# Advanced format drive for a S2 DirecTiVo?



## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

Has anyone successfully used one of the Western Digital AV-GP advanced format drives in a Series 2 DirecTiVo? I'm going to attempt to revive a Hughes HDRV2, and I can get a WD10EURX to use with my Rosewill RC-A-SATA-IDE SATA/IDE adapter for about $100. Is this an exercise in futility, and if so, what currently available drive is among the recommended for a Series 2 with LB48-aware 6.4a software?


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

I also have a pair of Hitachi hdt721050sla360 500 GB SATA drives in my spare parts pile. They are not advanced format, but they do run at 7200 RPM with similar power draw numbers to the 2 TB Western Digital WD20EURS I just put in my TiVo HD. I'll probably experiment with those first since I already have them on hand.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

If the 500GB drive works I'd just stick with that. It's a lot of hours of SD recording.


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

Yeah, they're the easiest thing to try anyway. I've been going through my supply of disks lately and I've had a bunch of dead soldiers on hand.


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## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

I'm currently testing a WD20EURS drive on a S2 DTivo. I've paid special attention to the number of hoops to jump through to get a full 2TB working on a Series2, and also to keeping the partitions aligned. I have seen some partition tables where the bootstrap partitions are a single sector (512bytes) in size. If that occurs, it looks as though that will cause the rest of the partitions to be misaligned. 

Normally, bootstrap partitions are 4kB in size, which results in proper partition alignment.


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

Thanks CrashHD, I have been watching your progress at ddb.


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## BobCamp1 (May 15, 2002)

CrashHD said:


> I'm currently testing a WD20EURS drive on a S2 DTivo. I've paid special attention to the number of hoops to jump through to get a full 2TB working on a Series2, and also to keeping the partitions aligned. I have seen some partition tables where the bootstrap partitions are a single sector (512bytes) in size. If that occurs, it looks as though that will cause the rest of the partitions to be misaligned.
> 
> Normally, bootstrap partitions are 4kB in size, which results in proper partition alignment.


Apple's were typically 800 kB in size, which is 1600 sectors, which still keeps the drive aligned.


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## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

Is that why the bootstrap partitions are there? It's an Apple partition manager thing?


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## BobCamp1 (May 15, 2002)

CrashHD said:


> Is that why the bootstrap partitions are there? It's an Apple partition manager thing?


I presume the bootstrap partition contains the Linux bootloader. In the old Macs (PowerPC), this is the only partition type that the "BIOS" could load and execute. (The Mac OS would not mount this partition). This bootstrap partition would have some simple program that loaded the kernel from a different partition (or if it had yaboot, allow you to choose which partition to boot from, if you had multiple OSs on one machine).

There was usually only one bootstrap partition, yet Tivo has two. Apparently Tivo designed the box so that even the bootstrap code was upgradeable and counted as part of the image (kind of defeats its purpose, but very flexible).

Since the bootstrap partition contained a very small program, you wanted it as small as possible as unused sectors in that partition would lead to precious wasted space on a 40 MB hard drive. But now we have 2 TB drives, so who cares?

If Tivo balks at increasing the bootstraps' partition sizes, just align the next partition so it starts on an LBA that's a multiple of 8. There will be a tiny amount of unpartitioned (and unused) space, but who cares?


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## TEDALLAS (Aug 6, 2010)

CrashHD said:


> I'm currently testing a WD20EURS drive on a S2 DTivo. I've paid special attention to the number of hoops to jump through to get a full 2TB working on a Series2, and also to keeping the partitions aligned. I have seen some partition tables where the bootstrap partitions are a single sector (512bytes) in size. If that occurs, it looks as though that will cause the rest of the partitions to be misaligned.
> 
> Normally, bootstrap partitions are 4kB in size, which results in proper partition alignment.


Were you ever successful in getting the WD20EURS to work on a Series2?


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## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

Yes. I have two of them running like this, one with standard 512 byte sectors, and one 4K sector drive. I periodically get a stutter in the video, which is usually followed by a reboot. They can be fine for weeks at a time, and then do this twice in an evening, with no particular pattern to it. I don't think it's related to the drives, I think it's a combination of 10 year old hardware, and a nearly 2TB MFS simply pushing that old hardware/software to the limit.

Sorry for the delayed response. Life has been getting in the way of tivo lately.


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

TiVo bootstrap partitions in the S3 and S4 series are all null and contain no code. Not sure about earlier TiVos but I assume the same.

Sometimes failing capacitors in the power supply can cause problems with reboots.


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