# Replace 2rd HD question



## purplerhino12 (Jan 3, 2006)

Hi,

I just upgraded my Tivo 540040 with a second hard drive last weekend. It went well but the drive I used was old and now it whistling quite a bit. I want to replace that upgraded drive will a new one and was wondering if I have to someone remove the second drive from the mfs mount before installing the new drive.

I did do a backup and I guess worst case, I could restore that to the original drive.

Any advice would be appreciated.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

You can not go back and keep recordings.

One possible way is to replace just the failing drive. To do this Install just the noisy Drive and the replacement Drive in the PC. Boot to Linux from your LBA48 MFSTools cd, use the Linux command dd or cp to make an "image" copy of the noisy drive on the new drive. Key *dd --help* or *cp --help* for the command usage. If the source is primary slave and the destination is secondary slave the cp command would look something like *cp /dev/hdb /dev/hdd* *DOUBLE check the command* getting it wrong *WILL* wipe out all data on the drive then you will have to restore both drives from the backup.

If the new drive is larger then after you verify that the new drive is working you can expand the drive using mfsadd you will need both the TiVo 'A' and 'B' drives installed in the PC to do that.


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## purplerhino12 (Jan 3, 2006)

Thanks HomeUser.

I tried your recommedations last night. The cp worked fine but the mfsadd would not expand to the new hard drive size. 

I had already moved the recordings off, so I ended up restoring from backup and running the mfsadd on the new drive. The new drive and the Tivo are working great. 

Thanks again.


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## NikkiSixx (Sep 21, 2005)

Hi guys, I'm running into the same problem. I'm running a 300gig A drive and a 160gig B drive in a new 540040 standalone. I did alot of reading and ended up DD'ing my 160gig drive to a new second 300gig. Once installed and booted, tivo still thinks it's the 160gig that was in there. I pulled the drives and did more reading from a DOC that i believe Tiga wrote I found on another site. It looked promising but the command thats supposed to expand the B drive doesn't work I get "drive is alreadty at 525hrs" "nothing to do" I have run out of space using high quality mode and want to keep my recordings as well as upgrade the B drive a final time to make the Tivo a twin 300gig unit. My question is how do you expand a B drive that's been DD'ed from your original (smaller) so that a guy gets to use the extra space on the new B drive? 
Thanks for any help

Nikki
540040 300g+160g USB broadband
540040 120g USB broadband


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