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Trouble converting 60+20 to 120gb standalone
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Posted by: stephens1

My previously upgraded Tivo was starting to act up, so I decided to upgrade from 60+20GB to a single 120gb drive (thanks Hinsdale & Tiger!). My wife has the drives full of recordings she wants, so I initially tried the command as printed in configuration #6:

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

I got the error message stating that my target drive was too small, even though it was bigger than the other two combined. I saw that some people had success by dropping -s 127 and/or -x. I opted to drop the -x under the impression that keeping -s might speed up my lagging menus.

The copy worked, and the new drive boots up as a 79 hour drive, so I went back and tried to use "mfsadd -x /dev/hdc" (only HD attached) but I got an error stating that would give me too many partitions. MFSINFO says the volume can be expanded 3 more times.

Sorry for the long message, but what should I try next?

Posted by: Robert S

mfsinfo is wrong. If you boot a byteswapping disk you'll see you have 15 partitions on your A drive. You can have a maximum of 16 and you add 2 each time you expand the MFS set.

Posted by: stephens1

Does that mean I CANNOT expand this drive?

Posted by: Robert S

You can expand it, but not if you keep the recordings.

Posted by: redddevil

Sorry to reopen this thread but a couple of questions:

1) What is a 'byteswapping disk"?
2) How many upgrades would it take to end up with 15 partitions on the HDD?

Thanks

Posted by: Robert S

Any TiVo boot disk other than the MFS Tools 2.0 disks will byteswap primary slave and both drives on the secondary bus. It is possible to make the MFS Tools 2.0 CD byteswap, but it's rather fiddly.

If you start with a 11 partition A drive, then you can upgrade it twice. Newer TiVoes start with 13 partitions on the A drive, meaning they can only be upgraded once.

If you move to a two-drive configuration, MFS Tools may be able to copy the big partition to the B drive, allowing you to upgrade the A drive again, but there aren't really good work-arounds for this.

Posted by: redddevil

Thanks for the info. I thought the 80 Gb drive I had was just restored from a previous image but maybe the image had already had an upgrade.
Could I restore from an original Tivo image and then upgrade (losing my recordings of course but just so's I know)?
TFYH

Posted by: Robert S

If you make a compressed backup from the drive (to get your current settings) it should drop the upgrade partitions. If you then restore that back on to the same drive, you'll then be in a position to expand to the full size.

Posted by: redddevil

Thanks Robert - may well go that route on Tivo number 2.

Posted by: Trent Bates

Robert S, All,

I'm terribly sorry for sounding pushy here! I don't mean to!

I'm having a slight problem understanding this. Perhaps you can give me some insight and a pointer or two.

I have a Philips DSR6000 with it's original Quantum 40GB A drive and an added (mfsadd method) 80GB B drive. I'm nearly full of recordings in this configuration and wanting to convert over to a single 160GB (I'm aware of the 137GB limit) drive. I'm reading that this might not be possible but I'm a little short on time to really research the issue at the moment.

Is there a way to do what I want to do while retaining all the recordings or not? :confused: I'm not above putting another drive in there with the 160GB drive if it's the only way but I was really trying to get away from having the extra moving parts and heat of a second drive to worry about! :)

A quick response would be appreciated if possible because I will need to go to work soon. Thanks! As I said, I'm terribly sorry for sounding pushy! :)

Posted by: Robert S

You can put the contents of both drives on one, but unfortunately you'll have a bit of unused space on the drive that you won't be able to expand into.

Posted by: Trent Bates

quote:
Originally posted by Robert S
You can put the contents of both drives on one, but unfortunately you'll have a bit of unused space on the drive that you won't be able to expand into.

Thanks for replying so quickly!!!

Are you referring to the 137GB limit, or are you saying that I will be limited to a lower amount than 137GB (Maybe 40 + 80 +/- a little bit here or there) like 120GB?

Whould I use the mfsbackup | mfsrestore procedure? If so, what switches should I avoid if any?

Thanks again for your help! I shouldn't have tried to do this before work but now I'm here and ready to type whatever I need to type at the # prompt.

I thought this was going to be simple until I started reading the how-to! :)

P.S. - I'm reading the sticky threads at the top while waiting. :)

Posted by: Robert S

I think all DTiVoes have 13 partition A drives, therefore I think you'll be limited to 120Gb because you won't have enough spare partitions to expand again. However, you might want to check this - either boot byteswapping and count the number of MFS pairs or run mfsinfo - because if you can expand again you can use the full capacity if you replace the kernel (see page 5 and 6 of the 160Gb thread in the underground).

But if you do have the ability to expand again, you might prefer to stick at 120Gb now and replace with a really big drive later on when you're ready to replace the kernel.

If you're following Hinsdale then you'll leave out the x option on restore anyway, but if you were thinking of adding it, don't.

Posted by: Trent Bates

How about this then. I typed:

code:
# mfsinfo /dev/hdc /dev/hdd (and got)
MFS volume set for /dev/hdc /dev/hdd
The MFS volume set contains 6 partitions
  /dev/hdc10
    MFS Partition Size: 512MiB
  /dev/hdc11
    MFS Partition Size: 15697MiB
  /dev/hdc12
    MFS Partition Size: 512MiB
  /dev/hdc13
    MFS Partition Size: 20994MiB
  /dev/hdd2
    MFS Partition Size: 4MiB
  /dev/hdd3
    MFS Partition Size: 76315MiB
Total MFS volume size: 114035MiB
Estimated hours in a standalone TiVo: 126
This MFS volume may be expanded 3 more times
#

I am following Hinsdale. I'm trying anyway. :) It seems to be a wealth of info but I must think differently because I find it hard to follow.

I would be fine with staying with 120GB for now and studying about upgrading the kernal later. Does the above give me more options as it appears to?

Posted by: Robert S

No, as you can see you have 13 partitions on your A drive. You can have 16 partitions on each drive, so you have enough spare to move the two partitions from the B drive on to the A drive, but that will leave just one empty entry on the A drive.

In that case expanding again without starting over from a backup is tricky. If you bought two new drives then MFS Tools would be able to distribute the partitions over both drives, giving you the opportunity to expand again, but that's about it.

Posted by: redddevil

Robert - I'm quite interested in your last comments about "2 new drives". As I didn't end up using my new 120Gb drive I have both that and an old 40Gb Quantum (ex Tivo) doing not much at the moment. If I understand you correctly I could take the unexpandable drive and sort of split it over two others such that it could use the full capacity of each of them. Is that right and if so is it in Hinsdale?

Posted by: Trent Bates

Ahhh, I see what you mean! /dev/hdc13 is the indication of the last partition of the A drive. (totaling 13 partitions)

Maybe a better option is to just replace my 40GB drive with the 160GB drive (as described in Hinsdale's how-to) and keep the 80GB B drive.

Or I could watch everything on my existing drives and start over with a backup on a single 160GB A drive later.

What a mess!
The unrelated point of all of this was to get that Quantum 40GB drive out of there because it matches the other one that I have. I need them for a mirrored set in my old Novell server and it's just old enough that it doesn't like the two 80GB drives that I bought without an interface card. But the interface card doesn't support Novell so that's the end of that... :( The 40GB drives should work fine in the Novell server. If they don't, I only lose 8GB though.

SO, I'm going to contemplate this some more. I might decide to go the "120GB on 137GB available space" method for now. I'd be okay with more space at any time but I'd really like to get down to one drive at some point.
For future upgradeablility, it sounds like I'd be better off taking my backup that I made today minus the recordings and restore to a single drive. If so, I've got a bunch of TV watching to do first! :)

Thanks for all the help! I'm open to any further ideas, justifications, suggestions, concepts, etc.!

Posted by: Trent Bates

Hi again all,

Many times when someone takes a concept and tries to apply it, we never hear from them again to see how it went. I thought this might be beneficial to someone so here's what I did:

I did copy my 40 and 80 GB drives to a single 160 GB drive using mfsbackup | mfsrestore. I expanded the swap space at the same time. It took roughly 30 hours on a Pentium 4 2.66 GHz, 512MB RAM.

I now have too many partitions on the drive to do much else with it by itself. (As stated in this thread)

But this has allowed me to reclaim two smaller drives for other projects, minimize the potential for failure as much as I could, and has given me time to clean off all of my shows so that I can do a simple mfsrestore from a backup later to utilize all the available space on my 160GB drive.
While it's a little disappointing to not be using as much space as possible, when I'm ready, I'll already have the 160GB drive.

A question popped up while doing this process. Do they start counting partitions at 0 or 1? Reporting that I now have 15 partitions instead of 13 would seem to make more sense if they were all in pairs and they started counting with 0 (actually having 16 or 14 partitions) instead of 1. since I only used mfsinfo, I can't see the first group of partitions. The partitions that I can see start with 10 though.

Thanks all!

Posted by: Robert S

The system partitions are

1 map (the partition table itself)
2 boot 1
3 kernel 1
4 root 1
5 boot 2
6 kernel 2
7 root 2
8 swap
9 /var

So unfortunately you do have an odd number of empty slots. I suppose if you've given up on getting more software upgrades you could reuse the inactive system partitions. (I wonder if mfsadd'ing partitions would let you do that?)

Posted by: Trent Bates

Hmmm. That's interesting! I would have thought that they would start with 0 like many other "logical" numbering systems used in computers.

Why is it that existing partitions can't be enlarged? (Maybe they are when a backup is restored to a new drive?) While it's nice that I can always go back to a factory setup, I could see more of a benefit from having only 13 partitions on a large drive. From what I saw, the partitions can be fairly large as I only had two (one small (probably an index), one large) on my 80GB drive.

Anyway, Thanks again for all the help Robert S.! I was able to get everything together in time for my next scheduled recording to occur!

Posted by: Robert S

When you revert to a backup, a new larger partition is created /from scratch/. No resizing involved. I don't know the maximum partition sizes are for the various partition table. I suspect 'huge' is closer than 'fairly large'.

Posted by: stephens1

OK, so I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to revisit it for a moment. My wife and I planned to catch up with all of our unwatched programs, then I would do an MFS backup, and expand the drive to it's full 120gb capacity, erasing everything in the process. As might be expected, it has now been several months, and it is clear that we will NEVER catch up.

So I have a new plan:

1. Manually delete all the prgrams we don't care about (and there are a few)

2. Move the Tivo drive to my PC

3. Transfer the remaining programs in raw data form onto another large drive that is mostly empty.

4. Restore from MFS backup and expand to full capacity

5. Transfer the programs back

6. Place the drive back in TIVO

7. Erase the programs from my PC hdd

Result: 120GB HDD at full capacity with all the programs intact

I should note that this should not be considered video extraction, as the data will stay in it's original form (unusable to all but the SA tivo).

Now the questions:

1. Will this work? (I'd hate to tie up both TIVO and PC for many hours in vain)

2. How do I identify the data I need to transfer?

Thanks,

Stephen