# old internal to an external?



## michael114 (Feb 27, 2014)

I will be upgrading my premier XL to a 2t. I'm not to tech savy but want to keep my current recordings. Is there a way to keep the original hooked up as an external until i watch or re-record what i have, I've read some of the cloning posts but do not have a sata port on my home PC


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

Nope- you'll need to either transfer them off or copy as a part of the upgrade procedure.


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## michael114 (Feb 27, 2014)

What would be the easiest solution? I'm sure there must be a few post out there but I must not be wording it correctly in the search because I'm not having much luck.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

michael114 said:


> What would be the easiest solution? I'm sure there must be a few post out there but I must not be wording it correctly in the search because I'm not having much luck.


You should be able to use the free JMFS tool documented in this forum to do the copy and expansion of your old drive to the new 2TB drive.


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

neither is hard, they both just take time.


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## michael114 (Feb 27, 2014)

How long should it take to copy the drives?


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

michael114 said:


> How long should it take to copy the drives?


Without hooking the source and target drives to SATA ports on a motherboard, longer, although I'd allow several hours regardless of connection method.

Is your PC motherboard so old that it has no SATA ports at all?

Or just no spare ports?

How were you planning on connecting the drives? PATA/SATA adapters? USB/SATA adapters?

The way to do what you want, once you've run the drive manufacturer's own diagnostic software long test on the new 2TB drive to make sure there's nothing wrong with it (it may be new, but "stuff happens", especially if you had it shipped to you), is you'll need both the 2TB and the TiVo's current drive connected to the PC and you'll need to boot with the jmfs cd v1.04

Go here

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8143047#post8143047

to download the .iso of the jmfs cd and burn it "as an image" (so it'll be bootable) to a cd-r.

When it boots it should step you through the process without any trouble.

What it will do is use the Linux utility

ddrescue

to "Xerox" the TiVo drive to the 2TB drive, and then make the necessary changes to things so that it can add another MFS Media partition to fill out the rest of the space.

But first, check out DvrBARS

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=503261

since it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to make a backup of the current drive before doing anything else.


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## michael114 (Feb 27, 2014)

ok, so as I said I'm not much of a techie type guy. So if I got this right I
1) make a disk 
2) remove hard drive from my pc
3) install old tivo drive in place pc's drive
4) hook up new drive. -I have an external drive that i popped apart and plugged the new drive in there, will that work?
5) power on pc with new disk and follow prompts.


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

if you are trying to copy and include the shows on the drive, if you use a USB external I would plan for a 24 hour copy process, or more. I did that, and it took somewhere between 24-30 hours. Been using that drive for three years without issue.

Read the instructions, and then read them again. Make sure you know what the steps are saying so you are not surprised as you go through the process. I used the updated process from the premiere upgrade thread, as I know no linux and have not used command lines for 25 years.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

michael114 said:


> ok, so as I said I'm not much of a techie type guy. So if I got this right I
> 1) make a disk
> 2) remove hard drive from my pc
> 3) install old tivo drive in place pc's drive
> ...


If you have a GigaByte brand motherboard, you might need to leave the PC's hard drive connected, depending on how old the board is, because of the tendency of some of them to put a Host Protected Area on whatever drive it considers "first".

Otherwise, hook up the two drives, the one from the TiVo and the new 2TB, however you can, make sure the PC is set to look for a boot disk in the cd or dvd drive before it looks for a bootable hard drive, put in the jmfs cd, and away you go.


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## michael114 (Feb 27, 2014)

thanks for the info, 24-30 hardly seems worth it just for a few shows i can re-record, was trying to save all the kiddos shows but maybe I'll just wish list em and hulu the rest. I do have a newer pc only a year old but with all your info i may just skip it. thanks anyway


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

Its not hard, you just want to plan it out to avoid any issues by not understanding the procedure. I would just skip the shows if I did this again...


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## michael114 (Feb 27, 2014)

I kinda want to do just to do it, but honestly it seems for my situation to be a waste of time along with the risk of screwing something up for just a couple of recordings. But on the bright side i know where to come if i have any future issues thanks. Mike


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