I recognize maybe this thread should be on the MFSTool 3.2 forum, however, I started here and JMBACH is familiar with my history.
After a week fooling around with the original drive, I'm still stuck. On the original drive:
- MFSCK completes with no errors.
- MFSTool info completes with lots of info that "looks" okay to me...
- MFSAdd reports nothing to add and that there is (about) 756 HD hrs.
- TiVo reports the drive has only 76 HD hrs.
- MFSTool Copy (to the new 4Tb drive) errors-out with " Source log too short."

Can you give me any new pointers?
Thank you in advance.


----------



## jmbach

tivomolly said:


> I recognize maybe this thread should be on the MFSTool 3.2 forum, however, I started here and JMBACH is familiar with my history.
> After a week fooling around with the original drive, I'm still stuck. On the original drive:
> - MFSCK completes with no errors.
> - MFSTool info completes with lots of info that "looks" okay to me...
> - MFSAdd reports nothing to add and that there is (about) 756 HD hrs.
> - TiVo reports the drive has only 76 HD hrs.
> - MFSTool Copy (to the new 4Tb drive) errors-out with " Source log too short."
> 
> Can you give me any new pointers?
> Thank you in advance.


What program are you using to restore your backup image?


----------



## tivomolly

I've been using the TiVo for about a month since restoring to a 1.5Tb drive from the original 320 image I made when it was first upgraded; then I tried to "Expand" the image to take advantage of the 1.5 Tb space when I ran into all these issues. - So *I don't remember.* I think it was probably WinMFS or DVRBars since the image was on my PC and I used a Windows recovery. The TiVo has been working fine and recording lots of shows I hope to keep - except for reporting 76 Hrs on a 1.5Tb drive. ...And now I hope to upgrade the 320 Gb image on the 1.5Tb drive to a 4 Tb drive.


----------



## jmbach

tivomolly said:


> I've been using the TiVo for about a month since restoring to a 1.5Tb drive from the original 320 image I made when it was first upgraded; then I tried to "Expand" the image to take advantage of the 1.5 Tb space when I ran into all these issues. - So *I don't remember.* I think it was probably WinMFS or DVRBars since the image was on my PC and I used a Windows recovery. The TiVo has been working fine and recording lots of shows I hope to keep - except for reporting 76 Hrs on a 1.5Tb drive. ...And now I hope to upgrade the 320 Gb image on the 1.5Tb drive to a 4 Tb drive.


Can you post a picture of the command and error message you get when you run mfscopy from the 1.5TB to the 4TB.

And post a picture or the output of mfsinfo -d command in the drive.


----------



## tivomolly

Hi jmbach,
Thank you very much for following my issue. Here is the update and closure:
- I was not using mfscopy, I was using mfstool copy.
- I tried the KickStart code 58 for an mfs cleanup. After doing that, mfstool copy worked w/o error and I successfully created a 4Gb WORKING clone of the 1.5Tb drive.
- Next, got reports: 1.5 Tb still reports 67 hrs available in the TiVo info screen and (i think) 450ish hrs in msftool info - still not working correctly. 
- The new 4 Tb clone of the 1.5 Tb drive reports 640 hrs on both the Tivo info screen and in mfstool info.
- Next, fed-up with 1.5Tb drive problems, I used mfstool copy to clone the 4Tb back to (over-writing) the 1.5Tb drive. Now the 1.5Tb drive seems to be reporting and working 100%.
QUESTIONS: 1) Does 640 Hrs sound right for the 4Tb drive 2) Can I Supersize the 4 Tb or did mfstool copy do that automatically (I'll try that tomorrow ...) and 3) If I had followed Kickstart 58 with Kickstart 57 as suggested in the mfstools 3.2 thread, maybe I would have fixed the 1.5 Tb issues with not getting all the available space and size reporting errors?
Again, thank you very much for your assistance.
- Mark


----------



## jmbach

tivomolly said:


> Hi jmbach,
> Thank you very much for following my issue. Here is the update and closure:
> - I was not using mfscopy, I was using mfstool copy.
> - I tried the KickStart code 58 for an mfs cleanup. After doing that, mfstool copy worked w/o error and I successfully created a 4Gb WORKING clone of the 1.5Tb drive.
> - Next, got reports: 1.5 Tb still reports 67 hrs available in the TiVo info screen and (i think) 450ish hrs in msftool info - still not working correctly.
> - The new 4 Tb clone of the 1.5 Tb drive reports 640 hrs on both the Tivo info screen and in mfstool info.
> - Next, fed-up with 1.5Tb drive problems, I used mfstool copy to clone the 4Tb back to (over-writing) the 1.5Tb drive. Now the 1.5Tb drive seems to be reporting and working 100%.
> QUESTIONS: 1) Does 640 Hrs sound right for the 4Tb drive 2) Can I Supersize the 4 Tb or did mfstool copy do that automatically (I'll try that tomorrow ...) and 3) If I had followed Kickstart 58 with Kickstart 57 as suggested in the mfstools 3.2 thread, maybe I would have fixed the 1.5 Tb issues with not getting all the available space and size reporting errors?
> Again, thank you very much for your assistance.
> - Mark


1) it sounds about right for 4 TB
2) if the original drive was supersized, then the copy is as well. If not then you can supersize it. 
3) your guess is as good as mine.


----------



## theruckman

If someone needs to point me back to a post in this crazy long thread go for it....but here is my history:
I have owned Tivos since 2000, LOVE them....I have upgraded the HD on every one I have ever owned INCLUDING the one I am trying to upgrade yet again my S4 TCD746320....when I first got it I replaced the HD with a 3TB, I used the same method found on here somewhere (this was back around 2015). I still have the SAME boot up CD I used on this S4 using jmfs live CD....but of course it was a different PC. i am positive it was a SATA and NOT old IDE.......I have a different PC now.....I downloaded the latest JMFS ISO mentioned in this thread, only thing plugged into the PC is new RED WD 4TB HD and OLD Tivo 3tb HD, but every time I tried to load it I would get the same error:* "Fatal Error occurred-JAVAMFS Data not found. You are maybe using an unsupported boot device (eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA). Workaround: Copy the directory JAVAMFS from your boot device to an IDE/SATA disk, eg. to /mnt/hda1/javamfs or c:\javamfs"*
SO I tried the bootable USB method and it got past that error but then told me it "did not see any Tivo drives on my system"
THEN I got all smarty pants, got an OLDER DELL PC out of the closet, plugged in TIVO HD ONLY, bootable USB....same error "do not see any Tivo drives"
I have NEVER HAD A PRB upgrading a Tivo drive before....I have done it for friends too.....was always pretty easy.....ANY SUGGESTIONS PLEASE LET ME KNOW!
ALSO I started to get into MFS Tools 3.2 or whatever it is and was not sure I knew what I was doing.....BUT I am sure thats what I did way back in like 2005 or something.....I just remember in 2015 upgrading this S4 was breeze....I was assuming it was my "newer" Dell but again, then tried my older Dell!

thx
Scott


----------



## jmbach

theruckman said:


> If someone needs to point me back to a post in this crazy long thread go for it....but here is my history:
> I have owned Tivos since 2000, LOVE them....I have upgraded the HD on every one I have ever owned INCLUDING the one I am trying to upgrade yet again my S4 TCD746320....when I first got it I replaced the HD with a 3TB, I used the same method found on here somewhere (this was back around 2015). I still have the SAME boot up CD I used on this S4 using jmfs live CD....but of course it was a different PC. i am positive it was a SATA and NOT old IDE.......I have a different PC now.....I downloaded the latest JMFS ISO mentioned in this thread, only thing plugged into the PC is new RED WD 4TB HD and OLD Tivo 3tb HD, but every time I tried to load it I would get the same error:* "Fatal Error occurred-JAVAMFS Data not found. You are maybe using an unsupported boot device (eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA). Workaround: Copy the directory JAVAMFS from your boot device to an IDE/SATA disk, eg. to /mnt/hda1/javamfs or c:\javamfs"*
> SO I tried the bootable USB method and it got past that error but then told me it "did not see any Tivo drives on my system"
> THEN I got all smarty pants, got an OLDER DELL PC out of the closet, plugged in TIVO HD ONLY, bootable USB....same error "do not see any Tivo drives"
> I have NEVER HAD A PRB upgrading a Tivo drive before....I have done it for friends too.....was always pretty easy.....ANY SUGGESTIONS PLEASE LET ME KNOW!
> ALSO I started to get into MFS Tools 3.2 or whatever it is and was not sure I knew what I was doing.....BUT I am sure thats what I did way back in like 2005 or something.....I just remember in 2015 upgrading this S4 was breeze....I was assuming it was my "newer" Dell but again, then tried my older Dell!
> 
> thx
> Scott


Try downloading and using MFSTools 3.32. Even if you get it working, the problem with JMFS it does handle large drives correctly.


----------



## theruckman

You said "the problem with JMFS it does handle large drives correctly." -did you mean it "doesn't"? -since you said it was a problem?
Anyway, I had MFSTools 3.32 running well but just could not figure out what to type in....copy or supersize?....I am more than happy to type a bunch of Linux stuff in but really need it DUMBED down for me (haha) sorry. FOR EXAMPLE: when I was in MFSTools, I could not figure out how to just SHOW WHAT HD was WHICH.....I was afraid I was going to copy the wrong way and DELETE my old Tivo HD which I have a zillion shows on I don't wanna lose!
appreciate your help! I was actually happy to see you online haha....Scott


----------



## jmbach

theruckman said:


> You said "the problem with JMFS it does handle large drives correctly." -did you mean it "doesn't"? -since you said it was a problem?
> Anyway, I had MFSTools 3.32 running well but just could not figure out what to type in....copy or supersize?....I am more than happy to type a bunch of Linux stuff in but really need it DUMBED down for me (haha) sorry. FOR EXAMPLE: when I was in MFSTools, I could not figure out how to just SHOW WHAT HD was WHICH.....I was afraid I was going to copy the wrong way and DELETE my old Tivo HD which I have a zillion shows on I don't wanna lose!
> appreciate your help! I was actually happy to see you online haha....Scott


You are correct I meant doesn't.

The post that you downloaded MFSTools 3.32 has that information you are looking for. If you do not understand what to do after reading it, then let me know so I can clarify those points better for the next person.


----------



## theruckman

looking forward to trying this tomorrow, something you posted for MFS tools a while back:

Easy way to identify connected drives (thanks to 192bowler showing me this) - lsblk -o name,size,vendor
For most people who just want to copy their old image to a new drive (max 4 TB in size) the command is as follows:
Premier and earlier models - mfscopy -ai /dev/sdX /dev/sdY
Where sdX is the source drive and sdY is the target drive.
Hopefully it works, will let you know!
Scott



jmbach said:


> You are correct I meant doesn't.
> 
> The post that you downloaded MFSTools 3.32 has that information you are looking for. If you do not understand what to do after reading it, then let me know so I can clarify those points better for the next person.


----------



## theruckman

OK so I was able to issue those commands and get things started.....was easiest to just take a pic of what happened (see attached). Obviously a bunch of errors from the source drive......SO I SHOULD SAY the main reason I did this was constant freezing up etc.....I saw things about def power supplies but I found a troubleshooting guide on here somewhere that seemed to say it was probably a HD dying rather than the PS......PLUS I think this current 3TB I put in there before is a 7200.....PLUS the power supply capacitors etc....nothing bulging.....all looked OK there.
ANYWAY I am wondering if the errors shown in the pic I am attaching show that the HD is indeed going bad. BTW I have MFStools CD running (not usb) and only thing connected to the Dell PC (i7 optiplex 9020) is the 2 sata drives
I am about to try a couple things until I hear back from anyone:

swap SDA and SDB sata inputs on MB
I think there was a "fail safe" mode on MFStools, maybe that could
QUESTION: IF the errors on this HD are preventing copy over to the new one, anything I can do about this? I have about 60% of it filled and a LOT of good stuff I did not want to lose!

PLAN B: I think I saw some commands to pull streams off? is that possible?
thx


----------



## jmbach

theruckman said:


> OK so I was able to issue those commands and get things started.....was easiest to just take a pic of what happened (see attached). Obviously a bunch of errors from the source drive......SO I SHOULD SAY the main reason I did this was constant freezing up etc.....I saw things about def power supplies but I found a troubleshooting guide on here somewhere that seemed to say it was probably a HD dying rather than the PS......PLUS I think this current 3TB I put in there before is a 7200.....PLUS the power supply capacitors etc....nothing bulging.....all looked OK there.
> ANYWAY I am wondering if the errors shown in the pic I am attaching show that the HD is indeed going bad. BTW I have MFStools CD running (not usb) and only thing connected to the Dell PC (i7 optiplex 9020) is the 2 sata drives
> I am about to try a couple things until I hear back from anyone:
> 
> swap SDA and SDB sata inputs on MB
> I think there was a "fail safe" mode on MFStools, maybe that could
> QUESTION: IF the errors on this HD are preventing copy over to the new one, anything I can do about this? I have about 60% of it filled and a LOT of good stuff I did not want to lose!
> 
> PLAN B: I think I saw some commands to pull streams off? is that possible?
> thx


You may need to either clone the drive to a known good drive first or use ddrescue to try to save the data from the bad drive to a good drive. Other option is to try spinrite on the drive to see if it can be rescued and then copied.


----------



## theruckman

jmbach said:


> You may need to either clone the drive to a known good drive first or use ddrescue to try to save the data from the bad drive to a good drive. Other option is to try spinrite on the drive to see if it can be rescued and then copied.


I kinda thought I was "cloning" it but I assume "copy" is not quite the same.....can the "clone" be done via MFStools or use DD? not familiar with DD....ALSO is spinrite its own program or included on MFS tools or DD?
I am looking now but just asking......thx


----------



## jmbach

theruckman said:


> I kinda thought I was "cloning" it but I assume "copy" is not quite the same.....can the "clone" be done via MFStools or use DD? not familiar with DD....ALSO is spinrite its own program or included on MFS tools or DD?
> I am looking now but just asking......thx


ddrescue is on the ISO. May need to Google for instructions


----------



## theruckman

WHY CANT ANYTHING BE EASY FOR LINUS DUMMIES LIKE ME
anyway I am actually logged into these forums using the FF browser that comes with System Rescue CD.....I started the "graphical interface" which is great but I cannot figure out how to FIND or START DDrescue.....typing "ddrescue" in terminal does not work.....looking.....please chime in any suggestions


----------



## jmbach

So ddrescue should be on the MFSTools ISO you downloaded from my post.

dd_rescue is a very similar program.

You don't have to use Linux programs to do this. There are windows programs out there that do similar things.


----------



## theruckman

OK I think I got it going....check out what I typed in and does it look like it is doing what it needs to be doing? And FYI SDA is my old Tivo drive and SDb is my new 4tb
note the screenshot of what is going on right now....what I typed in....etc...


----------



## theruckman

theruckman said:


> OK I think I got it going....check out what I typed in and does it look like it is doing what it needs to be doing? And FYI SDA is my old Tivo drive and SDb is my new 4tb
> note the screenshot of what is going on right now....what I typed in....etc...


I got this info from here:
How to Clone Hard Disks with ddrescue |


----------



## jmbach

That is a good start. You can use the log file to have ddrescue go back and try scrubbing the drive to recover only the bad sectors. 

When it is done, take a picture of the final output to see how many bad sectors there are. Of there are too many, the copy may not work.

Once you are done trying to save your drive, boot the copy in the TiVo before you do anything else and check to make sure it works and connects to the TiVo servers okay. Then might want to run a few KS codes on it to see if it passes them okay.


----------



## theruckman

Based on what you see how long do you think it will take? And is it literally cloning/copying right now? And if so, Is there is a chance the new drive might work when installed? Or after this I would need to go back to mfstools etc for the copy command again? Thx!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


----------



## theruckman

jmbach said:


> That is a good start. You can use the log file to have ddrescue go back and try scrubbing the drive to recover only the bad sectors.
> 
> When it is done, take a picture of the final output to see how many bad sectors there are. Of there are too many, the copy may not work.
> 
> Once you are done trying to save your drive, boot the copy in the TiVo before you do anything else and check to make sure it works and connects to the TiVo servers okay. Then might want to run a few KS codes on it to see if it passes them okay.


Sorry I didn't see this last part on TapTalk app....let you know....ALSO what is "KS" codes?


----------



## ggieseke

theruckman said:


> Sorry I didn't see this last part on TapTalk app....let you know....ALSO what is "KS" codes?


TiVo Kickstart Codes and Information


----------



## theruckman

ggieseke said:


> TiVo Kickstart Codes and Information


man, just when you think you know alot about Tivo....thanks for that info.
SO it NOW seems to be holding steady at 15hrs left, could this be right? 15hrs???? UGH
I did this on my main desktop....but I have my laptop and some others of course.....thoughts? could it take that long?
current rate of reading is like 55,000kbs


----------



## jmbach

theruckman said:


> man, just when you think you know alot about Tivo....thanks for that info.
> SO it NOW seems to be holding steady at 15hrs left, could this be right? 15hrs???? UGH
> I did this on my main desktop....but I have my laptop and some others of course.....thoughts? could it take that long?
> current rate of reading is like 55,000kbs


Depends on the number of bad sectors

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


----------



## theruckman

jmbach said:


> Depends on the number of bad sectors
> 
> Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


no bad sectors yet, but 28 "read errors" but its only 25% done I think......12hrs left.......8hrs into it
anyway hoping for the best....let you know


----------



## theruckman

Well this stinks, I interupted it and hoping I dont have to start all over

Disk /dev/loop0: 788.8 MiB, 827146240 bytes, 1615520 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
[[email protected] ~]# ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda /dev/sdb rescue.log
GNU ddrescue 1.24
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
ipos: 2076 GB, non-trimmed: 970752 B, current rate: 0 B/s
opos: 2076 GB, non-scraped: 0 B, average rate: 30789 kB/s
non-tried: 924780 MB, bad-sector: 0 B, error rate: 0 B/s
rescued: 2075 GB, bad areas: 0, run time: 18h 43m 39s
pct rescued: 69.18%, read errors: 31, remaining time: 5h 17m
time since last successful read: 8s
Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 1 (forwards)^C[C^[[C^[[C^[[C
Interrupted by user

[[email protected] ~]#


----------



## theruckman

theruckman said:


> Well this stinks, I interupted it and hoping I dont have to start all over
> 
> Disk /dev/loop0: 788.8 MiB, 827146240 bytes, 1615520 sectors
> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> [[email protected] ~]# ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda /dev/sdb rescue.log
> GNU ddrescue 1.24
> Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
> ipos: 2076 GB, non-trimmed: 970752 B, current rate: 0 B/s
> opos: 2076 GB, non-scraped: 0 B, average rate: 30789 kB/s
> non-tried: 924780 MB, bad-sector: 0 B, error rate: 0 B/s
> rescued: 2075 GB, bad areas: 0, run time: 18h 43m 39s
> pct rescued: 69.18%, read errors: 31, remaining time: 5h 17m
> time since last successful read: 8s
> Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 1 (forwards)^C[C^[[C^[[C^[[C
> Interrupted by user
> 
> [[email protected] ~]#


THANK GOODNESS....I typed in 
ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda /dev/sdb rescue.log
and it picked up where it left off


----------



## richsadams

I'm sure it's been asked and answered many times and I read through a lot of this thread, but couldn't make it 150 pages, so don't shoot me...

Am I able to drop a new (WD Red) 3TB HDD into our aging Premiere XL 4 2TB box without using JMFS/MFSTools, etc. and have access to the full drive space? I think the answer is no, but I wanted confirmation from the experts.

No need to save recordings, etc. and I have the SP list on KMTTG.

If I not I'll either slip in a new 2TB and leave it as-is or go ahead and use the recommeded tools with the 4TB version of the same drive.

TIA!


----------



## jmbach

richsadams said:


> I'm sure it's been asked and answered many times and I read through a lot of this thread, but couldn't make it 150 pages, so don't shoot me...
> 
> Am I able to drop a new (WD Red) 3TB HDD into our aging Premiere XL 4 2TB box without using JMFS/MFSTools, etc. and have access to the full drive space? I think the answer is no, but I wanted confirmation from the experts.
> 
> No need to save recordings, etc. and I have the SP list on KMTTG.
> 
> If I not I'll either slip in a new 2TB and leave it as-is or go ahead and use the recommeded tools with the 4TB version of the same drive.
> 
> TIA!


The answer is no. If you do not need to save recordings then you can use MFSTools 3.32 to copy the drive to a 4 TB in a matter of 10 minutes. Use the copy command for Premieres without the "a" in the command line. It will copy the essentials including cableCARD pairing and expand the drive to use the whole drive space for recordings.


----------



## richsadams

jmbach said:


> The answer is no. If you do not need to save recordings then you can use MFSTools 3.32 to copy the drive to a 4 TB in a matter of 10 minutes. Use the copy command for Premieres without the "a" in the command line. It will copy the essentials including cableCARD pairing and expand the drive to use the whole drive space for recordings.


Understood about using a larger drive, thank you.

Does that mean that I would be able to drop in a new 2TB drive without having to do anything else; it would auto-format, etc.?

The Premiere XL4 is basically our "fall-back" box. It records everything our Bolt+ does. Glad we have it because our Bolt+ HDD failed the other day so I just moved the Premiere to our main HT until the Bolt's replacement arrives. The only reason I'm thinking of replacing the Premier's HDD is its age. It's been flawless since day one, but you never know.

Thanks again!


----------



## jmbach

richsadams said:


> Understood about using a larger drive, thank you.
> 
> Does that mean that I would be able to drop in a new 2TB drive without having to do anything else; it would auto-format, etc.?
> 
> The Premiere XL4 is basically our "fall-back" box. It records everything our Bolt+ does. Glad we have it because our Bolt+ HDD failed the other day so I just moved the Premiere to our main HT until the Bolt's replacement arrives. The only reason I'm thinking of replacing the Premier's HDD is its age. It's been flawless since day one, but you never know.
> 
> Thanks again!


No the Premiere series do not auto-format the drive. It has to have a drive with a preinstalled OS.


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## richsadams

jmbach said:


> No the Premiere series do not auto-format the drive. It has to have a drive with a preinstalled OS.


Got it. Well, might as well go big or go home then. 

Thanks again! raying:


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## jmbach

richsadams said:


> Got it. Well, might as go big or go home then.
> 
> Thanks again! raying:


Agree!


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## theruckman

@jmbach 
ITS DONE! Hoping for the best!
Here is the results....thoughts?

GNU ddrescue 1.24

Current status
ipos: 2476 GB, non-trimmed: 0 B, current rate: 1024 B/s
opos: 2476 GB, non-scraped: 7747 kB, average rate: 20598 B/s
non-tried: 0 B, bad-sector: 418304 B, error rate: 128 B/s
rescued: 3000 GB, bad areas: 817, run time: 3h 44m 17s
pct rescued: 99.99%, read errors: 974, remaining time: 16m
time since last successful read: 0s
Finished 
[[email protected] ~]#


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## jmbach

theruckman said:


> @jmbach
> ITS DONE! Hoping for the best!
> Here is the results....thoughts?
> 
> GNU ddrescue 1.24
> 
> Current status
> ipos: 2476 GB, non-trimmed: 0 B, current rate: 1024 B/s
> opos: 2476 GB, non-scraped: 7747 kB, average rate: 20598 B/s
> non-tried: 0 B, bad-sector: 418304 B, error rate: 128 B/s
> rescued: 3000 GB, bad areas: 817, run time: 3h 44m 17s
> pct rescued: 99.99%, read errors: 974, remaining time: 16m
> time since last successful read: 0s
> Finished
> [[email protected] ~]#


Hopefully the bad areas were able to be rescued with valid information. Only booting it up will tell. Would try a KS 58. If it finishes successfully, you can try MFSTools to copy and expand the image to a larger drive.


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## theruckman

Here's what popped up eventually. After reinstalling in my Tivo, NEVER seen this screen before that's for sure lol -bad sign? Or good that it might be fixed? This is the new cloned drive btw would love to hear from anyone who has ever had this screen and if chances are good or bad it will pull through.









Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## jmbach

theruckman said:


> Here's what popped up eventually. After reinstalling in my Tivo, NEVER seen this screen before that's for sure lol -bad sign? Or good that it might be fixed? This is the new cloned drive btw would love to hear from anyone who has ever had this screen and if chances are good or bad it will pull through.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


That is a good sign if it reboots and voota up normal after about 3 hours. It is a bad sign if it does not.

It is the equivalent of a KS 57.

I have had that screen before and it is about 50-50.


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## theruckman

soooooo everything appears to be doing OK! It came out of the green screen OK.... Actually I can tell its running a bit more "snappy" and so far no freezing or anything......should I still do any of the KS's you suggested?

thx for all your help on this @jmbach


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## jmbach

theruckman said:


> soooooo everything appears to be doing OK! It came out of the green screen OK.... Actually I can tell its running a bit more "snappy" and so far no freezing or anything......should I still do any of the KS's you suggested?
> 
> thx for all your help on this @jmbach


I think if it passed that start up screen, you do not have to do any additional KS checks.

If it connects to the TiVo servers okay and it updates the guide data okay then you do not need to do anymore KS checks.

If the above works, then you consider using MFSTools to upgrade to a larger drive.


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## SOGLAD

orangeboy said:


> This thread should be stickied.


*jmfs-rev-104.iso / jmfs-rev.iso.zip*

YES indeed! *GREAT JOB* and although COMER's post is from* "2010"*, the age hardly matters... 
_AND _the LINKS still work too (12/14/2019)... Thanks Team!

I'm going to INCLUDE the "COMER" post on my fresh/new copy of *JMFS 104 *(on CD).

*APPLAUSE!*

SOGLAD


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## theruckman

jmbach said:


> I think if it passed that start up screen, you do not have to do any additional KS checks.
> 
> If it connects to the TiVo servers okay and it updates the guide data okay then you do not need to do anymore KS checks.
> 
> If the above works, then you consider using MFSTools to upgrade to a larger drive.


soooooo if I do the upgrade to a larger drive, how long SHOULD that take? The error correction took like 2 whole days......hated being without Tivo that long BUT overall glad it copied over OK.......thx...Scott


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## theruckman

theruckman said:


> soooooo if I do the upgrade to a larger drive, how long SHOULD that take? The error correction took like 2 whole days......hated being without Tivo that long BUT overall glad it copied over OK.......thx...Scott


AND I should have mentioned is that the "supersize" option that gets that started?


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## jmbach

theruckman said:


> soooooo if I do the upgrade to a larger drive, how long SHOULD that take? The error correction took like 2 whole days......hated being without Tivo that long BUT overall glad it copied over OK.......thx...Scott


How large of drive is it now and how full is it?


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## theruckman

jmbach said:


> How large of drive is it now and how full is it?


so my old one was 3TB, this new one is 4TB but it shows in my Tivo menu that it is around 67% full.....and that was kinda surprising to me....last time I had a 1TB in there I think....I was like 85% full.....did the MFS deal from the 1TB to the 3TB.....took like 4hrs but was easy, slapped it in and immediatly had only like 30% full or something.....can't remember.....thats why this time was a big surprise.....BUT of course last time my HD was not acting up, I just wanted to expand the space......I guess now I think about it, I did not really expand the space, I was just trying to get things copied over OK with a DEF HD.......anyway sorry for the long version there but my new HD is a RED WD 4TB (and doing great BTW even though it shows 67% full)


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## jmbach

theruckman said:


> so my old one was 3TB, this new one is 4TB but it shows in my Tivo menu that it is around 67% full.....and that was kinda surprising to me....last time I had a 1TB in there I think....I was like 85% full.....did the MFS deal from the 1TB to the 3TB.....took like 4hrs but was easy, slapped it in and immediatly had only like 30% full or something.....can't remember.....thats why this time was a big surprise.....BUT of course last time my HD was not acting up, I just wanted to expand the space......I guess now I think about it, I did not really expand the space, I was just trying to get things copied over OK with a DEF HD.......anyway sorry for the long version there but my new HD is a RED WD 4TB (and doing great BTW even though it shows 67% full)


So when you used ddrescue to copy your bad drive to a food one, the total recording space did not change. You have two choices to get your recording space up to 4 TB. One is to use mfscopy to copy it to a 4TB drive as mfscopy will copy and expand. The other option is to use mfsadd followed by apmfix that is outlined in the 8 TB DIY Premiere thread to add the extra space to the current drive. However, this will limit future expansion. This limitation can be overcome later when the time comes.


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## theruckman

hmmmmmmm decisons decisions......OK....for now happy its working OK, stick with that for now....what is "supersize" option? Still need 2 drives for this?


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## jmbach

theruckman said:


> hmmmmmmm decisons decisions......OK....for now happy its working OK, stick with that for now....what is "supersize" option? Still need 2 drives for this?


I made an error in my prior post. I was getting mixed up between Premiere and Roamio as I am posting in both threads. I corrected the post.

Supersize works on the current TiVo drive. You do not use 2 drives, only the active TiVo drive.

Supersize gets rid of some TiVo reserved recording space (think ads and showcase) and gives it to the main recording area.


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## richsadams

@jmbach, old school question: is there any need to use WDIDLE3 on current WD HDDs? I received this WD Red 4TB HDD and am getting ready to upgrade our 2TB Premiere XL.

TIA!


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## ggieseke

richsadams said:


> @jmbach, old school question: is there any need to use WDIDLE3 on current WD HDDs? I received this WD Red 4TB HDD and am getting ready to upgrade our 2TB Premiere XL.
> 
> TIA!


Not on the Reds.


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## richsadams

ggieseke said:


> Not on the Reds.


Many thanks! :up:


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## richsadams

Another old school question... does a 32bit copy of the MFSTools iso exist? I saved an old tower PC for just this reason - easy to open and attach both drives, etc., but it's apparently too old now. I downloaded the current version of MFSTools, burned it to a USB drive but I get an error since it's a 64bit program.

I tried booting it up on a current 64 bit all-in-one HP PC (set the BIOS to boot from a USB drive first, etc.) as well as new iMac and MacBook and was going to just use a dual HDD dock and let it run, but it's not recognized by any of those machines at all.

Also tried burning JMFS to a USB drive and none of my computers recognize it. So I'm stuck trying to upgrade my TiVo Premiere XL4.

Thoughts?

TIA!


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## jmbach

richsadams said:


> Another old school question... does a 32bit copy of the JMFS iso exist? I saved an old tower PC for just this reason - easy to open and attach both drives, etc., but it's apparently too old now. I downloaded the current version of JMFS, burned it to a USB drive but I get an error since it's a 64bit program.
> 
> I tried booting it up on a current 64 bit all-in-one HP PC (set the BIOS to boot from a USB drive first, etc.) as well as new iMac and MacBook and was going to just use a dual HDD dock and let it run, but it's not recognized by any of those machines at all.
> 
> Also tried burning MFSTools to a USB drive and none of my computers recognize it. So I'm stuck trying to upgrade my TiVo Premiere XL4.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> TIA!


How did you burn MFSTools to the USB drive


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## richsadams

Sorry, I flipped the application names. I should have said that the 64bit/32bit error was with MFSTools, not JMFS and that I couldn't get JMFS to boot on any of my machines. I'll update my post.

I used Universal USB installer to create the MFSTools USB ISO.

Apologies for the confusion.


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## jmbach

richsadams said:


> Sorry, I flipped the application names. I should have said that the 64bit/32bit error was with MFSTools, not JMFS and that I couldn't get JMFS to boot on any of my machines. I'll update my post.
> 
> I used Universal USB installer to create the MFSTools USB ISO.
> 
> Apologies for the confusion.


Download the HDD/USB version and unpack it. Then use a program like Etcher to write it to the USB drive.


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## richsadams

jmbach said:


> Download the HDD/USB version and unpack it. Then use a program like Etcher to write it to the USB drive.


I did download MFSTools and used balenaEtcher to burn it, but received the "no partition" error. I actually modified it in Terminal to create a DMG image file, but no love that way either.

I'll take a look for the HDD/USB version. I must have missed that.


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## jmbach

richsadams said:


> I did download MFSTools and used balenaEtcher to burn it, but received the "no partition" error. I actually modified it in Terminal to create a DMG image file, but no love that way either.
> 
> I'll take a look for the HDD/USB version. I must have missed that.


Just make sure you unpack it before burning it.


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## richsadams

jmbach said:


> Just make sure you unpack it before burning it.


The only downloadable file I can locate is this one which is the one I used (after unzipping it) to create the USB drive - which, again, booted in the old PC, but had the 64 bit error message. Is there a different USB file somewhere?

Normally the CD ISO would have been fine, but the CD/DVD drive in my old tower PC has apparently given up the ghost and why I'm trying to boot from a USB drive. I can pick up a cheap DVD drive if needed.

Thanks so much!


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## jmbach

richsadams said:


> The only downloadable file I can locate is this one which is the one I used (after unzipping it) to create the USB drive - which, again, booted in the old PC, but had the 64 bit error message. Is there a different USB file somewhere?
> 
> Normally the CD ISO would have been fine, but the CD/DVD drive in my old tower PC has apparently given up the ghost and why I'm trying to boot from a USB drive. I can pick up a cheap DVD drive if needed.
> 
> Thanks so much!


You did not download the one from my post in MFSTools 3.2 thread?


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## richsadams

jmbach said:


> You did not download the one from my post in MFSTools 3.2 thread?


Still searching. Do you happen to have the link? Thanks!


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## jmbach

richsadams said:


> Still searching. Do you happen to have the link? Thanks!


In post 8 of the MFSTools 3.2 thread has a link


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## richsadams

Ah, got it... ultimately this file - MFSTools 3.32-devel USB/HD from this thread?
If so, yes, I believe that was the first one I tried, but I'll give it another try. :up:

Just tried that file and am getting the balenaEtcher "Missing Partition Table" error.


----------



## jmbach

richsadams said:


> Ah, got it... ultimately this file - MFSTools 3.32-devel USB/HD from this thread?
> If so, yes, I believe that was the first one I tried, but I'll give it another try. :up:
> 
> Just tried that file and am getting the balenaEtcher "Missing Partition Table" error.


Can you use dd to copy it to the USB drive?


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## richsadams

jmbach said:


> Can you use dd to copy it to the USB drive?


I will give that a try! Thanks!


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## richsadams

jmbach said:


> Can you use dd to copy it to the USB drive?


Unfortunately I'm back to square one. Used dd to copy/create the iso on a USB drive. MFSTools will initially boot up on the old PC but gives me the "64 bit program vs 32 bit computer" error. It doesn't boot up at all on the newer PC or Macs.

Thanks so much for all of your time on this... far too much for what I'm trying to accomplish. But if you think of something else that I can try, let me know, I'm all ears. Otherwise, have a great weekend!

Thanks again! raying:


----------



## jmbach

richsadams said:


> Unfortunately I'm back to square one. Used dd to copy/create the iso on a USB drive. MFSTools will initially boot up on the old PC but gives me the "64 bit program vs 32 bit computer" error. It doesn't boot up at all on the newer PC or Macs.
> 
> Thanks so much for all of your time on this... far too much for what I'm trying to accomplish. But if you think of something else that I can try, let me know, I'm all ears. Otherwise, have a great weekend!
> 
> Thanks again! raying:


Can you disable EFI booting on your newer computer or enable legacy booting or compatibility mode?


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## richsadams

jmbach said:


> Can you disable EFI booting on your newer computer or enable legacy booting or compatibility mode?


Well, by gosh, that worked (on the newer PC of course)! Had to disable secure boot and enable legacy boot mode in the BIOS, and THEN get into the boot device menu to tell it to boot from the USB drive, but now it's sitting at the MFSTools login screen. So fingers crossed I should be good to go. I'll post back with the (hopefully) positive results.

Thanks again! I owe you big time! :thumbsup::thumbsup:


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## richsadams

Moved post about my Premiere HDD upgrade fail here since it was with MFSTools and not JMFS.


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## lsutrey

Hi Everyone, 

I recently had a Premiere drive GSOD on me and used JMFS to copy, expand, and super size a working Premiere 320 GB drive to a 2TB drive. I installed the new 2 TB drive after executing these three steps and booted up the Premiere. However, during the boot up, I got a message that the external disk drive was missing i.e. TiVo expected that there was an external drive linked to the internal. This obviously was not the case, so I followed the prompts to disassociate the nonexistant external drive and reboot. When it rebooted, TiVo booted into its OS, but it only showed 75 hours of HD recording space. It is as if the expand step did not take correctly. 

I was just wondering if any of you have heard of or experienced this behavior previously and / or have any recommendations. I will try and expand it again this weekend, but if you have any advice or suggestions, I would appreciate any input you might have.

Thanks!


----------



## vaquero

lsutrey said:


> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I recently had a Premiere drive GSOD on me and used JMFS to copy, expand, and super size a working Premiere 320 GB drive to a 2TB drive. I installed the new 2 TB drive after executing these three steps and booted up the Premiere. However, during the boot up, I got a message that the external disk drive was missing i.e. TiVo expected that there was an external drive linked to the internal. This obviously was not the case, so I followed the prompts to disassociate the nonexistant external drive and reboot. When it rebooted, TiVo booted into its OS, but it only showed 75 hours of HD recording space. It is as if the expand step did not take correctly.
> 
> I was just wondering if any of you have heard of or experienced this behavior previously and / or have any recommendations. I will try and expand it again this weekend, but if you have any advice or suggestions, I would appreciate any input you might have.
> 
> Thanks!


I had that happen. I just went back and expanded/supersized again and it worked properly the next time.


----------



## Donarmand

Can I take a hard drive from one box and switch it to another box to save the subscription? i bought 2 premiers one brand new in box and other is used with lifetime on it


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## jmbach

Donarmand said:


> Can I take a hard drive from one box and switch it to another box to save the subscription? i bought 2 premiers one brand new in box and other is used with lifetime on it


The "subscription" is married to tge motherboard and not the drive.

Sent from my SM-G988U using Tapatalk


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## Donarmand

what is the coolest running hard drive to use? is it the wd red and not pro? is that correct?


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## Donarmand

jmbach said:


> The "subscription" is married to tge motherboard and not the drive.
> 
> Sent from my SM-G988U using Tapatalk


 dang, i was hoping to put it in a new box make use of it.... ill save new one for parts then accept the MB. unless there is another way? and thanks for responding


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## richsadams

Donarmand said:


> what is the coolest running hard drive to use? is it the wd red and not pro? is that correct?


I'm running this WD WD40EFRX 4TB Red HDD in our Premier XL4 and the temp is comparable to the OEM drive. It's been a few months and no issues so far.


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## Donarmand

Thanks so much!


----------

