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DirecTiVo and Hard Drive Size (backup process)
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Posted by: Kam

I have a Direct TiVo SAT-T60 40 gig Quantum Fireball drive. I bought a Western Digital drive and got all the slave master secondary IDE bus connection settings all right but Dylans boot CD did not work making a backup... it stopped mid way and gave no errors and no reports (went to sleep.) I tried it a second time from scratch and used the linux floppy. Everything worked (sorta) the number that it displayed on output was 1 number smaller. The Western Digital has 5 bytes less space than the quantum and when I tried it out the thing would crash and reboot every time I hit the TiVo button... quite intresting actually because the TV stuff still worked fine. Now I have several questions from here. You would think 5 bytes doesn't matter (I guess its a pretty precise IMAGE of the drive) Well why couldn't the number (that was off by one) be from one of the recordings? Is there ANYTHING I can do to still use these drives to backup the TiVo. I have the latest TiVo firmware (my phone line is plugged in.) I don't care about the recordings. Is there anything that I can do to make a plug and play backup of the quantum drive using the WD drive? Also I want to mate a 160 gig drive (5400 rpm b/c of heat issues... right?) with the Western Digital 40 and have the Quantum drive as my backup (incase things go wrong.) I have not tried the DOS way (just linux.) If I backed up the Quantum 40 gig to the 160 gig Maxtor drive do I still have to use a program like TiVoMad to make linux see the new 160 gig drive size or is that everything? What do you guys think is my best solution. I mean 160 or 160 + 40 I would prefer b, but if a gets the job done and I can later USE the 160 gig if I decide I don't want it in TiVo then why not. From my impression once you bless a TiVo those drives are as one... forever? Even if you tried to format one of them? I never quite got that. What is the best way to tackle this thing from here...?

Is there any other information that people can provide or any help. I have read and used hinsdale(sp?) and the samba guide to this process and I still can't get things right. I assume using TiVo to do the backup is not any different (better or worse) than using the linux floppy on the PC. Am I doing something wrong or do I actually need to buy/find a quantum drive that is exact to my unit (everything is 20/20 looking back) Thanks for helping me and if you cannot be of assistance, thanks for reading. Also I forgot to plug the fan plug in when I put the TiVo back (iddiot!) and the other people who use the TiVo ignored the warnings about over heating (iddiots too lol). It smelled toasty (poptarts anyone?) (mostly the hard drive was worked!) but everything seems to still work, should I be concerned (I know this sounds like a dumb question but if stuff works... so far... am I ok?) ? I also would like to apologies for any ignorance or ill-read solution that I could not find (I am sure problems get repeated over and over here) and thanks for putting up with me ;). -J

Posted by: Kam

Keeping it simple -

What is the method that has worked for other users when backing up their Tivo drive? when adding a second drive?

methods that have just worked - with no issues first time around.