# Tivo HD Internal Hard Disk Upgrade - two attempts, one failed



## TaquacheDawg (Nov 18, 2007)

What I learned, what worked... when upgrading internal Hard Drive in my new (2nd)TivoHD. This new Tivo is for the Bedroom. Thought this was worth posting, may help some people.

- Tried 2 different Hard Drives, will tell a little about each. 

Already have a working TivoHD, upgraded to a 1 TB drive. This Living Room Unit has been working for 2 years now.

First Hard Drive Upgrade attempt: Western Digital WD20EADS WD Caviar Green 2TB
- Upgrade DID NOT succeed for me
- paid extra... wanted a 2 TB drive, a large drive
- My fault, I jumped the gun and did NO research before buying the 2 TB drive. Learned two things:
- TivoHD does not upgrade easily beyond ~1.2 TB. Some postings say it's possible, but sounds like the skills of a "Linux Developer" are needed to get this accomplished
- Model of Hard Drive: This specific WD Caviar was not on the recommended list. I did not check this list, since the Hard Disk used to upgrade my Living Room Tivo was not on the list either, and that upgrade worked fine 2 years ago.
- What was tried during this upgrade attempt:
- Used winmfs_beta9_3f
- Also tried the IntelliPark to remove the Western Park Timeout feature
- Backup of 160 gig, then copy onto 2TB. Expand beyond 1 TB - answered yes
- All programming was present, including recorded shows
- Showed capacity 287 hours of HD
- Seemed to be running OK
- BUT... once Tivo tried to access storage beyond the 160 capacity is when the issues started. Would reboot and stay on "Power Up"
- Back to PC and tried a restore, tried IntelliPark... several times, and ultimately would fail
- Now just wanted to get Tivo to work, thought to use this 2 TB and not go beyond the 1 TB limit... just get this thing running. Would be an expensive drive not using 2 TB, just 1 TB but working. Did a Restore, but did not supersize. 
- Restore
- Expand beyond 1 TB? responde NO
- Still did not work
- Now thought the Drive must be the issue so this Western Digital was returned to Fry's Electronics. With this credit purchased the next drive, 1 TB, for just $70.

Second Hard Drive Upgrade attempt: Hitachi Deskstar 1000GB HDT721010SLA360 
- Tried winmfs_beta9_3f
- Also used a Hard Drive tool to change a setting to keep disk as quiet as possible
- Did Restore and Copy
- All programming was present, including recorded shows
- Showed capacity 144 hours of HD
- Seemed to be running OK
- Issued a "connect to Tivo" and loading the down-loaded TV Schedule Table would not complete! Tivo would reboot after about 8% loading. Would reboot and stay on "Power Up"
- DID NOT Work
- Even tried formatting in Windows just to test the drive to be certain the drive was in good shape. Tested out OK.
- Once I figured out how to get the MBR cleaned up, I then did a Restore and NO copy to see if having a "cleaner" drive might allow Tivo to figure out the Hard Drive layout and continue. Again, "connect to Tivo" would NOT succeed. Would reboot.
- What to do... What to do... I read my old notes when upgrading my 1st TivoHD 2 years ago, and decided to use that version of WinMFS. I backup everything, and am glad for I could not find an older version of WinMFS on-line, at least not at MFSLive.org, so I broke out my archive DVD's. Yep, I had the older version used to upgrade the LivingRoom Tivo. Decided to give this a try.
- Now using winmfs_beta9_2 
- Put 160 gig back into Tivo, ran for 2 days to make sure it was still working well. It was.
- Now did a copy from 160 gig to 1 TB using winmfs_beta9_2
- Put Hitachi 1 TB in Tivo and tested:
- Old programs are available
- "connect to Tivo" and wait for schedule table load to complete
- Hard Reboot
- Soft Reboot
- All seems good. 
- Now test for 2 days and ask Tivo to record more than 40 hours of HD programming, ie go beyond the 160 gig limits. 
- YES! Good.
- Now that known good, back to PC and made a "backup" incase needed if Disk goes bad.
- Has been running for 2 weeks now
- Amount of Storage is 144 hrs of HD

- Western Digital WD20EADS 2 TB, would this have worked with older WinMFS? It may have worked if only using 1 TB of the 2 TB available... would have been a waste of money, 1 TB sitting there doing nothing. Would be nice to know if this hard drive was a good one for Tivo, but had to return it to purchase Hitachi drive.
- Hitachi Deskstar 1000GB HDT721010SLA360 - This drive is working fine. The noise measurements listed in TivoCommunity... they are right on! The WD Green drives are the quietest. My Tivo #1 has a Green drive and if you call that "quiestness" a 10, then the Hitachi in the Tivo #2 would be a 7. In a living room, this would not be that big a deal, but in a bed room it may be. My room is small and it does bother me some. I will be looking for a sale of Green Drives and if I see a 1 TB on sale I'll will swap out the Hitachi. If I never see one on sale, I will live with the noise. The secret? Don't tell you better half that the hard drive in the bedroom seems noisy, if you do, then you will for sure have to swap it out


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## pl1 (Jan 18, 2007)

TaquacheDawg said:


> What I learned, what worked... when upgrading internal Hard Drive in my new (2nd)TivoHD. This new Tivo is for the Bedroom. Thought this was worth posting, may help some people.


You might want to post this at MFSlive.org as well. Maybe Spike has the answers.


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## MPSAN (Jun 20, 2009)

pl1 said:


> You might want to post this at MFSlive.org as well. Maybe Spike has the answers.


When doing the 2GB drive I thought you were supposed to select YES to limit expansion beyond 1GB? It is kind of a "yes we have no bananas" deal.


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## bkdtv (Jan 9, 2003)

TaquacheDawg said:


> - Western Digital WD20EADS 2 TB, would this have worked with older WinMFS?


No. Older versions of WinMFS didn't allow use of >1TB drives at all. The newest version of WinMFS allows one to restrict capacity on a 1.5TB or 2.0TB drive to 1.26TB, the maximum the TivoHD can support. All of this is mentioned in the Drive Upgrade FAQ stickied at the top of the forum.

As a reminder, no recently manufactured Western Digital "Green" drives work out of the box. See the FAQ.



TaquacheDawg said:


> I will be looking for a sale of Green Drives and if I see a 1 TB on sale I'll will swap out the Hitachi. If I never see one on sale, I will live with the noise. The secret? Don't tell you better half that the hard drive in the bedroom seems noisy, if you do, then you will for sure have to swap it out


If you opt for a WD "Green" drive, keep in mind the above. They were removed from the list for a reason.



MPSAN said:


> When doing the 2GB drive I thought you were supposed to select YES to limit expansion beyond 1GB? It is kind of a "yes we have no bananas" deal.


You select yes. As per the FAQ, selecting Yes will limit capacity to the 1.26TB the TiVoHD can support.


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## Wulf (May 18, 2005)

TaquacheDawg said:


> - TivoHD does not upgrade easily beyond ~1.2 TB. Some postings say it's possible, but sounds like the skills of a "Linux Developer" are needed to get this accomplished


This upgrade is actually quite easy now. I know nothing about Linux, and followed these instructions with no major problems:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8362960

My "minor" issues were just finding a boot CD image (I went to Ultimate Boot CD) so I could run wdidle3 from the DOS command line to eliminate the head parking issue, and then finding that I had to copy the WinMFS executable to my Windows 7 system's hard drive, right click and choose "Run as Administrator" or else it wouldn't see any of my drives. The Linux stuff, doing the copy and expand with JMFS, and then the supersize with WinMFS were actually the easiest parts. I used a WD20EARS as the upgrade drive, starting with the original 160 GB drive as source. The upgraded Tivo HD has been running fine for a couple of days.

I haven't filled the upgraded Tivo beyond 160 GB yet, so it sounds like that's a test I should run though.


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