# Replacement HD Shows Wrong Capacity



## LoneStar1981 (May 21, 2006)

I ran dd_rescue on a 300gb drive that was failing, and I succesfully copied all of the recordings to a new 750gb drive. When I booted the Series2 Tivo to test it, the capacity shows to still be at 340hrs. Is there an easy way to fix this? I tried using mfsadd but it gave the message "nothing to add". If there is not a quick way to fix it, what would be the least time consumming? (dd_rescue took about 7 hours and I am hoping that there might now be an easier way) I do not know if it is important, but dd_rescue showed many "input/output" errors and "unrecoverable read errors". Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Check out MFSLive I think the re-expand option is/was in the beta version.


----------



## LoneStar1981 (May 21, 2006)

Thanks for the reply! I am getting ready to upgrade our other Tivo which still has its original drive. (Series2 with a 120gb) I am going to replace that drive with a single 500gb and I want to be sure to save all of the recordings, settings, etc. If I connect the original drive to primary master, and the new 500gb drive to primary slave, is this the command that I should use;

backup -qTao - /dev/hda | restore -s 128 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb

I just thought I would check before I mess something up again...  

Thanks


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

I just recently upgraded a brand new seagate 500 gb hdd for my HR10-250 how come it is showing me 71 HD hours? About 3 weeks ago I restored a different tivo with a similar 500gb hdd drive and it only reported 63 HD hours. How is it that I was able to gain 8 addl hours? Did I mess something up in my restore operation?


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

LoneStar1981 said:


> Thanks for the reply! I am getting ready to upgrade our other Tivo which still has its original drive. (Series2 with a 120gb) I am going to replace that drive with a single 500gb and I want to be sure to save all of the recordings, settings, etc. If I connect the original drive to primary master, and the new 500gb drive to primary slave, is this the command that I should use;
> 
> backup -qTao - /dev/hda | restore -s 128 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb
> 
> ...


That looks OK only if using the MFSLive boot CD did you get those from the MFSLive Interactive Command Generator?

Suggest, that if at all possible move the 500G to Secondary channel either Master or Slave. Putting the source and destination drives on separate channels (cables) will make the copy of programs much faster. For another magnitude incresse of speed verify that DMA is enabled I believe that is the default with the MFSLive CD. DMA settings (MFSLive CD boot option 1)


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

cr33p said:


> I just recently upgraded a brand new seagate 500 gb hdd for my HR10-250 how come it is showing me 71 HD hours? About 3 weeks ago I restored a different tivo with a similar 500gb hdd drive and it only reported 63 HD hours. How is it that I was able to gain 8 addl hours? Did I mess something up in my restore operation?


Where both TiVos models HR10-250 ?

250G / 30Hrs = 8.3G/hr
500G = 60hrs 
525G = 63hrs Believable for a 500G drive
591G = 71hrs an extra 100G is questionable for the 500G drive

Different manufactures use different formulas for computing the storage capacity if you have the drives in a PC use the cat /proc/partitons command and check the reported total number of blocks for each drive.
Where both of the TiVos models HR10-250 ?


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> Where both TiVos models HR10-250 ?
> 
> 250G / 30Hrs = 8.3G/hr
> 500G = 60hrs
> ...


Yes both were HR10-250 boxes, and both are seagate drives, one is a 7200.9 and the newer is a 7200.10. The only thing that I did different would be that the newer drive I reloaded with an image from my newest instant cake disc, I extracted the image from the disc and still used mfslive to perform the restore. I was using a back up image from a 250 set up in the past.


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

The 500G 7200.10 has 976,773,168 sectors or 500,107,862,016 bytes

The Seagate website shows that the 7200.9 has a max size of 160G.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> The 500G 7200.10 has 976,773,168 sectors or 500,107,862,016 bytes
> 
> The Seagate website shows that the 7200.9 has a max size of 160G.


Well I think it is that they no longer sell a 500gb 7200.9 however they used too. I tried restoring the drive one more time and got the exact same results once the machine was booted 71 HD hours, or 471 SD hours, the even weirder thing is when it went to expand the drive it reported somewhere around 582 hours available. Im confused I dont understand how this is possible.


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

I don't know when they switched Seagate used to use 1G = 1024M making your 500G about 12G larger. To be complete you could verify the total number of sectors of both drives in the PC with the cat/proc/partitions command.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> I don't know when they switched Seagate used to use 1G = 1024M making your 500G about 12G larger. To be complete you could verify the total number of sectors of both drives in the PC with the cat/proc/partitions command.


My hard drives arent connected via ide interfaces so there is no way for me to do that.


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

cr33p said:


> My hard drives arent connected via ide interfaces so there is no way for me to do that.


 Oh, you got pre-loaded drives I thought you did the upgrade yourself with Instant Cake.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> Oh, you got pre-loaded drives I thought you did the upgrade yourself with Instant Cake.


No my drives are not pre loaded, I'm using a usb to ide adapter and mfslive to load the images. A little more info on this interesting problem is I tried reloading the drive again with a different image, same outcome, I also loaded my 250 gb drive and it resulted with 34 HD hours, so the problem is not with only the 500gb hdd. I even dropped off the -r 4 option in my restore command. Im suspecting that it has something to do with the expand option from the IC image. Later tonight I will try another time on the 250 gb with the original image dropping the expand option.


----------



## spike2k5 (Feb 21, 2006)

If you send me the output of 

pdisk -l /dev/hdc
mfsinfo /dev/hdc

(/dev/hdc is your tivo drive on secondary master)

I can take a look.

Reported hours on Tivo is just estimate and you are fine. 
I have not looked at IC image so I can't tell you exactly, but there are few things you can do to squeeze out more hours.


----------



## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

HomeUser said:


> Where both TiVos models HR10-250 ?
> 
> 250G / 30Hrs = 8.3G/hr
> 500G = 60hrs
> ...


There are some tricks you can play to reduce the disk allocation reserved for "TiVoClips" and gain back a bit more "User" capacity. Details are over at DDB in a thread with subject: _Is it possible to delete clips in "Reserved Space"_. I seem to remember that it filtered into a thread here at TCF too a while back.

It is quite possible that the latest instant cake for HR10-250 is employing these tricks, either directly, or indirectly. That could account for the capacity difference seen.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

JamieP said:


> There are some tricks you can play to reduce the disk allocation reserved for "TiVoClips" and gain back a bit more "User" capacity. Details are over at DDB in a thread with subject: _Is it possible to delete clips in "Reserved Space"_. I seem to remember that it filtered into a thread here at TCF too a while back.
> 
> It is quite possible that the latest instant cake for HR10-250 is employing these tricks, either directly, or indirectly. That could account for the capacity difference seen.


Ok well as long as the machine works its really not a big deal to me, however I do plan on selling my unit with the new 500gb hdd and I dont want to feel like Im ripping someone off by stating it has more hours than it actually has. I will run spike's command this evening as well and take a look. Thanks everyone for your help so far


----------



## LoneStar1981 (May 21, 2006)

HomeUser said:


> That looks OK only if using the MFSLive boot CD did you get those from the MFSLive Interactive Command Generator?
> 
> Suggest, that if at all possible move the 500G to Secondary channel either Master or Slave. Putting the source and destination drives on separate channels (cables) will make the copy of programs much faster. For another magnitude incresse of speed verify that DMA is enabled I believe that is the default with the MFSLive CD. DMA settings (MFSLive CD boot option 1)


Thanks again for the info. I did not realize that about moving one of the drives to the secondary channel. I will do that. Also, I did not use the command generator to get that...I got it from the instruction section.

I am unable to download the beta version. Is there any other way to take a drive that is already expanded and copy it to a new bigger drive? When I copied the 300gb drive to the 750gb, the new drive still shows to be a 340hr. I would like to try to either copy the 300gb again, or hopefully run a command on the 750 drive to fix it. I have access to another blank 750gb drive if that will make it any easier. The 300gb drive is clicking and whining and I think I was lucky to get it copied to the new one using dd_rescue.  Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanx


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

LoneStar1981 said:


> Thanks again for the info. I did not realize that about moving one of the drives to the secondary channel. I will do that.


 No need now that you have the drive copied and the copy works in the TiVo (except for the extra space).



LoneStar1981 said:


> I am unable to download the beta version. Is there any other way to take a drive that is already expanded and copy it to a new bigger drive? When I copied the 300gb drive to the 750gb, the new drive still shows to be a 340hr. I would like to try to either copy the 300gb again, or hopefully run a command on the 750 drive to fix it. I have access to another blank 750gb drive if that will make it any easier. The 300gb drive is clicking and whining and I think I was lucky to get it copied to the new one using dd_rescue.  Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanx


 I think spike2k5 might be able to help here. You just need to join (no charge) MFSLive to download the MFSLive beta.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

Well I wasnt able to test out anything more last night, however I dont think it could be an IC image issue, I tried an image from a restore off of a normal 6.3d , and got the exact same results, It has something to do with mfslive. Does anyone out there have a drive they can restore for an hr10-250 with mfslive to see if they get the same results as me?

Thanks


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

cr33p said:


> Well I wasnt able to test out anything more last night, however I dont think it could be an IC image issue, I tried an image from a restore off of a normal 6.3d , and got the exact same results, It has something to do with mfslive. Does anyone out there have a drive they can restore for an hr10-250 with mfslive to see if they get the same results as me?
> 
> Thanks


Most likely there is not a problem. You really need to get the actual size of the drives with the pdisk -l command or cat/proc/partitions.


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

LoneStar1981 said:


> When I attempt to login to the beta, it will not allow it. If Spike does read this, my login over there is Lonestar. I posted a request on that forum, so hopefully I will be able to give it a try.
> 
> Thanks again!


You might PM Spike. With this thread going in two directions it may be getting a little hard to follow.


----------



## LoneStar1981 (May 21, 2006)

Big thanks to Home User & Spike! I was able to expand the drive and it now shows to be 861 hours...  

I noticed that the hard drive is a bit louder than the previous "Quickview" that I had. Will the AAM feature help to quiet it, and if so, is it even worth the trouble? In other words, is there something that I should know before I attempt to try it?

Thanks!


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

LoneStar1981 said:


> I noticed that the hard drive is a bit louder than the previous "Quickview" that I had. Will the AAM feature help to quiet it, and if so, is it even worth the trouble? In other words, is there something that I should know before I attempt to try it?
> 
> Thanks!


 AAM is patented so it depends on the manufacture of the hard drive if AAM is available. I think the patent is one of the reasons that Seagate bought Maxtor. I have noticed that the drives quiet down after the initial indexing/sorting has completed which may take several days.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

spike2k5 said:


> If you send me the output of
> 
> pdisk -l /dev/hdc
> mfsinfo /dev/hdc
> ...


Ok I was able to issue those commands to my drive tonight.
What information is it that you need from these commands, I see that is has spit out a ton of jibberish. it is telling me it has 512 byte blocks, 232.9g of space
I have 4 partitions total mfs volume size is 237953 mib, then it tells me it has 282 standalone hours. this is on the standard 250 gb hard drive that the machine came with. That is from the IC image expanded

Now the output from the backed up 250 gb image is very similar it is only off by one hour as far as standalone size is concerned, the biggest difference I noticed is that with the IC image the mfs media region is only 1.0 gb and the new mfs media is 230.9 gb, however the restored image from the backed up 250 drive shows different, it has 103.0 gb for the mfs media region and 128.1 gb for the second mfs media region. The other large difference I just stumbled on is that the ext root sizes are different, the IC image has 128.0m for root 1 and root 2, while the back up image has 256.0 m for root 1 and root 2. hope some od this helps please let me know what I can do.

thanks


----------



## spike2k5 (Feb 21, 2006)

> IC image the mfs media region is only 1.0 gb and the new mfs media is 230.9 gb


1GB 1st media region... 
That sounds like mfs was built from scratch.



> IC image has 128.0m for root 1 and root 2


Both active and alternate root / boot partition pairs shunk from 256MB to 128MB


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

spike2k5 said:


> 1GB 1st media region...
> That sounds like mfs was built from scratch.
> 
> Both active and alternate root / boot partition pairs shunk from 256MB to 128MB


I was able to get the new mfslive beta 7.2 disc today "nod" I will be trying the F option and hope it fixes all my problems.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

Ok I just finished loading up a new IC image to the 500 GB hdd, with the F option, I now have 256 mb root partitions, but I still have only 1gb MFS media region and then the remainder is 463.5 in the new MFS media region, reporting 582 standalone hours. Is this a problem ? 

Thanks


----------



## spike2k5 (Feb 21, 2006)

cr33p said:


> Ok I just finished loading up a new IC image to the 500 GB hdd, with the F option, I now have 256 mb root partitions, but I still have only 1gb MFS media region and then the remainder is 463.5 in the new MFS media region, reporting 582 standalone hours. Is this a problem ?
> 
> Thanks


That's ok.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

Ok so im just about at my end with this weird problem I have been experiancing, I have this new 500gb hdd loaded, everything seems fine, it still shows that with a 500 gb hdd that it has 71 HD hours of recording time, how did I pick up 8 hours? I understand 1 or 2 is feasible, but 8 hours thats huge.


----------



## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

cr33p said:


> Ok so im just about at my end with this weird problem I have been experiancing, I have this new 500gb hdd loaded, everything seems fine, it still shows that with a 500 gb hdd that it has 71 HD hours of recording time, how did I pick up 8 hours? I understand 1 or 2 is feasible, but 8 hours thats huge.


A minimal image isn't going to have the /Config/DiskConfigurations objects, and so you are going to gain back much of the TiVoClip hours when compared to a stock image, as I described here.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

JamieP said:


> A minimal image isn't going to have the /Config/DiskConfigurations objects, and so you are going to gain back much of the TiVoClip hours when compared to a stock image, as I described here.


So then this is a good thing right? I wouldnt have assumed that an IC image would implement such things that are out of the norm, but hey anything is possible. But why is it when I restore from a normal image backed up from a stock machine I still get more hours 34 vs 30 with a stock 250 gb hdd ????


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

cr33p said:


> Ok so im just about at my end with this weird problem I have been experiancing, I have this new 500gb hdd loaded, everything seems fine, it still shows that with a 500 gb hdd that it has 71 HD hours of recording time, how did I pick up 8 hours? I understand 1 or 2 is feasible, but 8 hours thats huge.


 What is the actual size of both drives? use cat/proc/partitions and report back the first couple of lines for each drive. I am looking for the total number of blocks. The total number of blocks / 2 = drive size in 1024 KBytes.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> What is the actual size of both drives? use cat/proc/partitions and report back the first couple of lines for each drive. I am looking for the total number of blocks. The total number of blocks / 2 = drive size in 1024 KBytes.


I cant run that command with the mfslive disc. But if I run a pdisk command I get

250 gb hdd = device block size = 512, Number of Blocks=488397168 (232.9g)
500 gb hdd = device block size = 512, Number of Block=976773168 (465.8g)

The 500 gb hdd has 463.5 g allocated to the new mfs region thats only about 11gigs less then what the entire drive has for space.


----------



## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

Well I am not sure what I did differently tonight but I tried restoring my unit once more with the back up image and not the IC image and now its reporting the correct hours, I give up but apparently its fixed now. I just wonder had I left it the way it was before do you really think I could have snuck by with another 8 hours of HD content, seems more like some numbers where being misrepresented.


----------



## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

cr33p said:


> Well I am not sure what I did differently tonight but I tried restoring my unit once more with the back up image and not the IC image and now its reporting the correct hours, I give up but apparently its fixed now. I just wonder had I left it the way it was before do you really think I could have snuck by with another 8 hours of HD content, seems more like some numbers where being misrepresented.


Yes, you really did have 8 more hours of HD content capacity when you used the other image. By going back to a backup image of a stock drive, you are giving up those extra hours. If you really want to understand what's going on underneath the hood, go read the DDB thread.


----------

