TiVo Community Forums Archives - Drive not recognized

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Drive not recognized
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Posted by: asorrell

I successfully added a drive to one of my Tivo systems about a year ago. Of course, when one of my friends found out, she wanted me to upgrade her 15-hour mod 1 Tivo (yah - VERY old) as well. However, this one isn't going well, so I need a bit of help...

First of all, my friend didn't buy the drive I told her to buy... she decided to save $$ and buy the Maxtor 120gb drive that is causing everyone in this forum problems (yes I read the threads). It is a Maxtor Diamond Plus ATA drive.

Now, I'm using Hinsdale's Bootable CD (same one I made a year ago), the drive is connected as slave (no master in system) and I boot to the CD. I am planning to just add the new drive along the existing Tivo drive, so I'm skipping the backup directions and proceeding directly to "blessing". When I try to use BlessTiVo /dev/hdb - it says it can't find the device.

Ok - so I boot to the diagnostic floppy from Maxtor, and it finds the disk just fine - and says it is the slave on the Primary channel (which should make it /dev/hdb).

Now I'm stumped... here are my questions:

1) I'm using the "ATA" cable that came with the drive to connect it to the Pentium III system for "blessing". I'm connecting it straight into the standard IDE connector. Is there any difference between ATA and IDE cables? Should I try to get an IDE cable to use instead?

2) Could this be somehow related to the fact I'm trying to "bless" the drive using system with a fairly old BIOS? I sort of discounted this since the Maxtor diagnostics say they can see the drive when I boot to the floppy.

2) I have read that these 120mb drives don't seem to work very well or very consistently once they are installed, somehow reverting to displaying a smaller (10mb) size. Should I tell my friend to eat the $$ and buy a Seagate?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Andy

Posted by: asorrell

After trying an IDE cable (no change), I finally decided to put the drive in my 2.0 Ghz Pentium and try it there. I don't really like messing with my main system, but decided I had to try it...

It was recognized!

Blessed it, and it reported back as 114GB, which is apparently close enough in this case.

So I guess the answer is, that the older BIOS on older systems won't recognize ATA drives.

Argh....

I HOPE I won't have a problem putting this thing in the TIVO.

Can I still use the "ATA" cable that came with the drive when I put it in the TIVO?

Andy