# Is this Seagate HD good to use in tivo?



## jp233 (Jun 15, 2006)

I have a 160gb UATA Seagate Barracuda 7200 drive in a computer I'm not using, and I'd like to put this in my Hughes SD-DVR40 box if it will work OK. I'm not overly concerned with the Tivo lasting years upon years, so if this isn't the "optimal" hard drive I'm not worried about it -- unless it won't function properly.

As i've read from Weaknees etc, there are certain drives that are recommended for Tivos... Seagate DB35 and Maxtor QuickView.

So.... will this drive work OK or should I plunk down for a new drive so I can upgrade my tivo capacity?


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## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

It should work fine.


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## jp233 (Jun 15, 2006)

great.

ok my question now is, since it'd be nice and i have a donor computer to do all this on (not having to mess with this one i'm posting from that actually works right and has the internet) - I'd like to preserve all my recordings that are on the tivo now.

the new 160gb drive has 3 ntfs partitions on it.... do i need to wipe that clean?

I have instantcake and PTVnet, and i have been looking at the tivo.upgrade-instructions website also. using mfstools to do the transfer of my old tivo 6.2 drive to the new big drive, will that overwrite the whole mess and create one big partition?


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## maharg18 (Dec 4, 2002)

Yes MFSTools will wipe the drive automatically.


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## jp233 (Jun 15, 2006)

fan-diddly-tastic.

well after several months of having ~140 hrs recording time, and with a nice xmas gift of a 500gb drive... I want to go bigger in the tivo. And keep all my recordings. And enable all the home networking options available for the thing.

I ran a cat5 cable to the tivo, and will be getting a USB-to-cat5 adapter soon. and need to replace the drive inside it with the 500 gigger, and enable all the gucci stuff.

will this work?

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdX (/dev/hdY) | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdZ (/dev/hdZZ)

?

Then, after the drive is formatted and all the recordings copied, do I run PTVnet, or Zipper it, or TyTools in order to enable all the gucci functions ??? I want to be able to play music & pic slideshows thru the tivo, transfer videos from PC to Tivo, transfer tivo recordings to a PC, etc

wish I could read the forum all day at work but its blocked :down:


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

If your drive has NTFS partitions on it then chances are you used it in Windows NT, 2K, or XP, correct? If this is the case then there is a signature written to the boot record that may prevent the drive from booting ni a Tivo. You can try using the MakeTivoBootable utility after installing the Tivo OS or you could run a low-level format on the drive to erase the boot partition. If you can perform a quick low-level format then that should suffice. It generally erases just the boot partition and the first and last 100 clusters(?) on the drive. You can then install the Tivo OS and it should boot fine.

If you're going to use the 500GB drive instead then you can ignore the above. I don't recall the exact command to do a direct copy so I can't help you there. I would recommend that you set up a larger swap file and then use tpip to activate it. You should allocate 1MB of swap file for every 2GB of drive capacity so your swap file size should be 250MB instead of 127MB.

PTVNet installs networking functions. The Zipper will set up networking and add all the bells and whistles. TyTools is a utility used to transfer videos from your Tivo to your PC and has nothing to do with setting up the "gucci" features.


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

mr.unnatural said:


> If your drive has NTFS partitions on it then chances are you used it in Windows NT, 2K, or XP, correct? If this is the case then there is a signature written to the boot record that may prevent the drive from booting ni a Tivo. You can try using the MakeTivoBootable utility after installing the Tivo OS or you could run a low-level format on the drive to erase the boot partition.
> ...


mfstools properly initializes the boot records. There is no need to do anything else to prepare the drive.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

So you're saying that mfstools will automatically clear any signature written to the boot record by NT, 2K, or XP?


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

mr.unnatural said:


> So you're saying that mfstools will automatically clear any signature written to the boot record by NT, 2K, or XP?


An mfstool restore overwrites the whole drive, including the boot records. MakeTiVoBootable is only needed when you are trying to recover the contents of an existing tivo drive that's been booted into windows NT/XP/2K.


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## jp233 (Jun 15, 2006)

sweet...thanks. I"ll copy the current tivo stuff to the new 500gb drive first, then zipper it to enable all the networking features etc. Then get TyTools on the computer so i can xfer stuff between the two devices. Give me Tivo or give me death!!


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