# Is there a maximum drive size on the HR10-250? (Dual 500's??)



## Rob00GT (Mar 10, 2003)

I know the HR10-250 has LBA48 support, but is there a hardware or software limit to the amount of recording space this unit will recognize? Using one of the dual drive installation kits available can a pair of Hitachi 7k500 500GB hard drives be used to full capacity?


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

Rob00GT said:


> I know the HR10-250 has LBA48 support, but is there a hardware or software limit to the amount of recording space this unit will recognize? Using one of the dual drive installation kits available can a pair of Hitachi 7k500 500GB hard drives be used to full capacity?


Here's someone who tried to push it up to 1600GB via an external raid. He mostly got it to work, but see the ss5 screen shot halfway down the thread. We haven't heard back in a while, so I don't know how it worked out for him in the long term. Seems that 1TiB may start to hit an integer overflow boundary. Two 500GB drives should be just under that though, so I suspect it would work out ok. Two 400GB drives are known to work.


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## donnap (May 2, 2004)

Interesting. 

I'm trying to upgrade a S1 with 2x Seagate 500GB drives to give 1TB, but it doesn't seem to work 

1x 500GB is fine, but when I add the 2nd (mfsadd -x -r4) the TiVo fails to boot up at all - won't even get to "Powering up...". I thought it might be a PSU issue, so tried powering the HDDs from a PC, but again no joy. Then I powered one HDD from the TiVo's PSU and one from a PC and (after a very long delay) it booted to just after "just a few seconds more" then rebooted and stuck at "Powering up..." 

Thinking it might be a partition-size issue I tried re-doing the mfsadd of the "B" drive without LBA48 support (to give a 137GB partition) then rebooted under LBA48, rebuilt the partition table and re-ran mfsadd to create another partition to fill the drive. All looked fine and mfsinfo reported the partitions as expected (with the 2nd partition on the "B" drive smaller than I know works with a 400GB "B" drive) - but the thing still refused to boot in the TiVo regardless of how I arranged the power cables 

Any ideas? My next step will be to try a 500+400 configuration, but I'm worried about 2 things:-

1. If there is a PSU-loading issue with these drives (Seagate 7200.9 ST3500641A) compared to the 400GB Seagate 7200.8 drives that work just fine. 
2. If there is some kind of 1TB limit as mentioned above.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Weaknees have got 2x500GB working in a Series 2 machine, but that has a different PSU AFAIK. Maybe that's your problem?


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## donnap (May 2, 2004)

Does this mean I'm the first person to try 2x500GB drives in an S1 then? 

OK, here's what I know:-

1. Both plugged into the same S1 TiVo PSU (sounds like both drives spin up) - nothing onscreen for about a minute followed by "Welcome. Powering up..." for ever. 

2. Master plugged into a 2nd S1 TiVo PSU, slave into the target TiVo, both powered on around the same time - same as 1). 

3. Master plugged into the same or a 2nd S1 TiVo PSU, slave into the target TiVo, master powered on after slave has spun up (my attempt to emulate SmartStart/PowerTrip function) - nothing onscreen, ever. 

4. Master plugged into a 2nd S1 TiVo PSU, slave into the target TiVo, *slave* powered on after master has spun up - same as 1). 

5. Slave plugged into either TiVo PSU, Master into the target TiVo, *slave* powered on anytime after master (1 second to up to just after "Powering up." message) - TiVo boots to "almost there..." then screen goes black for about a minute followed by a reboot and "Welcome. Powering up..." for ever.

So, option 5 seems to get the closest, but I'm guessing the TiVo doesn't recognise the slave drive then reboots because it can't find it. Starting the master after the slave never works at all. 

FWIW, I have also tried a Seagate 500GB + a Seagate 400GB and get the same results. However, a 500GB master + a Seagate 300GB slave works just fine (I haven't tried it the other way round). I have also tried powering both drives from a PC PSU and get the same result as 1 or 3 (can't remember which, but it doesn't work), and have tried all the 1-TiVo options in the 2nd TiVo just in case the 1st TiVo's PSU is defective - same results. 

From the above, does it sound like a PowerTrip/SmartStart will help? It appears that staggering the drives (slave then master) manually doesn't work in this scenario. Some people have hinted that maybe IBM drives "look" for each other at startup which is why they don't work with the PowerTrip - could these 500GB Seagates be doing the same? 

Interestingly, it appears that the S2 TiVo PSUs have a slightly higher rated power output than the S1 PSUs, so maybe this is why people have been able at to use 2x500GB in an S2? Is there any way I could use a S2 PSU in a S1?


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## thatoneguy (Oct 4, 2005)

donnap said:


> Interestingly, it appears that the S2 TiVo PSUs have a slightly higher rated power output than the S1 PSUs, so maybe this is why people have been able at to use 2x500GB in an S2? Is there any way I could use a S2 PSU in a S1?


I don't see why not, if you use the S2 PSU to power the HDs and leave the S1 PSU as is to power everything else.


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## donnap (May 2, 2004)

I don't think there's room for two PSUs in the same box  

What I'm hoping is that I might be able to swap the S1 PSU for a S2 one which would be able to power the two drives OK. 

Does anybody know the model number of the PSU in a TCD540040? That's the machine that Weaknees have working with 2x500GB Seagate drives.


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## Robdalec (Feb 3, 2006)

Last evening I attempted to upgrade my Series 2 Tivo (TCD540040) with two Hitatchi 500GB drives. After the 9 hours of copying I put everything in the tivo and powered it up. First I got the "powering up" screen, then the "just a few more seconds" screen, then the green screen indicating that the tivo found a problem and would be attempting to fix it for the next three hours. This screen stays up for only about 10 seconds, the unit then powers down, and the whole process starts again. The A drive is connected to power thru the weaknees power trip relay and I can verify that both drives do power up. 

During the copy the CD was booted from a SCSI CD drive. The two new drives were connected to the secondary IDE port and the original drive was connected to the primary IDE port. No other hard drives or CD drives were connected to the system. The mfs tools command I used was:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

There were no error messages and the messages indicated that the copy and adding the drives was successful.

I noticed on the Hitatchi drives that there is an option for selecting the number of heads. This is currently set at the default of 16 rather than 15, but I haven't looked into whether this may be an issue or not. 

Not sure what my next step will be, however I do know that I won't do the 9 hour copy thing again until I verify that this all works......


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

You need to use the -r 4 option in the restore for large drives


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## Robdalec (Feb 3, 2006)

Thanks. 

How about the swap file? Should I expand it to 500mb and then run TPIP?


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Yes.


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## Robdalec (Feb 3, 2006)

Thanks everyone for your help. I'll post how this works after I try it (again).


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## JasonD (Mar 30, 2003)

Please let us know how it goes. I think the only people who have done the upgrade of dual 500's is weaknees.

Jason


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## Robdalec (Feb 3, 2006)

Here is the command I tried:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 500 -xzpi -r 4 - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

and mfsrestore fails immediately and gives me a list of valid options. 

I believe I am getting an error due to the size of the swapfile I am trying to create. So the question is, if I am restoring with a large block size do I need to expand the swapfile so much? this seems to have been bantered back and forth on here but I have yet to see a definitive answer. One posting I read said that since the block size is so large (-r 4) then the swapfile does not need to be expanded larger than -s 127. 

I'm confused.....


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

Robdalec said:


> Here is the command I tried:
> 
> mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 500 -xzpi -r 4 - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd
> 
> ...


You put the -r 4 in the wrong place. The -i option takes a value (in this case "-") and it has to follow it in the arg list. Try

```
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 500 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd
```


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## Robdalec (Feb 3, 2006)

Thanks. I figured this out last night and once I did everything went fine.


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