# I'm confused my PC's BIOS only shows 137GB on both new drives



## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

I have make a bakup on the C: drive following hinsdales guide.

I went to expand to both new a and b drives but noticed the BIOS on my ECS810 mobo only recognised 137GB.

So I changed the mobo to a K7s5a mobo BUT the BIOS only recognises 137gb still on both new drives.

Am I stuffed?

The new drives are both Seagate ST3250620A 250GB ATA100 7200rpm 16mb Cache

Can I still use the full 250gb capacity of both these drives with these mobo's?

I so how?

I am also confused as to what disk I need to buy or will one of the freebies ones do?

I searched an searched the forums but keep getting confused 

Can anyone in plain english tell me what I need to do?

Sorry to sound so lame.

I have a series 1 UK Tivo.

Thanks

Matt


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

I take it you haven't yet come across www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/upgrade3.html which should be pretty helpful to your hard drive upgrade.

So far as your Motherboard not recognising more than 137Gb in disk drive size is concerned this is usually overcome when you boot the PC using the Linux MFSTools disk instead of booting it in Windows. However in some cases you do need to upgrade the Bios of the motherboard to a more recent version with support for large hard drives. This proved to be the case with the old desktop PC I bought to upgrade my Tivo.

You can usually track down a more recent Bios for the motherboard on the web but sometimes you have to pay for it if you are unlucky. But try booting the machine with the MFSTools CD first as your current Bios will probably be fine with large hard drives under Linux.


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## bradleyem (May 23, 2002)

are you booting into Linux using the normal non LBA48 disk?


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

marsbarbabe said:


> The new drives are both Seagate ST3250620A 250GB ATA100 7200rpm 16mb Cache


Sorry to rain on your parade, but those drives are very unlikely to work as a pair in a Series 1 TiVo  One should be OK though...

Set the drive type to "none" in your PC BIOS settings to allow linux to see the full size of the drive, and use the LBA48 boot CD for the restore, followed by copykern to copy the updated kernel and initialise the swap.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> Sorry to rain on your parade, but those drives are very unlikely to work as a pair in a Series 1 TiVo  One should be OK though...
> 
> Set the drive type to "none" in your PC BIOS settings to allow linux to see the full size of the drives, and use the LBA48 boot CD for the restore, followed by copykern to copy the updated kernel and initialise the swap.


To amplify blindlemon's comments these Seagate drives draw too much power as a pair for the Tivo power supply to be able to boot them both.

Two 400Gb Samsung HDLD drives or even just one for now would be no problem at all though. One of these currently costs about 80 quid.


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

1 - Ooh that steve conrad site looks easy to follow  - thank you.

I think I killed the mobo last night after many attempts of trying to install a faulty graphics card and faulty RAM - its all old stuff - now it won't boot.

Not to worry I'll use my newer PC to do it on - Hopefully that will support >137gb

2 - The disk I was using is called MFSTools 2 - I've no idea if it's the large disk one/LBA48 or not.

3 - BUT from the steveconrad site - I take it I can use the "MFSTools2 Large Disk iso image. (11 Meg file size). " that he has for download?

4 - Just out of interest and before I knackered the mobo - I tried setting the HD's to 'none' in the BIOS but MFSTools still kept reporting them as 137gb ?? whats that all about?

5 - UM - I wasn't aware there was a power supply issue powering two drives  - Oh Damm!
I'll have to get "400Gb Samsung HDLD drives" - BUT I did a google and nothing came back - are they called a different/specific model number? Also where would you guys buy them from?

Thanks EVERYONE - I was blown away with the amount of different help I got in such a short time 


M


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Try here:-

www.cclonline.com/basket/mycurrentbasket.asp?refresh=39118.5264930556&track=7168Q1

for the 400Gb Samsung

Or here for the 300Gb Samsung:-

www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=7166&category_id=111&manufacturer_id=0

Or here for a 250Gb Samsung:-

www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=7164&category_id=111&manufacturer_id=0

Plenty of other suppliers at reasonable prices but these people are reliable and offer rapid shipping.

All these Samsung drives can be fitted in pairs.

Yes its the MFSTools ISO on the Steve Conrad site you want or you could alternatively use the one at www.mfslive.org


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

marsbarbabe said:


> 4 - Just out of interest and before I knackered the mobo - I tried setting the HD's to 'none' in the BIOS but MFSTools still kept reporting them as 137gb ?? whats that all about?


Linux usually detects your hard drive sizes anyway regardless of the settings in the Motherboard BIOS. The exception is when your motherboard has a BIOS so out of date it can't detect large hard drives at all.


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

thanks for the link I think this ones works better.. 
http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=7168&category_id=111

My BIOS and mobo were well old - lets hope the modern PC I'm gonna try is OK.

I've ordered one of those drives - hopefully it will be plain sailing from there once it arrives.

Thanks ALL for your help I'll let you know how I get on.

Most appreciated.

Thanks

M


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

marsbarbabe said:


> I've ordered one of those drives - hopefully it will be plain sailing from there once it arrives.


I'm sure you will let us know if it isn't plain sailing for any reason.


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

I went mad and ordered 2x400gb samsung drives and I've just splashed out on a cache card as well - the Mrs will kill me when she finds out how much I've spent.

is there anything I need to be aware of when installing two large HD's and a card?

Thank you
M


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

marsbarbabe said:


> I went mad and ordered 2x400gb samsung drives and I've just splashed out on a cache card as well - the Mrs will kill me when she finds out how much I've spent.
> 
> is there anything I need to be aware of when installing two large HD's and a card?
> 
> M


Well you definitely need the Cachecard with that much hard drive capacity and also the 512MB of 168PIN PC133 SDRAM that goes in it.

For instance Ebuyer's own brand is the cheapest and the one I have and Blindlemon often uses:-

www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/22918/rb/25030774184

Or for a fiver more you can get the Kingston version that I might have got had the price difference been that small at the time:-

www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/21569/rb/25030774184

Sorry that means a few more quid to spend unfortunately.

Also you definitely need to record everything at Best with this much capacity as 800Gb equals about 280 hours of recording at Best or around 300 or so recordings when full which is about the maximum number the Tivo can handle even with a Cachecard and 512MB of RAM without Tivo menu performance starting to slow down. Or in due course you probably will also set up Mode 0 recording quality, which probably means more like 250 hours of recording. You can record everything in Basic if you want but this would be about 980 hours worth and you would end up waiting a few seconds after each menu selection for things to happen.

You also need to follow the Large Hard Drive and Cachecard installation guides at www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo to set it all up.

Good luck as you are going to end up with one of the largest capacity UK Tivos in circulation.


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

Hmm OK...

I've now got 512mb RAM, a cachecard and two 400GB HDLD samsung drives. And am using a newer PC where the BIOS recognises the full 400gb of each drive.

BUT! - When trying to restore the bakup image to the two drives I could NOT use the command (in the red box) of "restore -x -s 300 -zpi -r 4 /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev.hdc /dev/hdb"

.. it just says "Usage:restore [options] Adrive [Bdrive]"

I'm presuming the command is wrong somehow? yet I copied it letter for letter as per the instructions. Out of interest I used the command for the 'less than 300gb drives' and this worked (without the "-r 4 ") - BUT I am creating unused space on my nice new drives now aren't I?

What am I doing wrong? (i'll have to wait for one of you kind folk to tell me before I can continue  )

Thank you
M


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

Ummm 

Even more confusing...

I thought that seeing as I am going to have to 're-do' my two new drives once someone can kindly answer the question above - I may as well try and see if I am able to install the cachecard drivers.

So... with my 'new' Tivo A drive in secondary master I try to follw the instructions here ..
http://www.silicondust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2&sid=0ca821b7fd78669cfa2d87e11dabfc3a

I get to step 6 but its not obvious how to run the nic_install. I tried typing "/nic_install/nic_install cachecard" but it didn't like that command.

I tried typing "nic_install" and this seemed a little more promising as it came up with "supported card:
airnet
tivonet
turbonet"

BUT it didn't give a 'cachecard' option so I typed "nic_install tivonet" - it nearly went to do it but then said "error no tivo drive detected".

Errrr help please  am I supposed to mount something first? if so how.

I feel like a right idiot. I can't even get the full capacity of the drives and nor can I do the next stage of installing the cachecard drivers (sob!)

I think I'm going to have to give up (it's 00.20am) as no one's going to answer at this time of night. Hopefully someone might tomorrow.

Another even more frustrating thing is that I looked at steveconrads instructions on how to do it here http://www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/cachecard.html (as his instructions seem easy to follow - apart from the above previous problem) BUT I haven't got a floppy drive!!

Do I need them on floppy - or will the 11.5mb .iso MFSTools image I'm using (booting from) be good enough?

By the way the copykern instruction went fine  shame about the rest.

Hope to hear from some of you soon.

Cheers
M


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Well I read it the same night but I think this is more blindlemon's territory than mine.

I wouldn't want to give you an answer that lands you up with a system that doesn't work. I would suggest the swap file value is a bit small for this much drive capacity and you probably want to use at least 500MB -s 500


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## yungee (Dec 29, 2002)

marsbarbabe said:


> BUT! - When trying to restore the bakup image to the two drives I could NOT use the command (in the red box) of "restore -x -s 300 -zpi -r 4 /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev.hdc /dev/hdb"
> 
> .. it just says "Usage:restore [options] Adrive [Bdrive]"


The "i" part of the command is the input file, so it's most important that is followed by your ".bak" file.

So you have the right command, just in the wrong order.

restore -x -s 300 - r 4 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev.hdc /dev/hdb

.. will do nicely.

Edit: Or as Pete says, you might want to up your swap to:

restore -x -s 500 - r 4 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev.hdc /dev/hdb

(Half a gig from your 800 isn't going to be significant!  )


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## yungee (Dec 29, 2002)

marsbarbabe said:


> So... with my 'new' Tivo A drive in secondary master I try to follw the instructions here ..


I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding something here, but you haven't restored your image to your 400Gb drives yet, so it isn't really an "A" drive yet.

I don't know what image you are using from Silicondust, but you want this one:

http://www.silicondust.com/tivo/nic_cd_lba48_20050218.iso

Restore your A & B drive using the commands in the post above, then you were along the right lines. Boot from the CD created from that ISO, with your A drive on anything other than primary master.

Then ...

/nic_install/nic_install cachecard 

... should work fine.

Have you gone to bed yet? Maybe I should!


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

WOW! thanks for thelate night answer yungee !

I wish I'd of stayed up waiting. Now I just have to wait till the kids go to bed so I can have drives hanging out of my PC to do the above.

Thanks for the image link too.

I feel 'prepared' and confident that I should be able to get it all working tonight with your above answers.

Just another question if I may..

I need to 're' restore to the two new drives (using your command above) as I went ahead and used the command without the "- r 4 " yesterday (just to see if it would do it). 

CAN I just use your above command "restore -x -s 500 - r 4 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev.hdc /dev/hdb" ... and this will automatically overwrite/format over what I did to the two new drives yesterday? i.e. I don't need to format them or delete anything first?

Thanks again
M


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Yes, just run the command and it will overwrite everything on the target drives.


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

Cool! thank you 

I'll update on here late tonight.

Thanks again all!
M


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## yungee (Dec 29, 2002)

Just as a warning, I noticed I made a typo.

(The reason I was still up at that time was that I'd just returned after a few beers ... I'm surprised my comments were even vaguely coherent to be honest!  )

restore -x -s 300 - r 4 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev.hdc /dev/hdb

Should be

restore -x -s 300 -r 4  -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev.hdc /dev/hdb

ie no gap between the "-" and the "r"


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

OK thanks for that - glad you spotted it 

So I should do ..

"restore -x -s 500 -r 4 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev.hdc /dev/hdb"

.. for the the larger swap file?

Thanks
M


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

marsbarbabe said:


> OK thanks for that - glad you spotted it
> 
> So I should do ..
> 
> ...


I have a swap file of 300Mb on a 2 x250Gb setup and the 300Mb swap file size was blindlemon's recommendation. As 800Gb is 60% more disk space than 500Gb then increasing the swap file from 300Mb to 500Mb is also a proportionate 60% increase to handle all the exta swapping that may go on.

Of course if at some point the swap file no longer needs to be increased any further in line with disk size increase then perhaps blindlemon can let us know.


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## alan_m_2004 (Jan 6, 2005)

_I have a swap file of 300Gb on a 2 x250Gb setup and the 300Gb swap file size was blindlemon's recommendation._

300*Mb* for the swap surely! Otherwise you are using 60% of your capacity for swap space.


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## yungee (Dec 29, 2002)

marsbarbabe said:


> OK thanks for that - glad you spotted it
> 
> So I should do ..
> 
> ...


Yup. Then when you do the "copykern" it installs the LBA48 kernel AND makes that 500Mb a valid swapfile too. Up to that point, it's just 500Mb of space on a partition the Tivo doesn't really know how to deal with.

Good luck with it tonight! :up:


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

alan_m_2004 said:


> 300*Mb* for the swap surely! Otherwise you are using 60% of your capacity for swap space.


Thanks for spotting my careless typo.

Now corrected in my original post.


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## marsbarbabe (Mar 1, 2003)

A day later than expected but...

Woohoo!!

SUCCESS!

It all seems so easy when you have the right commands 

Thank you ALL very much for your superb help and guidance - I am most chuffed. It's currently going through guided setup now and showed 280 odd hours of recording at best and 990hours at worst = 41 days solid LOL


I think I am going to read up some tutorials on how to add end-pad, start-pad, TiVo Web and mode 0 recording when I get a chance. Are there and other 'essential' add-ons I should consider?

Can you you guys recommend the best place to get/read those guides/tutorials/sw and any do's n don'ts as well?

What a great forum!!
THANK YOU

M ~(most happy - incase you didn't notice)


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

marsbarbabe said:


> I think I am going to read up some tutorials on how to add end-pad, start-pad, TiVo Web and mode 0 recording when I get a chance. Are there and other 'essential' add-ons I should consider?
> 
> Can you you guys recommend the best place to get/read those guides/tutorials/sw and any do's n don'ts as well?


Good to hear it all went well.

You will probably want to consider Highlights, Tracker, DailyMail and HiGuide module add ons amongst others and something called autospace (another background bootup program like Endpad) that gives you a graphical display in the Now Playing screen of how many recordings you have and how many left to go etc. Oh and Mode 0 recording as well.

Glad to hear it all worked out and you now have one of the biggest capacity Tivos around.

Perhaps start at

www.ljay.org.uk/tivoweb/

and

http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TiVoWeb Modules

and progress on through

www.planetbuilders.org/tivo/tivo_upgrade_diary.html

www.garysargent.co.uk/tivo/hacking.htm

www.beaconhill.plus.com/TiVo/tivohacks.htm

http://www.arielbusiness.pwp.blueyo.../TiVo/HowTo.htm

http://tivo.lightn.org/

http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com

http://tivo.stevejenkins.com/network_cd.html

http://hywel.underground-history.co.uk/tivo/logos/

http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com/tivowebplus

http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/?search=oztivo&x=0&y=0

www.tivohackman.com

www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo


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