TiVo Community Forums Archives - Dylan or TivoMad or both?

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Dylan or TivoMad or both?
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Posted by: Jim West

Having read quite a bit about the Dylan and TivoMad brilliant programs, I am trying to decide my best course of action. First, I already have about 200 hours for myself (on 3 TiVos-2 expanded and a 30 hr.), so what I do, if anything, will be for a relative.

I have two extra 14 hour TiVos with 2.0.1 to work with(one I had been keeping as a backup and one I just acquired from my sister when she bought a 30 hour TiVo).

Plan A would be to use Dylan's plan with one 14 hr. TiVo and an 80 gb drive, and keep the other 14 hr. as a backup for all the expanded TiVos.

Plan B would be to use TivoMad's plan with one 80 gb drive. I assume this would give me two backups (A drive from one 14 hr. unit and other 14 hr. unit).

Plan C would be to use TivoMad's plan with two 80 gb drives.

What would you do if you were in my shoes and why? Which would be easiest for a low tech guy like me?

Jim West

[This message has been edited by Jim West (edited 05-31-2001).]

Posted by: DanT

Well, here's some info to help you decide:

Plan A will give you about 105 hrs.
Plan B will give you about 90 hrs.
Plan C will give you about 198 hrs.
(my numbers may be a little off here, but not by much.)

Two backups are better than one, but probably overkill. You need to figure out whether you want to spend the money on 2 80G drives for each unit or not. For me, it helps to think of the 198 hours of Basic as ~50 hrs of Best quality, so I never have to record anything at Basic or Medium again. Of course, some people don't notice or care about the crappy quality, so that may not be a factor for you.

Personally, if I could afford it, I'd go the dual-80s route, because more capacity is always better. And it's especially convenient if you're going to be out of town for a week or two.

As to which is easiest, they're all essentially the same. The only difference would be whether or not you copy the first 14-hr drive to a new drive, and that takes a few (unattended) hours. I see no reason, other than money, to not go the biggest possible route.

------------------
Dan T.
RKBA!

Posted by: Jim West

DanT,

Thanks for the suggestions. After thinking about this some more I think my relatives would be delighted with any expanded TiVo (90, 105 or 198), so my primary focus should be on two things.

1. Ease of the project. Keep in mind that I do not understand the inner workings of a computer (primary, secondary, slave etc.), and instructions which are clear to others may not be clear to me. (see note below)

2. Possibility of future problems. (Would a 198 hour TiVo be more likely to have problems than a 90 hour TiVo? Will the extra hours slow down the TiVo in any noticeable way? Is the Dylan plan more tried and true, since it has been around a long time and TivoMad's is relative new?)

Note: To add an 80 gb drive to a 14 hr. TiVo it was necessary for me to get telephone help from a forum participant (which he volunteered to do), and this is even though I really studied the FAQs and relevant threads in the Underground Forum. My other upgraded TiVo was purchased from Dylan through the forum. The one upgrade I worked on was so long ago I may not remember much of what I did.

Jim West

Posted by: DanT

1. Ease of the project - you'll have to figure out which is primary and secondary, master and slave, regardless of which method you use. Whether or not you make a backup, you also need to know in order to use BlessTiVo or TivoMad's disk.

2. So far there have been two people (one dual 80's and one dual 60's) that have reported problems with TivoMad's version after using it for a week or two. They both now have endless reboots. Hopefully it's not a problem with the utility, and is just coincidental. I just bought a second 60G to replace my existing 14hr A drive but now I'm thinking I might wait another week or two before doing the upgrade, just to see what the real hackers figure out.

Also, some people have reported that the 200hr units get really slow in the menus with so many shows listed. This can be avoided by using higher-quality settings for recordings (therefore fewer shows to sort/list) and may or may not be annoying to you anyway.

As for phone support, I'd be glad to help you. Just look up my email address in my profile, and I'll send you my phone number if you need it.

------------------
Dan T.
RKBA!

Posted by: LifeIsABeach

Jim - the easiest way to upgrade (although the most expensive) is to buy a kit from 9th tee. Then you don't have to open your computer at all. You simply open the TiVo, plug in the drive, and close it back up.

------------------
Go TiVo!

Philips HDR112 108+ hr with 2.0.1

Posted by: Jim West

quote:
Originally posted by DanT:

As for phone support, I'd be glad to help you. Just look up my email address in my profile, and I'll send you my phone number if you need it.

[/B]

DanT, thanks a lot for the offer. If I get in trouble you may well hear from me.

Jim West

Posted by: Jim West

quote:
Originally posted by LifeIsABeach:
Jim - the easiest way to upgrade (although the most expensive) is to buy a kit from 9th tee. Then you don't have to open your computer at all. You simply open the TiVo, plug in the drive, and close it back up.

Since DanT has offered telephone help, if needed, I probably will try to do the upgrade. If it fails, I might dig a little deeper in my pocket and use the 9thTee option.

Jim West

Posted by: Jim West

Well, I have ordered an 80 gb Maxtor and am leaning heavily toward using the Dylan method of adding it to one of my 14 hour TiVos. I will still have the other 14 hour TiVo as a backup.

Does anyone know if the FAQs are up to date insofar as Dylan's method is concerned?

I am going to study hard to see if I might be able to do the upgrade without telephone help. If I run into a problem, DanT has offered to help me by phone.

Now I need to order a bracket from 9thTee.

Jim West

Posted by: DanT

The only thing I've heard that's really out of date is that with 2.0, you no longer need to set runideturbo=false if you're not using a Quantum drive as your A drive.

And since you're talking about only adding a B drive, this doesn't affect you.

------------------
Dan T.
RKBA!

Posted by: Jim West

I am about ready to try the upgrade using Dylan's method and adding an 80 GB drive to a 14 hour TiVo.

One quick question. In trying to find out how to get to CMOS I checked the Hewlett Packard web site and understood I was to hit the F1 key at start up. This takes me to some kind of BIOS, saying such things as "Primary Master Maxtor; Primary Slave Auto; Secondary Master CR480; Secondary Master DVD; memory 192; Pentium III 800 mhz."

However, it does not show the size of the drive. Is this CMOS, and if not how do I get to CMOS? Will it show the size of the new drive after I have set the jumper and attached the new drive (probably to the primary slave, based upon my notes)? If not, can I check through Windows Explorer or My Computer or some other way?

Here is my plan:

Turn computer off.

Connect new 80 gb drive (after setting jumper) to Primary Slave (primary master goes to computer hard drive).

Check CMOS or BIOS (or something else) for drive size.

Boot with Dylan's disk.

type "root" and hit enter

type BlessTiVo /dev/hdb

Yes to proceed

Check size of drive.

Install new drive in TiVo. (set to slave)

Boot TiVo.

Does anyone have any last minute thoughts before I proceed?

Jim West

Posted by: Steven McCaa

If you proceed with your plan you will not have a backup if something goes wrong, you will have a nice doorstop.

I would recommend backup up your original drive to another drive before you permanently marry your two drives (no tivo divorcees yet!).

What if your new drive goes bad in a few days? What if your new drive has bad stutter problems (like my first drive)?

Answer: Too bad.

If I were you I would backup the original drive to the new drive, run TivoMad, and then only run with the one drive. Yes your Tivo will have 20hrs less space, but imagine the peace of mind! Also if you ever get another $200 you'll be able to add that second 80GB later!

Best of luck to you which ever route you go.

Steve

[This message has been edited by Steven McCaa (edited 06-06-2001).]

Posted by: Jim West

quote:
Originally posted by Steven McCaa:
If you proceed with your plan you will not have a backup if something goes wrong, you will have a nice doorstop.

Steve

[This message has been edited by Steven McCaa (edited 06-06-2001).]

Steven, thanks for the warning. However, I have another 14 hour Philips TiVo as a backup in case of trouble.

Incidentally, I have finished work on the new drive and I think everything is going O.K. Factory recertification reported that the drive was good. CMOS reported 81,964 MB. After the BlessTiVo it reported 76 GB.

It is late, so I will wait until tomorrow to put the drive in the TiVo and see if everything is O.K. This time I have been able to get this far without telephone help (but with plenty of help here and by email).

Thanks to everyone.

Jim West

Posted by: c3

You may already know this. Make sure the 14GB drive A jumper is master, and the 80GB drive B jumper is slave.

Posted by: Jim West

In preparing the new drive I ran into two things I wondered about. When I ran Amset there was a report that the default primary had "off" but no drive found on secondary. Also a note that there was an invalid command.com or something to that effect. Since amset apparently can be run later if necessary, I suppose this is not a problem even
if something did not go exactly right.

The second thing is that after I ran the Dylan bless program there was something on the screen about rebooting for partitioning. Since I did not remember reading anything about the necessity of rebooting, I did not do so. Does anyone know if I should have rebooted? If rebooting is necessary, can I still do it (I have not put the new drive in the TiVo yet).

c3, I knew the B drive needed to be slave, but did not know about the A drive. Since I have not touched the A drive it will be whatever it was from the factory. Does it come from the factory with the Master setting?

Thanks again.

Jim West

Posted by: wmelnick

No, you did not have to reboot. The rebooting is only needed for certain partition types (ie MSDOS) and certain controller types. Making ext2 or image partitions on an IDE drive does not require a reboot.

W

Posted by: DanT

Jim -

I bet I know what's up with the invalid command.com message. You booted up from one floppy, then switched floppies to run the Amset utility, right? If so, no big deal. It's a DOS thing, where it needed more memory to run the utility, so it removed command.com from memory, and when it tried to reload it from the floppy, it wasn't there (or a different version was there) and so it gave you that message. The bottom line is you don't have to worry about it.

As for it not finding the secondary drive, that's a little disconcerting, assuming you had a second drive plugged in. If not, then it's fine. But if you did, then it didn't see it for some reason. Possibly wrong jumper settings, but if you didn't change them between running Amset and running BlessTiVo, then that wouldn't be it, because BlessTiVo worked. Anyway, if you run into stuttering problems, you may try re-running Amset on that drive. You won't need to re-do the blessing or anything, just hook it back up to your PC and re-run Amset.

As for the reboot message, it's nothing, really. Operating systems (including Linux) usually need to be rebooted to see an updated partition table (which is what BlessTiVo creates) but since you're not going to be using it in the PC, you don't really care. The only reason to do it would be to make sure that the new partition table info was there, but if works in the TiVo, then it's there. If it doesn't, then you can go back and try to figure out what went wrong.

------------------
Dan T.
RKBA!

Posted by: Jim West

This is just a note to confirm that my upgrade apparently was successful. System Information shows 108+ hours basic and 30+ hours best.

Thanks again to everyone who helped.

Jim West

Posted by: goofyone

From someone brand new to TiVo and experienced with PC's, I wanted to thank Dylan and TivoMAD for such excellent software!

I bought my very first TiVo (Phillips HDR212) from Best Buy last night, did a virgin copy (I'm trusting of hardware), and managed to upgrade my TiVo to a 120GB monster in just about 2 1/2 hours (backup time took 1 1/2).

The software was so incredibly easy to use it's almost foolproof. Thanks again for all of you that put the time and energy into making this hobby so enjoyable.

Craig

Mitch Taylor: Something strange happened to me this morning.
Chris Knight: Was it a dream where you see yourself in, sort of, Sun God robes, on a pyramid, with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?
Mitch Taylor: No.
Chris Knight: Why am I the only person that has that dream?