TiVo Community Forums Archives - Successful Upgrade: DirecTiVo Sony SAT-T60 (40GB to 120GB)

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Successful Upgrade: DirecTiVo Sony SAT-T60 (40GB to 120GB)
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Posted by: JakFrost

I just wanted to post about a successful upgrade on my DirecTiVo and thank many people who have made this upgrade possible. (No questions or problems in this post, you guys can take a little break.)

Tivo: DirecTiVo - Sony SAT-T60

Original Storage: (1) 40GB Hard Drive
Original Capacity: 35 variable hours/~10 actual hours for DirecTiVo Best Quality

New Storage: (1) 120GB Hard Drive
New Capacity: 109 variable hours/~30 actual hours for DirecTiVo Best Quality

I read pretty much everything that I could get my hands on before doing the upgrade just so that I could avoid my problem. Below are some of the things that helped me the most:
Tivo Hack FAQ
New Hinsdale How-to Tivo Upgrade Guide
MFS Tools 2.0

I also read the very lenghty Fixes for MFSTools 2.0 swap thread to understand the problem with the GSOD caused by small swap partition. I want to thank all the people who posted the information in this thread since it helped me to avoid a potential problem in the future (i.e. Since I only have a 120GB of storage in the TiVo I won't have the GSOD problem now, but since there is a good possibility that I will upgrade this TiVo later on, it is a good idea to do the swap partition expansion now since it would be difficult to do later without losing my recordings.) I want to especially thank, in no particular order: Merle Corey, gigageek, Robert S, Hinsdale, klincoln, Ivor, and anyone else that I might have forgotten for diagnosing and following up on this problem.

Before the upgrade I used the Maxtor tools to set the proper parameters on my hard drive. First I used the WVSET.EXE utility to disable the write-verification on my hard drive since if the hard drive is going to fail, it is going to fail anyway regardless of the write-verification option set. I also used the AMSET.EXE utility verify and change my hard drive's acoustic settings to "quiet". (The hard drive that I purchased was the OEM version and it actually had the WVSET setting set to '10' reboots and the AMSET setting set to 'Quiet'.)

I used the New Hinsdale How-To to do the actual upgrade and after doing the backup I used the pipe command below to do the actual data transfer between the original and the new hard drive.

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda

During this upgrade I also added the TurboNet card and ran the network cable on the side of the case under the motherboard to a keystone jack that I added to the case above the telephone jack, as somebody mentioned in a previous thread. The picture of this mod is attached to this thread if you want to see it. It looks quite good.

(While I'd like to say that the upgrade went without a problem I can't. My first attempt failed and the TiVo wouldn't boot even thought I followed the same steps as the later successful upgrade, but I can attribute the failure to either some small glitch that happened or to the fact that I missed some steps while doing the TurboNet CD upgrade I'm believe that I forgot the TiVoFlash utility. My second attempt using 'dd' to do the copy to eliminate hardware problems from being the cause of the first upgrade's failure worked but this was only a test attempt since I did not want to use the 'dd'ed image since I would not have been able to expand the swap partition with this method. My third and successful attempt used the identical steps to the first attempt except that I chose not to do the TurboNet upgrade and just do a storage expansion, which worked great. I will do the TurboNet upgrade at a later date once I'm satisfied that the storage upgrade is working fine, it has been so far after 3-days of usage.)

Below is the output from the 'pdisk' program from the original and new hard drive. If you notice the underlined text, you will see the expanded swap partition and the addition of partitions 15 and 16 with an extra 77.2GiB of storage.

Original 40GB Hard Drive

code:

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/hdc'
 #:                type name                       length   base     ( size )
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple                          63 @ 1       
 2:               Image Bootstrap 1                  4096 @ 42997799 (  2.0M)
 3:               Image Kernel 1                     4096 @ 43001895 (  2.0M)
 4:                Ext2 Root 1                     262144 @ 43005991 (128.0M)
 5:               Image Bootstrap 2                  4096 @ 43268135 (  2.0M)
 6:               Image Kernel 2                     4096 @ 43272231 (  2.0M)
 7:                Ext2 Root 2                     262144 @ 43276327 (128.0M)
 8:                Swap Linux swap                 131072 @ 43538471 ( 64.0M)
 9:                Ext2 /var                       262144 @ 43669543 (128.0M)
10:                 MFS MFS application region    1048576 @ 43931687 (512.0M)
11:                 MFS MFS media region         32148953 @ 46028839 ( 15.3G)
12:                 MFS MFS application region 2  1048576 @ 44980263 (512.0M)
13:                 MFS MFS media region 2       42997735 @ 64       ( 20.5G)

New 120GB Hard Drive

code:

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/hda'
 #:                type name                             length   base      ( size )
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple                                63 @ 1        
 2:               Image Bootstrap 1                        4096 @ 75145280  (  2.0M)
 3:               Image Kernel 1                           4096 @ 75149376  (  2.0M)
 4:                Ext2 Root 1                           262144 @ 75153472  (128.0M)
 5:               Image Bootstrap 2                        4096 @ 75415616  (  2.0M)
 6:               Image Kernel 2                           4096 @ 75419712  (  2.0M)
 7:                Ext2 Root 2                           262144 @ 75423808  (128.0M)
 8:                Swap Linux swap                       260096 @ 75685952  (127.0M)
 9:                Ext2 /var                             262144 @ 75946048  (128.0M)
10:                 MFS MFS application region          1048576 @ 76208192  (512.0M)
11:                 MFS MFS media region               32148480 @ 42996800  ( 15.3G)
12:                 MFS Second MFS application region   1048576 @ 77256768  (512.0M)
13:                 MFS Second MFS media region        42996736 @ 64        ( 20.5G)
14:                 MFS New MFS Application                1024 @ 78305344 
15:                 MFS New MFS Media                 161808384 @ 78306368  ( 77.2G)
16:          Apple_Free Extra                              6976 @ 240114752 (  3.4M)

Anyway, just wanted to share this and thank some people.

(As I promissed, no questions or problems in this thread, however, there is something interesting to be noted here for those of you that like to figure things out. In the 'pdisk' output for the new hard drive, notice partition number 14 "MFS New MFS Application" and the size of "1024" (0.5MiB). If you look at the previous "MFS MFS Application region" partitions 10 and 12 you will notice that they have a size of "1048576" (512MiB). I have a feeling that the new partition 14 should probably have been the same size as the previous two partitions to continue the trend and for compatibility. I do not know why this new partition was created to be so small. My guess is that it won't be used for any new "application" streams since the previous two already provide enough space.)

Posted by: Robert S

The MFS Application partitions don't hold streams, they hold the Guide DB (etc). Some twin drives separate the App partitions between the two drives. Anyway, once you've got enough App space to hold the DB there's no advantage to adding more. There does appear to be a requirement to create MFS partitions in App/Media pairs.

What's really interesting is the partition layout (the base column). You'd normally expect the system partitions to be at the bottom of the drive, but yours are more towards the top. This must be the effect of the -p optimisation.

Posted by: JakFrost

code:
Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/hda'
 #:                type name                             length   base      ( size )
13:                 MFS Second MFS media region        42996736 @ 64        ( 20.5G)
11:                 MFS MFS media region               32148480 @ 42996800  ( 15.3G)
 2:               Image Bootstrap 1                        4096 @ 75145280  (  2.0M)
15:                 MFS New MFS Media                 161808384 @ 78306368  ( 77.2G)

Yep, after the upgrade, the Second MFS partition started at location "64" and lenght of "42996736" and the First MFS partition started at "42996800" and a length of "32148480". The Linux partitions follow those and then the large upgrade partition at the end.

I see that as the "-p" switch in the 'mfsrestore' command did quite a nice job shuffling the partitions around to bring the Linux data to the middle of the drive to speed up head seeks.

code:
MFS Tools version 2.0
by Steven Lang (Tiger on TiVo Community Forum www.tivocommunity.com)

RESTORE

-p
	Attempt to optimize the partition layout for TiVo's access patterns.
	This will imitate the partition layout of DirecTV TiVo receivers
	and newer standalone receivers.  The partition layout of the first
	drive will be such that the application data will be in the middle
	of the drive and the video on the outside, causing the head to have
	to seek less.