Did a little bit of cleanup tonight in the computer room ..... among other things I got my one pc back to it's original identity as a WinXP machine after it had been transformed into a linux boot device. I was trying to salvage recordings from out bedroom TiVo which ran into a little bit of a hard drive problem. Long story short - I was only half successful - I have the TiVo working again but I wasn't able to salvage any of the recordings for Christl. Going through all of this - first time unplanned - third time overall (previously upgraded capacities for my other TiVo from 80hr to 250hr and upgraded my dad's from 40hr to 250hr) prompted me to better document the chicken scratches I had accumulated from a myriad of websites. So I thought why not blog my notes. Someone else may stumble upon them and find them useful. I may lose my hardcopy and need to refer back to this. Who knows. Before I dump all that into this post I just wanted to mention that the kids had their last soccer practice of the spring session tonight. It was mostly just scrimmages against two other teams and it just didn't seem like any of the kids were really into it. Me and the boys stopped at Pieschler's - or I think now it's called Parkland Drive-In - Dyl got a vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles, J got a chocolate cone with rainbow sprinkles and I got a banana split. Tomorrow night we're planning to head up to the basketball courts and play a little hockey. They have two soccer games Saturday - not sure what else we're doing but then Monday night we head down to Florida! Should be a great time. christl is doing 99% of the planning without me even knowing a thing. So it'll be interesting to see what she has in store for us. Ok, so as promised, here are my TiVo upgrade notes:

TiVo Notes

Weaknees Interactive Upgrade Instructions can be found at http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/index.php

My summary:

REPLACE WORKING TIVO DRIVE WITH ANOTHER, PRESUMABLY LARGER DRIVE (INCREASED CAPACITY)
Create FAT32 partition for temporary storage of old TiVo drive image
* Mount NEW TiVo drive on /dev/hdb (primary slave)

* Boot into Windows and assign a drive letter

* Format with a FAT32 partition (Type 'C' in linux - WIN95 FAT32 LBA)
On P4FRITSCH in the root of C is a program to do this once a drive letter is assigned

Backup current TiVo image onto new Tivo drive in FAT32 partition
* Mount OLD TiVo drive as /dev/hdc (secondary master).....NEW TiVo drive should still be on /dev/hdb

* Insert and Boot from Weaknees MFSTool 2.0 Large Kernel Support Boot CD

* # mkdir /newtivo

* # mount /dev/hdb1 /newtivo (might get 'modprobe' errors - seems ok)

* mfsbackup -f 9999 -1s0 /newtivo/tivo_image_name.bak /dev/hdc (I try to include hardware model of TiVo and size in name)

* ctrl+alt+del then power off

* Remove OLD TiVo drive (/dev/hdc)

* Remove boot cd and boot into Windows

* Copy TiVo imgae file created above from NEW TiVo drive to C:\

* Shutdown

* Mount OLD TiVo drive (/dev/hdc)

* Insert and Boot from Weaknees MFSTool 2.0 Large Kernel Support Boot CD

Then go to #1 to Restore the image only (no recordings) or #2 to copy everything including recordings


#1 - RESTORE IMAGE ONLY

* # mkdir /tivo_image_drive

* # mount /dev/hda1 /tivo_image_drive

* # mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -zxpi /tivo_image_drive/tivo_image_name.bak /dev/hdb

Go To #3


#2 - COPY ALL DATA INCLUDING RECORDINGS

* # mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdb


#3 - INSTALL AND TEST

* Install NEW drive in TiVo remembering to jumper as Master

* Power on TiVo

* If you copied from a different physical TiVo you'll most likely get a message stating that you may not be able to record anything. Go into Messages & Settings and choose Delete Everything.

NOTE: This took about 1hr on a 250GB drive which was upgraded from an 80GB drive.

* Rerun Guided Setup and you're done!

Alternate method - just copy - no image backup

* Install OLD TiVo drive as /dev/hdc (secondary slave)

* Install NEW TiVo drive as /dev/hdb (primary slave)

* Insert and Boot from Weaknees MFSTool 2.0 Large Kernel Support Boot CD

* # dd conv=noerror,sync if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb


Also found references to this:

Insert the MFS tools 2.0 boot cd and turn on power. At the very first 'hit enter to boot', type in vmlnodma hdc=bswap then hit enter. After it boots, type in pdisk -l /dev/hdc hit enter. It should show 11 or 13 partitions, make a brief note of the number of partitions and the size of each - nothing too detailed, you just want to know if the second drive has approximately the same setup.

here: http://dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=44575



As of 5/2008 I don't know how to extract just the recordings and that's bugging me. The bedroom TiVo encountered errors which caused it to not boot. Upon running the above procedure I was unable to get as working copy of the O/S. I needed to purchase Instantcake for the SD-H400 as a means to get a working O/S image on the drive. I had hoped to then copy over the partitions from the bad drive which contain the recordings but according to the responses to my question about this it looks like the technology does not yet exist. I haven't scrapped the old drive yet though.