# Boot Disks and SATA support?



## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

A few people in the Series3 thread say the boot disks have SATA support. I tried to boot the ptvupgrade disk on my aopen motherboard pc and it doesn't see the sata drive. Using page up it looks like it's gettign confused by the motherboards ability to do raid and sees a raid device. But I cant mount that either?

I usually do all my tivo fiddling with an old PIII sans SATA. So I rather then messing around with the aopen I figured let me get what i need to use the PIII with SATA. Rather then buying a sata/pata converter I was thinking of just putting a SATA PCI card in the PIII. Will the bootcd recognize any SATA card? Or do I need to find one with a specific chipset?

I'm looking at the syba SD-SATA150R http://www.syba.com/product/43/02/03/index.html with the Silicon Image SIL 3112 host controller chip - it says it works under linux.

Any help would be much appreciated.


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## Agent86 (Jan 18, 2002)

I bought the Promise SATA300 TX4 card to do my testing and upgrades. It is supported under linux using the "sata_promise" driver.

I've read about the Silicon Image stuff working as well, but I knew the Promise drivers were open source and the card had 4 ports on it, which was nice.

I had no problems using the GParted Live CD, as mentioned in this post to do my upgrade with this card in my system, but the card did refuse to work properly in my old Pentuim 2 system. I had to put it into my Athlon 1700 machine to get it to work.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

do you know if pdisk is on the gparted live cd?


or actually- can you use the gparted to change the partition sizes?


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## bschott (Sep 14, 2006)

FYI,

I had problems with GPartBoot CD, The PTV {free} CD, and Knoppix boot CD on my new Asus P5WDH Deluxe board using the onboard SATA controller. Howerver the Knoppix (and probably the other's) worked fine on my other MSI Nforce 4/AMD system. The MSI SATA is onboard NForce 4.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

Agent86 said:


> I bought the Promise SATA300 TX4 card to do my testing and upgrades. It is supported under linux using the "sata_promise" driver.
> 
> I've read about the Silicon Image stuff working as well, but I knew the Promise drivers were open source and the card had 4 ports on it, which was nice.
> 
> I had no problems using the GParted Live CD, as mentioned in this post to do my upgrade with this card in my system, but the card did refuse to work properly in my old Pentuim 2 system. I had to put it into my Athlon 1700 machine to get it to work.


I bought that same card- cant get the usual boot cd's to see drives on it.

But the knoppix cd works fine with it.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

I have the Adaptec ASH-125SA 2 channel SATA card it works with the older versions of Linux but does not support the 750G drive. After verifying this with Adaptec I purchased a Promise SATA300 4 channel card it works great with the Large drive however requires a Linux Kernel version 2.6.14 or later altho previous version of the kernel can be modified to support the Promise card. In order to complete the upgrade of the Series3 TiVo I upgraded the MFSTools + Linux PC to FC5.


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## wackymann (Sep 22, 2006)

Quick question for anybody/everybody about using the bumwine method for upgrading S3's on an older computer:

I have an older computer that doesn't have any SATA disks, and the mother board doesn't have any SATA ports. OTOH, my power supply claims to have 2 connections that are meant for SATA drives?? (I obviously built this PC just before SATA became popular).

I'd like to use the bumwine method to upgrade my S3 to the new Seagate 750GB DB35, so I was thinking I could just buy a PCI-SATA card and add it to my PC.

My questions are...

1. Will my Knoppix boot CD recognize the 2 SATA disks if they are attached this way?
2. Is there a good PCI-SATA card that somebody could recommend?

I'm running Windows 2000 if that makes a difference.


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## greg_burns (May 22, 2004)

My Thecus N2050 came with a Silicon Image SataLink PCI card. The chip says SiI3512ECTU128 on it. It has one Sata connector and 1 eSata connector. FWIW, I can see my sata drives connected to it when running under Knoppix.

Obviously the card I have wouldn't be useful in itself, you need two internal Sata connectors. (Unless you are going for the internal raid solution.  ) Point was the chip SiL3512 is Knoppix friendly.


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## spike2k5 (Feb 21, 2006)

Try my bootcd. It's got SATA support and fixes for mfstools.

www.mfslive.org


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## wackymann (Sep 22, 2006)

spike2k5 said:


> Try my bootcd. It's got SATA support and fixes for mfstools.
> 
> www.mfslive.org


Is there a guide for using this boot CD to upgrade an S3? I found some guides on your web page for S1 and S2, but I didn't see anything for the S3.


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## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

There is help on his web page and there is a readme on the CD image.


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## wackymann (Sep 22, 2006)

wscannell said:


> There is help on his web page and there is a readme on the CD image.


I found plenty of guides for Series 1+2 tivos, but none of them are for the Series 3 Tivo (as far as I can tell).


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## spike2k5 (Feb 21, 2006)

wackymann said:


> Is there a guide for using this boot CD to upgrade an S3? I found some guides on your web page for S1 and S2, but I didn't see anything for the S3.


S3 is going to be the same as S2 but use /dev/sda or /dev/sdb etc.

so to copy everything from original S3 to new drive,

backup -qTao - /dev/sda | restore -s 128 -xzpi - /dev/sdb

where sda is your original, sdb is your new hd.
make sure you know where each drive is mounted. 
you don't need to run tpip b/c it's done correctly.

Also set the bios settings for sata to do ide not raid.


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

In addition, the WeaKnees instructions cover the S3 now.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

spike2k5 said:


> Try my bootcd. It's got SATA support and fixes for mfstools.
> 
> www.mfslive.org


thanks thats great that you fixed MFStools!


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## wackymann (Sep 22, 2006)

Just updating my progress! My bare 750 GB Seagate DB35 drive arrived today from WeaKnees ($469), and I successfully used the bumwine method to upgrade my Tivo S3 to 750 GB. Knoppix saw my 2 SATA drives and everything went off without a hitch. It took about 90 minutes to copy the drive, and about 2 hours total for everything. I was amazed at the inside of the Tivo. It's so uncluttered and easy to work with.

I used the Promise SATA TX4 card that agent86 recommended at the top of this thread. Knoppix seems to get along with that card just fine, and now I have 4 SATA ports in my computer for future expansion.



wackymann said:


> Quick question for anybody/everybody about using the bumwine method for upgrading S3's on an older computer:
> 
> I have an older computer that doesn't have any SATA disks, and the mother board doesn't have any SATA ports. OTOH, my power supply claims to have 2 connections that are meant for SATA drives?? (I obviously built this PC just before SATA became popular).
> 
> ...


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