# Tivo Series 3 HD XL drive replacement



## stinga (Nov 12, 2004)

Hi Everyone,

I have a TCD658000 with an external Tivo drive attached.

The internal drive is on the way out and fear it will soon fail. I have a couple of question were I can use your help.

1) If I upgrade my internal drive will I loose the use of the external.

2) What tools are recommended for backup and restore to the new drive. Once restored, will it work with my external drive.

3) what drive is recommended for this.

Thank you,
Bruce


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

1) yes, and its not recommended. Just one issue arise and you lose recordings.

2) WinMFS would work up to 2TB, WD20EURX/S or WD20EFRX.
MFSTools would work, but if you are leary of typing commands, I would not recommend.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

stinga said:


> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I have a TCD658000 with an external Tivo drive attached.
> 
> ...


You could use one of the command line Linux utilities

ddrescue

or

dd_rescue

to "Xerox" the current internal drive to a new 1TB and the TiVo should think it's still the same drive, which means it'll still have the shows, or the parts of the shows the other parts of which are on the external.

If your external is a 1TB, then that's a total of 2TB, which is, as far as I know, the largest internal you could use instead of those 2.

So a WD10EURS or EURX would probably be your best bet for "Xeroxing" onto, though the EURS is probably not available "brand new" anymore (and anyone offering it as that may actually be selling one that got pulled from a non-TiVo authorized external enclosure, which means no 3 year WD warranty.

If buying from Amazon or newegg, stay away from "partners" or "associates" which use their websites but aren't actually them.


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## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

The recently released update to mfs tools (within the last week) might be able to do this, and consolidate from both drives.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

CrashHD said:


> The recently released update to mfs tools (within the last week) might be able to do this, and consolidate from both drives.


I think I remember seeing something somewhere about WinMFS being able to turn an S3 internal/external into one big internal and save all the shows, but I don't have the spare gear to do the experiment.


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## stinga (Nov 12, 2004)

So for clarity speak....

I don't really care about the shows existing on the internal or external drive. I would like to upgrade the Tivo to a 2Tb drive and get rid of the external all together. So what I really need is a backup of the Tivo OS with all the setting including the cablecard info.

WinMFS seems rather straight forward and may just go that route.... Can this be done and what command specifically. Is it a backup and restore of Tivo as opposed to MFSCopy?

Also, I read on the WinMFS site that the Tivo kernal may no be able to use the full 2tb and on up to 1.5tb. Thoughts on this?

Thanks you again!


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

With the Tivo software of 11.0h and up, it will use the full 2 TB for over 300 HD hrs.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

stinga said:


> So for clarity speak....
> 
> I don't really care about the shows existing on the internal or external drive. I would like to upgrade the Tivo to a 2Tb drive and get rid of the external all together. So what I really need is a backup of the Tivo OS with all the setting including the cablecard info.
> 
> ...


Be sure you're running WinMFS as administrator.

You can do a truncated backup of Series 1, 2, or 3 platform TiVos with WinMFS which will preserve all of your settings but not save the recordings.

Pretty sure in your case you'll need to hook up both internal and external drives to the PC first, or, since you're sacrificing recordings anyway, you could tell the TiVo to "divorce" the external first, which might take a while, and then when that's finished you can just back up the internal drive.

Remember, when you go to restore that backup to a new drive that's larger than the original internal, if it offers the option of using or not using the advanced or optimized (forget which word they use) partition layout, you DO want to use that on an S2 or S3 platform machine.

When it finishes the restore, it'll say you have extra space and ask if you want to expand. Tell it no.

Then recheck that the new drive is the one selected (File, Select) and run

mfsinfo

and make sure everything looks okay. There should be a very large Apple Free Partition on the end of the drive.

Then run

mfsadd

to do the expansion, and recheck it with

mfsinfo

and you should now have a very large MFS Media partition, the 15th, at the end of the drive.

But run the drive manufacturer's own diagnostic long test on any drive that is new or new to you before you do anything else with said drive, just to be sure.

When you tell it to expand with

mfsadd

it might say something about a partition being over 1.1 or 1.2 TBs, that's okay, go ahead and tell it to do it as long as you're running version 11.0h or newer of the TiVo operating system (current most recent S3 version is 11.0m)

If you run

mfsinfo

on the old internal before doing the backup, it should show the version number so you can be sure it's new enough.


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## stinga (Nov 12, 2004)

Thank you very much for your help and guidance! I'll post an update in the next day or so.


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## stinga (Nov 12, 2004)

Continued error trying to run Diag tools.

"DLGDiag for Windows has stopped Working"

I'm running as an administrator, have tried various compatibility modes, and even changed out SATA ports on motherboard. WinMFS does see it however.


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## stinga (Nov 12, 2004)

Got it working in another PC...... Quick test ran just fine and am now 1/3 through the extended.


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## stinga (Nov 12, 2004)

Extended test work out just fine.... no issues

I divorced the external drive without issues as well. All recordings were lost as expected.


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## stinga (Nov 12, 2004)

Backup took less than 2 minutes - 267,844kb

On to the restore...


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## stinga (Nov 12, 2004)

Restore took just as long.... less than two minutes. Installed the new drive, powered it up and all is working perfectly. 

Thank you to all that helped!
-Bruce


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