# Success upgrading Tivo HD 652160 with WinFMS/WD Red WD20EFRX



## Ratamacue (Dec 12, 2002)

I've got a 652160 box with lifetime service that I wanted to upgrade, and thanks to you good people the process went without a hitch. It had 1 TB drive that I used Instant Cake on when the (ridiculously expensive) DVR expander drive enclosure failed a few years ago. Using WinMFS along with a WD Red WD20EFRX drive on a Windows 10 machine, I now have 318 hours of HD recording capability on this dinosaur.

For anyone who wants to perform this operation, you'll find that the original Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ (Last Updated: August/12/2010) is a bit long in the tooth. The discussion regarding the maximum single drive capacity is no longer true as long as you are running updated firmware (11.0m-01-2-652 is last one Tivo pushed.) Most of the instructions, however, are good up until this step:



> 15. After the copy is complete, WinMFS should display a dialog box asking if you want to expand the drive. Click Yes..


Instead you'll want to follow...


unitron said:


> ...my excellent advice to, whether using WinMFS or the MFS Live cd, not do expansion on a larger than stock drive as a part of a copy or image restore, but do it afterwards as a separate process using
> 
> mfsadd
> 
> ...


It took over 3 hours to copy my nearly full 1 TB drive, but the entire process went without a single hiccup. Thanks again to everyone for keeping these boxes up and running (and relevant!)


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Pleased for your success, but I wish you'd achieved it running WinMFS on Windows XP, or not been successful on XP and successful on Windows 10, and I'd have more info to help understand my recent "Green" problem.


----------



## Ratamacue (Dec 12, 2002)

Wish I could have been more help. I couldn't find any reports of issues with the WD Reds if you are ready to give up on the Green. My upgrade couldn't have gone more smoothly.


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Ratamacue said:


> Wish I could have been more help. I couldn't find any reports of issues with the WD Reds if you are ready to give up on the Green. My upgrade couldn't have gone more smoothly.


It's more like WD is ready to give up on me being a customer for the A/V Greens.


----------



## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

unitron said:


> It's more like WD is ready to give up on me being a customer for the A/V Greens.


Still no feedback on what changed with the EURX so they don't work with your XP machine (or your TiVo)?

Scott


----------



## sixpackd (Sep 11, 2011)

unitron said:


> Pleased for your success, but I wish you'd achieved it running WinMFS on Windows XP, or not been successful on XP and successful on Windows 10, and I'd have more info to help understand my recent "Green" problem.


Hey Unitron

I just purchased 2 wd20efrx and 2 wd20eurx yesterday off amazon for my 652160.

The old 15tb av-gp died.

Was going to 
-return to sender the 2 WD20efrx and install the WD20eurx.
-hookup the eurx via esata to windows 7 professional Dell E6420
-run WDDLG, 
-use winmfs beta build 9.3f dated 1/22/2009 19:50 AM
-use an 652m.tbk image I got off dropbox, the one you uploaded.

If there is something you want me to do, please ask.

btw, I cannot PM, not enough posts.

thx


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

sixpackd said:


> ...
> _*btw, I cannot PM, not enough posts.*_..


Oh, I don't think that'll be a problem for long. 

Do you have, or have access to, a PC running Windows XP by any chance?


----------



## sixpackd (Sep 11, 2011)

unitron said:


> Do you have, or have access to, a PC running Windows XP by any chance?


I do.


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

sixpackd said:


> I do.


Can you install a simple program on it without getting yelled at?

Are those hard drives still sealed in their anti-static bags?


----------



## sixpackd (Sep 11, 2011)

unitron said:


> Can you install a simple program on it without getting yelled at?
> 
> Are those hard drives still sealed in their anti-static bags?


Yes, I can install a simple program, but hopefully I dont need to "install" it, and its just a standalone program like winmfs

I dont know if they are sealed. just got them off amazon, will be delivered tomorrow.


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

sixpackd said:


> Yes, I can install a simple program, but hopefully I dont need to "install" it, and its just a standalone program like winmfs
> 
> I dont know if they are sealed. just got them off amazon, will be delivered tomorrow.


Well, WinMFS *is* the program I had in mind.

I'm just concerned about the "returnability" of those drives if you make them "unnew" by opening the anti-static bags.

Anyway, go ahead and use WinMFS to put the image on an EURX if you can get Windows and WinMFS to see the drive in the first place.

When it finishes and offers to expand, tell it NO, and then check the drive with

mfsinfo

to make sure everything looks okay--you'll have a very large Apple Free partition on the end where you haven't expanded yet.

Then try it in the TiVo.

If it boots okay, you may need to do Guided Setup and then go back and do a Clear & Delete Everything to marry the image to your TiVo's TiVo Service Number since my image has the one from my TiVo.

If you can't get XP and WinMFS to see the EURX in the first place, try the EFRX.

At some point you'll need to take the drive you're actually going to use and run WD's own diagnostic software long test before putting the lid back on the TiVo and calling the job done.

As for expanding, you can take the unexpanded drive out of the TiVo, hook it back to the PC, run WinMFS again, select the drive, and expand with

mfsadd.

Sometimes, with both the older MFS Live cd v1.4 (which is a Linux command line based version of the even older MFS Tools and uses the .bak images) and with WinMFS, expanding as part of the image restoration process or the copy the original drive to the new one process doesn't work, and you have to do it all over again.

If you do it separately afterwards, it seems to always work.


----------



## sixpackd (Sep 11, 2011)

Ok here is what I did and what happened

1. the drives are sealed. manufacture date of 21, jun 2015 from Thailand.
wd20eurx-57t0fy0

2. put them into sata on XP, and ran thru WD DLG long and zero test, about 4 hrs each.

3. winmfs sees it, and I restored the 652m.tbk in like 5 minutes. I did not supersize or make it bigger

4. msfinfo sees zone 0 thru zone 5 and 14 partitions.

5. plugged into tivo, no go, still stuck on welcome, powering up.

at this point, I'll pause and wait to hear back to see what else to try.

btw, I had to do this because during the last power outage, Tivo was unable to restart, checked power supply, and it seemed fine, so I think my old upgraded WD 15 av-gp failed.

thx


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

sixpackd said:


> Ok here is what I did and what happened
> 
> 1. the drives are sealed. manufacture date of 21, jun 2015 from Thailand.
> wd20eurx-57t0fy0
> ...


Do you have any other 160GB or larger SATA drives lying around that could be temporarily used to eliminate motherboard problems as a possibility?


----------



## sixpackd (Sep 11, 2011)

unitron said:


> Do you have any other 160GB or larger SATA drives lying around that could be temporarily used to eliminate motherboard problems as a possibility?


Just did it with the original 160gb drive, no issues.

I also did the following as a test
-mfscopy (instead of using backup) from another 160gb tivo hd to WD20EURX. Tivo stays in Wecome. Powering up screen

Next thing I am going to try is to disable 6.0Gbs by adding a jumper for PHY and see if that does anything.

http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=6592

any other suggestions?

Should we move this back to your original thread?


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

sixpackd said:


> Just did it with the original 160gb drive, no issues.
> 
> I also did the following as a test
> -mfscopy (instead of using backup) from another 160gb tivo hd to WD20EURX. Tivo stays in Wecome. Powering up screen
> ...


Let's leave it in here for now, and when we finish I'll summarize over there.


----------



## sixpackd (Sep 11, 2011)

sixpackd said:


> Just did it with the original 160gb drive, no issues.
> 
> I also did the following as a test
> -mfscopy (instead of using backup) from another 160gb tivo hd to WD20EURX. Tivo stays in Wecome. Powering up screen
> ...


Tried the jumper, no change.


----------



## sixpackd (Sep 11, 2011)

ran mhdd 4.5
puis (power up in standby) to turn it off

tada! it works!


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

sixpackd said:


> ran mhdd 4.5
> puis (power up in standby) to turn it off
> 
> tada! it works!


Could you translate that to English for me?

I gather that mhdd is a utility of which I was previously unaware, but what exactly did you get it to do to the drive?


----------



## sixpackd (Sep 11, 2011)

unitron said:


> Could you translate that to English for me?
> 
> I gather that mhdd is a utility of which I was previously unaware, but what exactly did you get it to do to the drive?


Sorry, I turned off power up in standby

I have no jumpers set.
The drives are "defective" in that the have power up in standby or puis or pm2 enabled in the drive settings, even tho it is only supposed to be enabled via jumper.

To disable power up in stand by mode, you can use hdat2 (hdd utility) or mhdd

Hdat2 seems much easier to use


----------



## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

sixpackd said:


> Sorry, I turned off power up in standby
> 
> I have no jumpers set.
> The drives are "defective" in that the have power up in standby or puis or pm2 enabled in the drive settings, even tho it is only supposed to be enabled via jumper.
> ...


Interesting so maybe that's the change with the WD20EURX in that they've changed the default to have it enabled in the settings.

Unitron you should follow-up on your ticket.

Scott


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

HerronScott said:


> Interesting so maybe that's the change with the WD20EURX in that they've changed the default to have it enabled in the settings.
> 
> Unitron you should follow-up on your ticket.
> 
> Scott


Well, both drives have already been sent back to newegg, and my communication with WD doesn't seem to have led to an actual opening of a ticket so much as the script jockey saying he'd pass my concerns further up the food chain (after I explained that concept to him), but either it didn't get done or it didn't get far enough up the ladder to reach anybody who actually knows anything about hard drives.

Would these drives, if they had Power Up In Standby enabled, have reported themselves to the PC's BIOS so that I could go into setup and see them listed on the SATA port to which they were connected, and also respond to the WD diagnostic software on the Ultimate Boot CD and go through the long test successfully, but still be "asleep" when I booted into Windows, and also when, after using

dd_rescue

to put an image on them, still be "asleep" (shades of IntelliPark) when the TiVo went to call on them?

I can see this maybe being useful on the regular "Green" drives but why would WD enable this by default on A/V drives when generally they're used in applications that keep them spinning 24/7?


----------



## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

Reading the wiki on puis or pm2 could explain the behavior you are seeing unitron if the BIOS on your computer does not support that. However, I agree it does not make sense to set that for DVR usage in general. I cannot see how it would benefit a DVR but a surveillance system that records based on movement detection might benefit.

Edit: Oops misread your post. If the BIOS did not support this feature, then either your BIOS would not see the drive or if your computer did see the drive, it might see it as a drive of 0MB size. Perhaps WD Diagnostic on the UBCD skirts the BIOS when dealing with drives.


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

jmbach said:


> Reading the wiki on puis or pm2 could explain the behavior you are seeing unitron if the BIOS on your computer does not support that. However, I agree it does not make sense to set that for DVR usage in general. I cannot see how it would benefit a DVR but a surveillance system that records based on movement detection might benefit.
> 
> Edit: Oops misread your post. If the BIOS did not support this feature, then either your BIOS would not see the drive or if your computer did see the drive, it might see it as a drive of 0MB size. Perhaps WD Diagnostic on the UBCD skirts the BIOS when dealing with drives.


I'm theorizing that the BIOS only talks to the chips on the "paddleboard" on the drive without the platters having to spin up for anything to be read off of them, and that the WD DOS-based diagnostic on the UBCD knows what command to send to a PUIS'ed drive to get it to wake up and spin up the platters (and I'm getting pretty PIUS'ed at WD myself), but Windows expects the drive to already be spun up, as does the TiVo.

So this is apparently Son of Intellipark Debacle, where not only TiVos but Windows (and, of course, we humans) gets stymied.


----------



## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

unitron said:


> I'm theorizing that the BIOS only talks to the chips on the "paddleboard" on the drive without the platters having to spin up for anything to be read off of them, and that the WD DOS-based diagnostic on the UBCD knows what command to send to a PUIS'ed drive to get it to wake up and spin up the platters (and I'm getting pretty PIUS'ed at WD myself), but Windows expects the drive to already be spun up, as does the TiVo.
> 
> So this is apparently Son of Intellipark Debacle, where not only TiVos but Windows (and, of course, we humans) gets stymied.


Motherboard disk controllers can certainly talk to on-drive circuitry before a drive spins up, so the BIOS should see all attached drives, but most programs probably won't see a drive until it has spun up and become ready. And insufficient 12v current capability in the power supply can keep a drive from ever reaching full speed and becoming ready, although that's probably not the issue here.

In the old days, SCSI drives could be jumpered to spin up immediately, or only after a delay that depended on the SCSI ID, or only after they received a start command from the SCSI adapter. This allowed multiple drives to be spun up one at a time to spread the startup load on the power supply. I seem to recall that if Windows booted and then noticed that some SCSI drives were not spinning, it would issue start commands to spin them up. (Or did that occur only as the drives were actually addressed by some application program? I'm not sure.) Such behavior could make sense in drives designed for RAID use, but not so much in drives designed for video recorder applications (where they're more likely to be used alone).


----------



## Hardcore Legend (Sep 27, 2012)

Ratamacue said:


> Using WinMFS along with a WD Red WD20EFRX drive on a Windows 10 machine, I now have 318 hours of HD recording capability on this dinosaur.
> The discussion regarding the maximum single drive capacity is no longer true as long as you are running updated firmware (11.0m-01-2-652 is last one Tivo pushed.)


I have one of these laying around and I don't care about keeping the recordings. I'm thinking of adding it as an extra DVR in the house. Are you saying that the maximum single drive capacity is no longer limited? What is the top single drive size you can use on this box?

Is this the drive you used? WD Red Drive

I now see this thread is over a year old, how is the upgrade holding up for you?


----------



## TVisitor (Apr 3, 2008)

I just ran across this thread after having my Tivo HD series 3 die. I bought one of these red drives, but for the life of me cannot get it to work. The Tivo died probably 6-12 months ago, and I am only just getting around to it now. I've changed out the drive on this before (for a WD10EARS) and that worked great. The new red drive WAS recognized by my PC, and I restored the image I took from my Tivo after I activated it. That went off without a hitch and I followed the sizing instructions seperately. However, my Tivo won't recognize the drive. It's just stuck at "powering up." I tried HDAT2 on a bootable CD (the PC I'm using is so old I can't boot from USB, and it's running XP), and HDAT2 told me that the PUIS was already disabled. When I booted the Tivo I the the hold pause trick with code 54, and for whatever reason the SMART diagnostics keep telling me that there's no drive detected there. I'm kind of at a loss. (I DID recap this Tivo's power supply about 3-4 years ago as well since at least one of those failed.)

I thought maybe the Tivo was defective, so I dragged the original drive out of storage (when I bought the Tivo's 10 years ago, I upgraded them all). Using the original drive, it booted fine, so I know the Tivo itself is good.

After about 2-3 hours of futzing, I got tired of it, went to eBay and found some new WD10EARS that had the bag opened to test them. I gave in and bought 2 of them (... for a future failure). 

I don't really like being beaten like this, but I'm not sure what else to even try with the red drive.


----------



## kpeters59 (Jun 19, 2007)

Tried any of these?:

Miscellaneous Services from WeaKnees.com

-KP


----------



## TVisitor (Apr 3, 2008)

kpeters59 said:


> Tried any of these?:
> 
> Miscellaneous Services from WeaKnees.com
> 
> -KP


Yeah - I think I had mentioned above that I tried the SMART test (54). SMART said there was no drive to be found there. I know the drive has Power Up In Standby disabled, and I had set the Idle Timer disabled via WDIDLE3.


----------



## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

TVisitor said:


> I just ran across this thread after having my Tivo HD series 3 die. I bought one of these red drives, but for the life of me cannot get it to work. The Tivo died probably 6-12 months ago, and I am only just getting around to it now. I've changed out the drive on this before (for a WD10EARS) and that worked great. The new red drive WAS recognized by my PC, and I restored the image I took from my Tivo after I activated it. That went off without a hitch and I followed the sizing instructions seperately. However, my Tivo won't recognize the drive. It's just stuck at "powering up." I tried HDAT2 on a bootable CD (the PC I'm using is so old I can't boot from USB, and it's running XP), and HDAT2 told me that the PUIS was already disabled. When I booted the Tivo I the the hold pause trick with code 54, and for whatever reason the SMART diagnostics keep telling me that there's no drive detected there. I'm kind of at a loss. (I DID recap this Tivo's power supply about 3-4 years ago as well since at least one of those failed.)
> 
> I thought maybe the Tivo was defective, so I dragged the original drive out of storage (when I bought the Tivo's 10 years ago, I upgraded them all). Using the original drive, it booted fine, so I know the Tivo itself is good.
> 
> ...


Try it with the red drive powered by something other than the TiVo power supply.

Disconnect the short data cable from the TiVo motherboard and run a longer one between there and the drive.

Just in case your TiVo power supply is on the borderline of not working perfectly.


----------



## TVisitor (Apr 3, 2008)

Just to tidy this up - I don't believe it was the red drive causing me issues. I ended up returning it and buying 2 green drives (that I found on eBay still sealed). First one I tried didn't work, Idle timer set to off - and verified that PUIS was disabled. Baffled, the only thing I could do was pull out the original drive (again) and back it up on the assumption that somehow the original backup I made of it years ago was somehow corrupt. Backed it up, restored it to the new green, boom, worked the first time. I wish I had thought to try that with the red, but oh well! I've got some other issues now, but I'll post that in a new thread.


----------

