TiVo Community Forums Archives - 120GB+120GB=only 225 hours?...uh oh

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120GB+120GB=only 225 hours?...uh oh
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Posted by: cgee

I have a Philips 13h SA that I upgraded last year to 80+80 using TiVoMad. When one of my 80GB Maxtors started to crap out last week, I took my original TiVo A drive out of storage and used Tiger's MFSTools 2.0 to make a backup of the A drive (version 2.0.1 of the TiVo software) and then restore and expand the image onto another 60GB Maxtor that I wasn't using as a temporary measure while waiting for my drive replacement from Maxtor.

Soon thereafter, I had the same invalid swapfile problem as others on the board (Search By Title was empty). Despite the fact that I am not a Linux guy, I went to the trouble of enabling shell access and running
mkswap /dev/hda8
swapon /de/hda8
from bash using the DSS cable and adapters. Swapfile problem fixed, and my now-single drive 60GB TiVo is working okay.

I decide, now that I am back to messing around with my TiVo, maybe it is time to buy two 120GB drives and do a 120+120 upgrade. I get the new drives, and proceed to the storage upgrade. I still have my MFST2 CD and Hinsdale's HowTo from last week, and I figure that I may as well use MFST2 again, since I have dealt with the swapfile problem.

Using the MFST2 CD, I create a backup of my 60GB A Drive running 3.0 (which is actually just a 13GB image, since that was the original configuration of my Philips SA). My wife wants me to preserve the recordings on the 60GB drive, however, so instead of using this backup, I follow Hinsdale's Step 7, OPTION #3 (limited use): COPYING TiVo DRIVE TO NEW UPGRADE DRIVE, which uses dd to copy the 60GB A Drive with 3.0 software to one of my new 120GB drives. This takes about 2 hours, and returns an exact byte match.

Following the guide, I next skip to Step 10: Upgrade Configuration #2 to expand and complete the upgrade. I use the following command:

mfsadd -x /dev/hdc /dev/hdb

to expand the new 120GB A drive and new 120GB B drive

I remove the drives from the PC and place them back into the TiVo, power it up, and everything seems fine. My old recordings, settings, and season passes are still there. I enable backdoors to check the logs, and the swapfile problem remains resolved. All is well...

Except that I then read a thread on this board about drive capacities after upgrading, and notice that a 240GB SA TiVo should result in approx 300 basic hours. When I check my TiVo, I find that it has capacity for 225 basic hours, or 25% less than optimal. It doesn't take a genius to guess that one of the drives (I assume the A drive) may not have been expanded in Step 10, and is still only using 60GB of the 120GB drive. While I do not need the extra space right now, since I purchased 240GB, I would like to obtain use of this space. My questions:

Did I do anything incorrectly in the above?

Is there any way I can confirm that the A Drive is being under-utilized?

How do I fix this problem through shell access via DSS cable or by hooking up the drives to my PC?

Should I just start over and lose my programs, and if so, which MFST2 image should I use - 2.0.1 or 3.0?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Posted by: cgee

bump

Posted by: NERVOUS

I am having a similar type of problem... 120GB + 120GB = 240GB = 275 hours of basic recording. Now, 275 is a little better than 225, but it sure isn't the 300+ hours of basic recording that I was expecting to get! :(

I would like to know what, if anything, resolves your problem so that I can resolve my situation as well.

Thank you for any/all replies in advance.