TiVo Community Forums Archives - Adding a 2nd drive to hdvr2

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Adding a 2nd drive to hdvr2
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Posted by: goodness0001

Hi everyone, quick question,

I have a hdvr2 35 hour system (factory defaults).

I also have a hard drive of a tivo that was never used and I want to add it to my existing tivo.

Do I have to do anything special to the drive that came from a tivo that was never used?

Can I just add it to my current hdvr2 without doing anything or is there a special tool that is required to format a second drive properly for it to work with the primary drive?

Please clear this up and let me know if I have confused anyone.

Posted by: Robert S

You just have to run mfsadd to marry it to the current A drive.

Posted by: goodness0001

Do I have to hook both of them up to a linux PC and boot the linux PC with the boot disk to do this?

I believe you have to.

Posted by: Robert S

You don't need a 'linux PC' as such. You'll boot a special boot CD or floppy that will setup a controlled environment for you to run MFS Tools in. It doesn't matter what the PC normally runs (infact, you may prefer to disconnect the normal hard drive for safety).

You do run mfsadd against both drives.

It's all covered in great detail in Hinsdale.

Posted by: goodness0001

Do I need to backup the primary drive or can I just use the utils to add the second drive without losing data?

Posted by: Robert S

A backup is a very good idea, but not an integral part of most upgrades.

Posted by: Debbie25

I'm going to be doing the same tonight. My PC has 2 HDs in it now. Master HD has 2 partitions and the slave has one. So I don't make any mistakes I was thinking I would disconnect my master and leave the slave connected to backup the Tivo OS to.

Would this work?

Posted by: Robert S

That's fine, but you'll be mounting /dev/hdb1 (or possibly hdb5) instead of /dev/hda1.

Posted by: Debbie25

So would I be connecting both my 'A' drive and 'B' drive? Let's say 'A' as secondary master and 'B' as secondary slave?

Which drive would I be mounting the 'A' drive or 'B'?

Posted by: Robert S

You don't mount the TiVo drives. You mount your FAT partition so that you can write the backup file to it.

Posted by: Debbie25

OH, I'm not sure I'm ready for this. This is scarry. I have printed out all the Hinsdale how to's but so many do's and don't's. I'm afraid I'm going to mess everything up.

Posted by: Robert S

If you're not feeling creative, just arrange things so that you can follow Hinsdale precisely. In this case that would mean either using your C: drive for the backup or moving the jumper on the D: drive to make it master temporarily.

Posted by: Debbie25

That would make more since to me to just switch my slave HD to master then I can just follow the instructions. I'm just afraid of my system accidentally booting up into WinXP will I have the Tivo drives connected.