# 2nd hard drive upgrade method?



## Ehien (Jul 5, 2005)

What's the best way to upgrade a Series 2 Tivo (540040) the 2nd time? In my case it's 40GB->120GB the first time. And now the second time I'm trying to go 120GB->250GB. Turns out it's much tougher than I've original thought (a breeze the first upgrade) as I didn't realize partition has been used up on the first upgrade.

Preserving of most of near 120GB of recorded programs is preferred but if there's no solution (that's doable by myself), I may make the painful decision of leaving them behind.

So far the best hope seems to be in the method Jamie suggested:
http://alt.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=124#msg_num_2

If there's no easier path, I'll try this route tonight.

Thanks.

Ehien


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Messing with the partition table is not for the faint of heart. If you are willing to lose recordings, just do a minimal backup (with the -f 9999 option) and then restore it to your new drive. That will get you back to your original 40GB image, which you can then expand to fill the 250GB drive.


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## Ehien (Jul 5, 2005)

Well, since the worst from failing of messing with partition table is messing up of the new 250GB drive and wasting of time, I think it's worth trying. If Jamie's Pearl script works, I don't even need to do much at all. If I fail, I can wipe the 250GB HDD clean and do the minimal backup you suggested. I believe the original 40GB Tivo drive is still somewhere in this household if needed.

Thanks a bunch!

Ehien



Dan Collins said:


> Messing with the partition table is not for the faint of heart. If you are willing to lose recordings, just do a minimal backup (with the -f 9999 option) and then restore it to your new drive. That will get you back to your original 40GB image, which you can then expand to fill the 250GB drive.


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

Ehien said:


> Well, since the worst from failing of messing with partition table is messing up of the new 250GB drive and wasting of time, I think it's worth trying. If Jamie's Pearl script works, I don't even need to do much at all. If I fail, I can wipe the 250GB HDD clean and do the minimal backup you suggested. I believe the original 40GB Tivo drive is still somewhere in this household if needed.


The perl script is not turnkey and won't "just work". There are other steps that need to be taken, as described in that thread, and the end result is a non-standard partition/zone layout that existing tools (like mfsbackup) won't understand. So I suggest you don't go this route unless you are willing to spend a *lot* of time understanding partition tables, MFS data structures, etc.

I'll suggest again that you put a big disk in your PC, transfer everything off with Tivo2Go, then make a "shrunk" backup as Dan suggested. You can restore your shows from the PC on the new disk at your leisure. Yes, TTG is slow, but it is a way to preserve your recordings. Might take you several days or more to get everything off, at TTG rates.


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## Ehien (Jul 5, 2005)

JamieP said:


> The perl script is not turnkey and won't "just work". There are other steps that need to be taken, as described in that thread, and the end result is a non-standard partition/zone layout that existing tools (like mfsbackup) won't understand. So I suggest you don't go this route unless you are willing to spend a *lot* of time understanding partition tables, MFS data structures, etc.
> 
> I'll suggest again that you put a big disk in your PC, transfer everything off with Tivo2Go, then make a "shrunk" backup as Dan suggested. You can restore your shows from the PC on the new disk at your leisure. Yes, TTG is slow, but it is a way to preserve your recordings. Might take you several days or more to get everything off, at TTG rates.


Hi Jamie,

I thought the script was it and not much else was needed to be done. Thanks so much for the advises. Now it's fairly clear to me that due to lack of knowledge on related issues (and little time away from work load to learn on them), the best course of action is to do what you suggested- backing up with TTG to a large PC drive and getting them back to 250GB drive after upgrade.

Indeed it's going to be very slow. In past transfers I found it took a bit more than an hour transferring one hour of basic quality recording. At such rate at least 5 full days of non-stop transfer is needed to get 110GB of recordings. Hope there's a faster way to transfer but guess this is what it takes.

Thanks, so much, for all the patience and explanations. I know what I should do now.

Best regards,
Ehien


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## Ehien (Jul 5, 2005)

Just an update of my progress...

Transferring of recorded programs from Tivo to PC has been in progress since last night. On my network it took a bit more than one hour to transfer one hour of program. So as expected it'll take at least 5 full days to transfer all the programs. But this is at least a straightforward method without needing to learn all the things about MFS file system.

BTW, is the transfer rate normal?

When I set up Tivo with Wi-Fi last year, it couldn't work at 802.11G speed even with a G-compatible adapter. Has the situation changed? The speed should be up to 5 times faster if G standard is supported.

Ehien


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## Ehien (Jul 5, 2005)

Just realized there have been a few G adapters supported by S2 Tivo for 802.11g. It is a great news and I will be looking for one soon.

However, what is the actual Tivo-PC and PC-Tivo TTG transfer speed people observed with G?

Ehien



Ehien said:


> Just an update of my progress...
> 
> Transferring of recorded programs from Tivo to PC has been in progress since last night. On my network it took a bit more than one hour to transfer one hour of program. So as expected it'll take at least 5 full days to transfer all the programs. But this is at least a straightforward method without needing to learn all the things about MFS file system.
> 
> ...


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

Ehien said:


> BTW, is the transfer rate normal?


It sounds pretty normal for wireless.


> When I set up Tivo with Wi-Fi last year, it couldn't work at 802.11G speed even with a G-compatible adapter. Has the situation changed? The speed should be up to 5 times faster if G standard is supported.


Tivo has their own 802.11g adapter now that is supposed to have better performance. Performance will still be far below the theoretical maximum of 802.11g.


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## Ehien (Jul 5, 2005)

JamieP said:


> It sounds pretty normal for wireless.Tivo has their own 802.11g adapter now that is supposed to have better performance. Performance will still be far below the theoretical maximum of 802.11g.


Yeah I saw it and just read through a few posts about it. Some reported almost 2x faster transfer compared to B adapters. If true this is pretty good and worth the premium over other off-the-shelf G adapters. I will try to gauge whether we'll use TTG more in the future (rarely in the past, but the situation may change now that I found the added reverse transfer feature of v2.2) to justify upgrading the adapter.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Just as an FYI regarding transfer speeds - even with 100Mbit/sec wired ethernet, and USB 2.0 drivers, most folks top out at around 13 mbits/sec. I think Jamie has done considerably better with gigabit ethernet (around 50 mbits/sec IIRC). The USB adapter adds overhead that will always constrain performance from the network maximum.


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## Ehien (Jul 5, 2005)

Dan Collins said:


> Just as an FYI regarding transfer speeds - even with 100Mbit/sec wired ethernet, and USB 2.0 drivers, most folks top out at around 13 mbits/sec. I think Jamie has done considerably better with gigabit ethernet (around 50 mbits/sec IIRC). The USB adapter adds overhead that will always constrain performance from the network maximum.


I understood that there're overheads with both USB and WiFi. But I thought in the case of Tivo, the bottleneck is on the video encoding (or whatever else it's called) in Tivo? No? If the wired Ethernet is much faster than wireless than at least for the latter video encoding is not the bottleneck. It would be nice to have fast LAN throughput like Jamie's so bottleneck is indeed at encoding.

This is the 2nd day of my recording backup (to PC). With wireless B adapter I'm getting throughput of ~17GB per day (or ~1.6Mb/s). This means there're about 5 more days to go. Boy maybe I should consider a USB wired Ethernet adapter to directly connect to the wireless router and be done with the pain sooner.

Ehien


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

Ehien said:


> I understood that there're overheads with both USB and WiFi. But I thought in the case of Tivo, the bottleneck is on the video encoding (or whatever else it's called) in Tivo? No? If the wired Ethernet is much faster than wireless than at least for the latter video encoding is not the bottleneck. It would be nice to have fast LAN throughput like Jamie's so bottleneck is indeed at encoding.
> 
> This is the 2nd day of my recording backup (to PC). With wireless B adapter I'm getting throughput of ~17GB per day (or ~1.6Mb/s). This means there're about 5 more days to go. Boy maybe I should consider a USB wired Ethernet adapter to directly connect to the wireless router and be done with the pain sooner.
> 
> Ehien


Many people report 3GB/hour for TTG transfers using usb2 wired adapters on stock pre-nightlight series 2 hardware. This is about 6mbps and would allow you to do the whole transfer in < 2days. A nightlight model like yours will probably be a little slower.

TTG has to remux and apply DRM to the raw recordings on disk. In my experience, with a wired connection, it's this processing that is the bottleneck.


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## Ehien (Jul 5, 2005)

JamieP said:


> Many people report 3GB/hour for TTG transfers using usb2 wired adapters on stock pre-nightlight series 2 hardware. This is about 6mbps and would allow you to do the whole transfer in < 2days. A nightlight model like yours will probably be a little slower.


Ha! That would be wonderful, even if it's only 4 times faster than my snail speed wireless B link. But by the time I get everything for such a setup, 5 days are likely passed.

If anyone can save me troubles of searching for answers... For wireless setup, is one with Tivo's G adapter faster or one with USB wired adapter to a wireless G switch (or whatever other fastest wireless setup) faster?



JamieP said:


> TTG has to remux and apply DRM to the raw recordings on disk. In my experience, with a wired connection, it's this processing that is the bottleneck.


So the speed is Remux<USB<Wired Ethernet (100BaseT)? Wonder if it's possible for Tivo to change algorithm in remux to make it faster?

Ehien


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## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

They could if they didn't care for DRM, or could remux on the computer end.

When I do the TyTool thing, I can get ~4 MB/S. With supported .tivo transfer, 900 MB/S, both on 240 DVRs with wired USB2.0 adapters.


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