# Series 3 Upgrade



## Anametrix

I'm going to give this a try, but have a couple of questions:

What size swap file do I need to create on a 750GB upgrade drive? I've upgraded my other TiVos with 250GB drives using the following command:

mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -zxpi /mnt/backupimage.bak /dev/hda

I know I'll need to increase the 127 swap size, I was hoping someone knew what size that would need to be?

Also is there anything else I need to do to support a 750GB drive different to what I've done in the past with the 250GB drive?

Many thanks in advance for any advice anyone can offer!


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## cch108

I'm no expert, but my understanding is the swap file would have to be 375 MB and then you have to run the tpip command to utilize it.


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## Anametrix

Actually, also looks like the only drive that can be used is a SATA WD drive, the connector on the S3 is a propriatary WD connector...


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## cch108

Weaknees is selling 750 Gb drives for $599.


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## griboyedov

The proprietary cable is WD SecureConnect. While it won't work with other manufacturers' hard drives, that cable can easily be replaced with a vanilla SATA cable.

I'm planning on installing a 750GB Seagate as soon as I get my S3 tomorrow.


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## Anametrix

I'm not sure it can be replaced with a vanilla cable, I think the power cable is soldered on the TiVo board side...


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## tivoupgrade

Anametrix said:


> I'm going to give this a try, but have a couple of questions:
> 
> What size swap file do I need to create on a 750GB upgrade drive? I've upgraded my other TiVos with 250GB drives using the following command:
> 
> mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -zxpi /mnt/backupimage.bak /dev/hda
> 
> I know I'll need to increase the 127 swap size, I was hoping someone knew what size that would need to be?
> 
> Also is there anything else I need to do to support a 750GB drive different to what I've done in the past with the 250GB drive?
> 
> Many thanks in advance for any advice anyone can offer!


You don't need to (nor do we recommend) increasing the swap size. It will not benefit your performance in the least. The only harm in increasing the swap size is that if you do not initialize it correctly, using tpip, you may end up with no swap at all. And that is a bad thing.

I don't want to start a flame war of the benefits of increased swap vs the non-benefits of not-increased swap, however I can tell you with confidence, after having played with it for over 5 years and observed the effects of large drives in the field with increased and non-increased swap, there is truly no benefit to it, from what I have seen and experienced.

I respect the fact that some folks like to increase their swap and feel that there is a benefit to it - but I take issue with the misnomer that it is something you MUST do. It just isn't the case...


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## ahaley42

Anyone tried this yet? Looking to do mine today.


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## puffdaddy

tivoupgrade said:


> however I can tell you with confidence, after having played with it for over 5 years and observed the effects of large drives in the field with increased and non-increased swap, there is truly no benefit to it, from what I have seen and experienced.


Does your experience include MFS file system fixes and rebuilds?


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## JamieP

tivoupgrade said:


> I respect the fact that some folks like to increase their swap and feel that there is a benefit to it - but I take issue with the misnomer that it is something you MUST do. It just isn't the case...


I agree with this and it's the message I'm attempting to convey when I refer people to the "two schools of thought" post.


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## tripmaster

I'll spend the money at Weaknees if I must but Im hoping to do this myself as well -- so Im looking forward to the first how they did it post...


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## ahaley42

Well, it will take an actuall OS or system that can read SATA Drives, so not either of the well known boot disks at this time. After that it all depends on creating the disk image and placing it on the new disk. Possible that the MFSTOOLS will do that. WeeKnees said they wouldn't have time to share for a while, I'm guessing right about the time that drive sales taper off. 
I don't begrudge them getting their money but I just can't spent THAT kind of money to do it. Over double what the actual drive costs. My wife is already on the edge of murderous.


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## BobCamp1

ahaley42 said:


> I don't begrudge them getting their money but I just can't spent THAT kind of money to do it. Over double what the actual drive costs. My wife is already on the edge of murderous.


Well, one of their main sources of income will go away once Tivo activates the eSATA port on the back of the unit. Then upgrading the S3 becomes a one step process that even my grandparents could do (and they just discovered the backspace key on their PC last week...)


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## lessd

tivoupgrade said:


> You don't need to (nor do we recommend) increasing the swap size. It will not benefit your performance in the least. The only harm in increasing the swap size is that if you do not initialize it correctly, using tpip, you may end up with no swap at all. And that is a bad thing.
> 
> I don't want to start a flame war of the benefits of increased swap vs the non-benefits of not-increased swap, however I can tell you with confidence, after having played with it for over 5 years and observed the effects of large drives in the field with increased and non-increased swap, there is truly no benefit to it, from what I have seen and experienced.
> 
> I respect the fact that some folks like to increase their swap and feel that there is a benefit to it - but I take issue with the misnomer that it is something you MUST do. It just isn't the case...


I feel the same way, have TiVo running with 300g & 400G drives and 127m swap for years with no problems.


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## tripmaster

Shouldnt it be primarily a matter of finding a Linux distro that has SATA driver support?



ahaley42 said:


> Well, it will take an actuall OS or system that can read SATA Drives, so not either of the well known boot disks at this time. After that it all depends on creating the disk image and placing it on the new disk. Possible that the MFSTOOLS will do that. WeeKnees said they wouldn't have time to share for a while, I'm guessing right about the time that drive sales taper off.
> I don't begrudge them getting their money but I just can't spent THAT kind of money to do it. Over double what the actual drive costs. My wife is already on the edge of murderous.


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## tripmaster

I dont think that's true - ppl will be looking to maximize their storage for a long time. 750GB internal, maybe 1.5TB in a eSATA RAID...



BobCamp1 said:


> Well, one of their main sources of income will go away once Tivo activates the eSATA port on the back of the unit. Then upgrading the S3 becomes a one step process that even my grandparents could do (and they just discovered the backspace key on their PC last week...)


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## Dkerr24

tivoupgrade said:


> You don't need to (nor do we recommend) increasing the swap size. It will not benefit your performance in the least. The only harm in increasing the swap size is that if you do not initialize it correctly, using tpip, you may end up with no swap at all. And that is a bad thing.


I agree completely. I have been running a 300gb Samsung drive in one of my DTivo units for over 6 months with *only* a 127mb swap file and it runs perfect. I tried tpip before this, ended up with NO swap file and the unit locked up almost daily.


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## Anametrix

Great info on the swap size, many thanks guys.


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## ahaley42

tripmaster said:


> Shouldnt it be primarily a matter of finding a Linux distro that has SATA driver support?


Should be but I booted to one that did and it still had issues seeing the drive content. So I'm not sure. Guess I'll wait till someone smarter than I tackles it. I just wanted to do it before I got the image dirty.


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## ahaley42

BobCamp1 said:


> Well, one of their main sources of income will go away once Tivo activates the eSATA port on the back of the unit. Then upgrading the S3 becomes a one step process that even my grandparents could do (and they just discovered the backspace key on their PC last week...)


When. If. Whatever.  The if is what I'm worried about. 25 hours of HD isn't much. Guess I'll keep my S2 around for SD content.


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## JasonD

tivoupgrade said:


> You don't need to (nor do we recommend) increasing the swap size. It will not benefit your performance in the least. The only harm in increasing the swap size is that if you do not initialize it correctly, using tpip, you may end up with no swap at all. And that is a bad thing.
> 
> I don't want to start a flame war of the benefits of increased swap vs the non-benefits of not-increased swap, however I can tell you with confidence, after having played with it for over 5 years and observed the effects of large drives in the field with increased and non-increased swap, there is truly no benefit to it, from what I have seen and experienced.
> 
> I respect the fact that some folks like to increase their swap and feel that there is a benefit to it - but I take issue with the misnomer that it is something you MUST do. It just isn't the case...


I can say I've done a couple of 400 GB drives with no problems and also a 120 and a 400 GB together for total of 520GB with no problems.

Thank you for being a light in the darkness.

Jason


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## ZeoTiVo

tivoupgrade said:


> You don't need to (nor do we recommend) increasing the swap size. It will not benefit your performance in the least. The only harm in increasing the swap size is that if you do not initialize it


BTW thank you for the ISO image that had all the tools including TPIP on it. It was very helpful and I wont forget that


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## XBoogie

tivoupgrade is correct in his assessment. You only need to increase swap file size when you increase MEMORY (RAM), not storage space (hard drive). Therefore, you do NOT need to increase the swap file size if you add a larger hard drive.

NOTE: The swap file is preallocated storage space on the hard drive to swap RAM data into.


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## Gunnyman

with the ability to add external HD why even upgrade ? Or am I missing something?


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## ahaley42

There is an esata port on the back of the unit. No promises that it will be enabled. All of the normal Tivo folks on the board have been fairly mum on the subject of adding back in MRV, T2G, and esata expansion. I am not trusting that it will magically be turned on one day. Some things have in the past and some haven't. 25 hours of SD content isn't much. All I was hoping for from Tivo was an "it's coming, we're not sure when." is it a tech issue or a Cable Labs issue? Anyway, that's why it's a big deal.


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## JamieP

XBoogie said:


> You only need to increase swap file size when you increase MEMORY (RAM), not storage space (hard drive). Therefore, you do NOT need to increase the swap file size if you add a larger hard drive.


As a general statement, this is not true at all. You need to increase swap on a linux system if your total peak virtual memory usage will exceed the sum of physical memory size and swap size.

The theory that lead to the "1MB of swap for 2GB of disk" rule of thumb was that the mfscheck program (the media-file-system check and repair program that runs during a Green Screen of Death) can sometimes use that much VM when repairing a badly damaged MFS. It makes sense that it might use VM in proportion to the size of MFS. No one to my knowledge has ever verified the worst case mfscheck memory usage on a Series2. You really need access to the source code to do a through analysis, but careful experimentation could yield a good estimate too. Anecdotal reports ("I've never seen a GSOD that failed due to a lack of swap space") are useful, but not a substitute for a good experiment or theoretical analysis of the code.

The theory on the other side (there is no advantage to swap > 127MB) is that a GSOD is almost always caused by a failing hard drive, and recovery is unlikely anyway.

Both positions have their merit. Choose your poison.


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## Gunnyman

I got straight from Tivo Pony that some features were not ready when they had to lock up the box for release, but he did promise that you can add your own external SATA storage.


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## DCIFRTHS

Gunnyman said:


> I got straight from Tivo Pony that some features were not ready when they had to lock up the box for release, but he did promise that you can add your own external SATA storage.


That's awesome news! Is there a post where he states this, or was it a verbal/email conversation you had with him?

Thanks!


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## Gunnyman

DCIFRTHS said:


> That's awesome news! Is there a post where he states this, or was it a verbal/email conversation you had with him?
> 
> Thanks!


Said it in person at Tivo Con in Las Vegas.


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## Turtleboy

But it's not enabled today. And people want to upgrade today.


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## DCIFRTHS

Turtleboy said:


> But it's not enabled today. And people want to upgrade today.


While your statement is correct, and I would also like to upgrade today, this isn't a perfect world, and we don't always get what we want.


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## DCIFRTHS

Gunnyman said:


> Said it in person at Tivo Con in Las Vegas.


Thanks for the info !


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## cmepasu

some have mentioned that the s3 connector only works with WD drives, however weaknees is using seagate db35 series drives for their upgrades in 500gb and 750gb flavors. They are selling just the formatted drives by themselves as well, and I didn't see anything about needing or including a different connector...perhaps an adapter?

does anyone know where to purchase the bare seagate 750gb db35 drives?

thanks


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## 1283

ahaley42 said:


> Well, it will take an actuall OS or system that can read SATA Drives, so not either of the well known boot disks at this time.


My guess is that a PATA<->SATA adapter would work with the existing tools.


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## mindstorm

Well the first part of my backup test was successful. Nothing groung breaking here, just a simple image dump and restore using bzip2 (probably can do the same thing with dd, I just always forget the correct order of the devices  )

Well I made a full image of my S3 drive (no recording on it yet) using:
bzip2 -1c < /dev/sdb > hdtivo_img.bz2

where /dev/sdb was the original S3 HD

and I was able to restore it to a same size (250GB) SATA seagate drive that I had laying around using
bzip2 -dc < hdtivo_img.bz2 > /dev/sdb

where /dev/sdb was the Seagate HD

The S3 booted up and appeared to be function fine with the seagate drive.

Now I have the seagate drive to mess around with with mfstools. Does anyone know where I can obtain the latest version that is not part of the well known BootCD--maybe a statically linked verison or the source so that I can compile it? I guess I could try the mfs tool boot CD (actually I will after this, but I'm not sure of SATA support in there)---I used opensuse to do the operations above and would just link to run the mfstools from the OS.

TIA and I'll report back any progress (I have a 500GB SATA WD drive on order)

UPDATE: found the MFS tools at http://mfstools.sourceforge.net/


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## mindstorm

griboyedov said:


> The proprietary cable is WD SecureConnect. While it won't work with other manufacturers' hard drives, that cable can easily be replaced with a vanilla SATA cable.


Not true for all drives (but you may be right for some); the "SecureConnect" attached to my Seagate SATA drive with no problem. The connector is just some "extra plastic" specially designed that connects the SATA data and power cables together so that you only have one connector at the back of the drive. However, the one connector still aligns up exactly where the SATA data and power connectors are located on the back of the HD. Hope that was clear....I should just take a picture.


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## DCIFRTHS

mindstorm said:


> Not true for all drives (but you may be right for some); the "SecureConnect" attached to my Seagate SATA drive with no problem. The connector is just some "extra plastic" specially designed that connects the SATA data and power cables together so that you only have one connector at the back of the drive. However, the one connector still aligns up exactly where the SATA data and power connectors are located on the back of the HD. Hope that was clear....I should just take a picture.


*Please* take a picture. That would be awesome  Even if you can't, thanks for the update.

Are there any additional plastic clips, on the TiVo S3 connector, that look like they would snap into a WD brand drive?

The quote about the WD connector not working on other drives is actually from WD. They have it posted on their site when you purchase the connector from them. It is a slightly different design that they sell at retail though. You have to use a standard Molex power connector for the HD when you the WD connector on their site.


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## mindstorm

DCIFRTHS said:


> *Please* take a picture. That would be awesome  Even if you can't, thanks for the update.
> 
> Are there any additional plastic clips, on the TiVo S3 connector, that look like they would snap into a WD brand drive?


Pics and summary of the outcome using mfstools can be found here: Backing Up a Tivo S3, pics


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## classicsat

BobCamp1 said:


> Well, one of their main sources of income will go away once Tivo activates the eSATA port on the back of the unit. Then upgrading the S3 becomes a one step process that even my grandparents could do (and they just discovered the backspace key on their PC last week...)


The way I see it, not. If the eSATA drive needs somehow prepared, Weaknees can still have a market of selling ready to go TiVo drives.

Plus there is still their Series 1 and Series 2 market that will last a while.


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## Agent86

classicsat said:


> The way I see it, not. If the eSATA drive needs somehow prepared, Weaknees can still have a market of selling ready to go TiVo drives.
> 
> Plus there is still their Series 1 and Series 2 market that will last a while.


There will always be folks who have their internal drive give out on them, and need a quick and easy replacement. They also may still come out with brackets that offer better cooling, and the such.

There will also be a growing market for internal replacement parts for the DIY person - things like power supplies.

And, lastly, there will always be folks that just want a mega-huge TiVo out of the box.

That said, I try to purchase all of my brackets (for older models), cables, and anything else reasonably priced to support Weakness. He supports this community, and offers the instructions for free, so I think its fair.


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## heatzeker

mindstorm said:


> Well the first part of my backup test was successful. Nothing groung breaking here, just a simple image dump and restore using bzip2 (probably can do the same thing with dd, I just always forget the correct order of the devices  )
> 
> Well I made a full image of my S3 drive (no recording on it yet) using:
> bzip2 -1c < /dev/sdb > hdtivo_img.bz2
> 
> where /dev/sdb was the original S3 HD
> 
> and I was able to restore it to a same size (250GB) SATA seagate drive that I had laying around using
> bzip2 -dc < hdtivo_img.bz2 > /dev/sdb
> 
> where /dev/sdb was the Seagate HD
> 
> The S3 booted up and appeared to be function fine with the seagate drive.
> 
> Now I have the seagate drive to mess around with with mfstools. Does anyone know where I can obtain the latest version that is not part of the well known BootCD--maybe a statically linked verison or the source so that I can compile it? I guess I could try the mfs tool boot CD (actually I will after this, but I'm not sure of SATA support in there)---I used opensuse to do the operations above and would just link to run the mfstools from the OS.
> 
> TIA and I'll report back any progress (I have a 500GB SATA WD drive on order)
> 
> UPDATE: found the MFS tools at http://mfstools.sourceforge.net/


I don't think that MFS tools boot CD has the lba48 kernel that supports the large disks.

www.knoppix.org appears to have a decent boot CD loaded with utilities. I'm going to give it at try in a few hours when my 'OUT FOR DELIVERY' series 3 arrives in a few hours.

Mindstorm, how long did it take to copy the 250GB to disk, then how long to put it back on the new drive?


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## 1283

mindstorm said:


> Pics and summary of the outcome using mfstools can be found here: Backing Up a Tivo S3, pics


Looking at the picture, the connector is *NOT* WD's SecureConnect. SecureConnect has two additional guides/plugs on the two sides, so it would only work with WD SATA drives. TiVo's connector does not have those extra plugs, so it can be used with any standard SATA drive.


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## mindstorm

heatzeker said:


> I don't think that MFS tools boot CD has the lba48 kernel that supports the large disks.
> 
> www.knoppix.org appears to have a decent boot CD loaded with utilities. I'm going to give it at try in a few hours when my 'OUT FOR DELIVERY' series 3 arrives in a few hours.
> 
> Mindstorm, how long did it take to copy the 250GB to disk, then how long to put it back on the new drive?


You are right MFS Tools don't work, but in my case it was because of no SATA support . The statically linked libs I downloaded from sourceforge worked just fine under opensuse 10.1 (obviously suse has SATA and lba48 support)

As for the time, the bzip method took around 3+ hours to create the image and about 2 (maybe a bit more) to restore it (I essentially imaged the entire drive).

Using mfstool backup and restore is much faster (I went away and came back less than 20 minutes later and it [the backup] was complete. The mfstool backup was also very quick (again <20 minutes). I had no recorded content or season passes to backup or restore.

FWIW, I was able to get the S3 to boot and function normally using both methods. Just waiting on a larger dirve to see how easy it is to increase capacity.

As for knoppix or any other live linux CD, I'm sure that they should work just fine, but since I already have a few linux boxes for me to play with, it wasn't necessary for me


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## RichB

I have the Universal Boot CD 11 (LB48) that contains MFSTools 2.0.

My TiVo 2 was ordered on 9/12 so naturally I have not received it yet. I ordered a 750Gig drive from ZipZoomFly today with 2 day shipping so it should get here before the TiVo.

So I guess I should try a single drive image save and restore with 127MB swap?

- Rich


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## mindstorm

c3 said:


> Looking at the picture, the connector is *NOT* WD's SecureConnect. SecureConnect has two additional guides/plugs on the two sides, so it would only work with WD SATA drives. TiVo's connector does not those extra plugs, so it can be used with any standard SATA drive.


I noticed that as well when I compared it to the specs sheet at WD. I'm not complaining either  I don't know where the S3 is using SecureConnect information originally came from, but either Tivo changed their minds or WD has a few different variants of SecureConnect (just speculation on my part). Anyway, this is the stuff that makes tivo fun for me.

BTW I just checked, the tivo SATA connector doesn't have any mention of WD on it. The top says "SATA" and on the bottom of the connect it says "COMAX". This may be the possible supplier (probably cheaper than WD) http://www.comaxtech.com/ At least we now have a potential OEM part supplier if you break your connector (they are rather sturdy, but just in case...)


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## 1283

mindstorm said:


> FWIW, I was able to get the S3 to boot and function normally using both methods.


FWIW, the current MFS Tools has a bug that does not preserve the size of the non-active root partition. It may not matter, but I prefer to use dd/zip and mfsadd instead of mfsbackup/mfsrestore.


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## mindstorm

RichB said:


> I have the Universal Boot CD 11 (LB48) that contains MFSTools 2.0.
> 
> My TiVo 2 was ordered on 9/12 so naturally I have not received it yet. I ordered a 750Gig drive from ZipZoomFly today with 2 day shipping so it should get here before the TiVo.
> 
> So I guess I should try a single drive image save and restore with 127MB swap?
> 
> - Rich


Should work, I left my swap at 127 (I never explored what it really is set at on the original drive) and the drive/S3 is working just fine. Like I said, this was an image put onto the same size drive so keep that in mind.

Also I was extra anal in that I didn't want to screw up the original drive so I made a full image using bzip, put that image on my "test" drive and then experimented with mfstools on the test drive (mfstool back and restore). Based on those experiments I see no reason why you couldn't just perform a mfsbackup on the original drive as long as you are careful.

Update: See C3's post above about mfsbackup/restore bug....I'm not sure if this will be a problem or not (I haven't noticed contraindications yet).

C3, what combination of dd/zip do you use (example please?) I could give that a try and see how long it takes.


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## RichB

mindstorm said:


> Should work, I left my swap at 127 (I never explored what it really is set at on the original drive) and the drive/S3 is working just fine. Like I said, this was an image put onto the same size drive so keep that in mind.
> 
> Also I was extra anal in that I didn't want to screw up the original drive so I made a full image using bzip, put that image on my "test" drive and then experimented with mfstools on the test drive (mfstool back and restore). Based on those experiments I see no reason why you couldn't just perform a mfsbackup on the original drive as long as you are careful.


Thanks. I will give that a try when it comes in.

I also plan to put the original drive in the closet 

- Rich


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## 1283

mindstorm said:


> Update: See C3's post above about mfsbackup/restore bug....I'm not sure if this will be a problem or not (I haven't noticed contraindications yet).
> 
> C3, what combination of dd/zip do you use (example please?) I could give that a try and see how long it takes.


It's the very old TiVo backup method before MFS Tools came out, essentially the same as what you're doing with bzip.

If you look at the two root partition sizes, the ones created by mfsrestore are not the same. Probably not an issue until TiVo actually needs the additional disk space.


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## RichB

c3 said:


> It's the very old TiVo backup method before MFS Tools came out, essentially the same as what you're doing with bzip.
> 
> If you look at the two root partition sizes, the ones created by mfsrestore are not the same. Probably not an issue until TiVo actually needs the additional disk space.


BZIP is not on my disk. Is there a place to get a LB48 boot disk with bzip?

- Rich


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## mindstorm

RichB said:


> BZIP is not on my disk. Is there a place to get a LB48 boot disk with bzip?
> 
> - Rich


If you really want it: http://www.bzip.org/downloads.html

But you should get by with mfstools if you find it too hard to get this into your environment. If you are using the Boot CD, you could just copy this to a floppy and then mount the floppy drive and use it that way, or if you know how to modify the Boot CD image file, you could insert it into the image and reburn the image.

HTH


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## DCIFRTHS

mindstorm said:


> I noticed that as well when I compared it to the specs sheet at WD. I'm not complaining either  I don't know where the S3 is using SecureConnect information originally came from, but either Tivo changed their minds or WD has a few different variants of SecureConnect (just speculation on my part). Anyway, this is the stuff that makes tivo fun for me.


It came from me after I saw the great photos that MZ posted in the S3 FAQ. My post is here. After viewing this photo, I mistakenly thought it was the WD connector. If you check them out, it does _appear_ to be a _custom_ version of the WD connector.

I wasn't trying to start a _panic_  , and if you read my post, you'll see that my intention was that people verify the connection before they got stuck with a new HD that couldn't be returned. I was also disappointed because I didn;t want to see a proprietary connection in the S3. I like neatness (read as: no adapters necessary) 



mindstorm said:


> BTW I just checked, the tivo SATA connector doesn't have any mention of WD on it. The top says "SATA" and on the bottom of the connect it says "COMAX". This may be the possible supplier (probably cheaper than WD) http://www.comaxtech.com/ At least we now have a potential OEM part supplier if you break your connector (they are rather sturdy, but just in case...)


This is the kind of news I like to hear


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## mindstorm

DCIFRTHS said:


> I wasn't trying to start a _panic_


It wouldn't start a panic....extra plastic on a connector? That's what dremels are for


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## mindstorm

RichB said:


> BZIP is not on my disk. Is there a place to get a LB48 boot disk with bzip?
> 
> - Rich


BTW, if you are planning on using the Boot CD, I don't think it will work since it doesn't contain SATA driver support (as far as I know) and the S3 uses SATA drives. I don't have the time to take a real close look at the free boot cd and see what would be required to update the included kernel images. Hopefully someone will do it soon for those people that don't have linux boxes (and what's the excuse for not having at least one linux box anyway  )


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## Philmatic

mindstorm said:


> BTW, if you are planning on using the Boot CD, I don't think it will work since it doesn't contain SATA driver support (as far as I know) and the S3 uses SATA drives. I don't have the time to take a real close look at the free boot cd and see what would be required to update the included kernel images. Hopefully someone will do it soon for those people that don't have linux boxes (and what's the excuse for not having at least one linux box anyway  )


Incorrect, they both have SATA support, the only difference is that the MFSTools 2.0 disc doesn't support LBA48, which is required for drives/partitions larger than 137GB. The PTVTools LBA48 Disc works fine for backing up and restoring the original S3 drive to different drives.

PS. Check the *other* forum for some S3 drive information.


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## Philmatic

mindstorm said:


> I noticed that as well when I compared it to the specs sheet at WD. I'm not complaining either  I don't know where the S3 is using SecureConnect information originally came from, but either Tivo changed their minds or WD has a few different variants of SecureConnect (just speculation on my part). Anyway, this is the stuff that makes tivo fun for me.
> 
> BTW I just checked, the tivo SATA connector doesn't have any mention of WD on it. The top says "SATA" and on the bottom of the connect it says "COMAX". This may be the possible supplier (probably cheaper than WD) http://www.comaxtech.com/ At least we now have a potential OEM part supplier if you break your connector (they are rather sturdy, but just in case...)


I don't think you need the OEM for this one...

http://www.cooldrives.com/sa15poto4moa.html

I think that would work beautifully. SecureConnect port (15 pin power side) to that converter, then plugs right into the molex connector of the new hard drive. If your new drive doesn't have the older 4-pin molex connector, then you convert it back to sata using your standard molex - sata converter.

Something more elegant will come along, I'm sure... but still something to think about.


----------



## mindstorm

PhilipSaad said:


> Incorrect, they both have SATA support, the only difference is that the MFSTools 2.0 disc doesn't support LBA48, which is required for drives/partitions larger than 137GB. The PTVTools LBA48 Disc works fine for backing up and restoring the original S3 drive to different drives.
> 
> PS. Check the *other* forum for some S3 drive information.


Thanks for the clarification. I take it the PTVTools LBA48 disc/image is the one you need to pay for and the MFSTools 2.0 is the free one (that's the one I tried)

Could you PM me about *other* information....


----------



## Philmatic

mindstorm said:


> Thanks for the clarification. I take it the PTVTools LBA48 disc/image is the one you need to pay for and the MFSTools 2.0 is the free one (that's the one I tried)
> 
> Could you PM me about *other* information....


I used the free version available here: http://www.ptvupgrade.com/products/software/lba48/lba_4.04_license.html

PM Sent!


----------



## jtbarrett

PhilipSaad said:


> I used the free version available here: http://www.ptvupgrade.com/products/software/lba48/lba_4.04_license.html
> 
> PM Sent!


I'd be very appreciative of a PM regarding the *other* info as well.

-JB


----------



## Agent86

The Weakness Instructions for the Series 3 are available. Unfortunately, they don't mention anything about what they did to prepare the hard drive for insertion into the TiVo.

Has this alternate root partition bug always existed, or are we just seeing it now with the Series 3 being a different layout? How much difference in partition space are we talking about? Is this something we can fix using MFS Tools, or are we back to the old school "dd" methods again? Given that the root is where TiVo puts its stuff, and that new functionality will require more space, its probably in our best interest to get these the two partitions sized properly.

Also, to get back to the swap issue for a quick second, another site has the console output from the S3. I noticed this part in the log:



Code:


Activating swap partitions
Adding Swap: 131064k swap-space (priority -1)

So it appears that TiVo is still using 127MB for swap space, even though the drive is much larger then previous TiVos. Perhaps we should just stick with that number? I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that the TiVo kernel would not initialize more then 127MB of swap anyway - is this still the case?


----------



## 1283

Agent86 said:


> Has this alternate root partition bug always existed, or are we just seeing it now with the Series 3 being a different layout? How much difference in partition space are we talking about?


The bug has always been there. I reported it to Tiger a long time ago when he released MFS Tools 3 beta, but I don't think that version was ever completed. S1 has 128MB root, and S2 has 256MB root. The alternate root partition created by MFS Tools is always 128MB, based on the S1 scenario.

As for the swap size, based on the "forum guideline" of 0.5MB per 1GB, 128MB is still good enough for 256GB, which is larger than the S3 drive.


----------



## RichB

c3 said:


> The bug has always been there. I reported it to Tiger a long time ago when he released MFS Tools 3 beta, but I don't think that version was ever completed. S1 has 128MB root, and S2 has 256MB root. The alternate root partition created by MFS Tools is always 128MB, based on the S1 scenario.
> 
> As for the swap size, based on the "forum guideline" of 0.5MB per 1GB, 128MB is still good enough for 256GB, which is larger than the S3 drive.


So what would you recommend for a Series 3 with 750Gig drive?
Should I copy the drive using another method?

- Rich


----------



## mindstorm

PhilipSaad said:


> I used the free version available here: http://www.ptvupgrade.com/products/software/lba48/lba_4.04_license.html
> 
> PM Sent!


That is the image I tried and I was unable to successfully boot with that image and get it to recognize my connected SATA drives. Perhaps it is my computer's chipset or something. No major deal, I'm able to use mfstool with a my "regular" linux distro.


----------



## RichB

mindstorm said:


> That is the image I tried and I was unable to successfully boot with that image and get it to recognize my connected SATA drives. Perhaps it is my computer's chipset or something. No major deal, I'm able to use mfstool with a my "regualr" linux distro.


I guess I should load Linux on a system. Do you recommend any particular version?

- Rich


----------



## Anametrix

It sounds like things are really heating up here!  That's great news!

Do any of the more advanced Linux users have a feel for how much luck I'll have using an IDE to SATA converter along with the free PTVUpgrade CD with LBA support? I've used the CD to create images in the past, but only with IDE drives.

In order to try the series 3 upgrade I'll have to get an IDE to SATA converter for my aging IDE motherboard, as well as a SATA hard drive - quite a bit of non-returnable expense if it doesn't work...

Does anyone have any ideas / suggestions?

Thanks as always!


----------



## generaltso

I have an IDE to SATA converter and 750GB SATA drive ready to go. Now I just need my Series3 to be delivered so I can try the upgrade. I'll post back with results.


----------



## mindstorm

generaltso said:


> I have an IDE to SATA converter and 750GB SATA drive ready to go. Now I just need my Series3 to be delivered so I can try the upgrade. I'll post back with results.


Have you tried booting using the PVT Boot CD with just your 750 GB drive attached with the IDE to SATA convertor to see if it [the drive] is recognized?


----------



## generaltso

Yep, it worked fine. I even dumped a Humax 595 image on the SATA drive through the converter just to see if would work. As far as I can tell, it worked great.


----------



## Anametrix

generaltso - that's great! I'd love to hear how it goes, would save me a lot of expenses. As mindstorm mentions, have you tried the boot CD to see if the drive is at least recognised...don't need to wait for the S3 to arrive to see if that bit will work.  It's a pretty safe bet to say if the drive is recognized, the rest should be a given.


----------



## Anametrix

OOoop, our posts crossed paths.  That's great news. Which IDE -> SATA converter did you use? I'll plan on picking up the same one.

Thanks again!


----------



## generaltso

I used the Addonics ADSAIDE. You can get it at Amazon, but I'm sure you could find it cheaper elsewhere.

http://www.amazon.com/ADDONICS-SATA...FGEAS/ref=sr_11_1/102-0513397-3346523?ie=UTF8


----------



## Anametrix

Excellent, does that converter also take care of converting the power supply to the SATA drive also? My motherboard only has the IDE power supplys...

Thanks again for the enlightenment!


----------



## generaltso

Yup, it actually runs off of a floppy drive power connector, but it comes with an adapter for a standard IDE power connector.


----------



## 1283

RichB said:


> So what would you recommend for a Series 3 with 750Gig drive?
> Should I copy the drive using another method?
> 
> - Rich


Even though mfsrestore may work without problem, I would use dd/zip/bzip/etc. to keep the partition sizes the same as the factory ones.


----------



## Agent86

Its been a while since we've done "dd" backup/restores.

Is there a thread/guide to point folks to like the other guides out there. For a lot of folks, this is going to be "new".


----------



## mindstorm

Agent86 said:


> Its been a while since we've done "dd" backup/restores.
> 
> Is there a thread/guide to point folks to like the other guides out there. For a lot of folks, this is going to be "new".


To backup your image, you could do something like this:

dd if=/dev/hdc bs=32k of=/tmp/tivo_dd_image

If your tivo drive is device /dev/hdc
(Side note: if you are using a linux dstro that recognizes SATA drives, the drive will be 
sd{a|b|c} as in /dev/sdc instead of /dev/hdc)

as for the bs parameter, someone who has done it recently may have a better suggestion, but I think that is the number I've used in the past.


----------



## 1283

You should pipe dd to zip/bzip to compress it. Otherwise, you might as well dd directly to another drive (instead of file). Sorry, I don't have the exact command options right now.

If you want to use this method, don't connect any video source to the TiVo. Run guided setup, let it upgrade to the latest OS, and then backup. That would give you the smallest image.

Mindstorm, what is your bzip image size?

I would like to emphasize that MFS Tools may work without any problem. That is the easiest backup/restore method. It's just that I prefer not to use it because of the partition size issue.


----------



## 1283

www.acortech.com has Sabrent STDB for $20 shipped. Does anyone know a better product or better price?


----------



## mindstorm

c3 said:


> You should pipe dd to zip/bzip to compress it. Otherwise, you might as well dd directly to another drive (instead of file). Sorry, I don't have the exact command options right now.
> 
> If you want to use this method, don't connect any video source to the TiVo. Run guided setup, let it upgrade to the latest OS, and then backup. That would give you the smallest image.
> 
> Mindstorm, what is your bzip image size?


It was pretty damn big compared to a typical mfsbackup image, but I don't recall the total size off the top of my head (I want to say >100GB)

To compress the image using gzip you wound do something like this:

dd if=/dev/hdc bs=32k | gzip -9c > /tmp/tivodiskimage.gz

note that the -9 is the highest level of compression and probably the slowest
Gzip man page

so the -9c means compress heavily to stdout and pipe that to the output file /tmp/tivodiskimage.gz

/dev/hdc is your original tivo drive (always becareful that the `if=` param is the original drive unless you want to overwrite the original drive)

If you want to use bzip2 then pipe to that instead with appropriate options.

FYI: this type of imaging takes a lot longer than the mfsbackup where you are not backing up the data (recordings, etc). What I did originally that is equivalent to dd took 4+ hours.


----------



## Philmatic

c3 said:


> I would like to emphasize that MFS Tools may work without any problem. That is the easiest backup/restore method. It's just that I prefer not to use it because of the partition size issue.


DD took FOREVER when I did it, I used MFS instead...

DD


Code:


dd bs=2M if=/dev/sdc | gzip -9 > tivo.series.3.virgin.gz

MFS


Code:


mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/tivo/tivo.series.3.virgin.mfs /dev/hdx

The MFS image restored prefectly fine to a blank SATA drive and the TiVo booted up and I'm currently running it in my living room.

The image I made has been "provided" in the usual places. PM for details.


----------



## Agent86

I like MFSTools for speed and easy storage (they're smaller images), but I'm a little worried about the alternate root partition size being wrong. It works now, as Philip has proven, but I'm just a little worried about down the road if TiVo starts adding stuff. Does anyone have a Weaknees drive by any chance? It would be nice to know how they are laying it out.

Is there any rhyme or reason to the "dd" blocksize parameter when it comes to working with TiVos? Its seems like folks are using different values, and I'm guessing its for speed purposes. Any reccommendations on that?

Say you did a backup and restore, but not an expand with MFSTools. Could you then go into something like gparted and increase the alternate root partition size? Then, after that is complete, do the expand?

And, lastly, say you did a direct drive to drive "dd" copy. Is there any way to expand and initialize the swap partition using this method? I know swap is a highly debated issue, but I'm just trying to cover all the bases/holes.

Philip:

Do you still have both images? What size is/was each image?


----------



## mindstorm

c3 said:


> The bug has always been there. I reported it to Tiger a long time ago when he released MFS Tools 3 beta, but I don't think that version was ever completed. S1 has 128MB root, and S2 has 256MB root. The alternate root partition created by MFS Tools is always 128MB, based on the S1 scenario.
> 
> As for the swap size, based on the "forum guideline" of 0.5MB per 1GB, 128MB is still good enough for 256GB, which is larger than the S3 drive.


Do you know which partition is the 256MB root partition? I've just started looking through the mfstool restore code trying to see if this is an easy fix that I can attempt to make (no promises, and time permitting).

[edit--forgot the rest of the post]: I thought there were 2 root partitions...partitions 4 and 7 IIRC.


----------



## JamieP

mindstorm said:


> Do you know which partition is the 256MB root partition? I've just started looking through the mfstool restore code trying to see if this is an easy fix that I can attempt to make (no promises, and time permitting).
> 
> [edit--forgot the rest of the post]: I thought there were 2 root partitions...partitions 4 and 7 IIRC.


Yes, it is an easy fix and the easy fix is already checked in to CVS. Unfortunately, the CVS head is the unstable snapshot, and it seems to be badly broken.

Here's the patch:


Code:


Index: restore.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/mfstools/mfstools/restore/restore.c,v
retrieving revision 1.15
diff -u -r1.15 restore.c
--- restore.c   18 Apr 2004 01:59:52 -0000      1.15
+++ restore.c   19 Apr 2006 15:41:16 -0000
@@ -954,6 +954,15 @@
        for (loop = 0; loop < info->nparts; loop++)
        {
                info->newparts[info->parts[loop].partno - 2] = info->parts[loop];
+/* If it's part of a partition set and only one was backed up, set the */
+/* alternate set size. */
+               if (info->nparts < 6 && info->parts[loop].partno < 8)
+               {
+                       if (info->parts[loop].partno < 5)
+                               info->newparts[info->parts[loop].partno + 3 - 2].sectors = info->parts[loop].sectors;
+                       else
+                               info->newparts[info->parts[loop].partno - 3 - 2].sectors = info->parts[loop].sectors;
+               }
        }
 /* First MFS pair. */
        info->newparts[8].partno = 10;


----------



## mindstorm

JamieP said:


> Yes, it is an easy fix and the easy fix is already checked in to CVS. Unfortunately, the CVS head is the unstable snapshot, and it seems to be badly broken.


That's too bad....the CVS versions aren't really labelled all that well so I can't even tell what versions of what files were used to build version 2.0. If would have been nice to pull that that version's snapshot, apply the patch and see if that would have been good enough for now.

Scratch that...I was just able to complete a query and found a MFSTOOLS2_0 branch. I'll try to checkout that branch and get it compiling once I get some free time this week.


----------



## JamieP

mindstorm said:


> That's too bad....the CVS versions aren't really labelled all that well so I can't even tell what versions of what files were used to build version 2.0. If would have been nice to pull that that version's snapshot, apply the patch and see if that would have been good enough for now.
> 
> Scratch that...I was just able to complete a query and found a MFSTOOLS2_0 branch. I'll try to checkout that branch and get it compiling once I get some free time this week.


Yes, I checked out that branch, and I believe the patch applies directly to it. There are other updates from the head that may be worth porting back to the 2.0 version: e.g. the support for swap > 128. Alternatively, if someone was willing to spend time on it, it might not be that hard to get the CVS head back in to working order. If you are up to it, you might send a note to Tiger to see if he'll add you to the project developer list.


----------



## Agent86

JamieP said:


> Yes, I checked out that branch, and I believe the patch applies directly to it. There are other updates from the head that may be worth porting back to the 2.0 version: e.g. the support for swap > 128. Alternatively, if someone was willing to spend time on it, it might not be that hard to get the CVS head back in to working order. If you are up to it, you might send a note to Tiger to see if he'll add you to the project developer list.


I think it would be a big win if we could get MFS Tools cleaned up. I'm not a coder, but I can help out with documentation and testing if need be.

MFS Tools is fast, efficient, and easy to use - its just hampered by these few issues.


----------



## 1283

What does "CVS head" mean? I use CVS at work, but I don't know what "head" means.


----------



## Agent86

c3 said:


> What does "CVS head" mean? I use CVS at work, but I don't know what "head" means.


If I remember properly - and I could be wrong - "head" is the active development branch in the CVS. You generally have a branch for each release, and sometimes a few specialized development branches (like the "mm" branch for Morton's test kernels), and then "head". "head" is where all the patches go and the next release branch is made from.


----------



## 1283

OK, that makes sense. Thanks.


----------



## JamieP

c3 said:


> What does "CVS head" mean? I use CVS at work, but I don't know what "head" means.


Guess I should have said "HEAD" instead of "head"  To quote the cvs man page:


> ...HEAD refers to the most recent version available in the repository, ...


----------



## Agent86

Does anyone have any idea what is busted in CVS HEAD? Is it just not compiling cleanly or are there functionality issues?


----------



## 1283

There were functional issues when Tiger released a test version. I don't remember the details. There was a thread in this forum.


----------



## JamieP

Agent86 said:


> Does anyone have any idea what is busted in CVS HEAD? Is it just not compiling cleanly or are there functionality issues?


It compiles fine. Part of the problem is coming up with a test plan to determine what works and what's broken. I remember, for example, that using the CVS HEAD to restore an image created with mfstools 2.0 resulted in a disk with no root partition.


----------



## MungoJerrie

I have been unable to get this to compile on cygwin; it's choking here on readwrite.c - I've tried a later version of the readwrite.c but still fails.



Code:


readwrite.c: In function `tivo_partition_read':
readwrite.c:138: error: `off64_t' undeclared (first use in this function)
readwrite.c:138: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
readwrite.c:138: error: for each function it appears in.)
readwrite.c:138: error: parse error before "sector"
readwrite.c: At top level:
readwrite.c:145: error: `file' undeclared here (not in a function)
readwrite.c:145: error: `buf' undeclared here (not in a function)
readwrite.c:145: error: `count' undeclared here (not in a function)
readwrite.c:145: error: initializer element is not constant
readwrite.c:145: warning: data definition has no type or storage class
readwrite.c:146: error: parse error before "if"
readwrite.c: In function `tivo_partition_write':
readwrite.c:213: error: `off64_t' undeclared (first use in this function)
readwrite.c:213: error: parse error before "sector"
readwrite.c: At top level:
readwrite.c:224: error: redefinition of 'retval'
readwrite.c:145: error: previous definition of 'retval' was here
readwrite.c:224: error: initializer element is not constant
readwrite.c:224: warning: data definition has no type or storage class
readwrite.c:225: error: parse error before "if"
make[1]: *** [readwrite.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mfstools/lib'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1


----------



## JamieP

MungoJerrie said:


> I have been unable to get this to compile on cygwin;


I don't think it was ever intended to compile/run on a windows box, even under cygwin.


----------



## MungoJerrie

JamieP said:


> I don't think it was ever intended to compile/run on a windows box, even under cygwin.


Ahhh..thanks. I'll try it on a Debian box tonite.


----------



## Philmatic

Agent86 said:


> Philip:
> 
> Do you still have both images? What size is/was each image?


I deleted the DD image once I verified the MFS backup was working. The MFS image is a clean, "virgin", never booted up unit.

It's available in the usual places, PM me for details.


----------



## RichB

PhilipSaad said:


> I deleted the DD image once I verified the MFS backup was working. The MFS image is a clean, "virgin", never booted up unit.
> 
> It's available in the usual places, PM me for details.


Philip,

The discussion about MFStools not creating the hidden partition with the proper size has me concerned. What other method is there to do the copy. Can I just DD from one disk to the other. If I do that, what kind of time am I looking at Hours, Days 

Since I am upgrading to a 750Gig drive, I do not want to mess this up.

Thanks,

Rich


----------



## 1283

With DMA enabled, dd should be around 40-60GB/hour.


----------



## mindstorm

Got my WD RE2 500GB hd today and just finished mounting it in the S3.

Stock 250GB drive: 32HD/303SD hours
500GB drive: 65HD/610SD hours

I restored an image that I had made with bzip2 and restored it using


Code:


bzip2 -dc < hdtivo_img.bz2 > /dev/sdb

Restore took about 2 hours.
I then expanded the drive using



Code:


mfstools add -x /dev/sdb

I also had an mfstool backup image of the original drive, but since I knew I was going to be out a few hours, I went with the bzip2 image.

Note: this was all done under opensuse 10.1

Couple of observations
The WD drive seems to run a little cooler than then seagate drive (250GB) I had started testing with (based on how hot it felt to my hand, no real temp measurements taken). I can't say the the WD is any quieter (or noisier) than the seagate or stock S3 drive. The S3 is nice a quiet, just as it was when I got it.


----------



## mindstorm

MungoJerrie said:


> Ahhh..thanks. I'll try it on a Debian box tonite.


Let me know if you getting it working (compiling/building) and if you needed any special options. I had about five minutes to play with the source today under RHEL and while I got automake to generate the Makefile, make failed complaining about something in macpart.h (I think that was it). Can't recall the gcc version OTTOMH.

BTW, I was working with the mfstools2 branch, not head/latest


----------



## ipodtivo

Duplicate drive on a mac? I have a new mac pro with 4 SATA drive bays, can anyone tell me if I just simply load in the Tivo Series 3 drive & a blank SATA drive, can I simply do a full copy/diplicate drive from the Series 3 drive to the blank drive? If so should I just go to the terminal window and do a DD?


----------



## tripmaster

So does this mean we should do a dd copy rather than using an archived MFS image?



c3 said:


> The bug has always been there. I reported it to Tiger a long time ago when he released MFS Tools 3 beta, but I don't think that version was ever completed. S1 has 128MB root, and S2 has 256MB root. The alternate root partition created by MFS Tools is always 128MB, based on the S1 scenario.
> 
> As for the swap size, based on the "forum guideline" of 0.5MB per 1GB, 128MB is still good enough for 256GB, which is larger than the S3 drive.


----------



## 1283

tripmaster said:


> So does this mean we should do a dd copy rather than using an archived MFS image?


Other people are already using MFS. Use dd if you're picky (like me). I don't know what the S3 root partition size is. I don't have my S3 yet.


----------



## MichaelK

Gunnyman said:


> I got straight from Tivo Pony that some features were not ready when they had to lock up the box for release, but he did promise that you can add your own external SATA storage.





DCIFRTHS said:


> That's awesome news! Is there a post where he states this, or was it a verbal/email conversation you had with him?
> 
> Thanks!





Gunnyman said:


> Said it in person at Tivo Con in Las Vegas.


FYI- Tivo Pony just posted in the s3 forums ESATA tghread- that CABLELABS has to approve it.

He said tivo submitted their DRM for them to review.

SO it is NOT a given at his point....


----------



## MichaelK

here's his post:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=4402752&&#post4402752


----------



## RichB

I pulled a bone head move. Bought and IDE 720Gig disk. Now that is getting sent back and my SATA drive is on order.

This may be a stupid question, but If I upgrade my drive with DD, I assume that any recording that I have made will be preserved. Correct?

- Rich


----------



## bigDvette

quick tip for anyone going the route of using a SATA to IDE adapter so you can use the LBA48 MFS tools disk already out there.

The Tivo drive comes with the jumper removed for 300mbps vs 150mbps setting so the Tivo drive is in 300 mode. This mode kept hanging the MFSBACKUP utility (probably because the adapter won't reclock the signal). Anyway, set it to 150 and the backup runs smoothly.

BTW - remember to set you new drive to the 300 setting or you aren't getting full speed. my seagate comes default at 150.


----------



## DCIFRTHS

bigDvette said:


> ... BTW - remember to set you new drive to the 300 setting or you aren't getting full speed. my seagate comes default at 150.


Interesting. What model drive did you get?


----------



## 1283

bigDvette said:


> BTW - remember to set you new drive to the 300 setting or you aren't getting full speed. my seagate comes default at 150.


I don't think it matters because the Broadcom chip is probably 1.5G only. 1.5G is already about twice as fast as what the actual platter can deliver.


----------



## Agent86

Houston... we have a problem.

I did a "dd" copy and expand last night, and it refused to work. I thought I did something wrong, so I tried it again. No dice.



Code:


dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=32k
mfstool mfsadd -x /dev/sda

Both times I ended up in a loop. I would get to the "Almost there" screen, then it would reboot. After the "Welcome" screen it would go to a GSOD for a second or two, and then reboot again. This just repeats forever.

However, I went back and tried MFS Tools, and it produced and upgrade that actually worked.



Code:


mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/sdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/sda

I'm at a total loss as to why the dd method failed but MFS Tools functioned. I used the same boot environment and MFS Tools version for both procedures.


----------



## 1283

If you're using a 750GB drive, you need "-r 4" for mfsadd because the largest partition size without -r 4 is 256GB.


----------



## Agent86

c3 said:


> If you're using a 750GB drive, you need "-r 4" for mfsadd because the largest partition size without -r 4 is 256GB.


Doh!

I will leave the TiVo as is for now, since I have the CableCard folks coming in a few hours. After they get that all working, I'll give the dd run another try and give "-r 4" a shot.


----------



## 1283

dd a 250GB drive three times must be painful.  BTW, using bs=1024k may speed it up slightly.


----------



## mindstorm

c3 said:


> If you're using a 750GB drive, you need "-r 4" for mfsadd because the largest partition size without -r 4 is 256GB.


Humm, I restored my from my bzip image and just used mfstool add -x /dev/sdb on my 500GB drive and my S3 booted up fine and shows 60+ hrs of HD recording time. I did not specify "-r 4".


----------



## 1283

With 500GB drive, your new partition size is less than 256GB.


----------



## bigDvette

Thought I'd summarize my activity so other can potentially benefit.

I upgraded from the stock drive to a 750gb seagate.

I utized a Sata to IDE converter that goes on the sata drive to attach to an PATA IDE cable.

I used the PTVupgrade free disk.

My drives were setup as:

hda - fat32 drive for backup
hdc - original tivo drive for backup and then new 750 seagate for restore

I backed up my image using the following commands.

ddparm -d1 /dev/hda
ddparm -d1 /dev/hdc

** I had to set the DMA to get the drives to work reliably with the adapter. Without using this, I had to jumper the original tivo drive to the 1.5gbps setting.

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos

mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.series3virgin.bak /dev/hdc

umount -f -a -r

ctrl-alt-del 

*** at this point I disconnected the original drive and put it aside and installed the new 750gb drive on the hdc channel


To restore I did the following:

ddparm -d1 /dev/hda
ddparm -d1 /dev/hdc

** Again, I had to set the DMA to get the drives to work reliably with the adapter. 

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos

mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi -r 4 /mnt/dos/tivo.series3virgin.bak /dev/hdc

umount -f -a -r

ctrl-alt-del 

** I then pulled the drives and removed the jumper off of the seagate drive. The seagate drive comes by default with a jumper that limits the speed to the 1.5 setting instead of the 3.0 setting. Look on top of drive and you will see what I am talking about.

I put the drive back in the tivo and turned it on and walked through the guided setup.


**********************

That was it in the end. Took me 5 hours because I made the following mistakes.

Couldn't get the MFSbackup to work before setting the HDPARM settings above. I did get it to work by jumpering the original drive to 1.5, but the image would not restore on the seagate until I used the hdparm. Don't know why, but that is the problem I had and once I started using the hdparm DMA setting, I never had another problem.


I also did not realize I needed to use the -r 4 switch. I kept getting the GSOD, so I installed the image without expanding and it wored fine so I knew it was not the backup restore but something else. The -r 4 is not in the hinsdale guide and I saw it some places but it took me a while to figure out it's purpose as it is not in the help screen for mfsrestore. The -r 4 is needed if you expand beyond 256gb and since the jump from 250 to 750 is 500gb, you get the picture. I didn't until 1 am.

Hopefully this will help others.

It is a little noisier than the WD and a little hotter, but it is a LOOOTTTTT bigger. 92hours HD.


----------



## JKay

I cant help but wonder if TiVo rethought the wisdom of implementing the eSATA port. If you add a hard drive in this manner and it fails, are you simply able to disconnect it and lose some recording, but continue to have a functioning Tivo. I suspect this is not the case.

The idea of taking the virgin 250 drive, placing its image on a larger internal drive and putting the original drive away for safe keeping appeals to me.


----------



## bigDvette

It appeals to me as well as I have had to bring out the original drives on my other Hr10-250 and sat-t60 a few times because of drive failures. Also, when you resell it, you just slap the new drive in and let the person know it has never been used (the drive) and there should be know heat or wear issues.

That is what I did with my other Tivos.


----------



## southerndoc

If anyone here has done the 750 GB upgrade from Weaknees, can you tell if the unit is still quiet? I don't want to upgrade to a noisy drive. The S3 is a lot quieter than the S2!


----------



## RichB

geekmedic said:


> If anyone here has done the 750 GB upgrade from Weaknees, can you tell if the unit is still quiet? I don't want to upgrade to a noisy drive. The S3 is a lot quieter than the S2!


You and me brother, unfortunately, I already ordered one and I read hear that it was noisy. Then I read the review on SilentPCReview.Com and was even more concerned. Now I am in the final stage, acceptance 

I am a 200, so my TiVo ordered on the 12'th has not arrived, neither has my disk for that matter.

- Rich


----------



## generaltso

Regardless of where you get the drive, there is only one SATA 750GB drive on the market right now. The seek noises are much louder than the stock drive. If noise is a concern, you should go with a smaller drive that's quieter or wait for Weaknees to start carrying the DB35 drives.


----------



## mindstorm

So far I am very please with the WD 500GB RE2. There is no 750GB drive in this series, but these drives were allegedly designed with reliability in mind (then again, you'd hope most drives would be  ). There are many reviews on this drive (here's one WD RE2 review)

The downside is that it is *only * good for about 65 hours of HD content so you don't get the 90+ hours that a 750GB drive will give you, but it is whisper quiet and runs a bit cooler than the 250GB seagate drive I was originally testing with. It costs about $180 US.

Thanks for that nice complete post bigDvette. I have no doubt that that will certainly help others.


----------



## MichaelK

any progress with fixing the MFStools bug with the partition sizes?

would be a lot easier to go that route and still ensure future compatibility for whatever software updates tivo does on their end...


(i'm worthless hoping you smart guys can figure it out!)


----------



## bsather

If you upgrade the hard drive in the S3 that has had the cable cards installed, will they still work after the new drive has been installed?


----------



## bsather

bsather said:


> If you upgrade the hard drive in the S3 that has had the cable cards installed, will they still work after the new drive has been installed?


I got my answer straight from WeaKnees...

"Yes, absolutely."

Thanks,

WeaKnees.com


----------



## MichaelK

mindstorm said:


> To backup your image, you could do something like this:
> 
> dd if=/dev/hdc bs=32k of=/tmp/tivo_dd_image
> 
> If your tivo drive is device /dev/hdc
> (Side note: if you are using a linux dstro that recognizes SATA drives, the drive will be
> sd{a|b|c} as in /dev/sdc instead of /dev/hdc)
> 
> as for the bs parameter, someone who has done it recently may have a better suggestion, but I think that is the number I've used in the past.


trying to be most conservative here-

I plan to DD from old drive to new drive then use mfsadd to increase the size.

Is there a way to increase the swap before doing mfsadd? (please forgive my ignorance but I'm clueless about linux)

I figure it cant hurt so I might as well while I'm fiddling around- if I'm going trough the extra effort to not use MFStools in order to make sure the partition sizes are big enough for future tivo software versions, I figure might as well juice the swap while I'm at it...


----------



## Agent86

c3 said:


> dd a 250GB drive three times must be painful.  BTW, using bs=1024k may speed it up slightly.


It wasn't the most fun thing in the world, but its all in the name of TiVo science! . I boosted the blocksize to 1024k, but it didn't make a huge difference time wise.

That said, I can confirm the following two methods work for upgrading to a 750GB drive.

dd method
estimated completion time: 2 and a half hours


Code:


dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=1024k
mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/sda

MFS Tools method
estimated completion time: 15 minutes


Code:


mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/sdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/sda

As stated here many times, the various methods have their drawbacks (speed vs partition size correctness).

It would certainly be excellent if we could get MFS Tools working properly with regards to the partition sizes. It would give us some smaller images and it runs much much faster. But, until then dd will serve adaquately.

As far as drive noise on the 750GB drive goes, it is certainly louder then the stock drive. The spindle noise is non-existant. The drive spinning is amost completely silent, its the seeking that you can hear. In a dead quiet room it can be clearly audible, but I find it easily drowns out when actually watching TV. I haven't watched a lot yet, so we'll see how it holds up as I watch a variety of shows (quiter dramas, action movies, etc).

One interesting thing of note. Usually using MFS Tools results in a loss of recordings on the machine. But, for some reason, the videos that came on the S3 from TiVo made it through the MFS Tools process. I wonder if they are stored like normal video, or even count against the usable space.


----------



## RichB

Agent86 said:


> It wasn't the most fun thing in the world, but its all in the name of TiVo science! . I boosted the blocksize to 1024k, but it didn't make a huge difference time wise.
> 
> That said, I can confirm the following two methods work for upgrading to a 750GB drive.
> 
> dd method
> estimated completion time: 2 and a half hours
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=1024k
> mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/sda
> 
> MFS Tools method
> estimated completion time: 15 minutes
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/sdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/sda


How long does the DD take versus the MFS Tool?

- Rich


----------



## generaltso

Those promo videos were also on the S2 DT box and also survived an MFSTools upgrade. They must be stored differently than regulary video.


----------



## MichaelK

generaltso said:


> Those promo videos were also on the S2 DT box and also survived an MFSTools upgrade. They must be stored differently than regulary video.


I could be wrong but doesn't the 9999 tag tell it to only copy the first 9999 items in the mfs filesystem/database? The theory being that, that range will pick up all the settings, scheduling info, backround animations, etc but exclude recordings. I seem to recall a smaller number being used early on and then a newer model came out and that wound up chopping of some of the menu backround animations.

I'd have to dig through the help file but I believ if you use something like Tao (suggested from the weakness guide to preserve recordings) instead of 9999 it will copy everything in the MFS partitions including user recordings (and while not takign as long as DD since it will ignore empty spots will take alot longer than 15 mins that using the 9999 tag does.)


----------



## MichaelK

MichaelK said:


> trying to be most conservative here-
> 
> I plan to DD from old drive to new drive then use mfsadd to increase the size.
> 
> Is there a way to increase the swap before doing mfsadd? (please forgive my ignorance but I'm clueless about linux)
> 
> I figure it cant hurt so I might as well while I'm fiddling around- if I'm going trough the extra effort to not use MFStools in order to make sure the partition sizes are big enough for future tivo software versions, I figure might as well juice the swap while I'm at it...


I think I found my own answer.

from the fixes for MFStools 2.0 swap problems thread

there is this post

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=628370&&#post628370



> ....You can upgrade by using dd to copy the A drive and then using mfsadd to expand it. This gets you a working TiVo, but doesn't expand your swap. You can just wait for it to green screen (may well never happen) and use the rescue procedure above, but if this is the sort of thing that would worry you, you can manually add a swap partition.
> 
> The procedure is very similar to the rescue. Start by dd'ing the A drive on to the new drive. Then reboot into a byteswapping mode (you'll probably want to disconnect the old A drive) as above.
> 
> Run pdisk and create a new partition:
> 
> pdisk /dev/hda
> 
> C
> 12p
> 128m
> 
> You'll also be asked for the partition label and partition type. "Linux Swap" and "Swap", WITH the quotes, are the 'official' answers, but TiVo doesn't check this detail.
> 
> Swap the partition labels around
> 
> r 12 8
> r 9 13
> 
> The TiVoes currently on sale have 13 partitions on their A drives. The commands will be different - C 14p 128m <Return> r 14 8 <Ret> r 9 15 <Ret>.
> 
> If pdisk complains 'invalid partition' when you try to create the new partition, see post #7 for a laborious work-around.
> 
> Write and exit:
> 
> w
> y
> q
> 
> Then prepare your new swap partiton
> 
> mkswap -v0 /dev/hda8
> 
> and you can now complete the upgrade with mfsadd as normal:
> 
> ...
> 
> Thanks to angra for working through this one.
> ...


I suppose I want to change the c command to 256m and that I'll wind up with an extra 128m partition that isn't used but with 500 or 750 gigs I think that's no problem.

(unless someone knows the command off hand to nuke the left over partition when done?) 
_edit_: google is your firend- LOL- delete command is d

And what is the r 9 13(15) command doing? If 12(14) is the newly created swap partition and 8 is the old one, I understand swaping those two but why fiddle with 9 and 13(15)?


----------



## Agent86

RichB said:


> How long does the DD take versus the MFS Tool?


The times in the post were the actual completion times for the both jobs, from start to finish.

dd took about 2 and half hours
MFS Tools took about 15 minutes

MFS Tools is much faster, but it resizes the alternate root partition. Thus far that has not been a problem. That said, we don't know the direction TiVo will take the S3 and HD content (like a better font or menus) would likely take up more disk.

Hopefully we can fix MFS Tools to correct the partition sizing and large swap creation/initialization issues, and be good to go.


----------



## MichaelK

got to thinking about my post above with making a bigger swap partition.

I think the easiest/quickest thing to do to get the "perfect" upgrade is:

1) use MFS Tools to copy the drive (without expanding).

2) Then use pdisk as descirbed in the swap probelm thread to increase the swap partition (create a new larger one with c command, swap locations with r command, then delete the old partion with teh d command.)
-or-
tell mfstools to increase the swap and then use tpip to enable it.

3) Now use pdisk as above to create the larger correct sized alternate root partition.

4) finally use mfsadd to increase the drive size.


It's a little more complex with all the pdisk fiddling and having to do mfsadd as a seperate function but I think that's the simpliest way to a bulletproof upgrade.

I dont want to fiddle with the box till my cablecard install on wednesday but I'm thinking that's the way I'm going to go. I'll post my exact steps and results when I get to it if no one else tries that method beforehand.


----------



## MichaelK

RichB said:


> How long does the DD take versus the MFS Tool?
> 
> - Rich





Agent86 said:


> The times in the post were the actual completion times for the both jobs, from start to finish.
> 
> dd took about 2 and half hours
> MFS Tools took about 15 minutes
> 
> MFS Tools is much faster, but it resizes the alternate root partition. Thus far that has not been a problem. That said, we don't know the direction TiVo will take the S3 and HD content (like a better font or menus) would likely take up more disk.
> 
> Hopefully we can fix MFS Tools to correct the partition sizing and large swap creation/initialization issues, and be good to go.


as posted above- using the above arguments with mfs tools doesn't move all your recordings. So it's not apples to apples. If You're lookign to move all your recordings and you use the mfs tools arguments for that then it will take MFStools a LOT longer (but likely still not as long as DD)


----------



## RichB

MichaelK said:


> as posted above- using the above arguments with mfs tools doesn't move all your recordings. So it's not apples to apples. If You're lookign to move all your recordings and you use the mfs tools arguments for that then it will take MFStools a LOT longer (but likely still not as long as DD)


Great thanks.


----------



## y2jdmbfan

I initially forgot to use the -r 4 with mfstool add...Do I need to dd the drive again or can I just redo the mfstool add??? 

Thanks,

Y2J


----------



## MichaelK

didn't want to clutter up this thread with tangents- looking for some help with getting SATA on the boot cd's.

figured it would be best to start a seperate thread to keep that topic by it self.

please see http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=318519

Basically trying to find out what SATA PCI card to get so that it will work with the bood cd's.


----------



## Agent86

y2jdmbfan said:


> I initially forgot to use the -r 4 with mfstool add...Do I need to dd the drive again or can I just redo the mfstool add???


Put the drive in and see if it boots. It mostly depends on the size you upgraded to.

If you get stuck in a reboot loop, you'll need to redo it and use -"r 4" during the add.


----------



## Agent86

Oh - I forgot to mention - I used the GParted Live CD to do my upgrades. GParted has just about every linux disk controller driver since its primary purpose is to create/modify/resize partitions, so it makes a great choice from that respect. However, since it does not come with MFS Tools, you'll need to download the Statically Linked verison of MFS Tools and put it on a USB thumbdrive that you can mount after you boot the GParted disc. I just put the thumbdrive in the USB port before I booted the machine so that it would detect that drive along with the hard drives in the system during startup.


----------



## heatzeker

There's a how-to here:
http://www.bumwine.com/tivo.html


----------



## bkdtv

Just a tip...if you buy a Western Digital or Seagate drive to upgrade the Series3, you may want to enable AAM. AAM reduces seek noise as well as power dissipation (heat), at the expense of some performance. Most SATA drives are marketed for the performance desktop, so they ship with AAM disabled by default.

You can enable AAM with the WinAAM utility.


----------



## 1283

Unless something has changed recently, Seagate does not support AAM.


----------



## 1283

heatzeker said:


> There's a how-to here:


Come on. What's the *real* purpose of that website?


----------



## bkdtv

> Unless something has changed recently, Seagate does not support AAM.


Most of Seagate's drives do support AAM, but it isn't enabled, nor do they provide a utility of their own to enable it, due to legal questions. I have enabled AAM on my Seagate drives.


----------



## 1283

bkdtv said:


> Most of Seagate's drives do support AAM, but it isn't enabled, nor do they provide a utility of their own to enable it, due to legal questions. I have enabled AAM on my Seagate drives.


Are you talking about old Seagate drives, or recent Seagate drives? As far as I know, the last Seagate that supported AAM was early versions of 7200.7.


----------



## bkdtv

Try running the utility on your Seagate drive, it tells you whether AAM is supported or not.

Note you need to be using the default Windows driver for the utility to work. It doesn't support third-party IDE/SATA drivers from nVidia, ATI, etc.


----------



## 1283

I have checked PATA 7200.7, 7200.8, and 7200.9 with the Hitachi Feature Tool -- no AAM.


----------



## generaltso

I have already tried AAM on the 750GB drive. It doesn't work. That's why the drive seeks are so loud.


----------



## MichaelK

Agent86 said:


> Oh - I forgot to mention - I used the GParted Live CD to do my upgrades. GParted has just about every linux disk controller driver since its primary purpose is to create/modify/resize partitions, so it makes a great choice from that respect. However, since it does not come with MFS Tools, you'll need to download the Statically Linked verison of MFS Tools and put it on a USB thumbdrive that you can mount after you boot the GParted disc. I just put the thumbdrive in the USB port before I booted the machine so that it would detect that drive along with the hard drives in the system during startup.


wow- that gparted cd looks great.

can it adjust the partitions on the tivo disks? If so maybe we just use that to increase the swap partition and/or correct the partition size after the mdfstools big?


----------



## bschott

Can someone please confirm if the -r 4 command switch is needed w/mfsadd or mfsrestore on a 500GB WD drive?

Also is it confirmed that the bug in MFSTools2.0 is "OK" with this same drive, or would it just make sense to use bzip2 and/or DD at this point.

Thanks for your assistance.


----------



## 1283

bschott said:


> Can someone please confirm if the -r 4 command switch is needed w/mfsadd or mfsrestore on a 500GB WD drive?


It's not needed because the additional partition size is less than 256GB.


----------



## bschott

c3 said:


> It's not needed because the additional partition size is less than 256GB.


Thanks for the feeback. How about mfstools to backup and restore. Is it not worth screwing with becuase of 2nd root partition sizing bug?

Thanks.


----------



## 1283

I will use dd for my own S3 (whenever I'll get mine), but that's just me.


----------



## Agent86

MichaelK said:


> can it adjust the partitions on the tivo disks? If so maybe we just use that to increase the swap partition and/or correct the partition size after the mdfstools big?


I thought about this, but GParted fails to see ANY partitions on the drive. I think this is due to an irregularity in how TiVo sets them up.


----------



## 1283

Agent86 said:


> I thought about this, but GParted fails to see ANY partitions on the drive. I think this is due to an irregularity in how TiVo sets them up.


May be due to byte-swapping.


----------



## JamieP

c3 said:


> May be due to byte-swapping.


More likely, gparted doesn't grok the tivo partition table, nor does it know anything about the tivo MFS file system.


----------



## RichB

I am not really a big fan of seek noise in my TiVo. My S3 should arrive today and a Seagate 750Gig disk tomorrow.

It never occurred to me that the 750 would be noisy since I have put Seagate 320's in my S3's that are great.

I just read the review and listened to the sound files on SilentPCReview.com and I am really concerned. I am thinking about eating the restocking fee and getting a Western Digital 500 gig drive. Since I plan to do a DD copy, I can always upgrade the drive later.

750 Gig'ers do you regularly hear the drive?

Thanks,

Rich


----------



## MichaelK

JamieP said:


> More likely, gparted doesn't grok the tivo partition table, nor does it know anything about the tivo MFS file system.


If i understand correctly tivo just uses the apple file system and you can screw with partitions with pdisk.

total linux neophyte- is there a way to copy the pdisk program to a thumbdrive like you can do with the static mfstools?


----------



## jazzsax

RichB said:


> I am not really a big fan of seek noise in my TiVo. My S3 should arrive today and a Seagate 750Gig disk tomorrow.
> 
> It never occurred to me that the 750 would be noisy since I have put Seagate 320's in my S3's that are great.
> 
> I just read the review and listened to the sound files on SilentPCReview.com and I am really concerned. I am thinking about eating the restocking fee and getting a Western Digital 500 gig drive. Since I plan to do a DD copy, I can always upgrade the drive later.
> Rich


Note there are two different WD 500GB SATA drives; WD5000YS and WD5000KS. One is rated for raid setups and doesn't have the quiet seek option. I'm not sure if it really matters but actual user experience would be helpful in deciding.


----------



## RichB

jazzsax said:


> Note there are two different WD 500GB SATA drives; WD5000YS and WD5000KS. One is rated for raid setups and doesn't have the quiet seek option. I'm not sure if it really matters but actual user experience would be helpful in deciding.


http://www.silentpcreview.com/article617-page1.html

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=214

Here are the references. Looks like KS.

- Rich


----------



## MichaelK

jazzsax said:


> Note there are two different WD 500GB SATA drives; WD5000YS and WD5000KS. One is rated for raid setups and doesn't have the quiet seek option. I'm not sure if it really matters but actual user experience would be helpful in deciding.


thanks for pointing that out- I almost bought the one sans the quite seek features


----------



## Donzi

SEAGATE SHIPS 750GB HARD DRIVES OPTIMIZED FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF DVRS AND DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT DEVICES

According to the News Release the new quieter Seagate DB35 750's started shipping today. Hopfully they will start showing up in retail channels soon.

<sorry, can't post link to news release yet - apparenly I have to make 5 posts first  >


----------



## 1283

http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,3308,00.html


----------



## Donzi




----------



## RichB

c3 said:


> http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,3308,00.html


I could not find a model number. Did you locate one?


----------



## dominovm

St3750840ace


----------



## dominovm

RichB said:


> I could not find a model number. Did you locate one?


 Sorry...That is for the PATA

ST3750840SCE


----------



## philliptiongson

I am getting my s3 soon, and have already ordered a 750gb drive. My cablecards won't be here for a couple weeks, so should I

A) image the virgin s3 drive, and install the 750 now? or 
B) should I go ahead and go through setup and transfer my lifetime? THEN image it and install the 750? or 
C) should I wait until the cablecards are installed, and then image it?


----------



## Agent86

RichB said:


> 750 Gig'ers do you regularly hear the drive?


Depends on what you mean by "hear". If you're talking about when the room is silent and you can hear a pin drop, then yes I can hear the drive. And in that scenario it can be somewhat "loud" when it seeks.

If you're talking about being able to hear the drive over background noise/conversation, or audio from a recorded show you are watching, then I would say "sometimes". I've only had it active for a few days, but I can't say its bothered me much yet. Visitors to the house haven't said anything about it. Its there, but it has not been a problem so far. If you need the room to be silent when nothing is going on - like a bedroom - it might not be a good choice. For my Game/Rec room, it hasn't been a big deal. But I'll reserve judgement for a few more days.

It will be interesting to see if the DB35 drives are significantly quieter then the current drive series. Based on the available datasheets, it does not appear to be the case. It looks like there might be a .12 bel difference between the two.


----------



## Agent86

philliptiongson said:


> I am getting my s3 soon, and have already ordered a 750gb drive. My cablecards won't be here for a couple weeks, so should I
> 
> A) image the virgin s3 drive, and install the 750 now? or
> B) should I go ahead and go through setup and transfer my lifetime? THEN image it and install the 750? or
> C) should I wait until the cablecards are installed, and then image it?


I did A.

When I got the TiVo I called and transferred the lifetime, then I pulled the drive and did the upgrade, then I fired the whole thing up.


----------



## dikeosp

I just installed the new 750 gb hd from Weaknees and it is taking my S3 a LONG time to boot. It is stuck in SETUP mode.  

I am quite sure my connectors are firmly inserted, etc... I also did not do anything else to my S3.

I completed the upgrade a couple of days after the CableCards were installed. I could put the old drive in to ensure the device is ok, but my theory is that it is formatting the drive?

Any advice ??


----------



## jfh3

I have a new WD drive - I'd like to enable AAM, but not quite sure of the sequence. Can I use the Windows utility to enable AAM to a virgin drive and then use the upgrade procedure under Linux? Any hints on AAM (never used it)


----------



## dikeosp

dikeosp said:


> I just installed the new 750 gb hd from Weaknees and it is taking my S3 a LONG time to boot. It is stuck in SETUP mode.
> 
> I am quite sure my connectors are firmly inserted, etc... I also did not do anything else to my S3.
> 
> I completed the upgrade a couple of days after the CableCards were installed. I could put the old drive in to ensure the device is ok, but my theory is that it is formatting the drive?
> 
> Any advice ??


My oh my, I feel stupid. The front panel tells you what resolution it is using to talk to your tv. My TIVO clearly said 480, although I was still using the HDMI input on my TV.... Once I switched my TV over to the composite video setting all is well.... My oh my. sorry for the waste of bandwidth.


----------



## mindstorm

RichB said:


> http://www.silentpcreview.com/article617-page1.html
> 
> http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=214
> 
> Here are the references. Looks like KS.
> 
> - Rich


FWIW I have the 500GB YS model and it is very quiet....I can't hear the drive seeking at all.


----------



## 1283

mindstorm said:


> FWIW I have the 500GB YS model and it is very quiet....I can't hear the drive seeking at all.


Did you change the AAM setting (if the drive supports it), or is it at factory default?


----------



## RichB

mindstorm said:


> FWIW I have the 500GB YS model and it is very quiet....I can't hear the drive seeking at all.


Great mine is on order.

- Rich


----------



## bkdtv

> I have a new WD drive - I'd like to enable AAM, but not quite sure of the sequence. Can I use the Windows utility to enable AAM to a virgin drive and then use the upgrade procedure under Linux? Any hints on AAM (never used it)


Yes. *Prior* to running throught he Linux upgrade procedure, copy the WinAAM utility to the drive and run it to enable AAM from Windows. Then boot from CD and run the Linux upgrade procedure.

Note you must enable AAM before you run the upgrade procedure under Linux. If you boot to Windows XP after running through the Linux upgrade procedure, then you may have to run through the procedure again.


----------



## RichB

bkdtv said:


> Yes. *Prior* to running throught he Linux upgrade procedure, copy the WinAAM utility to the drive and run it to enable AAM from Windows. Then boot from CD and run the Linux upgrade procedure.
> 
> Note you must enable AAM before you run the upgrade procedure under Linux. If you boot to Windows XP after running through the Linux upgrade procedure, then you may have to run through the procedure again.


I am confused by this. SilentPCReview reviewed this drive and it performed well without this procedure. If you power the drive down and attach it to a new system will the AAM hold?

- Rich


----------



## 1283

RichB said:


> If you power the drive down and attach it to a new system will the AAM hold?


AAM setting is kept in non-volatile memory, so yes, it survives the power cycle.


----------



## RichB

bkdtv said:


> Note you must enable AAM before you run the upgrade procedure under Linux. If you boot to Windows XP after running through the Linux upgrade procedure, then you may have to run through the procedure again.


I do not understand this statement. Why would an operating mode change the data on the disk? Does enabling AAM alter data?

- Rich


----------



## 1283

Windows XP has a habit of writing data to the hard drive, which may mess up the TiVo data.

AAM does not change data on the disk.


----------



## bschott

c3 said:


> Windows XP has a habit of writing data to the hard drive, which may mess up the TiVo data.


Actually I was under the impression that booting into any windows product (barring Win98) is potentially leathal for a tivo drive. WIndows will try and "own" the drive by incorperating it as a "basic' disk, with the option to upgrade to dynamic.

Note that if you run the utility with your new drive attached and without your Tivo, your safe. DD will distroy any disk structure placed on the drive anyhow (assuming you do this).

On another issue, I just finished installing my new RE2 WD 500GB drive into the series3. The DD method worked best followed by mfstools add -x.

I now have 65 HD and 610. Thanks for everyones help here.

Brian


----------



## mindstorm

c3 said:


> Did you change the AAM setting (if the drive supports it), or is it at factory default?


I changed no settings on the drive and I never bothered to check what the default setting were (so no help there--sorry). When I had the seagate drive attached, you could definitely hear it seek if you were close to the drive; the WD was quiet enough that you had to "strain" to hear it even when you put your ear by it. Hopefully the new DB35 line will be quieter as the seagate noise factor was what kept me from going to 750 GB.


----------



## jfh3

bschott said:


> Can someone please confirm if the -r 4 command switch is needed w/mfsadd or mfsrestore on a 500GB WD drive?


I read that the -r 4 switch is not needed on a 500GB drive - I didn't see that until I'd already used it, so I'll ask the reverse:

Is there any problem in using the -r 4 on an mfstool add when expanding a drive copied with dd if the target drive is only 500GB?

(Hopefully, the answer is no. Things seem to be working so far, but figured I'd ask here, since I don't know what the parameter does)


----------



## mindstorm

RichB said:


> Great mine is on order. [WD RE2 500GB -yes?]
> 
> - Rich


If you can, please try to run the AAM utility mentioned in this thread as others have suggested and see what the factory default settings are (do this prior to copying the tivo data onto it as I believe you need to boot in to windows).


----------



## jfh3

One other thing - for those worried about noise - I used the WD 500GB SE16 drive.

It's at least as quiet as the stock drive. I hadn't run AAM either, but may re-do the process if I notice any noise.

I have two S3's (one modified, one stock) sitting on top of each other about 8 feet away and don't hear anything. Haven't really tried to stress the upgraded box yet, but will report back if I hear anything.


----------



## RichB

mindstorm said:


> If you can, please try to run the AAM utility mentioned in this thread as others have suggested and see what the factory default settings are (do this prior to copying the tivo data onto it as I believe you need to boot in to windows).


I will give it a shot and report back. The copy I found was from a German site. Is the GUI in english?

- Rich


----------



## Willin

I tried running in windows AFTER I copied the disk. The utility recognized my boot drive but not the seagate. It also killed the tivo image, so I had to recopy it.


----------



## 1283

jfh3 said:


> Is there any problem in using the -r 4 on an mfstool add when expanding a drive copied with dd if the target drive is only 500GB?


No, there is no problem. It's similar to "allocation unit size" in FAT/NTFS.


----------



## RichB

c3 said:


> No, there is no problem. It's similar to "allocation unit size" in FAT/NTFS.


Hmmm. So it could use a bit more space when a "block" is partially filled, but may have less fragmentation?

- Rich


----------



## spankspank

mindstorm said:


> If you can, please try to run the AAM utility mentioned in this thread as others have suggested and see what the factory default settings are (do this prior to copying the tivo data onto it as I believe you need to boot in to windows).


The likely default is AM off. I believe turning it on reduces performance on most drives.


----------



## bschott

I installed the RE2 WD Drive, more here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136032

My hearing is certainly not the greatest, but as someone else stated, you have strain to hear the RE2. I also have two different generations (pairs) of WD Raptors running in two systems side by side, and theres a night and day difference between those drives and this RE2 (as well as the original WD pulled from the S3).

My option is that I dont think that it's necessary to run any utility against the drive. At a minimum it's at least as quiet as the stock drive.


----------



## RichB

bschott said:


> I installed the RE2 WD Drive, more here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136032
> 
> My hearing is certainly not the greatest, but as someone else stated, you have strain to hear the RE2. I also have two different generations (pairs) of WD Raptors running in two systems side by side, and theres a night and day difference between those drives and this RE2 (as well as the original WD pulled from the S3).
> 
> My option is that I dont think that it's necessary to run any utility against the drive. At a minimum it's at least as quiet as the stock drive.


Which is quieter the 500YS or the 500KS?
I ordered the KS after reading this review:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article617-page1.html

- Rich


----------



## bschott

Rich,

I'm not sure, and it confuses me as to why WD has two very similar drives marketed. My guess is that they are one in the same drive, just marketed slightly differently. My guess is that youre good with what you ordered. If you check on newegg, there's a 20 dollar difference between the two. Heres the other drive on newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136014

Honestly, I'd just keep the one you ordered and run with that. Since they are similar, I doubt that you'll be dissatisfied.


----------



## RichB

spankspank said:


> The likely default is AM off. I believe turning it on reduces performance on most drives.


Isn't that something to worry about?

I wonder if anyone is willing to find out if the original drive has AAM enabled given that it may render the image invalid ?

- Rich


----------



## spankspank

RichB said:


> Hmmm. So it could use a bit more space when a "block" is partially filled, but may have less fragmentation?
> 
> - Rich


I don't know if fragmentation is so much the issue. I believe its more of a filesystem issue. A large disk requires the filesystem to keep track of a large number of blocks. This eats memory causing slower menus because of swapping. Worse, too many blocks can apparently crash the filesystem repair/clean program. Maybe Tivo has fixed this program on the S3?

I don't really see much downside to the larger block. I wouldn't even expect much wastage in the partial blocks. Wouldn't you only have unused data in one block (the last) for each show? But I guess MFS is used for other things besides AV streams.

-r4 is the largest allocation, 16MB. This applys to the expanded partitions only.
What size does Tivo create on the S3?


----------



## spankspank

RichB said:


> Isn't that something to worry about?
> 
> I wonder if anyone is willing to find out if the original drive has AAM enabled given that it may render the image invalid ?
> 
> - Rich


Yikes, I guess they don't have a DOS based utility available?


----------



## 1283

spankspank said:


> Yikes, I guess they don't have a DOS based utility available?


Hitachi Feature Tool is DOS based, but it may not work directly with SATA drives (don't know). I have purchased an IDE-SATA adapter and plan to upgrade S3 with that adapter, whenever my S3 gets here.


----------



## bkdtv

> I am confused by this. SilentPCReview reviewed this drive and it performed well without this procedure. If you power the drive down and attach it to a new system will the AAM hold?


As the previous poster indicated, the AAM setting is a bit set in in NV memory, so it will last after the power is cut.

Windows XP can corrupt a Tivo drive setup, and that is the reason you enable AAM in Windows with WinAAM *before* you setup the drive with the Linux boot CD. There are other DOS based utilities that would avoid that corruption, but I'm not sure they have been updated (as WinAAM has) to support the latest SATA drives.

Keep in mind, you need to be using the default Windows IDE/ATAPI drivers for the WinAAM utility to work. If you installed some disk driver from nVidia or ATI, this utility may not work.


----------



## RichB

Here is are some interestin measurements of the Western Digital and the effects of AAM:

http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/628/

I am not sure I want to turn it on 

- Rich


----------



## Anametrix

I see Series 3 Upgrade Drives have appeared on eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/750GB-TiVo-Seri...ryZ11725QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I wonder how these drives were prepared? If done using MFSTools there is the partition size issue correct? Incidentally, has anyone decided if that may be a problem going forward?

Anyone think this is a good direction to go in?


----------



## mindstorm

RichB said:


> Here is are some interestin measurements of the Western Digital and the effects of AAM:
> 
> http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/628/
> 
> I am not sure I want to turn it on
> 
> - Rich


Nice find on that link...at least I know I wasn't totally blowing smoke when I said I thought the WD drive ran cooller than the seagate drive I tested. Hopefully they will test the seagate DB35 drive when it is available, but for now I think I stick with the WD drives (unless I find I really need that 750 GB).


----------



## jfh3

Anametrix said:


> I see Series 3 Upgrade Drives have appeared on eBay:
> 
> http://cgi.ebay.com/750GB-TiVo-Seri...ryZ11725QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
> 
> I wonder how these drives were prepared? If done using MFSTools there is the partition size issue correct? Incidentally, has anyone decided if that may be a problem going forward?
> 
> Anyone think this is a good direction to go in?


Not if you have a computer with SATA support.

I did the upgrade myself in a couple hours, using the bumwine instructions. The vast majority of the time was spent waiting for the dd command to finish.

I don't know enough about Linux and mfstool to know of the partition size is going to be an issue, so I went the dd route and just copied my old drive to a new one (actually to two new drives). Got to keep my programs too.

My biggest problems were getting the cable holder off the original drive and finding a pair of tweezers to hold one of the screws in place to put the replacement drive back in.

A whole lot cheaper too ... about $155 and a CD blank for 500GB uograde.


----------



## davidwsica

jfh3 said:


> ...I did the upgrade myself in a couple hours, using the bumwine instructions...


What are the bumwine instructions?


----------



## mindstorm

davidwsica said:


> What are the bumwine instructions?


Pretty much a compilation of the backup/restore posts earlier in this thread and how to perform the upgrade using the Knoppix linux distro all on a single , easy to read/follow web page.

Bumwine Tivo Upgrade link


----------



## davidwsica

I wonder if I could hook the drives into this unit:

cooldrivesDOTcomSLASHdudresandusb.html

hook this up to my laptop (Apple MacBook) to perform the upgrade/transfer with the Knoppix CD? Then maybe I could reuse it as an eSATA unit to hook up to the Series3 when eSATA is enabled? Any thoughts?

David


----------



## TexasGrillChef

I want to do the upgrade of my s3 myself. I can get 3 Seagate 750gb SATA hard drives & the conversion connectors to convert the WD properitary to current SATA type drives for $249 each.

I thought I heard or read somewhere that I could plug these drives into a PC, run a bootable CD and then have it install Tivo software to the drives? OR even COPY the current HD from my tivo (with settings) and create them on the new larger drive?

Weakness doesnt' seem to have this CD for a S3

Any Ideas?

TexasGrillChef


----------



## 1283

TexasGrillChef said:


> the conversion connectors to convert the WD properitary to current SATA type


It's a *standard* SATA connector, not proprietary.


----------



## jfh3

TexasGrillChef said:


> OR even COPY the current HD from my tivo (with settings) and create them on the new larger drive?
> 
> Any Ideas?


Did you even read this thread? Look two posts above yours.


----------



## bschott

TexasGrillChef said:


> I want to do the upgrade of my s3 myself. I can get 3 Seagate 750gb SATA hard drives & the conversion connectors to convert the WD properitary to current SATA type drives for $249 each.
> 
> I thought I heard or read somewhere that I could plug these drives into a PC, run a bootable CD and then have it install Tivo software to the drives? OR even COPY the current HD from my tivo (with settings) and create them on the new larger drive?
> 
> Weakness doesnt' seem to have this CD for a S3
> 
> Any Ideas?
> 
> TexasGrillChef


I'll do these guys one better:

1) Buy any of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...03530113+1035915133&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=14

2) Follow this:

http://www.bumwine.com/tivo.html

If you get the 500GIG WD(s), you dont need the -R 4 switch on the mfstools add command.


----------



## Canoehead

TexasGrillChef said:


> I want to do the upgrade of my s3 myself. I can get 3 Seagate 750gb SATA hard drives & the conversion connectors to convert the WD properitary to current SATA type drives for $249 each.


Hey Chef - where did you find them at that price?


----------



## sysdude

Can the "older" MFS tools be used on a series 3? I've tried without a whole lot of luck.
Admittedly I'm using the MFSTools port to Mac OSX, and the tool itself has not produced a bootable disk.

I used dd to duplicate the disk on the mac, and it is bootable, but I can't expand the partitions with MFSTools. It does not seem to do the trick.

Has anybody else out there done this upgrade on a mac, or at the very least done the expansion of the drive using MFS tools?

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

In my first attempts I've tried things like:

./mfstoolDEBUG backup -f 9999 -so - /dev/disk2 | ./mfstoolDEBUG restore -i - /dev/disk0

and

./mfstoolDEBUG backup -f 9999 -so - /dev/disk2 | ./mfstoolDEBUG restore -ix - /dev/disk0

neither has worked, for expanding I've tried:

./mfstoolDEBUG add -r 4 -x /dev/disk0

and

./mfstoolDEBUG add -x /dev/disk0


----------



## davidwsica

sysdude said:


> Can the "older" MFS tools be used on a series 3? I've tried without a whole lot of luck.
> Admittedly I'm using the MFSTools port to Mac OSX, and the tool itself has not produced a bootable disk.
> 
> I used dd to duplicate the disk on the mac, and it is bootable, but I can't expand the partitions with MFSTools. It does not seem to do the trick.
> 
> Has anybody else out there done this upgrade on a mac, or at the very least done the expansion of the drive using MFS tools?


I'm also very interested in this as I would like to do this on my MacBook with the SATA drives attached via a USB enclosure.


----------



## sysdude

davidwsica said:


> I'm also very interested in this as I would like to do this on my MacBook with the SATA drives attached via a USB enclosure.


A warning up front:

You'll want to make sure your enclosure will support large drives. My firewrire enclosure would not work when I tried it with the 750Gb drive. The 250 which came with the TiVo, no problem. And dd takes *forever* I'm starting over again, and it has been running since 10:30am (now 2:30ish) .. still going....

I'm also attempting to build MFS tools from the sourceforge project rather than depend on the binary I found posted on Tivo Community. Unfortunately it does not want to cooperate and find _Endian32_Swap. I've found equivelant macros which should have (in theory) taken care of this, but the pre-processor does not seem to be doing its job, instead it thinks there is a function missing. I've also found references to Endian32_Swap in the developer documentation, but I'm afraid I'd have to take this thing into XCode to be able to use the CoreFoundation stuff, and I'm just not ready to do this. There's gotta be a command line way get the CoreFoundation library I need. Just gotta keep on looking.


----------



## davidwsica

sysdude said:


> A warning up front:
> 
> You'll want to make sure your enclosure will support large drives. My firewrire enclosure would not work when I tried it with the 750Gb drive. The 250 which came with the TiVo, no problem. And dd takes *forever* I'm starting over again, and it has been running since 10:30am (now 2:30ish) .. still going....
> 
> I'm also attempting to build MFS tools from the sourceforge project rather than depend on the binary I found posted on Tivo Community. Unfortunately it does not want to cooperate and find _Endian32_Swap. I've found equivelant macros which should have (in theory) taken care of this, but the pre-processor does not seem to be doing its job, instead it thinks there is a function missing. I've also found references to Endian32_Swap in the developer documentation, but I'm afraid I'd have to take this thing into XCode to be able to use the CoreFoundation stuff, and I'm just not ready to do this. There's gotta be a command line way get the CoreFoundation library I need. Just gotta keep on looking.


Any particular recommendations for a dual-bay eSATA/USB enclosure?

Please keep us up to date when you get the MFS tools built and working.


----------



## sysdude

davidwsica said:


> Any particular recommendations for a dual-bay eSATA/USB enclosure?
> 
> Please keep us up to date when you get the MFS tools built and working.


I don't in particular (since I have not been in the market for one) but I'd wager www.newegg.com would have something which would work for you.

The dd process is still running!! I've managed to find a macro which handled my compile time errors with MFStools. Now just have to wait for dd to finish, see if the copied drive is ok, then make the drive bigger!


----------



## ejennis

TexasGrillChef said:


> I want to do the upgrade of my s3 myself. I can get 3 Seagate 750gb SATA hard drives & the conversion connectors to convert the WD properitary to current SATA type drives for $249 each.
> 
> I thought I heard or read somewhere that I could plug these drives into a PC, run a bootable CD and then have it install Tivo software to the drives? OR even COPY the current HD from my tivo (with settings) and create them on the new larger drive?
> 
> Weakness doesnt' seem to have this CD for a S3
> 
> Any Ideas?
> 
> TexasGrillChef


It sounds like you are looking for the Instant Cake upgrade CD. That is sold on ptvupgrade.com. They show a disc for the S3, but only on the page for the S3, they apparently have not updated the Instant Cake product page with it yet.

S3 Instant Cake

-Eric


----------



## mindstorm

Doesn't appear to have the latest DB35 offering from seagate, so this may only have limited value to people looking to upgrade, but I'll post it just in case anyone is interested.

Sata HD Reviews


----------



## MichaelK

ejennis said:


> It sounds like you are looking for the Instant Cake upgrade CD. That is sold on ptvupgrade.com. They show a disc for the S3, but only on the page for the S3, they apparently have not updated the Instant Cake product page with it yet.
> 
> S3 Instant Cake
> 
> -Eric


looks like you can buy it now.

Anyone know if instant cake suffers from the mfstools bugs with the shortchanged alternate partion?

I'd buy one just to get a patched mfstools if it has it..


----------



## sysdude

So I was able to backup the hard drive, and restore it to the 750 Gb hard drive;it boots, it recorded TV last night (just to test). However, if I try to add partitions to the 750 Gb I wind up with a hard drive which no longer boots. 

What in the world is so different about the S3 that MFS tools creates partitions that the S3 chokes on? Suggestions would be appreciated


----------



## JamieP

sysdude said:


> What in the world is so different about the S3 that MFS tools creates partitions that the S3 chokes on?


Nothing.


> Suggestions would be appreciated


I'm guessing you failed to use -r 4 in the mfsadd. This is required (with all tivos) when creating partitions > 274GB.


----------



## pjasper

I succesfully upgraded my TiVo Series 3 with a 500GB Western Digital WD5000KS disk drive yesterday. The TiVo now reports up to 65 hours of HDTV and 610 hours of SD. It seems quiet enough - there are a few seek noises at times, but I'm not sure if they're from the Series 3 or my old Series 2, which is sat on top of it.

I wanted to backup my original disk first, so I adapted the bumwine approach into two steps. I also used a PC that has only IDE disk controllers, so I used the Sabrent IDE2SATA SBT-STDB adapter. I only needed one adapter, because I was working on only one disk at a time. The disk and adapter cost me $200 plus tax at newegg. Once I'm content that everything is working smoothly, I'll reuse the 250GB original TiVo disk in a PC system.

I tried to post my notes on the procedure I followed (which I burnt onto DVD along with the backup image, so I have some chance of being able to retrieve it if I ever need it), but I was defeated by the tivocommunity URL checker. It must see Linux device names in posts as URLs or something. Maybe when I've made five posts...


----------



## sysdude

It finally worked. I did not think that the -r 4 would work on the mac version of mfstool (downloaded from tivocommunity.com) the help that mfstool gives back does not indicate that -r is a valid option when restoring an option. However, going into the source code for restore and saw the restore_usage possible arguments, added it in and it worked! 

the actual command: 

./mfstoolDEBUG restore -x -r 4 -s 128 -i ../backup.tivo.test.bkp /dev/disk1 

where the target drive was connected via firewire to my mac. 

Cool  

Now the only thing is after all that, now (of course) I notice the noise of the drive, and it seems to be constantly clicking. Never noticed it before... if I don't get used to it, perhaps I'll just have to go back and get a 500Gb drive instead and wait for the external eSATA to be enabled...


----------



## davidwsica

sysdude said:


> It finally worked...


Can you write up detailed instructions on how you did this and post somewhere? Do you think the Mac version of mfstool will work on an Intel Mac? I'm debating about whether to try this with a SATA enclosure on my MacBook or try to find a Linux box.



sysdude said:


> Now the only thing is after all that, now (of course) I notice the noise of the drive, and it seems to be constantly clicking. Never noticed it before... if I don't get used to it, perhaps I'll just have to go back and get a 500Gb drive instead and wait for the external eSATA to be enabled...


I was curious how the noise would be on the stock 750GB drive. I might wait until the Seagate DB35 750GB drive is out to perform the upgrade. They've apparently starting shipping from Seagate though I don't know when we'll be able to buy them for retail. Weaknees says they expect them in about 6 weeks.


----------



## MichaelK

headups apparently hdparm can set AAM so no need to screw around with the windows utiliity (which i couldn't get to see my new drive for whatever reason)

from the hdparm man page at:

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/hdparm.8.html



> -M
> Get/set Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) setting. Most modern harddisk drives have the ability to speed down the head movements to reduce their noise output. The possible values are between 0 and 254. 128 is the most quiet (and therefore slowest) setting and 254 the fastest (and loudest). Some drives have only two levels (quiet / fast), while others may have different levels between 128 and 254. At the moment, most drives only support 3 options, off, quiet, and fast. These have been assigned the values 0, 128, and 254 at present, respectively, but integer space has been incorporated for future expansion, should this change.


*EDIT *  the original 250GB drive comes set already to 128. BUT WD5000KS comes set to 254 so you DO NEED to change the setting on it for AAM.

(use hdparm -I /dev/sdX to check the drive info)

hdparm -M128 /dev/sdX will set it to quiet.

then hdparm -I /dev/sdX to confirm the setting changed.


----------



## RichB

I just completed an upgrade to a WD5000KS drive.
Just comparing the noise of the DD copy from the stock drive to the WD5000KS, the WD5000KS was much quieter.

-- Rich


----------



## jrock

I just used the http://www.bumwine.com/tivo.html website to upgrade my S3 using a WD5000YS (500 GB Western Digital HD) and all went well. I notice the same thing as the guy above my post, that the new hd was quieter than the original drive during the DD Copy.

A big thanks to the bumwine page creator! I wouldn't of been able to do it without that site. I was really nervous at first about attempting it. I build my own PC's and use Linux but I'm kind of a novice with Linux commands I do most things using Webmin control panel and only use shell for a few things so I don't know a lot of the commands or what they do, for example I had never used DD before or really messed around with partitions.

Before this I always paid the extra money for the Weaknees drive, which I must say is a great service and has a warrantee and cheap replacement even after the warrantee runs out but the S3 upgrade this time is a bit to much for me. I ended up getting the 500 gb drive for $199 on newegg and it has a 5 year warrantee.

One thing I want to mention about the guide on bumwine that got me a tiny bit confused but I figured it out.

1) Step 9 the skippable step to show you the progress, when you open the new shell window you have to SU to get root access or it tells you you don't have access.

2) Step 12 uses sda as the example for mfstools but if you have it set up the way step 6 in the example shows it would be sdb.

I realize most people on here are more advanced and would know but for someone that is new to all this they may get confused. I just re read each step a few times and realized it should be sdb and it all worked out fine.

Now I just can't wait til they get the ESATA port working and maybe I'll add another 500 GB drive =)

-Joe


----------



## MichaelK

in the middle of using knoppix myself...

one thing i found odd is that teh drive assignments dont necessarily follow the "normal" boot cd pattern where the first drive is hda and the second is hdb, etc.

The drive I connected to my SATA port 1 comes up as SDB and the drive on my SATA port 2 comes up as SDA.

nice of the bumwine instructions to have the step to check the partitions or i would have royally screwed the pouch with dd....


----------



## Tivortex

dikeosp said:


> My oh my. sorry for the waste of bandwidth.


They'll make more !


----------



## mindstorm

MichaelK said:


> headups apparently hdparm can set AAM so no need to screw around with the windows utiliity (which i couldn't get to see my new drive for whatever reason)
> 
> from the hdparm man page at:
> 
> http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/hdparm.8.html
> 
> *EDIT *  the original 250GB drive comes set already to 128. BUT WD5000KS comes set to 254 so you DO NEED to change the setting on it for AAM.
> 
> (use hdparm -I /dev/sdX to check the drive info)
> 
> hdparm -M128 /dev/sdX will set it to quiet.
> 
> then hdparm -I /dev/sdX to confirm the setting changed.


Good info to know...thanks for bringing this info to the forum


----------



## sysdude

davidwsica said:


> Can you write up detailed instructions on how you did this and post somewhere? Do you think the Mac version of mfstool will work on an Intel Mac? I'm debating about whether to try this with a SATA enclosure on my MacBook or try to find a Linux box.


One thing I did realize, and not sure if it matters to the TiVo is the Endian(ness) of the drives. On the PPC mac, it is Big Endian, and on the intel iMac it is Little. Does the tivo itself care? perhaps not, since you're only restoring an image... But I dunno. Might as well try though. Got nothing to loose...

1) Get ext2 support on your mac:
I was able to load 1.4d3 on my wife's intel Imac
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=64713&package_id=101149&release_id=442777

2) download mfstoolsDEBUG from tivocommunity.com
http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/attachment.php?postid=1969708

3) Install ext2 support, reboot, and hook up your SATA drive from the TiVo. I installed my old SATA drive into my mac (hooked it up directly in the CPU). The new 750Gb drive I hooked up in an external IDE enclosure (using a SATA to IDE converter)

Using the system preferences "ExtFSManager", find out the device # of the original TiVo system disk.

4) backup your TiVo disk:
a) in the terminal, cd to the directory which contains mfstoolsDEBUG

sudo ./mfstoolsDEBUG backup -o tivo.backup.bkp -s /dev/disk#

(where # is the number which you got from looking in "ExtFSManager" for the orig TiVo disk)

5) Safeguard your orig TiVo disk, umount any mounted filesystems and disconnect it from the mac.

6) restore the backup to the new drive
a) in the terminal, cd to the directory which contains mfstoolsDEBUG

sudo ./mfstoolDEBUG restore -x -r 4 -s 128 -i tivo.backup.bkp /dev/disk#

(where # is the number which you got from looking in "ExtFSManager" for the NEW TiVo disk)

7) put it back into the TiVo and give it a try.. !



davidwsica said:


> I was curious how the noise would be on the stock 750GB drive. I might wait until the Seagate DB35 750GB drive is out to perform the upgrade. They've apparently starting shipping from Seagate though I don't know when we'll be able to buy them for retail. Weaknees says they expect them in about 6 weeks.


Noise? Well it is noticable, but then again I watch TV from a pretty close distance (just how the size of the living room worked out  ) so i can hear it pretty well. I'd wager if you have a large screen and sit back the distance you are supposed to, the noise would not be so bad..


----------



## davidwsica

Thanks for these detailed instructions! This will be helpful to me and probably some others out there.



sysdude said:


> 2) download mfstoolsDEBUG from tivocommunity.com
> http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/attachment.php?postid=1969708


Is mfstoolsDEBUG compiled to run on the Intel Mac's?



sysdude said:


> 3) Install ext2 support, reboot, and hook up your SATA drive from the TiVo. I installed my old SATA drive into my mac (hooked it up directly in the CPU). The new 750Gb drive I hooked up in an external IDE enclosure (using a SATA to IDE converter)


I'm assuming that I probably can hook the SATA drives (old and new) into an external USB SATA enclosure. Hopefully, that's a good assumption.



sysdude said:


> 4) backup your TiVo disk:
> a) in the terminal, cd to the directory which contains mfstoolsDEBUG
> 
> sudo ./mfstoolsDEBUG backup -o tivo.backup.bkp -s /dev/disk#


How big was your backup file? Thinking about it now, I may not have enough internal disk space on my MacBook to store the backup (I have a 160GB drive right now, the largest you can get).



sysdude said:


> Noise? Well it is noticable, but then again I watch TV from a pretty close distance (just how the size of the living room worked out  ) so i can hear it pretty well. I'd wager if you have a large screen and sit back the distance you are supposed to, the noise would not be so bad..


I have my Series3 in the bedroom so I don't think I want much noise out of the drive. As previously mentioned I might wait for the new Seagate DB35 drives which apparently should be quieter.


----------



## sysdude

davidwsica said:


> Is mfstoolsDEBUG compiled to run on the Intel Mac's?


No, it is not. However it was able to find the hard drive which was attached via firewire, and was able to tell me it was not large enough to restore my image onto. (It was just at test case, so I used a 60Gb drive). So, i'm guessing it'll work, but the only way to be sure is to try it 

Backup file size is 255.4Mb.


----------



## RichB

MichaelK said:


> headups apparently hdparm can set AAM so no need to screw around with the windows utiliity (which i couldn't get to see my new drive for whatever reason)
> 
> from the hdparm man page at:
> 
> http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/hdparm.8.html
> 
> *EDIT *  the original 250GB drive comes set already to 128. BUT WD5000KS comes set to 254 so you DO NEED to change the setting on it for AAM.
> 
> (use hdparm -I /dev/sdX to check the drive info)
> 
> hdparm -M128 /dev/sdX will set it to quiet.
> 
> then hdparm -I /dev/sdX to confirm the setting changed.


I did not do this but noise is not an issue. Is there any other reason to set it to quiet mode such as extending the life of the drive?

- Rich


----------



## davidwsica

sysdude said:


> Backup file size is 255.4Mb.


I would expect my backup size to be significantly bigger with several hours of HDTV programming. So, if I have like 15 hours of HD programming I might see ~100GB backup size? I wonder if I could backup to my NAS device where I have 1TB of storage?


----------



## MichaelK

RichB said:


> I did not do this but noise is not an issue. Is there any other reason to set it to quiet mode such as extending the life of the drive?
> 
> - Rich


i dont believe it will effect service life.

If noise doesn't bother you then leave it be.

Quite basically SLOWS down the heads during seeks. So the drive gets quiter but you loose performance. So if you dont have noise issues then you in theory will get faster IO from not enabling it.


----------



## davidwsica

Does upgrading the drive absolutely mean you're invalidating your warranty? I mean if you put the original drive back in, will TiVo (or other retailer handling returns) really know that you've messed with it?

Isn't anyone here concerned about invalidating the warranty on a $800 unit that is a new introduction into the TiVo line (i.e. there could likely be some "bad" units in the first batch)?


----------



## HomeUser

davidwsica said:


> Does upgrading the drive absolutely mean you're invalidating your warranty? I mean if you put the original drive back in, will TiVo (or other retailer handling returns) really know that you've messed with it?
> 
> Isn't anyone here concerned about invalidating the warranty on a $800 unit that is a new introduction into the TiVo line (i.e. there could likely be some "bad" units in the first batch)?


Nah, were all *R!ch [email protected] [email protected][email protected]$* 
Opening the box voids the warranty. It should be really easy for TiVo to tell the first time your box calls in and reports the extra storage. Honoring the warranty would be at the discretion of TiVo. So-far I have not read of any warranty issues not honored when the drive was not the problem which is one reason TiVo has such a loyal following. If you are concerned about breaking the TiVo or warranty issues you can get a pre-upgraded TiVo from WeaKnees with an extended warranty.


----------



## davidwsica

HomeUser said:


> Nah, were all *R!ch [email protected] [email protected][email protected]$*
> Opening the box voids the warranty. It should be really easy for TiVo to tell the first time your box calls in and reports the extra storage. Honoring the warranty would be at the discretion of TiVo. So-far I have not read of any warranty issues not honored when the drive was not the problem which is one reason TiVo has such a loyal following. If you are concerned about breaking the TiVo or warranty issues you can get a pre-upgraded TiVo from WeaKnees with an extended warranty.


Thanks for the feedback. That's good to know that TiVo has been honoring the warranty even if the box is opened. I was just concerned that a month after I upgrade the drive something non-drive related fails and I'm out $800. Note I've owned several TiVo's and none has ever had a problem. I might have bought a pre-upgraded TiVo from Weaknees if I wasn't such an early adopter  Now, I've got many hours of programming I'd like to transfer over to the new hard drive.


----------



## davidwsica

Now I just need to decide do I wait for the Seagate DB35 drives or go with the existing Seagate 750GB. Seems like there's some noise and heat concerns with the current 750GB drive so I'm unsure if I should wait. I can't wait too long, I've already got almost 20 hours of HD (getting close to that limit of 32)!


----------



## HomeUser

I went with the 750GB Seagate the seek noise is very noticeable in the TiVo, I am thinking about trying an acoustic damping pad under the HD because the the mounting bracket is shaped like a sound box. I ran SpinRite on the new drive for two days and did not notice the noise until it was mounted in the TiVo.


----------



## sysdude

So, another Tech came out today, and had to ask for the one "working" card to be "hit" again so it would receive HBO, etc. Nice and easy. 

He packed up and started to leave, then I had to ask about the second card. "oh you're getting a second card?". 

Yes... I told him. Anyway as it turns out the second card was a "new" card, not yet provisioned for use by RCN, (this was figured out after about 15 minutes of trying to get the card to work). So it required what I'm guessing was a firmware upgrade (took about 45 minutes to an hour). Then I got the basic channels, HD local channels, but not HBO and the like. 

I called RCN and asked them to hit the cable card (after giving them the cable card #) and then I got 2 of the error messages which indicate the lack of response from the cable cards when tivo has tried to access them (can't remember the error number). Anyway, then both of them started to work. 

What a long road this has been ... but hopefully everything will still be working by the time I get home tonight...


----------



## davidwsica

Well maybe I won't wait for the DB35. A reply I just got from Seagate says:

*Hello David,

The DB35, 750GB drives won't be available until the end of this calendar
year. Please check back with our press releases regarding these drives.

Regards,

Jimmy P.
Disc Presales*​
David


----------



## danlist

davidwsica said:


> Now I just need to decide do I wait for the Seagate DB35 drives or go with the existing Seagate 750GB. Seems like there's some noise and heat concerns with the current 750GB drive so I'm unsure if I should wait. I can't wait too long, I've already got almost 20 hours of HD (getting close to that limit of 32)!


I bought the Weaknees 750GB upgrade kit, which uses the Seagate 750GB 7200.10 HD. It is very, very noisy. I can hear seek noise clearly from across the room, even with the TV on. I complained to Weaknees about this and they offered to exchange it for a new, quieter 750GB Seagate drive which they'll have available in 5-7 weeks.

Unless you're running your S3 in a very noisy room, I'd recommend waiting for the DB35.


----------



## 1283

Do people realize that the Seagate 750GB drive is sold for around $300 retail? That's more than $300 profit for a few minutes of running mfsrestore!!!


----------



## RichB

c3 said:


> Do people realize that the Seagate 750GB drive is sold for around $300 retail? That's more than $300 profit for a few minutes of running mfsrestore!!!


I know. You can buy instant cake for series 3 for $20 if you want to upgrade the easy way.

- Rich


----------



## davidwsica

Well I took the plunge today and bought the Seagate 750GB drive from Outpost for $309. I used the bumwine instructions without a problem. Took about 2 hours to complete. I didn't have a PC around so I bought one from Walmart down the street with SATA connections. Apparently, I can return it within 15 days with NO restocking fee even opened.

The drive is definitely louder but I think I can live with it for now since I now have up to 98 hours HD, finally some breathing room! If it becomes a problem I might just replace it with a DB35 model when they come out depending on their price point. Anyway, this should hold me for a couple of months until eSATA is enabled!

David


----------



## ehardman

I have purchased a WD 500gb drive to upgrade my Series 3. This will be my first attempt at doing this as I have just purchased kits from Weakness in the past.

I obtained a copy of the virgin series 3 image but I am confused as how to load it on the new drive. All of the information I can find explains how to do this using the old and new hard drives. 

I really don't care about transferring the programming and wishlists over from the old drive. I just want to get the new drive up and running. My computer has eSata controller, a CD ROM drive and a DVD/RW drive.

I copied the image files on to a DVD. I made and tested both a bootable MFS tools disk and also a bootable Knoppix disk. I think I have what I need but I am confused about how to get the data from the DVD to the new hard drive.

Any help will be sincerely appreciated.


----------



## 1283

Has anyone upgraded S3 with an image from another unit? Is it the same S2, that you run "clear and delete everything" to accept the drive?


----------



## pan4life

To those that did the Bumwine instructions, how long did it take and is it affected by how much stuff is on your drive? I'm running the DD using 2 SATA-IDE adapters and it ran about 8 hours all night and looks like it's only transferred 50GB so far. I would say the drive was 50% used so if this is normal fine but it says the speed is about 1MB/sec, is something wrong here? Thanks.


----------



## MichaelK

seams VERY slow but those adapters might slow stuff down.

Mine copied over in I think 2-3 hours. I seem to recall 30MB/sec...


----------



## pan4life

Would the length be affected by how much stuff is on the drive? If you got 30MB and I'm getting 1MB something is definately seriously wrong....as it stands now it'd take me several days.


----------



## davidwsica

pan4life said:


> To those that did the Bumwine instructions, how long did it take and is it affected by how much stuff is on your drive? I'm running the DD using 2 SATA-IDE adapters and it ran about 8 hours all night and looks like it's only transferred 50GB so far. I would say the drive was 50% used so if this is normal fine but it says the speed is about 1MB/sec, is something wrong here? Thanks.


I had about 20 hours of HD, so maybe 2/3 full and it took about 2 hours. Of course, I didn't use the adapters, I had SATA I connections, SATA II probably would have been even faster.


----------



## Canoehead

I just did the Bumwine upgrade to the Seagate 750 - everything seemed to go smoothly, put the case back on, plugged it in and absolutely nothing. No lights, fan doesn't spin, no humming - just dead! Is there some sort of breaker I could have tripped? Everything seemed to go very smoothly - no dropped screws or anything - just dead!

Update: Spoke with TiVo - they could not really offer any solutions - so I exchanged at my local CircuitCity (within the 30 day window). Of course, the dd's drive caused an error 51 in the new machine - so I had to do a full erase. Glad I watched most of my key saved episodes last night. Also glad that all this happened within the 30 day period.


----------



## pan4life

I quit my copy and tried again on another system that had SATA it went fine.....but the 750GB Seagate drive is too noisy. I heard others comments but I had to see for myself because I want to be able to keep a bunch of HD movies on the drive, but it really is loud. It's much louder than the Seagate 300GB drive that's next to it in my series 2. Seeing as how this was a DD of an existing drive and I'm way past the guided setup is there any chance it's gonna get any quieter, I don't know if it would be indexing anything at this point. I think I'm gonna have to drop back down to a 500GB of another mfg where I can tune the acoustics. I don't even really need silent but my wife sometimes uses the livingroom for work and I know the noise will bother her.


----------



## Tokapeba

My title says it all. What is a dd copy?

Andy.



Agent86 said:


> Houston... we have a problem.
> 
> I did a "dd" copy and expand last night, and it refused to work. I thought I did something wrong, so I tried it again. No dice.


----------



## sysdude

Tokapeba said:


> My title says it all. What is a dd copy?
> 
> Andy.


un*x command which can basically do a very low level copy of one drive to another. VERY slow though..


----------



## Canoehead

sysdude said:


> un*x command which can basically do a very low level copy of one drive to another. VERY slow though..


Mine took 4,623 seconds for - not too bad for a 250gb HDD. I thought it would be over 2 hours.


----------



## RichB

Canoehead said:


> Mine took 4,623 seconds for - not too bad for a 250gb HDD. I thought it would be over 2 hours.


Thank god it did not take 1 hour, 17 Minutes, and 3 seconds. Wait a minute. It did 

- Rich


----------



## Tokapeba

sysdude said:


> un*x command which can basically do a very low level copy of one drive to another. VERY slow though..


I've been having trouble making an image with MFStools. What is the setup and input for the "dd" copy. I'm, going to be copying my S3 to a wd 500gb.

Andy.


----------



## Canoehead

RichB said:


> Thank god it did not take 1 hour, 17 Minutes, and 3 seconds. Wait a minute. It did
> 
> - Rich


Egad! I didn't realize it was so long!

Well, if displaying the time in seconds is good enough for Knoppix, it's good enough for me. I'm Ok on the hardware side, but a total Linux ignoramus, so I had my brother on the phone while I was punching in the commands, just in case. Turns out even I could follow the Bumwine instructions without help, but it was nice to have the safety net.


----------



## Canoehead

c3 said:


> Has anyone upgraded S3 with an image from another unit? Is it the same S2, that you run "clear and delete everything" to accept the drive?


I sort of did accidentally - my Tivo went toes up right after the upgrade (see my post above) so I just popped the new 750gig drive with the image from the dead Tivo into the replacement TiVo - which is how I learned about Error 51. Apparently there is a work-around (51killer) but I couldn't detirmine if it would work on an S3, and since Battlestar Galactica was also recorded on my S2, I did the total wipe.


----------



## ehardman

This is my first attempt at imaging a Tivo drive. I'm following the Bumwine instructions however I am trying to load a virgin Series 3 image from a CDROM drive (I have two). 

Knoppix is running as expected. cat/proc/ppartitionsreports as follows: 

8 0 488386584 sda 
8 16 117220824 sdb 
8 17 117218241 sdb1 
240 0 1991680 cloop0 

The Knoppix boot disk is in my first CDROM (primary) drive (would this be hdb?) 
The Series 3 image cd is in my second CDROM drive (would this be hdb1?) 

I entered the following command to copy the image from the CDROM to the new HD 

dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sda bs=1024k

My thinking was that this would copy the Tivo image from my second CDROM to the new Tivo HD. However, I get this error message: 

dd: opening 'dev sda': no such file or directory 

I am a novice here so if someone could advise me what I am doing wrong it would be appreciated. Thanks!


----------



## MichaelK

what type of "image" do you have on the CD.

a bit by bit image like the kind DD wants would be 250gigs so it's not fiting on a cd. So that's not what you have. (if I am following)

So sounds like you have a bzip image or an mfstools image? Either one would use their respective program to restore. Look around for the proper bzip or mfstools commands.


----------



## ehardman

MichaelK said:


> what type of "image" do you have on the CD.
> 
> a bit by bit image like the kind DD wants would be 250gigs so it's not fiting on a cd. So that's not what you have. (if I am following)
> 
> So sounds like you have a bzip image or an mfstools image? Either one would use their respective program to restore. Look around for the proper bzip or mfstools commands.


The image I have on CDROM is a mfs image.

Realizing this, I have a bootable mfstools disk which I booted up on my CD/RW drive with the mfs Series 3 image in my DVD/RW drive. I tried using mfsrestore with no success. I can't figure out how to get mfstools to read the image from the DVD/RW drive.

I have Supafly's image and the argument he shows to use is:

mfsrestore -s 127 -zxpi /mnt/tivo/Tivo.Series.3.TCD648250B.Virgin.Image.Supafly.mfs /dev/hdx (where x is the location of the new Tivo HD). I set "hda" as the location for the hard drive but the argument didn't work. I guess it couldn't find the image file since it was located on the DVD/RW drive.

Part of my problem is the drive I bought from newegg came as a bare drive so I didn't get a SATA cable with it. My Dell has two SATA ports on the motherboard but I have only one cable. This is why I am trying to load the image from the DVD/RW drive.

Sorry to be such a pain-in-the-a**. Any help will be greatfully appreciated.


----------



## MichaelK

poke around the generic mfstools threads but you need to change the from locations at:
/mnt/tivo/Tivo or at least mount the cd drive to = tivo

I think you need to mount the cd drive as "tivo" and then try that comand.


----------



## ehardman

After hours of trial and error (mostly error) I finally got the new WD5000KS imaged, installed and I now have 65 hours of HD! I will post details later.


----------



## Sy-

Thanks to BumWine's tutorial I upgraded my new S3 yesterday too with a 500 gig WesternDigital ($159 at CompUSA after $40 mail in rebate). 

Anyone have any good ideas of what to do with a 250 gig virgin S3 drive?

~Sy


----------



## 1283

Keep in mind that retail WD drives have only 1-year warranty. You can pay extra $15 for additional 2 years, but it may be cheaper to buy OEM drives instead. The 3-year KS and 5-year YS OEM drives are both around $170-$185 shipped.


----------



## Sy-

I only need a 1 year warranty because I'm going to up to a *quiet* 750 gig drive when they become available. Hopefully they will be available in a year.
~Sy


----------



## Canoehead

Sy- said:


> Thanks to BumWine's tutorial I upgraded my new S3 yesterday too with a 500 gig WesternDigital ($159 at CompUSA after $40 mail in rebate).
> 
> Anyone have any good ideas of what to do with a 250 gig virgin S3 drive?
> 
> ~Sy


Keep it somewhere safe - you might want it if your new drive crashes or to set up your new, even bigger disk in 12 or 18 months - you can't use your present upgraded drive if you go the bumwine route.


----------



## 1283

Sy- said:


> I only need a 1 year warranty because I'm going to up to a *quiet* 750 gig drive when they become available. Hopefully they will be available in a year.
> ~Sy


It may be cheaper to get one with 3 or 5 years of warranty than one with just 1 year warranty. You're not just throwing away the 500GB drive after you upgrade it to 750GB.


----------



## ehardman

These are steps I took which are a modified version of the bumwine.com step-by-step guide.

My goal was to load a virgin Series 3 mfstools image using a single SATA drive attached to a computer with SATA interface. My computer also has an external USB drive. I did not have a SATA to IDE adapter and I did not want to buy one if it was not needed. The new SATA drive I purchased to install in my Series 3 Tivo did not come with a SATA interface cable so I could not use my computers existing hard drive to transfer the image. If you can install both SATA drives in your computer you can modify these intructions accordingly.

I obtained the Series 3 image via a download from the web (thanks to Supafly).

1. Copy the Tivo Series 3 image to the USB hard drive. (You may be able to use a 2gb thumbdrive but I did not try this).

2. Disconnect the computers internal SATA drive and connect the new SATA drive for your Tivo.

3. Make sure the ROM BIOS is set to boot from CDROM.

4. Boot the computer from the CDROM drive with Knoppix boot disk.

5. When the Knoppix GUI is loaded, open a browser and go to mfstools.sourceforge.net.

6. Click on the gzipped tar static link.

7. When the box opens, drag the file mfstools onto your desktop.

8. Open a console by clicking the icon with the black computer screen on the 
program bar.

9. At the Knoppix prompt enter these commands:


cat/proc/partitions (This will confirm Knoppix sees the hard drives. In my install, the USB drive was identified as sdb1. Write these down and do not get them mixed up).

su (to gain root access)

mount dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 (enables the USB drive)

ls /mnt/sdb1 (this should display the directory of the USB drive. You should be able to see the image file if it is in the root directory).

/home/Knoppix/Desktop/mfstool mfsrestore xzpi /mnt/sdb1/(Series 3 mfs image filename) /dev/sda (The image should now begin restoring to the new HD. Make sure you enter mfstool and not mfstools as I did the first time. It wont work).

Since the image was restored using mfstools, it was not necessary to to expand the partition of the new drive. It was very fast.

After installing in my Tivo Series 3, I got the error #51 message. This was resolved by doing a Clear & Delete Everything on the Tivo.

Before attempting this I had never used Linux. This result was obtained by much trial and error.


----------



## RichB

Canoehead said:


> Keep it somewhere safe - you might want it if your new drive crashes or to set up your new, even bigger disk in 12 or 18 months - you can't use your present upgraded drive if you go the bumwine route.


It has been pointed out to me that I cannot use the bumwine method to ugrade my already upgraded 500Gig drive.

Is there a method that can do an upgrade that preserves the current shows lile MFS Save?

Just looking ahead.

Thanks,

Rich


----------



## ChampA320

Just got my S-3 tivo last week... now upgraded to 65 hrs HD using WD500GB Hard Drive and an SATA to IDE Adapter I got from Cool Drives 
Once I hooked up the adapter just treat it like an IDE upgrade using Weeknees Upgrade instructions.. Took about 20 Mins to do... Pretty ease in fact...


----------



## shfawaz

I just completed an upgrade using the 750Gb Seagate SATA drive. I followed the Bumwine procedures verbatim and with a nearly full orginal 250gb Tivo drive, it took about two hours to complete the procedure. 

For those who might be curious, I actually had purchased the Calvary 750Gb ESATA drive originally intended to connect to the ESATA port on the HD Tivo, but obviously that didn't pan out given that the ESATA port is currently inactive. I connected the Cavalry drive via the external ESATA port on my upgraded HP desktop (The Cavalry drive comes with an expansion slot port adapter to connect to an existing SATA controller to allow for an external ESATA connection) as well as an AC adapter to power the external drive. My original series 3 250Gb drive was connected directly to the SATA controller. Once I completed the dd and partition expansion, I removed the 750Gb drive from the the shell and installed it in the the HD Tivo replacing of course the 250Gb drive. My HD Tivo now shows that it has up to 98 hours of HD recording capcity. Pretty Sweet!

Some would ask if it would have been cheaper to simply by a naked drive instead of paying what amounts to a $75 premium for the exernal drive, I'd say that is true, but the shell won't go to waste, I plan to install another drive in it...once Tivo decides to activate the ESATA port.


----------



## sganesh

I want to document the procedure I used to backup and upgrade the stock 250 GB Series 3 HD with a Seagate 750 GB HD. Hopefully this helps others attempting the same task.

_*Components Used*_:

1. *Upgrade PC*: I used an old Pentium II 300Mhz PC / 256 MB RAM with Primary and Secondary IDE ports that has a CDROM drive as Primary Master and an ext2 (Linux) formatted drive as Primary Slave to store the backup image. This is the "backup" drive. (you can also use a FAT32 formatted drive as Primary Slave for this purpose)

2. *Seagate 750 GB SATA drive*: - part number ST3750640AS. I got it here for $334.

3. *SATA HD to IDE ATA Cable Adapter*: This is required to have the PC (which has only IDE ports) recognize the SATA drives for backup and upgrade. I got this adapter here for $19.98

4. *PTVUpgrade LBA48 CD*: This is needed to boot the upgrade PC with so that you can run the commands in the procedure. You can download the ISO image here for free and burn to a CD. More info on this CD can be found here

5. *T-10 Torx L-Key or Screwdriver and a Hard Drive jumper*: The Torx L-Key is needed to open and close the S3 and remove and reinstall the HD. You can get this at any home wares store. The jumper is required to set the Seagate 750 GB drive to 1.5 Gb/sec mode so that it can work with the SATA-to-IDE-adapter when connected to the upgrade PC. You can get this at the local Rat Shack.

_ 
*Backup and Upgrade Procedure*_:

*Step 1*

Open the Tivo S3 and remove the stock 250 GB HD using these instructions from Weaknees

*Step 2*

The Primary IDE cable on the Upgrade PC is connected to the CDROM drive as Master and the Linux (ext2) or FAT32 drive (to store the backup image) is connected as Slave. 
Connect the stock S3 250 GB SATA drive to the Secondary IDE cable as Master using the SATA to IDE adapter. The stock S3 HD is a 1.5 Gb/sec drive, so there is no need to jumper it.

*Step 3*

Configure the Upgrade PC BIOS to boot from CDROM. Boot the Upgrade PC with the PTVUpgrade CD that you burned. When you get to the "PTVUpgrade:" prompt hit "Shift and "PageUp" to see how your drives are recognized. With the above connections, my devices were as follows:

_hda_: CDROM Drive 
_hdb_: Linux (ext2) drive with _hdb1_ (Swap Partition) and _hdb2_ (Main Partition) 
_hdc_: Tivo S3 Stock 250 GB HD with multiple partitions.

Note carefully the device and partition designations on the "backup drive". You will need this in the next step.

*Step 4*

Type the commands below. They sets the DMA mode of the "backup" drive and the stock S3 drive to a mode that is compatible with the SATA-to-IDE-adapter.

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc

Then type the following to backup the S3 stock HD as an image to the "backup" drive. The partition name you enter int he "mount" command will depend how your "backup" drive is recognized. In the "mfsbackup" command, name the backup file what ever you want. This step took about 45 min for me. You time will vary based on the contents of the stock S3 HD, etc. :

mkdir /mnt/s3bak

mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/s3bak

mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/s3bak/tivoS3virgin.bak /dev/hdc

After the backup is complete (the MFSTools software will indicate this on the screen), type the following to unmount all the devices .

umount -f -a -r

Hit the CTRL-ALT-DELETE keys to shut down all processes. Turn off the PC when all processes are shut down and the PC attempts to reboot.

*Step 5*

Disconnect the stock S3 HD from the SATA-to-IDE-adapter.

Jumper the Seagate 750 GB HD for 1.5 Gb/sec mode using these instructions from Seagate.

Connect the Seagate 750 GB drive to the SATA-to-IDE-adapter

Reboot the PC with the PTVUpgrade CD

*Step 6*

When the reboot is complete, verify that the Seagate 750 GB HD is now recognized as _hdc_

Type the commands below. They set the DMA mode of the "backup" drive and the Seagate 750 GB HD to a mode that is compatible with the SATA to IDE adapter.

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc

Type the following commands to restore the backed up image from the "backup" drive to the new Seagate 750 GB HD and at the same time expand the image to the full capacity of the new drive. This step took about 15 minutes.

mkdir /mnt/s3bak

mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/s3bak

mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi /mnt/s3bak/tivoS3virgin.bak /dev/hdc

When this step is complete, the software will indicate on the screen the new expanded size in hours of storage. At this point, type the following to unmount all the devices.

umount -f -a -r

Hit the CTRL-ALT-DELETE keys to shut down all processes. Turn off the PC when all processes are shut down and the PC attempts to reboot.

*Step 7*

Disconnect the Seagate 750 GB drive from the SATA-to-IDE-Adapter.

Remove the HD jumper you installed in Step 5

Reinstall the Seagate 750 GB HD into the Tivo S3 using these instructions from Weaknees

Connect the Tivo S3 to your TV and go through Guided Setup.

In the System Information screen you will see the expanded number of storage hours

The attached pic shows what my System Information screen looks like showing the expanded storage:

*Notes:*

This procedure does not set up the "correct" (according to popular belief) swap partition size required for the 750 GB HD. The swap partition size set up by this procedure is 127 MB which is sufficient to get a working Tivo S3 with expanded storage for the foreseeable future. If you want to change/correct the swap partition, these instructions will help you do this.

The steps outlined above are only one method to expand the storage hours on an S3. There are many other ways to do this, so please use this procedure only as a guideline.

I have used many sources for the info compiled above and give credit to all of them. If there are any errors, they are mine.

Good Luck ! :up: :up:


----------



## jrock

When I first got my S3 a month ago I used the "bumwine" dd copy method to upgrade to a 500 GB drive. I am wondering, can I do the same procedure again to upgrade to a 750 GB drive to replace the 500 GB when the new 750's get cheaper? I'm wondering if there will be to many partitions on the drive since I will be copying it and expanding it a second time.

-Joe


----------



## 1283

No, you can upgrade from the factory configuration only once (for single drive system).


----------



## jrock

So what would I have to do to get all the programs from the 500 GB drive to a 750 GB drive? It's already totally full and I need more space still


----------



## 1283

Unless you want to manually manipulate the partition tables (if that is even possible), you're out of luck until TiVo enables MRV, TiVo2Go, or eSATA.


----------



## jlib

After being inspired by the Terabyte Tivo pioneers I am saddened to report that my attempt to create a budget RAID 5 system for the S3 has hit a seemingly insurmountable barrier. I thought for sure the driverless hardware RAID three drive enclosure such as the Accusys ACS-76130 (also sold as the SIIG SC-000081-S1) would be an ideal candidate and all preparation went well but it just won't boot. I tried both the bumwine dd and the classic mfstool backup and restore pipe methods. I am able to see the initialized RAID 5 array of 3 Western Digital 500 RE2 drives fine as one big virtual drive (just under a TiB) both in Windows and in Linux and I am able to successfully copy and expand the virgin S3 drive to it.

But when the RAID is attached to the S3 I just get the Tivo powering up screen and no disk activity. I have verified the cable is good by conecting the original drive to the external power supply I am using and the internal SATA cable I routed to the exterior of the S3 and it boots up fine. I have pretty much resigned myself to it not being a bootable device and just settling on using one of the drives in a conventional upgrade but just wanted to throw this out there in case someone had any ideas I might try.

I knew this was just an experiment and I might end up with a boat anchor but I have now spent so much time on it I don't want to give up.  It is not an ideal piece a equipment anyway. It has one of the loudest fans outside of a server room I have ever heard. And this is supposed to be for a desktop computer. Another manufacturer that just doesn't _get it._ Then if you fix the fan problem the enclosure squawks that there is a fan speed problem (not a heat problem) because the box monitors the RPMs. A quick twist with the pliers to the piezo buzzer took care of that. Sheesh. Anyway, any last comments before I take the thing out back and put it out of iits misery?


----------



## 1283

Size shouldn't be an issue because lightrunner has already proven it. Sounds like there is a compatibility problem between the RAID firmware and the TiVo SATA host. That's too bad. Thanks for the experiment.


----------



## audiowurks

Hello...

I'm trying to upgrade my S3 drive to a Seagate 750g. I'm using the Bumwine method. All appeared to go well, but putting the 750 in the Tivo box, I now get the green-screen of death. Actually, the green-screen of "serious problem, this could take up to 3 hours to fix". It never lasts longer than 30 seconds as the Tivo box now goes into endless re-boots. 

I'm questioning if I didn't expand and/or partition the drive correctly. However, after typing this line into the Linux console:

/home/knoppix/desktop/mfstool add -x /dev/sda -r 4

(yes, sda is the 750g drive) I get the reply:
Current estimated standlone size 881 hours
Nothing to add!

881 hours seems like 750g worth.

doing a info /dev/sda on the drive returns:
The MFS volume set contains 6 partitions
... and there are 6 partitions from 0MB to 400G.

Any ideas? Perhaps I should just start all over from scratch again. Is that even possible?

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!


----------



## 1283

"-r 4" should be before "/dev/sda".


----------



## greg_burns

c3 said:


> "-r 4" should be before "/dev/sda".


That's not how the bumwine instructions read. 

http://www.bumwine.com/tivo.html


> 12. To expand the partition, type '/home/knoppix/Desktop/mfstool add -x /dev/sdb -r 4' where 'sdb' is the name of your new hard drive and hit enter to expand the capactiy of your new hard drive to its full potential. Don't worry, if you try to expand your original drive, nothing bad happens, it just tells you that it's already at capacity.


Perhaps to troubleshoot, try doing just the dd command first and verfiying it works in your Tivo. If so, come back and do the mfstool add later. I haven't had a problem in the couple times I tried it.


----------



## generaltso

The PATA 750GB DB35 drives have been released, so I would think the SATA version will be released any day now. I've got a PATA DB35 on the way for my Series2 box and a SATA on order for the S3. Since I'm currently using the non DB35 version of the 750GB drives in both TiVos, I'm planning to do a dd copy to the DB35 drives. Does anyone see any reason why this wouldn't work?


----------



## audiowurks

greg_burns said:


> That's not how the bumwine instructions read.
> 
> Perhaps to troubleshoot, try doing just the dd command first and verfiying it works in your Tivo. If so, come back and do the mfstool add later. I haven't had a problem in the couple times I tried it.


Thanks for your help. Agreed, the previous post isn't what Bumwine states, and I'd guess an error like that would be well documented on this forum. Nonetheless, I tried it, and it returned the "Standalone size 881 hours. Nothing to add!" line again. No improvement.

I did try just doing the dd command, and re-installing into Tivo. Tivo worked, but did not show a storage increase beyond the stock 250g removed. So I went back and tried the mfstool again. The "expansion" took a suspicious half a second (thought it would be longer than that). While I got "added 559 hours", upon Tivo re-install, I'm where I am now: green screen w/ constant re-boot.

Any other ideas?

I'm thinking I'll do the entire dd / mfstool process again.

Again, thanks.


----------



## greg_burns

audiowurks said:


> I did try just doing the dd command, and re-installing into Tivo. Tivo worked, but did not show a storage increase beyond the stock 250g removed.


As expected.



audiowurks said:


> So I went back and tried the mfstool again. The "expansion" took a suspicious half a second (thought it would be longer than that).


The expansion does just take half a second. Not really sure what is going wrong. Very strange.

I wonder if you don't have a bad drive. May want to download the Seagate diagnostic tool.


----------



## jlib

c3 said:


> "-r 4" should be before "/dev/sda".


I don't have the mfstools doc file right at hand but I have been using the utility several times in the last few days and I do remember where he mentions you can have multiple instances of -x (with its following device name) so the location of the -r on the command line shouldn't really matter.


----------



## 1283

greg_burns said:


> That's not how the bumwine instructions read.


OK, that's not the reason, then. I have always put the options before the device.


----------



## audiowurks

Shazam.... it works!
I re-did EVERYTHING....

I used Seagate Disc Wizard to start over by completely erasing the 750g.
Then went back and followed the Bumwine method to the T (abeit, like I did last time).

Put it back together, and Tivo booted right up. It now not only has all my previously recorded programs, but shows 98 hours of HD, and 980 of SD capability. Oh thank god... I so need to sit in front of the dummerizer for 980 hours. Finally. Kidding aside, I only did this upgrade because I got the drive for free.

So, a complete clean wipe and re-try did the trick.
Thanks everyone for your help.

tivo on-


----------



## greg_burns

audiowurks said:


> Shazam.... it works!
> I re-did EVERYTHING....
> 
> I used Seagate Disc Wizard to start over by completely erasing the 750g.
> Then went back and followed the Bumwine method to the T (abeit, like I did last time).
> 
> Put it back together, and Tivo booted right up. It now not only has all my previously recorded programs, but shows 98 hours of HD, and 980 of SD capability. Oh thank god... I so need to sit in front of the dummerizer for 980 hours. Finally. Kidding aside, I only did this upgrade because I got the drive for free.
> 
> So, a complete clean wipe and re-try did the trick.
> Thanks everyone for your help.
> 
> tivo on-


So, is it as loud as everyone says?


----------



## JKay

audiowurks said:


> Shazam.... it works!
> I re-did EVERYTHING....
> 
> I only did this upgrade because I got the drive for free.
> 
> So, a complete clean wipe and re-try did the trick.
> Thanks everyone for your help.
> 
> tivo on-


I am curious, was the Seagate 750 brand new or had it been used before?


----------



## audiowurks

greg_burns said:


> So, is it as loud as everyone says?


YES! After all this trouble, I might switch back (to the stock drive) because it is a really noisy SOB. I'm gunna give it a week or so to see how much it annoys the crappola out of me.

BTW, the Tivo crashed once since this change, but after 8 or so hours, no problems.


----------



## audiowurks

JKay said:


> I am curious, was the Seagate 750 brand new or had it been used before?


As far as I know, it was unused.


----------



## ehardman

Tivo has sent me an new Series 3 to replace mine which has been having problems. I want to move my 500gb drive to the new unit. Is there any way to do this without a C&DE? I am assuming I will get error 51 when I move it over.

After searching the board regarding using 51killer.tcl, am I correct this can't be used on a Series 3?


----------



## generaltso

I just put a 750GB DB35 drive in my S2 box. It's extremely quiet, so it's probably safe to say that the SATA version will be the same.


----------



## davidwsica

generaltso said:


> I just put a 750GB DB35 drive in my S2 box. It's extremely quiet, so it's probably safe to say that the SATA version will be the same.


Where did you get the DB35 drive? Is the SATA version available there also?


----------



## generaltso

I got it at CDW. They don't have the SATA version in stock yet, but I wouldn't think it would be too much longer.


----------



## JKay

I just finished the do-it-yourself S3 upgrade with a WD 5000YS hard drive and everything is working properly. As I am Linux Challenged, I just wanted to thank all the folks here for the guidance and information that made this possible.


----------



## AlohaNick

I have diligently read this entire thread from beginning to end and would like to thank everyone for sharing the information on how to replace the existing drive in the HD TiVo. This information will come in handy once I am ready to increase capacity. I have not yet opened up my Series 3, so do not know what it looks like inside and hence my question:

Is it not possible to simply add a second internal hard drive to the unit?

Thanks,
Nick


----------



## greg_burns

AlohaNick said:


> Is it not possible to simply add a second internal hard drive to the unit?


Doesn't look like it.

Picture thread...
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=315795


----------



## ehardman

AlohaNick said:


> I have diligently read this entire thread from beginning to end and would like to thank everyone for sharing the information on how to replace the existing drive in the HD TiVo. This information will come in handy once I am ready to increase capacity. I have not yet opened up my Series 3, so do not know what it looks like inside and hence my question:
> 
> Is it not possible to simply add a second internal hard drive to the unit?
> 
> Thanks,
> Nick


Not enough room inside. If you want a second drive, perhaps the best option for you would be to wait for the eSATA port activation.


----------



## TexasAg

ehardman said:


> Not enough room inside. If you want a second drive, perhaps the best option for you would be to wait for the eSATA port activation.


Not only that, I think there is only one SATA connector in the S3, so there is no way to connect a second drive (other than the ESATA port).

Some people have used a SATA-ESATA connector to connect an external RAID array to the single SATA port inside the S3, but that requires that you form a hole in the back of the box. I myself just added a larger internal drive. You can do it and copy your recordings over.


----------



## generaltso

Yeah, just put a 750GB drive inside and then plan to add another 750GB to the esata port when it becomes active.


----------



## AlohaNick

Thanks for the info. I was just surprised that it hadn't even been mentioned in the thread since a second internal drive is the easiest sort of upgrade.

For now I can wait to upgrade later. The 300+ hours of SD recording capacity will be fine for me for now. I don't yet have an HD TV set, so no need to record HD. An HD Plasma set will be my next purchase within the next 6 months. Only got the Series 3 now to take advantage of the Lifetime Subscription transfer from my series 1 svr-2000. Until I get my plasma tv I don't really have a need for more capacity. But just checking on options for when I am ready. Hopefully they will have a 1TB drive out by then.

Thanks again,
Nick


----------



## 1283

AlohaNick said:


> I don't yet have an HD TV set, so no need to record HD.


I don't yet have HDTV, either, but HD content is *much much* better even on analog TV. My S3 records HD channels only. Watching SD is like a torture now.


----------



## Maeglin

This may have been covered before and I've not seen it, but does anything need to be done with the WD5000YS (jumper or software setting) to get it running in 3Gbps mode, or does it do that out of the box? The reason I ask is because I bought a Hitachi drive before that needed a software download to flip that switch, but I haven't seen any such thing on the WD site nor have I seen any jumper setting docs there.

I'm hopefully getting one for an upgrade this weekend, and want to make sure that at least that part is right before I start copying things


----------



## jlib

The jumper settings are on the label of the drive. By default it comes in 3Gbps mode. No, you don't need to do anything except change the head seek acoustics to quiet. You can use the Hitachi Feature Tool you already have for that.


----------



## greg_burns

Also note, probably run just fine in 1.5Gbps mode anyways. I was using a 300GB SATA I 1.5 Gbps drive for awhile as a test with no issues to speak of. Doubt you would even notice the difference. Sound right to you guys?


----------



## 1283

Today's 7200RPM drive cannot sustain more than about 70MB/s anyway, and TiVo does not need anything close to that kind of transfer rate. Each HD stream is about 2.5MB/s.


----------



## generaltso

My 750GB DB35 from CDW should be here today. I'm planning to do a dd copy from my current Barracuda 750GB. The last time I did this with 750GB PATA drives, it took about 24 hours. I'm hoping it will be faster with SATA drives.


----------



## davidwsica

generaltso said:


> My 750GB DB35 from CDW should be here today. I'm planning to do a dd copy from my current Barracuda 750GB. The last time I did this with 750GB PATA drives, it took about 24 hours. I'm hoping it will be faster with SATA drives.


It took me about 5 hours to DD from my 7200.10 750GB to the DB35 750GB last week.


----------



## kkluba

generaltso - Sounds like you didn't have dma turned on when you did the last copy. 

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdX

X=a, b c, d. It should be turned on for both source and target.


----------



## generaltso

Cool, thanks. I'll give that a try this time and report back with the results. I'd much rather be without my S3 for 5 hours than 24.


----------



## 1283

generaltso said:


> My 750GB DB35 from CDW should be here today.


Isn't it cheaper from Weaknees?

Another source but not in stock yet:
http://store.pagecomputers.com/catalog/Unclassified/Other/1184336.html


----------



## generaltso

My office actually has a corporate deal with CDW, which made it a little cheaper than Weaknees.


----------



## generaltso

Well, it looks like dma is actually turned on by default with Knoppix, so I guess I've been using DMA all along. I started the dd copy about 10 minutes ago and it looks like it's copying at about the same rate as the last dd I did with the IDE drives. Looks like it will probably take about 24 hours again. I'm using a fairly old computer with 512MB of RAM and adapters to convert the SATA drives to IDE. Maybe there's just not enough horsepower to move the data any faster.


----------



## bozo8787

Any chance price may drop on these babies?


----------



## generaltso

Of course it will. You just have to decide how long you want to wait.


----------



## generaltso

So the dd ended up taking just over 25 hours with DMA turned on. Oh well, it was worth it. The S3 is now whisper quiet.


----------



## tase2

I am scheduled to get my S3 today. I ordered the upgrade yesterday and it will not be here for several days.

Should I wait until doing the upgrade to play with it?

I was advised to do the upgrade prior to installation of the Cable Cards, but I was wondering about using it at all prior to upgrade.


----------



## greg_burns

tase2 said:


> I am scheduled to get my S3 today. I ordered the upgrade yesterday and it will not be here for several days.
> 
> Should I wait until doing the upgrade to play with it?
> 
> I was advised to do the upgrade prior to installation of the Cable Cards, but I was wondering about using it at all prior to upgrade.


I assume by upgrade, you mean a preconfigured HD from Weaknees. Definately want to wait on the CableCard install until after you have the new drive from Weaknees installed. (If you aren't doing a copy from you original drive to the new one, you may loose you authentication on the cards.)

But I would definately try out the S3 before cracking the case to install that bigger drive. Make sure you don't have a lemon. Obviously, you won't be able to test out the cablecards functions yet, but make sure everything else is working.


----------



## tase2

greg_burns said:


> I assume by upgrade, you mean a preconfigured HD from Weaknees. Definately want to wait on the CableCard install until after you have the new drive from Weaknees installed. (If you aren't doing a copy from you original drive to the new one, you may loose you authentication on the cards.)
> 
> But I would definately try out the S3 before cracking the case to install that bigger drive. Make sure you don't have a lemon. Obviously, you won't be able to test out the cablecards functions yet, but make sure everything else is working.


Yah-duh that is what I meant


> preconfigured HD from Weaknees


I was half asleep this morning.

Anyway-cool-I will get to play w/ my S3 today


----------



## Dennis Wilkinson

I updated an S3 last night to a 500GB drive, using a Rosewell RC-201 PCI SATA controller under Ubuntu 6.10. Actual drive-to-drive backup/restore was about 20 minutes (about 13GiB), with the only recordings on the drive being the demo videos.

I used a patched version of mfstools, based on the MFSTOOLS2_0 branch at SourceForge, for the restore. The patch (also taken out of the CVS tree) just makes sure that the two sets of partitions created for the OS are the same size. Since I figured other folks might find it useful, my patched version (and the patched source) is at:

http://www.fallingrocks.org/tivo/mfstools20patched.tar.gz

It should be at that URL for the foreseeable future (I was going to attach it here, but it's over the size limit). I'll almost certainly pull it down should Tiger have an official release, since that would contain the same patch.

It's built statically (on an older Debian install, which was the right vintage for the branch). I was being paranoid, so I only used the patched version for the restore and not the backup, like this (with both mfstool and mfstool-patched on the PATH):



Code:


mfstool backup -Tao - /dev/sdc | mfstool-patched restore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/sdd

You'd need to adjust based on your device naming, etc., of course.

This does *not* contain a patch for the "swap > 127MiB" bug. If you create a larger swap partition, you'll still need tpip to initialize it.


----------



## doctord

I tried unsucessfully to upgrade to a 500GB Maxtor last night. I did a direct complete backup-restore using the correct parameters. The interesting part was that when I first tried with the new disk direct out of the box, I got an error that drive Sdb could not be written to. When I scrolled up, it showed "Unknown Partition" on that drive. I then used the Maxtor software to create a partition on that drive and the drive could be read and the process began. This morning it showed that it had completed and listed the correct number of hours. Unfortuantely, when installed in the Tivo I get the GSOD and the Tivo will not boot. 
I would like suggestions on how to prepare the drive before I try again.
Thanks.
Update: I deleted the partition off of the new disk and used the Weaknees Tools with Sata support. It worked first try.


----------



## JSP

Dennis Wilkinson said:


> I used a patched version of mfstools, based on the MFSTOOLS2_0 branch at SourceForge, for the restore. The patch (also taken out of the CVS tree) just makes sure that the two sets of partitions created for the OS are the same size. Since I figured other folks might find it useful, my patched version (and the patched source) is at:
> 
> ....
> 
> This does *not* contain a patch for the "swap > 127MiB" bug. If you create a larger swap partition, you'll still need tpip to initialize it.


The weaknees_sata.iso used with the WeaKnees Series3 upgrade instructions contains both the partition size patch and the v1 swap patch. Details and the patch source are on the WeaKnees forums.


----------



## greg_burns

doctord said:


> I tried unsucessfully to upgrade to a 500GB Maxtor last night. I did a direct complete backup-restore using the correct parameters. The interesting part was that when I first tried with the new disk direct out of the box, I got an error that drive Sdb could not be written to. When I scrolled up, it showed "Unknown Partition" on that drive. I then used the Maxtor software to create a partition on that drive and the drive could be read and the process began. This morning it showed that it had completed and listed the correct number of hours. Unfortuantely, when installed in the Tivo I get the GSOD and the Tivo will not boot.
> I would like suggestions on how to prepare the drive before I try again.
> Thanks.


Have you tried just following the bumwine method using the dd command? No preparation of the drive should be required. Worked great for me.

http://www.bumwine.com/tivo.html


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Will a "-Tao" backup+restore (to preserve recordings) work with TWO of those IDE-to-SATA adapters?

And has anyone tried any of these adapters?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812203016

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812186007


----------



## 1283

Two of those adapters would take up both IDE ports on the motherboard. You still need a CDROM drive to load Linux and mfstools.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

c3 said:


> Two of those adapters would take up both IDE ports on the motherboard. You still need a CDROM drive to load Linux and mfstools.


I was thinking one adapter per hard drive. But if its one adapter per IDE channel, then you may be right.

How many SATA devices can be on the same channel? If it's like IDE, then maybe the one adapter plus a cable with two ports on it will work for me.


----------



## 1283

SATA is point to point, so one device per SATA channel.

There are two kinds of adapters. One that plugs into the motherboard and becomes a SATA host, and one that plugs into the drive and becomes an IDE device. I think the ones you linked are the former type.


----------



## generaltso

I used two adapters to do a dd copy from one SATA drive to another using a computer that only had IDE controllers. Since the adapters make SATA drives emulate IDE drives, you can have up to four drives in use at once in a typical computer with two IDE controllers.


----------



## brossow

Maybe I should ask in a separate thread but this seems like a reasonable place to start: will this drive work in an S3? I can get it for $159.99 shipped with a $30 discount code, plus 2% more back via FatWallet.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136032

Thanks,
Brent


----------



## generaltso

Sure.


----------



## greg_burns

brossow said:


> Maybe I should ask in a separate thread but this seems like a reasonable place to start: will this drive work in an S3? I can get it for $159.99 shipped with a $30 discount code, plus 2% more back via FatWallet.
> 
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136032
> 
> Thanks,
> Brent


What's the code? I was thinking of buying a pair of these for my internal raid to be used with my S3.


----------



## brossow

generaltso said:


> Sure.


Great -- thanks! I really want a 750GB drive for both S3s, but for this price I'll get by with a single 500GB in the main S3 for now and leave the other alone. Maybe the external SATA port will be enabled by the time I start running out of room on the new S3s (considering I can't transfer any of the hundreds of hours of programming on the S2s to them, at least not at the moment).


----------



## brossow

greg_burns said:


> What's the code? I was thinking of buying a pair of these for my internal raid to be used with my S3.


EMCWDRE2CAV


----------



## greg_burns

brossow said:


> EMCWDRE2CAV


Thanks. Guess I should be looking at the raid version of that drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136032

How many times can you use that code?


----------



## brossow

You can use it at least twice -- I did so tonight. Also used PAYPALFREE on a third order and got free shipping on the Thecus I just ordered (only free shipping if you pay via PayPal) from NewEgg. In addition, by clicking through FatWallet, I'll get 2% back on all of those purchases. Now I just need to locate an appropriate SATA card for my PC and an appropriate SATA-eSATA cable....


----------



## greg_burns

brossow said:


> You can use it at least twice -- I did so tonight. Also used PAYPALFREE on a third order and got free shipping on the Thecus I just ordered (only free shipping if you pay via PayPal) from NewEgg. In addition, by clicking through FatWallet, I'll get 2% back on all of those purchases. Now I just need to locate an appropriate SATA card for my PC and an appropriate SATA-eSATA cable....


I guess I ordered too quickly. Didn't see how to use it twice w/o two separate orders. Figured newegg would know anyways, so didn't bother trying.

Did you order the same RAID edition version of those drives like I (and jlib) did?

The Thecus comes with a PCI card the gives you eSata out the back and one extra internal Sata connector.

I ordered a eSATA to SATA cable 1M from www.satacables.com.

Part # SS-1ESS
http://www.satacables.com/html/esata-external-esata-shielded-.html

1M is official maximum length, but others have gone longer w/o a problem. I wish I'd gone longer, gives you more wiggle room.


----------



## brossow

greg_burns said:


> I guess I ordered too quickly. Didn't see how to use it twice w/o two separate orders. Figured newegg would know anyways, so didn't bother trying.
> 
> Did you order the same RAID edition version of those drives like I (and jlib) did?


This is the drive I ordered (x 2): Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD5000YS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive



greg_burns said:


> The Thecus comes with a PCI card the gives you eSata out the back and one extra internal Sata connector.


Figures. I should have read the description more carefully. I bought a card on eBay about an hour ago. Only $16 shipped, so I'm not out a fortune. Maybe I can find a reason to use it at work and expense it. 



greg_burns said:


> I ordered a eSATA to SATA cable 1M from www.satacables.com.
> 
> Part # SS-1ESS
> http://www.satacables.com/html/esata-external-esata-shielded-.html
> 
> 1M is official maximum length, but others have gone longer w/o a problem. I wish I'd gone longer, gives you more wiggle room.


I bought the same basic cable on eBay earlier tonight. I don't need much wiggle room as my options for placement are severely limited as it is. Should be just fine next to the S3  the TV is a 61" HDTV and seating is about 15' away, so whatever fan noise it creates won't really be an issue. 

Thanks for the great advice! Ordering the stuff is the easy part, unfortunately, and I'm probably going to be back with questions once everything arrives and I jump into this project.

Brent


----------



## aaronwt

Will the SE16 WD5000KS work just as well as the RE2 WD5000YS?


----------



## greg_burns

aaronwt said:


> Will the SE16 WD5000KS work just as well as the RE2 WD5000YS?


Yes, we paid a little extra for the YS version because they are going in a RAID system (a Thecus). (They are advertised as RAID drives. Whatever that means. ) Otherwise, I would have gotten the KS myself.


----------



## generaltso

I think the RAID drives are optimized for performance, so they'll be a little louder. I'm not sure if they support Accoustic Management.


----------



## 1283

greg_burns said:


> Yes, we paid a little extra for the YS version because they are going in a RAID system (a Thecus). (They are advertised as RAID drives. Whatever that means. ) Otherwise, I would have gotten the KS myself.


The price difference between KS and YS should be negligible. RAID in this case means redundant system such as RAID 1, 5, 10, etc. with error recovery. Not RAID 0 the way you're using it.

YS limits the drive retry time to something like 6 seconds before giving up, instead of much longer time with KS, because that usually works better with RAID 1/5/10. For TiVo, it shouldn't make much difference because if the drive cannot deliver data in 6 seconds, it's already hosed. I'd rather have the longer 5-year warranty.


----------



## aaronwt

brossow said:


> EMCWDRE2CAV


What else do you need to purchase to be able to use this coupon code to get $30 off the WD drive?


----------



## brossow

aaronwt said:


> What else do you need to purchase to be able to use this coupon code to get $30 off the WD drive?


Nada. Just the drive. $159.99 shipped -- $30 instant discount and free shipping with that code.

NOTE: The discount code is only good on that particular drive (the RE2).


----------



## aaronwt

Never mind. It only works with the YS. I had tried it on the KS drive. The KS drive is 4DB quieter when seeking according to the specs. So how loud is it for the people who bought it. I just purchased one but I'll hold off ona second one until I hear how much noise it makes.


----------



## 1283

According to what others have reported, YS should support quiet seek as well. 4dB is a lot to be unnoticed.


----------



## greg_burns

I just enabled acoustic management on my new YS pair using Hitachi Feature Tool w/o a problem. They are currently in my Thecus and I can't hear them at all. The real test will be when I am finished with the S3 copy. Tivo's really seem to make them work.

Wanna also touch them later and see if they get anywhere near as hot as my 400GB pair did.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

ANyone know if this will work with Linux? In particular with any of the LBA48 boot CDs with MFSTOOLS?


----------



## 1283

What is "this"?


----------



## ThreeSoFar

ThreeSoFar said:


> ANyone know if this will work with Linux? In particular with any of the LBA48 boot CDs with MFSTOOLS?


Oops....can't read my mind? Sorry: this is a PCI SATA adapter for $13.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

ThreeSoFar said:


> Oops....can't read my mind? Sorry: this is a PCI SATA adapter for $13.


May have found my answer, this seems to have reviews saying it works fine with linux: http://www.newegg.com/Product/CustR...ortField=0&SummaryType=ALL&Pagesize=100&Page=


----------



## aaronwt

greg_burns said:


> I just enabled acoustic management on my new YS pair using Hitachi Feature Tool w/o a problem. They are currently in my Thecus and I can't hear them at all. The real test will be when I am finished with the S3 copy. Tivo's really seem to make them work.
> 
> Wanna also touch them later and see if they get anywhere near as hot as my 400GB pair did.


Where can we get that from?


----------



## 1283

What is "that"?


----------



## greg_burns

aaronwt said:


> Where can we get that from?


http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm


----------



## greg_burns

brossow said:


> This is the drive I ordered (x 2): Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD5000YS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive


Well one of my two RE2 WD5000YS is going back. This make two drives I've ordered from newegg recently that were bad.


----------



## brossow

Bummer. Is the problem with their packaging or something else?


----------



## greg_burns

brossow said:


> Bummer. Is the problem with their packaging or something else?


Doubt is was packaging. They were well wrapped in bubble wrap.

I actually went through the whole bumwine dd copy w/o any indication of a problem. S3 wouldn't boot though.

Decided to hook they up individually to my PC. Took a couple hours to format them. Copied close to 300GB to the first drive no problem. The second started having "delay write" errors almost immediately. Brought into work on another PC and it must have caused a reboot cause it was stuck on the BIOS with an error about the drive.

Lesson here is test your drive(s) prior to bothering with them in your Tivo!


----------



## 1283

greg_burns said:


> Doubt is was packaging. They were well wrapped in bubble wrap.


How thick was the bubble wrap?

Also, any problem with the temperature?


----------



## greg_burns

c3 said:


> How thick was the bubble wrap?
> 
> Also, any problem with the temperature?


Bubble wrap was the big bubble kind. My kid popped every one of them. 

Also there were also peanuts in the box as well.

Drives were much, much cooler from what little testing I did. They weren't in my Thecus for long though. And while they were they weren't doing much.


----------



## aaronwt

greg_burns said:


> Well one of my two RE2 WD5000YS is going back. This make two drives I've ordered from newegg recently that were bad.


Crap I ordered two of them also. I hope they don't send any of the bad ones to me. I want to get the S3 drives upgraded before Comcast comes out this weekend.


----------



## greg_burns

aaronwt said:


> Crap I ordered two of them also. I hope they don't send any of the bad ones to me. I want to get the S3 drives upgraded before Comcast comes out this weekend.


Oh no you don't! Make sure your original drive is in there when Comcast setups your cablecards. Then image (using dd copy - bumewine method) to your new drive(s). That way if you ever need to upgrade again, replace drive, whatever, you can use your original drive w/o needing a Comcast truck roll.

At least that appears to be the best method. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to put it to the test this weekend. 

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=323639

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=327661


----------



## aaronwt

Thanks I'll give it a try.


----------



## nyjklein

greg_burns said:


> Oh no you don't! Make sure your original drive is in there when Comcast setups your cablecards. Then image (using dd copy - bumewine method) to your new drive(s). That way if you ever need to upgrade again, replace drive, whatever, you can use your original drive w/o needing a Comcast truck roll.
> 
> At least that appears to be the best method. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to put it to the test this weekend.


Yes. That's the method I went with somewhat unintentionally. I actually ordered the 750GB drive from Weaknees preloaded. But after reading that people had difficulty with their cablecards after an HD swap. I was concerned. After I found that my two-year old Dell PC actually had internal SATA connections (while sportining IDE drives) and all I needed was a couple of cables, I decided to give the bumwine method a shot.

Worked great. Cablecards are still working fine AND I still have the programs I had recorded on the original HD and my season passes.

Jeff


----------



## brossow

nyjklein said:


> I actually ordered the 750GB drive from Weaknees preloaded. [...] I decided to give the bumwine method a shot.


Ouch. That [effectively] makes for a damn expensive bare 750GB drive!


----------



## ashu

brossow said:


> Ouch. That [effectively] makes for a damn expensive bare 750GB drive!


He's a Jets fan ... they make easy things appear difficult, and vice versa 

If you're within 30 days, ask if you can return the 750, even with a restocking fee it'll work out cheaper to buy a standalone 750


----------



## brossow

ashu said:


> If you're within 30 days, ask if you can return the 750, even with a restocking fee it'll work out cheaper to buy a standalone 750


I doubt they'd take it back if it's been reformatted and installed. (And if they do, great -- just don't be surprised if they laugh.)


----------



## ashu

brossow said:


> I doubt they'd take it back if it's been reformatted and installed. (And if they do, great -- just don't be surprised if they laugh.)


I'm glad nyjklein're taking this in a good-nature way ... I agree, no harm in asking. Nicely.


----------



## 1283

brossow said:


> Ouch. That [effectively] makes for a damn expensive bare 750GB drive!


Weaknees sells the bare drive for $469, and the formatted drive for $499. I have not found any lower price with the drive in stock.


----------



## ashu

c3 said:


> Weaknees sells the bare drive for $469, and the formatted drive for $499. I have not found any lower price with the drive in stock.


I was at BestBuy during lunch (picking up online-ordered gifts) and they had the 750 for 369 (or 399?) OTD. Granted, not the (hacked) DB35 (equivalent) that WK sells - but that's nitpicking IMHO


----------



## 1283

Non-DB35 doesn't count. Fry's was selling the regular 750GB for $310/$320 without rebate.


----------



## ashu

c3 said:


> Non-DB35 doesn't count. Fry's was selling the regular 750GB for $310/$320 without rebate.


I'll defer to you on that, then ... I don't know just how much quieter (and potentially longer-lasting/more reliable) the quietness hack makes WK's 'cloned' DB35-equivalent. It may be worth it to some ... but not to me


----------



## davidwsica

ashu said:


> I'll defer to you on that, then ... I don't know just how much quieter (and potentially longer-lasting/more reliable) the quietness hack makes WK's 'cloned' DB35-equivalent. It may be worth it to some ... but not to me


Having owned the non-DB35 750GB and now the DB35 drive from WK I can tell you it's night/day difference in noise level. If you have ANY concerns whatsever on the noise the drive makes I would go with the DB35.


----------



## 1283

ashu said:


> I'll defer to you on that, then ... I don't know just how much quieter (and potentially longer-lasting/more reliable) the quietness hack makes WK's 'cloned' DB35-equivalent. It may be worth it to some ... but not to me


The one that WK is selling is the real DB35. The firmware hack was just a temporary solution that Seagate provided to WK.


----------



## DCIFRTHS

c3 said:


> The one that WK is selling is the real DB35. The firmware hack was just a temporary solution that Seagate provided to WK.


I have been trying to verify that information. How did you confirm this? Have you purchased one? Thanks!


----------



## greg_burns

DCIFRTHS said:


> I have been trying to verify that information. How did you confirm this? Have you purchased one? Thanks!


remove the ~  
http://www.wk~forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=66


----------



## aaronwt

So this bumewine method uses a GUI? Can I connect a mouse also.

I also tried the acoustical management program and that worked. I enable it on a Raptor I have but I could tell a difference. Is the difference noticeable on thos drives from Newegg. I received one today but I guess I'll wait until after the cable card install to do a copy.


----------



## greg_burns

aaronwt said:


> So this bumewine method uses a GUI? Can I connect a mouse also.


You boot to knoppix, which is a CD based distro of Linux. That has a GUI. The bumwine method itself is done from the console window (think DOS) inside of Knoppix.


----------



## greg_burns

aaronwt said:


> I also tried the acoustical management program and that worked. I enable it on a Raptor I have but I could tell a difference. Is the difference noticeable on thos drives from Newegg.


I can tell you this. When I had my two 400GB drive in my Thecus w/o AM turned on it was very noticeable. As soon as I turned it on, not a chirp.

As far as the 500GB, I dunno. That was the very first thing I did was turn on AM.  From experience with the 400GB pair, the drives were very quiet when just connected to a PC (even in the Thecus). Connecting to a Tivo makes the really work, and is when you'll notice the AM doing something.



aaronwt said:


> I received one today but I guess I'll wait until after the cable card install to do a copy.


One? Didn't you order them together? I take it you are not playing the internal raid game with a Thecus? Do you have two S3's?


----------



## aaronwt

I ordered the second drive a day after I ordered the first one. That one should arrive tomorrow. I actually tried to order a third one today since I might get a third S3 before the end of the year, but the $30 discount code didn't work anymore.


----------



## greg_burns

aaronwt said:


> I ordered the second drive a day after I ordered the first one. That one should arrive tomorrow. I actually tried to order a third one today since I might get a third S3 before the end of the year, but the $30 discount code didn't work anymore.


Doh! That's what I should have done to use that coupon a second time. What I should have done was just send back this bad drive for my money back. And then bought it again with coupon. Double doh!!! <slap>

Instead of 1 day deliver, I will probably have to wait 3 weeks to see it again.


----------



## brossow

aaronwt said:


> Is the difference noticeable on thos drives from Newegg.


I'm working on my Thecus right now with (2) of those drives installed. I have not enabled AM because I don't have a computer available with internal SATA nor any internal SATA cables on hand to use with the card included with the Thecus (and I don't have a store near work that sells said SATA cables). Having said that, the ONLY thing I hear from the Thecus is the fan itself, and the Thecus is sitting at my feet right now. It's not recording but it IS formatting, so there's drive activity on both drives. (And yes, I know I'm wasting my time formatting them in Windows. ) FWIW....


----------



## greg_burns

brossow said:


> I'm working on my Thecus right now with (2) of those drives installed. I have not enabled AM because I don't have a computer available with internal SATA nor any internal SATA cables on hand to use with the card included with the Thecus (and I don't have a store near work that sells said SATA cables). Having said that, the ONLY thing I hear from the Thecus is the fan itself, and the Thecus is sitting at my feet right now. It's not recording but it IS formatting, so there's drive activity on both drives. (And yes, I know I'm wasting my time formatting them in Windows. ) FWIW....


You not wasting your time. True, it is not necessary. But give them a thorough run though using Windows before wasting your time with them in your Tivo. 

Since you won't be applying AM, you can let us know how much noiser it gets when it is connected to your Tivo. 

FWIW, you can always latter dismount them from the Thecus and apply AM using either Knoppix disc or the Hitachi Feature tool. As long as you put them back in the Thecus in same position shouldn't be a problem. (That is what I did in fact.)


----------



## 1283

Formatting is sequential access (adjacent tracks), so there's no seek noise which comes from random access (tracks far apart).


----------



## brossow

greg_burns said:


> You not wasting your time. True, it is not necessary. But give them a thorough run though using Windows before wasting your time with them in your Tivo.
> 
> Since you won't be applying AM, you can let us know how much noiser it gets when it is connected to your Tivo.
> 
> FWIW, you can always latter dismount them from the Thecus and apply AM using either Knoppix disc or the Hitachi Feature tool. As long as you put them back in the Thecus in same position shouldn't be a problem. (That is what I did in fact.)





c3 said:


> Formatting is sequential access (adjacent tracks), so there's no seek noise which comes from random access (tracks far apart).


All good info -- thanks!


----------



## Jerry_K

The bubble wrap and peanuts may have caused a static discharge. Static discharges do a great job on electronic parts, some of which are usually exposed on the controller board of a drive.


----------



## 1283

The drive should be packaged in factory sealed anti-static bag, so I don't think static discharge is an issue, unless that happens after the bag is opened.


----------



## brossow

The attached image (and my sig) says it all, baby!

There are more pictures of the upgrade here: http://ambroserossow.com/gallery2/v/Brent/TiVoStuff/


----------



## jtown

MichaelK said:


> (use hdparm -I /dev/sdX to check the drive info)
> 
> hdparm -M128 /dev/sdX will set it to quiet.
> 
> then hdparm -I /dev/sdX to confirm the setting changed.


I skimmed through the entire thread and didn't see any feedback from people who have tried the -M128 option on one of the older (noisy) 750 gig drives. I know the windows utility says the drive doesn't support accoustic management but perhaps it scans a static list of tested drives that doesn't include the 750 gig seagate. (I'm just guessing here.) Alternatively, has anyone stuck the old 750 gig drive in a relatively recent Dell and tried to use its BIOS to set the acoustic level during POST? (All of the Dells I've seen in the last few years have the option to configure the hard drive's acoustic management in the BIOS setup.)

Just trying to find a way to avoid spending $470 on a drive (in which case, I may as well spend the extra $30 so I don't have to muck around with the transfer myself). The new Tivo's going in a bedroom so it needs to be quiet but the extra cost of a DB35 drive drops the ROI considerably and pushes me towards a 500 gig Western Digital. I can justify spending around $300 but $500...no so much.


----------



## DCIFRTHS

jtown said:


> ...Alternatively, has anyone stuck the old 750 gig drive in a relatively recent Dell and tried to use its BIOS to set the acoustic level during POST? (All of the Dells I've seen in the last few years have the option to configure the hard drive's acoustic management in the BIOS setup.) ...


Interesting question. I assumed that if the drive didn't support the acoustic commands, then it just ignored the BIOS setting. Would love to hear more about this...


----------



## 1283

For all practical purposes, there is no way to change the acoustic mode of Seagate drives.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

c3 said:


> For all practical purposes, there is no way to change the acoustic mode of Seagate drives.


Sure there is. Eat the exorbitant 15% restock fee ( *cough* TCFSTORE *cough* ) and send them back and get a WD.

Or Samsung just came out with a 500G SATA. newegg.com.


----------



## jtown

C3, that's not terribly helpful. This is a software issue, not hardware. The firmware on the drive controls how the hardware functions. While the Windows acoustic management software doesn't work, there are a number of possible explanations that have nothing to do with the drive's ability to adjust the speed at which the heads move.

The 750 gig drives are relatively new. The windows software may have a list of tested/approved drives that predates the 750 gig drive. If this is the case, it would report that the drive doesn't support acoustic management. It also appears that the WinAAM utility is _very_ sensitive to drivers. The two methods I inquired about are more direct methods of modifying the acoustic management settings. If you've tried these methods and found that they don't work, please say so. If you haven't, please don't discourage people from trying them.

We're not talking about saving $20. The difference in price is $150-200. It's worth exhausting all of the options to save that much money. If I had a 750 gig drive in hand, I would have tried both methods myself but I don't have one and don't plan to buy one within the next month. No point in making people wait until I get around to it if someone else has the equipment in hand and is willing to give it a shot.


----------



## 1283

jtown said:


> C3, that's not terribly helpful. This is a software issue, not hardware. The firmware on the drive controls how the hardware functions.


The firmware controls what is allowed and what is not. Since the firmware does not support acoustic management (Seagate does not want to license the patent.), what you buy is what you get. Unless you can get a different firmware for the drive (highly unlikely), there is nothing you can do, other than getting a different drive.


----------



## spike2k5

AAM which is part of S.M.A.R.T is disabled in the firmware for all Seagate drives.
DB35 drives are supposed to be set to the quiest mode at the factory so it is quieter than other Seagate drives.
If you have professional Hard drive repair kit / software, you might be able to hack the firmware and add that in. Any one tried ths yet?
I do have two identical Seagate drives one with aam and the other w/o.


----------



## jtown

Thank you for clarifying. In that case, I'll probably go with the 500 gig KS drive form Western Digital. I can pick one up at Best Buy for $150 with no rebates. Cheaper than anything on pricegrabber.


----------



## aaronwt

Really, only $150 at BB. Newegg has it for $20 to $30 more.


----------



## 1283

For 500GB, I would recommend WD5000YS with 5-year warranty.


----------



## brossow

jtown said:


> Thank you for clarifying. In that case, I'll probably go with the 500 gig KS drive form Western Digital. I can pick one up at Best Buy for $150 with no rebates. Cheaper than anything on pricegrabber.


I just ordered one of those last night for my other S3. Would have gone with the YS like I have in my 1TB Thecus setup but I had store credit at Best Buy I wanted to use  no out-of-pocket cash. Already spent enough on the two S3s and the Thecus setup that any money I can save right now is good.


----------



## aaronwt

Is this a special sale for the KS version? I already have a couple of the YS drives to put in my first two S3 boxes but if I can find a KS from BB for $150 I'll get that for my third S3.
When I just looked on BB website they listed the 500GB KS drive for $250.


----------



## brossow

That's the drive -- sale apparently is over.


----------



## aaronwt

With the Hitachi program to change the acoustic management, what setting is recommended? The setting the program defaults to is 128 or should I set it to the max which I think was 254? I'm using the WD 500Gb drive.

I also need to see if I can return one. The plastic part around the SATA connector broke off on the drive. I've used around 15 SATA drives and never seen this happen before.


----------



## greg_burns

aaronwt said:


> With the Hitachi program to change the acoustic management, what setting is recommended? The setting the program defaults to is 128 or should I set it to the max which I think was 254? I'm using the WD 500Gb drive.


IIRC, 254 means it is not enabled at all. Make sure you click the OK button as well. It is really easy to exit out of that screen and not make any changes at all.

Also, I believe there is a test you can run so you can hear the difference for yourself.

The linux command hdparm uses same values...
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=4431857&highlight=hdparm#post4431857

I would add that you won't hear a difference when just doing the dd command (if following bumwine method) to copy the drive over. That is a linear copy. Where it makes a noticeable difference is with random seek, like when it is actually being used in the Tivo.

You need some acoustic management on that sig! Almost had a heart attack!


----------



## brossow

Just a quick note that after using my Thecus setup (WD 500GB drives) for a couple weeks without AM enabled, I really don't hear it at all and now that I've pulled the daughtercard with the LEDs out, I don't see it either. Eventually I'll probably enable AM on the drives but it's definitely not a problem as-is from the factory.


----------



## greg_burns

brossow said:


> Just a quick note that after using my Thecus setup (WD 500GB drives) for a couple weeks without AM enabled, I really don't hear it at all and now that I've pulled the daughtercard with the LEDs out, I don't see it either. Eventually I'll probably enable AM on the drives but it's definitely not a problem as-is from the factory.


With it enabled on mine I never hear any seeking either. But, you can definately tell it is in the room. Two drives running in that enclosure has a slight just above noise floor level rumble to it. I think I want to move it behind the entertainment cabinet to help mask the sound.

I never did modify mine any for additional airflow. I also haven't check its temp since buttoning it up again. Maybe when it starts warming up again (next summer) I'll check on it.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

Samsung SATA drives at newegg.com are just $149 shipped. oh wait--free shipping deal is over. $6 or so for shipping, maybe less.


----------



## brossow

greg_burns said:


> I never did modify mine any for additional airflow. I also haven't check its temp since buttoning it up again. Maybe when it starts warming up again (next summer) I'll check on it.


Did you see my temp report in the other thread? Don't remember exact temps but they were well below the max operating temp of 140ºF. That's with no case mods, either, so I'm leaving it as is.


----------



## greg_burns

brossow said:


> Did you see my temp report in the other thread? Don't remember exact temps but they were well below the max operating temp of 140ºF. That's with no case mods, either, so I'm leaving it as is.


These WD 500 drives run much cooler than the WD 400s I have. Who woulda thunk it.


----------



## ashu

greg_burns said:


> These WD 500 drives run much cooler than the WD 400s I have. Who woulda thunk it.


Isn't that kinda expected, though ... as technology advances? 

Do you know how many platters each of 'em have? And sides? Maybe the 500s are newer and have greater data density - requiring less movement/moving parts and reducing the heat generated!


----------



## aaronwt

The 500GB drive has four 125GB platters. The 400GB drive has four 100GB platters.


----------



## 1283

$399 1TB drive coming.

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070105/20070104006138.html?.v=1


----------



## jlib

Nice!

CinemaStar 7K1000 - DVR applications

Adaptive error recovery and SMART command transport for optimized video streaming and picture quality

Smooth Stream Technology to optimize the drive for audio/video applications requiring reliable storage

"Bedroom quiet" acoustics

The CinemaStar 1TB hard drive will be available in the second quarter


----------



## pan4life

jlib said:


> Nice!
> 
> CinemaStar 7K1000 - DVR applications
> 
> Adaptive error recovery and SMART command transport for optimized video streaming and picture quality
> 
> Smooth Stream Technology to optimize the drive for audio/video applications requiring reliable storage
> 
> "Bedroom quiet" acoustics
> 
> The CinemaStar 1TB hard drive will be available in the second quarter


I wonder if the Deskstar model will support acoustic management to tune it quiet as well. That would be a nice alternative if it is significantly cheaper.


----------



## aaronwt

WOW! Each platter is 200GB!


----------



## ehardman

c3 said:


> $399 1TB drive coming.
> 
> http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070105/20070104006138.html?.v=1


Sure would be nice to get the eSata port enabled!


----------



## brossow

No need for the E-SATA port given the current TiVo software limitations unable to deal with more than a TB anyway (unless I'm remembering or reading something wrong). Just plunk one of these inside and record away! 

Wonder if it's too late to return the 500-gigger I just bought for my other S3....


----------



## JamieP

brossow said:


> No need for the E-SATA port given the current TiVo software limitations unable to deal with more than a TB anyway (unless I'm remembering or reading something wrong). ...


Dual 750GB drives work fine on the Series2 platforms (e.g. hr10-250), with the exception of a minor display glitch in the display of the recording capacity.

The real MFS limit is actually hit at 2TiB (512 * 2^32 bytes), so I expect that two 1TB drives (2 * 10^12 bytes) would work fine.


----------



## scoombs

brossow said:


> No need for the E-SATA port given the current TiVo software limitations unable to deal with more than a TB anyway (unless I'm remembering or reading something wrong). Just plunk one of these inside and record away!
> 
> Wonder if it's too late to return the 500-gigger I just bought for my other S3....


That is 1TB per volume due to the current Tivo LBA implementation, so e-sata would give two 1TB maximum drives.


----------



## aaronwt

Sweet!! I just upgraded one of my S3 boxes with a 500GB WD drive using the Bumwine method. It's showing "up to 65hours HD or 610 SD" in the system info screen.
I used two PATA to SATA adapters and an old P3 1Ghz PC. It took 3 hours for the copy but everything seems to be working fine. I'll do the next one later this week and then the third S3 after they install those cables cards.


----------



## Bruce Houston

TiVo Series 3 Power/SATA Connector is universal on any SATA2 drive and can also be used on original SATA Drives. It is just the SATA Power Connector and SATA Interface cable connected into one cable. I'm using it successfully on my S3 with an Maxtor MaxLine Pro 500 Model 7H500F0 500 GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Drive!! Good Luck to y'all!!


----------



## aaronwt

I upgraded my Second S3 tonight. Everything seems ok. I did notice a few audio dropouts but they didn't occur over OTA just digital cable so I hope the Cable card is oK. 
I did notice when I was enabling acoustic management thet the stock drive only has a 2MB buffer. The new drives I put in have a 16MB cache.


----------



## aaronwt

I've ordered a WD5000AAKS 500GB drive which is the one that has 3 platters instead of 4 and supposedly a 3 year warranty. I'm going to use that instead of the RE2 version that was damaged incase WD doesn't accept my claim to replace the drive. If they do replace it I figure I can save it or sell the RE2 model
Hopefully the 3 platter drive is just as quiet as their 4 platter drives.


----------



## tweekerz

The http://www.bumwine.com/tivo.html is the best process for Series 2 SA or S3 Hands Down


----------



## ThreeSoFar

tweekerz said:


> The http://www.bumwine.com/tivo.html is the best process for Series 2 SA or S3 Hands Down


easiest, maybe.

In the sense that they work just fine, though, there are several equivalent methods.


----------



## haysdb

I just ordered a 500GB Seagate DB35 from Page Computer, part #ST3500830SCE. They are the only place I was able to find that drive. They also claim to have the 750 GB model in stock.


----------



## 1283

For 500GB, I would recommend WD5000YS which also has 5-year warranty. Cheaper (got mine for <$150) and better RMA process than Seagate in case you need it.


----------



## brossow

I'd also point out that any new WD drive can get an upgraded warranty for an additional $15. I ended up getting the KS drive for my second S3 because I had store credit at Best Buy I could use instead of paying cash (_muy importante_ after the holidays!)


----------



## 1283

brossow said:


> I'd also point out that any new WD drive can get an upgraded warranty for an additional $15.


Retail drive with 1-year warranty can be upgraded to 3 years for $15. Consumer bare drives already have 3-year warranty. Enterprise drives have 5-year warranty.


----------



## ThreeSoFar

haysdb said:


> I just ordered a 500GB Seagate DB35 from Page Computer, part #ST3500830SCE. They are the only place I was able to find that drive. They also claim to have the 750 GB model in stock.


And Seagates are loud. At least the one I sent back was, and I've seen others say the same.


----------



## 1283

ThreeSoFar said:


> And Seagates are loud. At least the one I sent back was, and I've seen others say the same.


haysdb ordered a DB35, not the regular kind.


----------



## haysdb

ThreeSoFar said:


> And Seagates are loud. At least the one I sent back was, and I've seen others say the same.


I strongly suspect you bought the wrong drive. There are differences between the DB35's (7200.2 and 7200.3) and the other Seagate models. The DB35 is designed for streaming video (DVR's and Media PC's), the others are not.

Has anyone complained that their DB35 was too loud?


----------



## BrianCT

Silly question, but when using the bumwine method, and you have the 2 drives connected and the CDRom drive, how are you supposed to open a web broswer (step 10) or access your desktop (step 11)? It has been a long day, so forgive me if this is dumb.


----------



## greg_burns

BrianCT said:


> Silly question, but when using the bumwine method, and you have the 2 drives connected and the CDRom drive, how are you supposed to open a web broswer (step 10) or access your desktop (step 11)? It has been a long day, so forgive me if this is dumb.


bumwine method involves using Knoppix, which is a Live CD distro of Linux. Basically the CD rom boots a full graphical OS and runs from the CD and ram entirely. From within this OS you can open a web browser, etc.


----------



## Maeglin

BrianCT said:


> Silly question, but when using the bumwine method, and you have the 2 drives connected and the CDRom drive, how are you supposed to open a web broswer (step 10)...


Live Linux filesystem on the CD... the browser is there.



> ...or access your desktop (step 11)?


RAM disk.

If you're thinking in terms of Windows and the notion that every OS requires a read/write hard drive to function, leave that world behind temporarily.


----------



## BrianCT

Thanks, greg, I knew it had to be something easy! Good advice, Maegelin...


----------



## aaronwt

BrianCT said:


> Silly question, but when using the bumwine method, and you have the 2 drives connected and the CDRom drive, how are you supposed to open a web broswer (step 10) or access your desktop (step 11)? It has been a long day, so forgive me if this is dumb.


Also I found out the best thing to do is let the drive copy. Don't open the browser and download MFSTools until the drive finishes the copy. That way it goes much, much faster. I'm using an old 1GHZ P3 PC for the Bumwine method with ide to SATA converters. The first and second time I did a copy I opened the web browser during the process and it ate up someof the bandwidth. It took 3 to 3.5 hours for the copy. For my third S3 I did the copy first before doing anything with the web browser. it only took around 2 hours and 20 minutes that time. Of course if you use a faster PC the process will go much faster but I didn't feel like messing around with one of my newer PC. The old P3 used to be my HTPC in 2002 and now I only use it for the TiVo drives.


----------



## BrianCT

I appreciate the help, guys! Now I am trying to figure out which 500GB drive to get, the Seagates are recommended I know, but the W/D prices are good at the moment. I noticed two W/D drives mentioned here in the forums, and NewEgg has them both, why the $20 difference? Are they basically the same drive?


----------



## greg_burns

BrianCT said:


> I appreciate the help, guys! Now I am trying to figure out which 500GB drive to get, the Seagates are recommended I know, but the W/D prices are good at the moment. I noticed two W/D drives mentioned here in the forums, and NewEgg has them both, why the $20 difference? Are they basically the same drive?


WD YS has a 5yr warranty
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822136032


----------



## aaronwt

Just don't get the 5000AAKS drive. The one with only 3 platters for 500GB. It is fairly quiet but there is no acoustical management so it isn't as quiet as the 5000KS or 5000YS with their AM enabled. I'm still waiting to see if WD replaces one of the YS drives I got from Newegg. Hopefully they will replace it and I can replace my AAKS drive with the YS drive. Although the AAKS drive makes the the TiVo 1 or 2 degrees cooler though. It's just not right for my bedroom. I might just switch it(after spending several hours to copy it)with the driive I have in the S3 in my computer room and then I can sell the YS drive assuming WD does replace it.


----------



## 1283

What's really different about the "Bumwine method"? Native SATA support with that Linux version? If you're using an IDE-SATA adapter, the standard boot CDs from Weaknees and PTVUpgrade work just fine.


----------



## BrianCT

True, but I could run the bumwine method without waiting for the CD to arrive from Weaknees or PTV.


----------



## 1283

BrianCT said:


> True, but I could run the bumwine method without waiting for the CD to arrive from Weaknees or PTV.


Unless something has changed, those are free downloads.


----------



## greg_burns

BrianCT said:


> True, but I could run the bumwine method without waiting for the CD to arrive from Weaknees or PTV.


Weaknees is a free download. Much smaller download than Knoppix I might add if you don't have broadband.

I have yet to see someone confirm their cablecards continue to work using anything but bumewine "dd" copy. But maybe I missed it.


----------



## aaronwt

The bumwine method with Knoppix uses a GUI. Does the disc from Weaknees or PTV use a GUI? I haven't used weaknees or PTV with the S3. But I'm soldon th eBumwine method. After 3 times I have the process down solid now, it's just takes a while to copy with the old PC I'm using.


----------



## 1283

greg_burns said:


> I have yet to see someone confirm their cablecards continue to work using anything but bumewine "dd" copy.


No need for the bumwine version to use "dd".


----------



## 1283

aaronwt said:


> The bumwine method with Knoppix uses a GUI.


What's the GUI for? Aren't you still typing commands in a shell window?


----------



## aaronwt

c3 said:


> What's the GUI for? Aren't you still typing commands in a shell window?


You are but then you have to download MFSTools using the browser plus it has the drivers for all the peripherals like the network card, mouse etc.


----------



## greg_burns

c3 said:


> No need for the bumwine version to use "dd".


ACK. But the weaknees instructions doesn't mention it and bumwine does. 



c3 said:


> What's the GUI for? Aren't you still typing commands in a shell window?


Another good point. Personally, I was surfing the internet using Firefox on same PC while my dd copy was going on. Can't do that with weaknees.


----------



## 1283

aaronwt said:


> You are but then you have to download MFSTools using the browser plus it has the drivers for all the peripherals like the network card, mouse etc.


With the Weaknees/PTVUpgrade CD, there is no need for network, mouse, etc. MFSTools is already included on the CD.


----------



## JSP

greg_burns said:


> I have yet to see someone confirm their cablecards continue to work using anything but bumewine "dd" copy. But maybe I missed it.


I can confirm that a full mfstools backup/restore pipeline using, for example, the weaknees_sata.iso and weaknees tivo upgrade instructions preserves the information needed to keep the cablecards working. That's the way I upgraded my Series3 and I had no cablecard problems after the upgrade.


----------



## greg_burns

JSP said:


> I can confirm that a full mfstools backup/restore pipeline using, for example, the weaknees_sata.iso and weaknees tivo upgrade instructions preserves the information needed to keep the cablecards working. That's the way I upgraded my Series3 and I had no cablecard problems after the upgrade.


Glad to hear. :up:

Maybe I can back up my 250GB now and reuse the drive for something else. How large a backup (no recordings) is it? I assume it will fit on a CD or DVD.


----------



## 1283

Slightly under 2GB for mine.


----------



## JSP

c3 said:


> Slightly under 2GB for mine.


Did the backup include the "TiVo Video Tour" videos shiped on a stock drive? Those are pretty big. In my experience, an mfs_backup *-f* value below 7000 or a *-l* below 100 should exclude them.


----------



## 1283

I used 9999, so the tour videos were preserved.


----------



## ashu

As with every single one of my past upgrades, I bet I'll want to copy the shows too (I willl create, test & archive a barebones backup first). I'll let folks know, sometime over the next few months, how long a 250GB SATA-SATA copy takes 

Although some judicious quick viewing/deleting will delete many GBs at a time, so I might pare it down somewhat!


----------



## greg_burns

ashu said:


> As with every single one of my past upgrades, I bet I'll want to copy the shows too (I willl create, test & archive a barebones backup first). I'll let folks know, sometime over the next few months, how long a 250GB SATA-SATA copy takes
> 
> Although some judicious quick viewing/deleting will delete many GBs at a time, so I might pare it down somewhat!


If you use "dd" it will copy the entire 250GB no matter how much is "used".

Mine took 4235 seconds. 
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=4479921&&#post4479921


----------



## haysdb

c3 said:


> No need for the bumwine version to use "dd".


I'm sorry, what does that mean? dd pretty much IS the bumwine method, isn't it?

My new drive should arrive tomorrow or Monday. I have the knoppix iso burned to a CD. Haven't tried to boot from it yet, but I should probably do that here in a bit just to make sure it works.


----------



## 1283

haysdb said:


> I'm sorry, what does that mean? dd pretty much IS the bumwine method, isn't it?


I have been using dd with mfsadd for many years. In fact, dd was the only method before mfstools came out, so there is really nothing new.


----------



## greg_burns

haysdb said:


> I'm sorry, what does that mean? dd pretty much IS the bumwine method, isn't it?
> 
> My new drive should arrive tomorrow or Monday. I have the knoppix iso burned to a CD. Haven't tried to boot from it yet, but I should probably do that here in a bit just to make sure it works.


dd is just a generic linux command. You don't need Knoppix to run it. You could (I suppse) just use the weaknees .iso instead.

But then how would you surf the web? 

Edit: make sure you downloaded the english language version of Knoppix, not the DE - German one. Boy was that a confusing thread...


----------



## ashu

dd is merely disk duplication. Been around since the dawn of Unix-kind.

It'll copy a smaller disk to a larger one, and then running mfsadd configures the important parts of the copied data (config/partition info) to use the additional space for further storage.


----------



## greg_burns

ashu said:


> dd is merely disk duplication.


Did you just make that up?  Seems to fit though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)


> dd is a common Unix program whose primary purpose is the low-level copying and conversion of files. Some have suggested that it stands for Copy and Convert, but since "cc" was already in use as the code for the C Compiler, "dd" was used instead


----------



## haysdb

That sounds like Unix. Perfectly obvious to Unix-types, and completely incomprehensible to everyone else.

I just read through the *Weaknees instructions*. I am amazed that they can take something so simple...
Shut down your computer
Plug in two drives
Boot from a Linux CD
Run ONE command
Plug the new drive into the Tivo
...and make it so confusing...


> Connect your TiVo Drive(s) to your PC


Shouldn't we maybe shut down our PC first?



> Open your PC and connect the drive you removed to an open SATA port. You must keep the CD-ROM and the backup destination drive connected.


Again they tell us to connect the drives before they tell us to shut down, and then immediately after telling us to connect both drives, they say to keep one of them connected. Is it really necessary to tell people to "keep the CD-ROM and the backup destination drive connected"? Do some people actually disconnect one of them immediately after plugging it in? And "backup drive" is not really an appropriate term when doing an upgrade.



> Hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE


NOW they tell us to shut down. And sure, you can DO it that way, but how about Start --> Turn Off Computer ? Or just say "Power down your computer." If you don't know HOW to do that...
1/27/07 update: As has been pointed out in a subsequent post, at this point you are in Linux rather than Windows, so these instructions are correct.



> You are done! Power the TiVo back up and go to TiVo Central


Shouldn't we plug the new drive into the Tivo first?

They alternately assume we're smart enough to rearrange their instructions into chronological order, and then they condescend to state the bleedin' obvious.

mfsbackup is nice because it's ONE command and done, with nothing to download beyond the iso. Decipher the instructions successfully and it's a winner.

Bottom line for me: this process may well work, and in fact I assume it does, but there is a sloppiness about the instructions that leaves my uninspired.


----------



## haysdb

Quick summary of the available upgrade methods methods:
Bumwine
Weaknees
MFSLive
Hinsdale - has fallen out of favor because it's more complicated than the other methods
InstantCake - link coming (maybe)
Continuing on with my quick-and-dirty reviews...

*MFSLive*. I like this. The instructions are simple bullets, links that you can drill down into for more detail. Simple, but lots of elaboration if you need it. And the pop-shot is, like the Weaknees method, a single command.

The ICG (Interactive Command Generator) is clever, useful, and simple to use. It generates the appropriate Linux command based on a brief "quiz." Define your configuration with drop-down boxes, click a couple of radio buttons, and bink, the proper command is spit out for easy cut-and-pace.

Negatives:

1) Mention of the Series 3 is lacking in some places, leaving one to wonder whether the instructions will work for a Series 3. This is an inexplicable oversight.
1/27/07 Update: The instructions have been updated to include mention of the Series 3 when the Series 2 instructions also apply to the S3.

2) The instructions end a little before the end of the process. OK, it's pretty obvious what the next steps are (shut down, unplug the drives, plug your C: drive back in, install the new drive into the Tivo), but I think their should be one more step in the instructions just so people know that they are indeed at the end and aren't just missing the next page of the instructions.
1/27/07 Update: The instructions have been revised and now take you all the way to the end of the process.

These are obviously more "minor quibbles" than harsh criticisms.

I'm really tempted to try this one first because it's the easiest to understand (so far) while also giving a strong sense of competence, that the author really knows what he's doing.

Edit: Something odd. I cut and pasted the command generated the first time I went through the ICG. I went through it again later and...different command! What's more, the written instruction show yet a third command. Which is the correct one? I'm not finding a "man page" for this backup command, so I don't know what T, s, and -f do.


Code:


backup -f 9999 -qso - /dev/sda | restore -s 128      -xzpi - /dev/sdb

backup        -qTao - /dev/sda | restore -s 128      -xzpi - /dev/sdb

backup        -qTao - /dev/hdc | restore -s 128 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdd


----------



## haysdb

Note: my "reviews" are based on a brief look at the INSTRUCTIONS. I am not judging how well the procedures work (I don't know) or how long each method takes, but only on how "accessible" the process is for someone coming in cold to the world of Tivo upgrades. I am a "computer guy," comfortable with poking around inside a PC case, and not overly intimidated with Unix/Linux, but I also appreciate clear and concise instructions which are not condescending.

*Bumwine*

Clear step-by-step instructions, easily read top-to-bottom (in contrast to the Weaknees instructions). One beef I have is the Linux commands are buried within the instructions - I'd like to see them put on their own line so they stand out and are easy to read.

Although the instructions are easy to follow, there are quite a few more steps than the MFSLive or Weaknees methods. Opening a browser, downloading a file, extracting a file from it - it's not difficult or complicated, it's just a lot more individual steps.

Edit: After looking at three different methods, this one inspires me with the most confidence and is the one I plan to use myself.


----------



## 1283

If you pick an older/more popular model such as the 540040 from the Weaknees site, the instructions are better. They just copied the pieces and did not clean up.


----------



## haysdb

c3 said:


> If you pick an older/more popular model such as the 540040 from the Weaknees site, the instructions are better. They just copied the pieces and did not clean up.


The instructions feel like "generated code." Based on a series of questions, the instructions are ostensibly tailored to each persons individual configuration. That may be true, but the result feels "sloppy."

Is there a "poll" for enumerating how many people have used each method? I've done a lot of reading, but don't have a good sense for how "popular" each of the methods are. I have to assume the Weaknees method has been used a lot, since the company is such a prominent name in the Tivo upgrade community.


----------



## haysdb

Here are the copy commands for three of the methods. The overall upgrade process is basically the same for every method, with these commands being the only significant difference. And even here, all three use mfstools in some capacity, so they actually differ in pretty minor ways. The MFSLive backup command was forked from the mfstools source code and is therefore essentially the same thing as the mfsbackup command used by Weaknees.

Bumwine


Code:


dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024k                  ; Copy the drive

/home/knoppix/Desktop/mfstool add -x /dev/sdb -r 4   ; Expand the partition

Weaknees


Code:


mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/sdX | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/sdZ

MFSLive


Code:


backup -f 9999 -qso  - /dev/sda | restore -s 128      -xzpi - /dev/sdb
OR
backup         -qTao - /dev/sda | restore -s 128      -xzpi - /dev/sdb
OR
backup         -qTao - /dev/hdc | restore -s 128 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdd  ; Series 2 command


----------



## 1283

You need "-r 4" when you increase the capacity by more than 256GB per drive. Otherwise, you don't, although people say "-r 4" can improve performance.


----------



## haysdb

I think the term MFSLive came from the fact that the last stable release of mfstools was February of 2005 and nobody is working on it anymore, i.e. it's "dead." MFSLive is mfstools with some bug fixes and a few new features.

Both Bumwine and Weaknees use the Feb 2005 version of mfstools.


----------



## haysdb

c3 said:


> You need "-r 4" when you increase the capacity by more than 256GB per drive. Otherwise, you don't, although people say "-r 4" can improve performance.


I'm hearing that it may not be "necessary" when upgrading from 250GB to 500GB, but also that there is no harm in it. At worst it will do nothing.

Is there any way to determine the block size on an existing drive using mfstools or any of the utilities that come with any of the Linux distros (knoppix, etc.)? I'm curious what the block size is on the OE Series 3 drives. Is it 1 MB?

From the MFSLive FAQ:


> r 0 = 2048 sectors or (1MB blocks) (TiVo and blesstivo default)
> r 1 = 4096 sectors or (2MB blocks)
> r 2 = 8192 sectors or (4MB blocks) (mfstools default)
> r 3 = 16384 sectors or (8MB blocks)
> r 4 = 32768 sectors or (16MB blocks)


----------



## 1283

The mfsrestore bugs are related to swap size more than 127MB and the size of non-active root partitions. With dd and mfsadd, there is no issue with the Feb 2005 version. Since dd produces an exact duplicate of the original factory drive, that's my preferred method, instead of mfsbackup and mfsrestore.


----------



## haysdb

Post 128 in this thread by Agent86 indicates that mfstools (and presumably MFSLive) is dramatically (as much as 10 times) faster than dd. Not that a couple of hours is a huge imposition when upgrading one drive.

So from a speed standpoint, weaknees and MSFLive will both be faster than the Bumwide method which uses dd to do the copy.
Edit: each of the other distros also include dd, so selecting one of the mfstools iiso's would give the option of using either one.

If the mfstools bugs are an issue, then MFSLive gets the nod, assuming it hasn't introduce NEW bugs.
Edit: Have read elsewhere that the weaknees iso includes these bug fixes also.

I'm leaning toward MFSLive. It's fast, it's simple, the instructions are clear, and there may actually be someone to ask questions of (the author) if any sort of problem is encountered.

Edit:
Fixed MFSTools - Introducing MFSLive



> This software is GREAT and the guy will help you if you E-Mail him, he answers quickly.


I suppose I should apologize for the bomb of posts, but I hope I have added something to the thread. After coming to my conclusions more or less iindependently, I expected to find tons of posts on MFSLive and people saying things like "hey, dude, use the search button." But when I searched for MFSLive, I didn't really find much, so maybe my "research" adds something to the overall discussion.


----------



## 1283

haysdb said:


> Post 128 in this thread by Agent86 indicates that mfstools (and presumably MFSLive) is dramatically (as much as 10 times) faster than dd.


Faster only because no user video was copied.


----------



## haysdb

c3 said:


> Faster only because no user video was copied.


I missed that little detail I guess. So then mfstools is not faster than dd, or just not ten times faster?


----------



## haysdb

c3 said:


> The mfsrestore bugs are related to swap size more than 127MB and the size of non-active root partitions. With dd and mfsadd, there is no issue with the Feb 2005 version. Since dd produces an exact duplicate of the original factory drive, that's my preferred method, instead of mfsbackup and mfsrestore.


So mfsbackup and mfsrestore do NOT make exact duplicates? Why is this an issue, or a potential issue?


----------



## 1283

If you have a full drive to copy, there is no way mfstools can be faster than dd, unless mfstools is able to skip certain "unused" or "unnecessary" areas. /tmp /swap and /var are the obvious ones, but their sizes are small. I don't know how smart mfstools is related to the recorded but deleted video streams. Personally, I'd rather copy everything (dd) instead of letting a program decide what should and should not be copied.


----------



## 1283

haysdb said:


> So mfsbackup and mfsrestore do NOT make exact duplicates? Why is this an issue, or a potential issue?


Nope. The recreated partition sizes may be slightly smaller. The mfstools author said the unused space is not needed because the size is smaller than the minimum file allocation unit (or something to that effect).

I'm not saying that mfstools has problem or potential problem. It's just something I would rather not use when I can use dd.


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## greg_burns

haysdb said:


> I just read through the *Weaknees instructions*. I am amazed that they can take something so simple...
> Shut down your computer
> Plug in two drives
> Boot from a Linux CD
> Run ONE command
> Plug the new drive into the Tivo
> ...and make it so confusing...
> *Shouldn't we maybe shut down our PC first?*





haysdb said:


> and then they condescend to state the bleedin' obvious.


Which is it? 



haysdb said:


> And "backup drive" is not really an appropriate term when doing an upgrade.


Not sure the context here, but there is a part where you can optionally "backup" your Tivo OS to a FAT drive.



haysdb said:


> NOW they tell us to shut down. And sure, you can DO it that way, but how about Start --> Turn Off Computer ? Or just say "Power down your computer." If you don't know HOW to do that...


You won't be in Windows, instead a Linux command prompt. No Start button. CTRL-ALT-DELETE properly dismounts the drives in Linux. Is that necessary? I don't know, and I don't want to find out!


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## spike2k5

This method is the slowest because it copies bit by bit but works.



> Bumwine
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024k                  ; Copy the drive
> 
> /home/knoppix/Desktop/mfstool add -x /dev/sdb -r 4   ; Expand the partition[/QUOTE]
> 
> Both Weakness & mfslive are little quicker because it does some short cuts to save transfer time.  If your drive is full of shows, you might as well do dd because it's not going to make much difference.
> 
> [QUOTE]Weaknees mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/sdX | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/sdZ[/QUOTE]
> 
> This command is used to truncate shows and just copy tivo software, all of MFS w/o shows.
> [QUOTE]MFSLive
> 
> backup -f 9999 -qso  - /dev/sda | restore -s 128      -xzpi - /dev/sdb[/QUOTE]
> 
> This command is used to copy everything and expand the new drive to fill the extra space.
> [QUOTE]backup         -qTao - /dev/sda | restore -s 128      -xzpi - /dev/sdb[/QUOTE]
> 
> Same as above but if your new drive creates new partition greate than 274GB, you won't be able to boot your TiVo due what I think is Tivo software bug.
> So hard drive equal or smaller than 500GB for Series 3 won't need this (-r 4). 500GB-250GB = 250GB so no chance of creating new partition greater than 274GB.
> [QUOTE]backup         -qTao - /dev/hdc | restore -s 128 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdd [/QUOTE]
> 
> MFSTools has been around for a while and it's well proven to work.
> MFSLive website & bootcd is only 2 months old.  It's compilation of fixed-up I did on mfstools since Tiger (original author) stop working on it and few other tools were added.
> Boot cd kernel & drivers are new so it will work well with newer hardware and added SATA support for Series 3.
> 
> Nothing much has changed on Series 3 when it comes to capacity upgrade other than it's using SATA drive, so you can apply Series 2 techniques on Series 3.


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## haysdb

Thank you spk2K5.

I notice you have made a few changes to the instructions. I have edited my original "review" to make note of the fact that the instructions do now take the user through to the end of the process, and "Series 3" has been added in a couple of spots to make explicit that the instructions for the Series 2 apply equally to the Series 3.

What is the purpose of the stand-alone dashes after -qTao and -xzpi ?


Code:


backup -qTao - /dev/sda | restore -s 128 -xzpi - /dev/sdb

Are the backup and restore commands documented somewhere? I would like to know what each of the switches do.

Edit: Answered both of my own questions. -o - means to send the output to stdout. Likewise -i - means to read from stdin. These are neccessary in order to pipe the output from backup to restore.

I posted documentation of the switches here in the Fixed MFSTools - Introducing MFSLive thread.


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## ashu

(Minor clarification)
-o means you are about to provide an output destination. Providing NONE is akin to requesting stdout output.


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## ThreeSoFar

ashu said:


> (Minor clarification)
> -o means you are about to provide an output destination. Providing NONE is akin to requesting stdout output.


No, it's not. Providing "-" (a dash) as the argument to -o is saying send it to standard out, as in the "backup -Tao - .... | restore -i - ....." option of duping a TiVo, shows and all.

Providing no argument to -o is a syntax error. Putting something like /dev/hda there, where that's supposed to be your TiVo, may well wipe the TiVo drive.


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## ThreeSoFar

And FYI, just run "restore" or "backup" (or mfsrestore or mfsbackup if that's your poison), with NO arguments at all, and you get the usage statement.


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## Thos19

Hi,

Will this converter allow me to use my Dell 4400 to do the upgrade?

SATA to IDE

I take it, if I'm just going to do an image restore, I only need one. If I'm going to try to clone the drive, then I need 2 ?

Thanks,

Thos.


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## generaltso

It should work with any computer that has an IDE controller. If your image is going to be stored on an IDE drive, you'll only need one adapter.


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## ThreeSoFar

Thos19 said:


> Hi,
> 
> Will this converter allow me to use my Dell 4400 to do the upgrade?
> 
> SATA to IDE
> 
> I take it, if I'm just going to do an image restore, I only need one. If I'm going to try to clone the drive, then I need 2 ?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Thos.


And you'll need one SATA cable per drive (just one unless you're doing SATA to SATA).

But power-cable-wise, you should be fine. It'll take EITHER the older format power, which you have already, or the new SATA type.


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## ThreeSoFar

ThreeSoFar said:


> And you'll need one SATA cable per drive (just one unless you're doing SATA to SATA).
> 
> But power-cable-wise, you should be fine. It'll take EITHER the older format power, which you have already, or the new SATA type.


And your link describes it comes with a power splitter, but NOT with any SATA cable.


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## generaltso

You won't need any SATA cables if you're using that adapter in a computer with an IDE contoller. You'll use a regular IDE ribbon cable to go from the IDE contoller to the adapter. Then the adapter will plug directly into the SATA drive.


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## ThreeSoFar

generaltso said:


> You won't need any SATA cables if you're using that adapter in a computer with an IDE contoller. You'll use a regular IDE ribbon cable to go from the IDE contoller to the adapter. Then the adapter will plug directly into the SATA drive.


He's right, of course. I thought I saw a PCI edge connector on that board, like it was a SATA controller, vs. a IDE/SATA converter.

FYI, I bought a SATA PCI controller for about the same price and it works fine. Well, about $6 more counting the SATA cables I needed. Also gives me more wiggle room as far as having multiple drives (not having to worry about having enough spare IDE slots).


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## Thos19

Just an update....

The adapter worked, and my upgrade went surprisingly (to me at least) fast and smooth. I now have 65hours of HD recording available to me. 

Thos.


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## haysdb

When do you have time to watch 65 hours of TV?

I have a 500GB drive on order myself, but am almost wondering what I'm going to do with it that I can't do with the 250GB drive. I already don't have time to watch everything I record in a week as it is.

Just me rambling on, feel free to ignore me...

I want the larger drive so that I can record some movies that I may not want to watch for awhile. Some movies (or TV shows) I just have to be in the mood for, and sometimes those moods don't come around that often. And I will be able to give some generous padding to baseball games, which can take 2.5 hours, or they can take 4 hours, you just never know.

I find myself wondering what the economic life of a 500GB Tivo S3 will be. About the only things I can see on the horizon that might "obsolete" the current model would be Switched Digital, or if On Demand evolves into something I want. There will be no new broadcast standards or output formats for a LONG time and no new digital interfaces, and the software can be upgraded to handle other stuff that comes along, like downloadable movies. I'm thinking I could have my Series 3 for quite a long time.

Another reason that causes some hardware to become "obsolete" is when the hardware isn't that good. Current generation Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players fall into this category. The S3 hardware appears to be rock solid and well up to the tasks it's asked to do. I have not experienced so much as a glitch with mine in the 5 or 6 weeks that I have had it, and it's fast enough that I won't be that enticed by a faster processor or more memory, so long as Tivo doesn't allow their software to get big and slow.

The bottom line for me is it seemed like an outrageous amount to pay (over $1000 for the S3 and a lifetime sub) for the S3, but I have REALLY enjoyed this device. It basically offers NONE of the frustrations I had with two different "free" DVR's. Spending another $200 to double the storage capacity feels like a pretty good investment.


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## brossow

haysdb said:


> When do you have time to watch 65 hours of TV?


Not in an average week, that's for sure! I did it (1) just because I could and (2) because now I simply have to make NO decisions about what to keep and what to delete nor do I have to worry about episodes getting wiped out to make room for something else before I have a chance to see them. A terabyte of storage is overkill in the extreme, but it was a fun project and gives nice peace of mind.


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## tripmaster

brossow said:


> Not in an average week, that's for sure! I did it (1) just because I could and (2) because now I simply have to make NO decisions about what to keep and what to delete nor do I have to worry about episodes getting wiped out to make room for something else before I have a chance to see them. A terabyte of storage is overkill in the extreme, but it was a fun project and gives nice peace of mind.


Seems like the rule of thumb is to get as much storage as possible with these things.

I have the 750gb option and it allows me to record HD shows with near impunity!


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## Bierboy

tripmaster said:


> Seems like the rule of thumb is to get as much storage as possible with these things.
> 
> I have the 750gb option and it allows me to record HD shows with near impunity!


Me, too! Hard to keep track of it all....


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## Bierboy

haysdb said:


> ...About the only things I can see on the horizon that might "obsolete" the current model would be Switched Digital, or if On Demand evolves into something I want. There will be no new broadcast standards or output formats for a LONG time and no new digital interfaces, and the software can be upgraded to handle other stuff that comes along, like downloadable movies. I'm thinking I could have my Series 3 for quite a long time....


I plan on that, too. The large HD allows "archiving" without having to move it off the HD.


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