TiVo Community Forums Archives - Blessing odd-sized drive

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Blessing odd-sized drive
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Posted by: robin731

I just bought a 60GB drive to expand my TiVo, but when I tried to bless it I found that my ancient computer wouldn't boot -- it hung in the drive-recognition sequence, and I couldn't fix it by fiddling with any of the BIOS parameters.

However, the drive has a jumper setting that makes it appear to be a 33GB drive, and when I set it that way my computer recognized it just fine. So I ran BlessTiVo, and sure enough it reported that it had successfully blessed a 33GB drive.

So my question is what happens if I now un-jumper it and put it in my TiVo? Will the system recognize it as a 60GB drive, or did the blessing fix its size at 33GB? If it's the latter, I need to find a friend with a modern computer who's willing to let me take the skins off and fool around inside, and most of my friends know me too well for that...

If you don't know the answer to that, what are the consequences of un-jumpering it and sticking it in my TiVo to see what size it reports? I know my original drive will now be "married" so that it won't work without a second drive, but what would happen if I later took the second drive and re-blessed it as a larger size?

Posted by: hinsdale

Thats called a cylinder limitation jumper and is there for use with older computers that cant recognize the larger drives. Unfortunately, what you bless is what you get.

Your going to need to update your Bios and then you will not have any problems or use a different PC for the few second blessing procedure.

Posted by: robin731

Thanks for the quick reply! Unfortunately, I'd already checked for a BIOS upgrade and there don't seem to be any for my motherboard. I guess I need to find a gullible, I mean helpful friend with a computer that isn't five years old.

Or, looking on the bright side, maybe this is the excuse I need to go out and buy a new computer myself!

Thanks again for the help.

Posted by: kdmorse

Sometime you can get by in your situation by disabling autodetect, and telling the BIOS you have NO drive. If the bios doesn't see it, it won't hang. And the bios doesn't need to see it in order for BlessTivo to work properly.

-Ken

Posted by: robin731

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!

Disabling the drive in the BIOS worked like a charm, and I now have a 91-hour TiVo! I never would have thought of that idea in a million years.

What a great community this is...

Posted by: Want1394

Bummer, the economy needs help. Please buy a new computer.

------------------
TOTAL Digital

Posted by: hinsdale

quote:
Originally posted by robin731:
it hung in the drive-recognition sequence, and I couldn't fix it by fiddling with any of the BIOS parameters.

Sorry I assummed based on your statement above, and that the How-To instructs turning the BIOS IDE detection to off, that you had already tried turning the BIOS IDE off. But i should remember to never assume because...yada yada yada.

Posted by: josetann

I know I read your how-to thoroughly a couple months ago when doing my upgrade. But I missed that part as well. Moving the jumpers to work with an older PC worked in that I could edit files on the drive, but I couldn't back up or anything like that. I finally figured out I needed to disable auto-detect. Everything worked like a charm then.

Posted by: robin731

quote:
Originally posted by hinsdale:

Sorry I assummed based on your statement above, and that the How-To instructs turning the BIOS IDE detection to off, that you had already tried turning the BIOS IDE off. But i should remember to never assume because...yada yada yada.

I had tried setting the parameters manually, but not turning off the drive recognition entirely. I was perhaps reading the instructions too literally -- the part I read said "If it is not reporting the correct drive size you may need to turn off your computers BIOS IDE detection", and my problem was that it was hanging instead of reporting any drive size at all. I was assuming that "detection" meant auto-detection, which I now realize isn't true.

My real misconception was assuming that the BIOS had to recognize the drive at all -- I didn't realize that the Linux on the boot disk bypassed that. One problem with writing such excellent instructions is that you get people like me fooling around with things they don't understand at all and never would have gotten into on their own.

But all that's in the past now. I'm happily enjoying my 90-hour TiVo and feeling grateful to all the people who helped me build it, both the ones who answsered me here and the ones who wrote the instructions and the software in the first place. As I said before, what a great community!

[This message has been edited by robin731 (edited 11-30-2001).]