# Roamio upgrade, did I kill the HDD partition?



## bmwbiker (Sep 3, 2015)

I'm new to this upgrade stuff. I am trying to dry run this with my essentially virgin 500 GB from the Roamio. It only has a couple incomplete recordings on it. I did the brute(blank) swap to 1TB on the day the unit arrived.

I'm trying to test drive upgrade/copy with the 500 GB in prep for the 3 TB drive arriving tomorrow. But all the tools I try with this drive in the PC aren't happy with it.

fdisk -l returns "no valid partition data" (I guess this is expected) 

(mfslive) pdisk -l returns "bad data in block 15"

winMFS returns "wrong Tivo partition signature"
I also saw one indication that the (Tivo) drive was "byte swapped"

(I forget) complained about an invalid apple partition

I was able to create a ddrescue copy of it, but I haven't verified that it will work in the Tivo, I will try that tomorrow.

Did I kill the 500 GB drive's partition table by booting windows with it hooked up to one of the PC's SATA ports? I did this before finding out that the Tivo had is own unique file system (MFS)

I still have the working 1 TB drive, but don't want to kill it also so I'm trying to debug what happened.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

With Roamio, all you do is to swap the blank drive (up to 3 TB) and the Tivo will get it working. None of the programs you mentioned works on Roamio, so you can't just copy and expand it. 

A new, out of the box Roamio has a blank drive within it and will prep it once its plugged in.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

You didn't kill the partition table by hooking it up to your PC - all those error messages are normal for the programs you mentioned when faced with a Roamio drive.


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## bmwbiker (Sep 3, 2015)

So is there simply no way to clone my current 1TB roamio drive onto the new 3TB one? I was looking for some sort of clone then expand sequence like ddrescue followed by ???. 

I'm using kmttg to offload my current recordings but that is going to take days. And I don't know how to archive the season passes and cable card info.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

Use KMTTG for copying the passes, but the cable card may need to be re-paired.


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## bmwbiker (Sep 3, 2015)

Well I gave up and just used the Tivo to format the new 3TB drive. Had to wait 3 days for KMTTG to do its thing across my network.

Damm cable card pairing failed which was what I was really trying to avoid. Two phone calls plus a truck roll later my HBO is back. House call took all of 5 minutes, bad DATA ID. If they had just asked on the phone I could have provided it.


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## bmwbiker (Sep 3, 2015)

bmwbiker said:


> Damm cable card pairing failed which was what I was really trying to avoid. Two phone calls plus a truck roll later my HBO is back. House call took all of 5 minutes, bad DATA ID. If they had just asked on the phone I could have provided it.


Comcast tried to charge me $70 for the 5 minute house call. I balked and threatened to invoke my 30 day right to cancel. CSR refunded the charge for a "new customer"


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## spaldingclan (Aug 22, 2012)

I never could figure out a way to get KMTTG to push my recordings BACK to the tivo..man that pytivo install process is TERRIBLE


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