# After large drive upgrade, no Tivo SW upgrades?



## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

So I have a 540040 Series 2 Tivo that I bought in November of 2005. I love it. But, like most, the 40GB drive is too small. I'm looking to upgrade. I have both a 160GB drive ATA-133 drive and a 250GB ATA-100 drive. I'd love to switch the 40GB drive out for the 250GB but am told that if I change the kernel to allow that to happen, then I won't be able to get Tivo SW upgrades anymore?

Basically, can I upgrade to something a big drive (250GB) and have the Tivo recognize more than 137GB with a hitch/problems? Reading into this forum for the first time I'm thinking I was not given the whole story? It looks like as long as I use the MFGtools boot CD option that by 540040 is one of the Series 2 Tivos that actually can be upgraded to big drive sizes without a problem?

Someone set my feeble mind straight?????


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## funtoupgrade (Mar 15, 2005)

The kernal problem is only with series ones and that is not really a problem since TiVo is never going to update the software for any of those old units. You can use which ever of those drives you prefer and if you use the PTV LBA48 upgrade mfstools software it should be a snap. Give it a try and post back if any problems.


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## cdeckert219 (Jan 7, 2006)

Ditto what funtoupgrade says... I upgraded my 40gb to 300gb and then received software updates. Works like a charm!


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

Really? That's great news. Like I said, I have a 250GB drive and I'd rather the bigger size obviously. So, going to the PTV LBA48 site, there are 3 options to download: $20 boot cd, free LBA48 CD v4.02, and $5 LBA48 CD v4.02 with enhancements. Yeah, it's only $20, but do I need that one, or will the free one do the trick?


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## funtoupgrade (Mar 15, 2005)

Keep poking around for the free downloadable version (CD iso image).


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

Funny, just edited my previous. Ok, sounds like downloading the free one will do the trick?! Downloading away and will probably give it a shot this weekend. Any words of wisdom or should it just go by the numbers...planning on using the Hinsdale step by step.

Now, though, I have to be dense, but the Hinsdale instructions say that for a big disk above 137GB I need to get the boot CD. In the hopes of sounding somewhat competant, does that mean that all 3 PTV LBA48 downloads are boot cd's including various levels of "extra" tools? If that's the case, I think the "fog" in my head is clearing.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

That is correct. The free LBA48 disk is just a LBA48-aware Linux boot CD with mfstools and killhdintrd (the latter is not applicable to a 540xxx TiVo without also replacing the boot ROM). The $5 CD adds some other tools, like BusyBox (not applicable without the ROM change and killhdinitrd) and Copykern (not needed for your situation). The $20 version adds TiVo WebPlus, tpip and a set LBA48 Linux kernels for series 1 machines.

Bottom line, if all you're looking to do is upgrade the disk space, the free version is fine.


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

Trying to be as logical about this upgrade as I can, thought I'd ask your opinion. Given I have a 540040 Tivo brand, what is your opinion about simply adding a drive to the 40GB drive and running with 2, or (as I'm thinking of doing) replacing the 40GB drive with the 250GB drive. 

My reasoning is that if I completely blow the upgrade with teh 250GB drive, I can always drop the 40GB drive back in? Thoughts on that? Looking at your long list of machines you are not lacking in experience huh? 8)


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## dbish (Aug 30, 2004)

I would recomment 1 drive. The extra 40gb isn't providing enough additional storage to make up for twice the likelyhood of a hard drive failure.

I pulled the 40gb out of my HDVR2 and put in a 250gb single. That way, as you said, you have a problem, you can just go back to original config.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Ditto.


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

Alright, I'm gaining confidence in myself again. You're agreeing with me for the same reasons I had thought to go with 1 drive. I'm not crazy!


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## MokTask (Jan 13, 2006)

Not to jump on gimedaball's thread here, but this weekend I too am going to be upgrading my Tivo. Bought at the end of January, just before they stopped selling the 40hour units (so, a 540040). Bought the small one knowing I'd do the upgrade soon enough.

This weekend is the time. I've got a brand new Seagate 250gig hard-drive all ready to go. 

As for the instructions, the Weaknees one seems a lot easier to follow, but in reading other forum posts, it seems it does have some errors to it. I've also printed out the Hinsdale, so I've got them both. I am doing a straight replace, so I'm not that worried if I screw up something.

I've got a nice machine just waiting to take the new drives, doesn't even have its own HDs yet, so no worries about screwing up and nuking the Tivo drive booting to windows.

Seems a number of people concerned with "swap space" on the drive. Both the Weaknees guide and the Hinsdale, as well as PTVupgrade.com all say not to worry about it. Granted, couldn't this be achieved if going through a full boot of Linux, mounting the drive, and increasing it with some nifty OS partitioning tools? I'm not going to worry about doing it, because it sounds like if it is ever actually needed, it is probably time for a new Hard-Drive anyway....

I am SO going to love not being forced to record at Medium all the time to save space.... You know, had it for like 3 weeks, and have somewhere close to 35 episodes of Kim Possible on there, maybe I'll nuke them so I can re-record them in a better quality, that will help my transfer/upgrade time, right?


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## wmm_16 (Jul 10, 2003)

Do what I did, just give your 4-1/2 year old her own Tivo!


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## MokTask (Jan 13, 2006)

Heck no, I Tivo'd the KPs for me too! Best Disney cartoon in ages!

yeah, I'm a geek. My nearly 3 year old likes to watch too, so that's good justification!


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

Right on! Let me know how yours goes. Sounds like you're doing exactly what I'm planning. I may not get to it this weekend though. Funny as well, my Tivo is filled with KPs as well. I manage it by transfering them to the PC and burning CDs. We have 42 episodes so far. 4 1/2 year old loves 'em and the 2 year old too.

Really though....please post how it went...what to watch out for....any/all details you can! Only detail I know for sure....DON'T MESS WITH THE WHITE CABLE! 8)


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## MokTask (Jan 13, 2006)

Well, status thus far? Yeah, Tivo on my test-bench, opened like a gutted fish. I've got all the cables all hooked up, but ran out of time.

Can only do so much before a 3 (almost 3) year old completely looses interest in what he's doing and the behavior does a nosedive. Needless to say, it will be finished tonight. Well, I don't know about finished, it depends on how long the backup takes.

I'm ignoring the "backup the OS" to the FAT32 partition, as I'm never going to use the original drive for anything. It will go in a anti-static bag, and placed in my gun-safe. I /may/ end up regretting this, but doubt it. Tonight when I boot, I may end up changing my mind, since I do have an old 6gig hard-drive that I could just use for that, but really from what I'm reading if you just save the old drive you'll never have a problem doing that.

So, basically, tonight is the boot to CD, and the copy over. If it takes too long, the reinstall will have to wait until tomorrow, but we'll see.

One thing I noticed from the weaknees interactive guide is that is /says/ you need to install the CD-rom, but it never says which channel to put it on. Not a problem for me, but should really be addressed in the instructions for people not familiar with how PCs and IDE works. Which, brings me to the point of, how do people with dual HDs upgrade? Do they boot to floppy? Guess I should read over that portion on the Hinsdale Guide, as I skipped over it since it didn't apply to me, but now I'm curious. 

I'll keep everyone informed.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

MokTask said:


> .... Which, brings me to the point of, how do people with dual HDs upgrade? Do they boot to floppy? Guess I should read over that portion on the Hinsdale Guide, as I skipped over it since it didn't apply to me, but now I'm curious.
> 
> I'll keep everyone informed.


They do one of two things:

1) Use some other boot mechanism (floppy, scsi, etc.)
2) Do not save recordings

In the case of option 1, you may need some different boot software. I keep an old SCSI CD-ROM drive around for this circumstance.

In the case of option 2, you only need the A drive form the original set. You do a minimal backup (-s option) and pipe it staright to the new A and B drives.


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## MokTask (Jan 13, 2006)

Well, that was faster than reading the Hinsdale about doing this. 

Thanks for the info, not that I'm going to be using it any time soon, but now it will be something in the back of my mind if I do.


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## MokTask (Jan 13, 2006)

Done.

The whole project start to finish from unhooking the Tivo to putting it back on top of the entertainment center and hooked up, probably just over an hour.

Backing up the drive to the new drive, 33 minutes (yeah, I used a stopwatch  ).

The instructions were extremely clear, concise, and there were no problems, with the upgrade.

I was (still am) a complete moron. When I hooked the Tivo back up, I hooked it up WRONG! I put the RCA's in the wrong spot (in the input, the 2-pair next to each other), hard to see because it was "behind" the unit, but that's just an excuse, I'm a moron. When it didn't work right, I re-hooked it all up, with using just Coax, nadda, Dish wouldn't "tune". So, I ran through the guided setup again.

HOLY COW, was this slow. Slow, slow, slow. So slow, I fell asleep in the recliner waiting. Every step of the way took forever. This of course could have been avoided had I hooked the darn thing up right the first time.

The first "call" to Tivo for setup, it "hung" on the "preparing to load" section, and then the "loading XX%" took a long time, probably 45 minutes for the first one. Then, the tuning of the over the air antenna channels, it ran through them, and it completely hung on the last channel to tune, this is where I fell asleep, over an hour later (now 2am) I rebooted the Tivo. Had to run through a few more steps and this next time it tuned channels it took about 30 minutes. When it got to the next "call to Tivo" I just went to bed, when I woke, it was done, and ready to go.

I do have a question though, is this normal to have such long times to do things because of the larger HD? Tonight I'll run through some more things, to see if it takes more time. Maybe it was trying to "index" the drive or something and that is why it was taking so much time.

Maybe I'll start a whole new thread with the question, as I think it is important, and not a lot of people will view it here.

I'll say this though, as SOON as I had it hooked up, I sighed a huge relief sigh, as that thing was quiet. It no longer had that annoying high-pitch whine. Granted, the Seagate drive "clicks" while doing searching/seeking, but it is not noticeable when sitting on the couch or chair, so that's ok by me. The whine, I could hear that in the bedroom, it was ridiculous. So, bigger drive or not, I'm already happy without the noise driving me nuts.

250gig drive, something like 284 hours basic, 198 medium, 139 high, and 80 best, not too shabby for an hours (or so) work in upgrading. (those hour numbers are from memory of this morning before I left for work) This upgrade cost me $108 (with shipping) so this is more than worth it for the cost.


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

Ok, sounds great! Got a couple questions though.

Did you use the Hinsdale instructions? I just finished reading them through again. There's a note at the bottom saying not to boot up the new/old drives with your PC into XP? Was that a problem? I'm assuming you pulled of the "ptvlba48-4.02" image and burned your own boot cd right? Let's see...oh, and did you do the full conversion by copying over all your saved programs as well or the fast version? I guess either way, it wasn't necessarily fast...how powerful was the PC you used? I have an older 500Mhz that I was thinking of hooking up and sticking in the corner. It may take some time, but since no one is using it.

OH, and in the Hinsdale instructions...I think it has you create a quick image, burn it to the new drive, reinstall the drive in the Tivo to test it. Once that checks out, take it back out of the Tivo and do the full copy over in the PC. Did you do that stage or go on faith and direct to copy?

Lastly, any words of wisdom or things to watch out for? I'm always skeptical of the gotchas. 8)

Congratulations!


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## MokTask (Jan 13, 2006)

gimedaball said:


> Ok, sounds great! Got a couple questions though.
> 
> Did you use the Hinsdale instructions? I just finished reading them through again. There's a note at the bottom saying not to boot up the new/old drives with your PC into XP? Was that a problem? I'm assuming you pulled of the "ptvlba48-4.02" image and burned your own boot cd right? Let's see...oh, and did you do the full conversion by copying over all your saved programs as well or the fast version? I guess either way, it wasn't necessarily fast...how powerful was the PC you used? I have an older 500Mhz that I was thinking of hooking up and sticking in the corner. It may take some time, but since no one is using it.
> 
> ...


I used a combination of both the Hinsdale guide and the Weaknees guide (the interactive guide thing). Mostly used the Weaknees one though, as it was less confusing, not having to jump from this part to that part. Weaknees was straightforward. Also, all the gibberish about using dd instead, blah... Just do the weaknees.

Yeah, do NOT boot to any machine that has windows XP installed, XP will trash your Tivo drive. I happened to have a spare computer that was still in parts on my test bench (building it for my near-3 year old). It didn't have any hard drives, let alone an operating system yet. So, that wasn't a problem. System used? Hehe, p3-500 would work just dandy, and about the same speed. I used a VIA micro-ATX m-10000 motherboard, on a piece of cardboard, with a power-supply hooked up to it. Then, I used a jumper to hit the power and reset switch on the motherboard, hows that for old-school upgrading? I did have a stick of 512m ram in it, which probably help with keeping data in memory before transferring to the other HD.

Since I KNEW I wasn't ever going to use that hard-drive for anything, and that I was going to keep it as the backup, even if I would have had a drive with Windows XP on it, I would have unhooked it. My suggestion, do what I did, keep that 40gig as a permanent backup (kept in a safe place, anti-static bag labeled appropriately) and unhook all the other drives in your computer, except for the CD-rom (or dvd-rom, both work fine).

Since I wasn't planning on using the hard drive (original 40gig) for anything ever, and going to keep it in storage "just in case" I didn't worry about the "backup image". As long as you do the command in the right order, and don't overwrite the original 40gig with the blank 250gig you're pretty safe doing that.

Really, they made it sound on these boards this would take forever. I couldn't believe how fast it was, I was prepared to wait hours and hours on the transfer.

Too keep your speeds up, make sure the original 40gig and the 250gig drives are on separate "channels", one on Primary, and one Secondary. (not talking master/slave here, separate ribbon cables) Keeping them on the same takes a LOT of bandwidth during the copy, separating them, speeds things up, so it was natural to do it for this copy.


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

Hmmm. So my "old" machine (which is nothing compared to your cardboard config, heh!) is indeed a P3 500 and has XP on the smaller 13GB drive, and a bunch of data on the 80GB drive. I believe the 80GB drive is FAT32 already. My thinking is this...
1. I disconnet the smaller 13GB drive that has XP on it.
2. I leave the bigger drive with data on it (believe it's jumpered as slave already) connected.
3. Then, I start attaching Tivo and new drives and go through Weaknees etc...

Or, this may be a dumb question, but given I'd do like you and save the 40GB drive somewhere and wouldn't need a backup image built...can I just disconnect both drives all 
together? Then I'd only have to worry about attaching the Tivo drive, new drive, and leave the CD/DVD drive attached with the boot CD? That may be more cut and dry right?

OH, and looking at Weaknees, they have a link for the bootable CD. Did you use that one or the one from the Hinsdale instructions? Maybe they're the same, but thought I'd ask.

VERY valuable posting, really!!!! Assuming your Tivo is still doing great? Oh, I'd heard there was some hack to have the Tivo show you how much space your using and/or have left? Do you know of that? I'm having trouble finding the backdoor code for 7.2 but haven't really put a lot of work into searching yet. I'll give myself the opportunity to screw up the drive upgrade first. 8)


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## MokTask (Jan 13, 2006)

If you are in fact going to keep the 40gig intact (forever, with hopes of NEVER needing to use it, because if your 250gig fails, you'll need it or a backup image) then yes, just disconnect every drive in the beast except the CD-Rom drive. Just make sure the CD drive is jumpered the right way (usually your optical drives should be all slave or cable-select anyway)

But, if you go through the whole Hinsdale, or select the right options on the Weaknees Interactive Guide, and wish to create the backup, you can probably leave it as is. But depends on where on the chain it is, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave (since the XP drive is probably Primary Master). Should check just to make sure.

I can't remember for sure, but I did have both Weaknees and the PTVupgrade boot disks on hand at the time. Booted both (for posterity), but think I ended up using the one linked to in the Weaknees guide, I think. They both have the same exact small version of text-only Linux on them, maybe not EXACT, but the commands you're going to use, are on both.

Yep, Tivo is doing excellent. My original post (and the other thread I created) did note some issues, but that was only on the initial setup, and the fact I was an idiot and didn't hook it up right. Had I hooked it up right, I wouldn't have run through the Guided Setup again, and never would have known it took WAY too long, and still don't know why. Have a couple leads in my thread, but nothing solid yet.

Why on earth Tivo doesn't put a little "filled up" bar on the top of your Now Playing list, on all those screens, is beyond me. Get with the program Tivo! If you know of a backdoor to show me via keypresses, you let me know!

Really, I don't foresee you screwing things up. It is pretty easy. Granted, I know my way around tech pretty good (including some real dabbling with Linux, have a dedicated machine) but the guides make it simple. Hardest part, was getting the cover off. If looking at the back of the machine, the "right" side wouldn't slide back, there was like a catch there, it took some prying to get if off, but it did, and went back on easy.

If you've got anything else, just ask here. I've got it subbed, so it'll popup that someone replied. Could have replied sooner, but my near 3-year old was in the hospital overnight Wednesday, so that has kept me pretty preoccupied since like Tuesday. All is semi-well now though, so that's good.


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

I haven't even touched the machine yet and you've already set me along the right path. I'm not a tech, "but I play one on tv". 8) Actually I'm pretty decent so I'm hoping that helps me along. At least I understand the instructions. I'm thinking the only issue I may run into is not jumpering the drives right...besides that I think I get it.

Yeah, I don't get why Tivo doesn't show you how much you've used and how much you have left. The processing in the machine I'm sure keeps track of it given it knows when it needs more room or not. How tough is it to write a little script to format and spit out that data so the humble user knows how close or far away he is? 

Sorry to hear about your little one. Had a family hospital trip myself that's delayed my upgrade but it's working out. Hope he/she is on the mend.

Thanks for the offer to help. I'd hate to write am email to the forum starting with "so I took my HD apart, are there are these disk things in there..."


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

I'm stuck! I'm finally getting to this and I'm stuck. I've verified both the old 40Gb drive and the new 250GB drive so I don't have anything to unlock. Now though, when it boots up through Linux, it shows all the drive sizes and concludes with an "hda:" prompt. Actually, the last 2 lines are "Partition check:", next line "hda:". I have the drives attacked like this:

hda Tivo original 40GB drive
hdb New 250GB drive
hdc TDK ATAPI CD ROM (w/ weaknees boot cd)

I don't see any errors or anything, I just can't type in the "mfsbackup ..." command! What am I doing wrong?


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## gimedaball (Dec 20, 2005)

Wow, when things work right, you wonder why it took so long. 

The bottom line is that I've now upgraded my Tivo from 40hours
to 250hours.

The sorted details aren't important, but I ran into an issue with the weeknees
bootable CD image. I burned CD's with that image 3 times at even the slowest speed and had the image data verified successfully. When I tried to run the upgrade, it stalled (as written in this thread). On a whim, I threw in the PTV CD and it spun through like a champ!!!

Before I knew it, it was copying the tivo drive onto the new 250GB drive. After about an hour (of which it counted down each MB being copied) it gave me a message saying I increased the capacity to roughly 280hours from the original 40hours!!!

I feel so good about it I want to do it from everyone I know!

Thanks to everyone that helped me through the process. Honestly, when it works like it's supposed to, it's REALLY simple.


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