TiVo Community Forums Archives - Is there a way to unmarry drives?

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Is there a way to unmarry drives?
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Posted by: jpotter

I upgraded my SVR2000 by adding a 120gb WD HD about a year ago. I now have a Series 2 SA and want to remove the 120gb B drive from the Sony and upgrade my Series2. I've heard that if I simply remove the B drive, it will render the Tivo inop because the B drive is married to the A drive. Is there a way to unmarry the two drives?

THanks...

JP

Posted by: Robert S

Make a backup of the drive set and then restore it to the A drive. It's in Hinsdale.

Posted by: lrhorer

Will this destroy all recordings if nothing has been written to the new drive? I'm having a problem after adding a B drive - the TiVo won't boot.

Posted by: Robert S

Recordings that are entirely on the A drive (ie, made before the upgrade) may survive, although it's far from certain. Omit x and p and s from your restore options (probably leaving you with just -i <filename>) and cross your fingers.

Posted by: philhu

what makes you think nothing has been written to your b drive?

MFS is a wierd format and is considered to be one big disk to tivo.

It could actually have written a few blocks of shows , not even complete shows, to the b drive.

Posted by: lrhorer

I booted the Dylan CD and browsed the log files (which are all now huge). The error log shows repeatedly that the primary and secondary volume headers have CRC errors. The mfsinfo utility also shows corrupted volume headers. I've started the restore. Hopefully this will fix the volume headers.

Posted by: lrhorer

On writing to the B drive: No gurarantees, of course, but mfsadd certainly didn't have much time to write very much to any of the B drive partitions, and since the TiVo never mounted the MFS partitions, I don't see how it could have ever written anything to the B drive, or why it would have re-written any of the stored videos in the first place, even if it had mounted the MFS volumes. I understand that video streams can span multiple MFS partitions, and I can imagine moving stuff around during operations - although this is very inefficient, and that last thing any developer should do on a high bandwidth real-time application is be inefficient, but since the TiVo never even booted with the new drive, I find it very unlikely.

Posted by: lrhorer

It looks like now the TiVo is completely hosed. I noticed before doing the backup and the marry the MFS Tools boot did not recognize any partitions on the TiVo A drive, but the Dylan disk did, or rather would if I disabled sector translation. This was true after the marry, as well, butI can't get the disabled sector translation to "stick". In any case, now neither the Dylan boot nor the MFS boot recognize any partittion on the drive. I think I'm going to have to start totally from scratch with a new drive image. I've seen this mentioned. Where can I get it?