TiVo Community Forums Archives - copy a tivo hard drive

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copy a tivo hard drive
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Posted by: xiaoyu

Hi,

I have PTV-100 running software 3.1. The hard drive is 120 GB through tivo mad, but it is very noisy. I just bought a new 120 GB hard drive and running very quiet. Can I copy the old one to the new? I understood that the newer drive has to be larger in order to copy the old one. Can I make copy when they are in same size? further more, how can I keep all the recording if I decide to reduce the hard drive size?

xiaoyu,

Posted by: waruwaru

quote:
Originally posted by xiaoyu
Hi,

I have PTV-100 running software 3.1. The hard drive is 120 GB through tivo mad, but it is very noisy. I just bought a new 120 GB hard drive and running very quiet. Can I copy the old one to the new? I understood that the newer drive has to be larger in order to copy the old one. Can I make copy when they are in same size? further more, how can I keep all the recording if I decide to reduce the hard drive size?

xiaoyu,

I think you can do a straight copy with dd. It suppose to create an exact copy. Check out Hinsdale's How To Guide for more details.

I am not sure you can keep the recording with a smaller drive. Might want to try to create an image using mfsbackup, and then restore via mfsrestore.

Posted by: xiaoyu

Hi waruwaru,

Thank you for the advice. I remembered that awhile ago once I tried to copy the same sized drive, but the message told me the newer drive is not big enough. I wonder is there possible the slightly difference in size (couple MB) will cause this problem. It will be guaranteed if the newer drive is larger than the original.
The second question is: is there any new development to copy the recorded program only. I knew in the past you can't

xiaoyu,

Posted by: Robert S

If it's literally a couple of megs then you can shrink the swap partition with -s (default for -s is 64).

However I think you're probably looking for a couple of gigs, and there's no way to get around that.

Either wipe your recordings or get a bigger drive.

Posted by: rblancojr

Robert,

What method do you recommend to go from 2 large drives to 2 smaller drives? Is this possible? If so, do you have to perform a "backup" and then "restore" or just a straight copy?

I have a situation where I need to go from 2 120gb drives to 2 80gb drives. There is some programming on it, but I am sure it will still fit on 2 80 gigers.

Posted by: Robert S

There's no way to shrink the partitions, so you can't take any recordings with you.

The best you can do is make a compressed backup from the current set and then restore & expand that to the new set. As the compressed backup recreates the original A drive, this allows you to go to a smaller drive set (or even back to the original A drive if necessary).

You can't take your recordings, but it is very quick.