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Help... How to Upgrade 40+120 to 120+120 while....
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Posted by: Tivogre

...

1. saving all recordings

2. Increasing swap space to max (127)

3. Increasing "cluster size", which I think is supposed to help with UI speed

Is there an easy single step method to accomplish all of this this?

I did the prior upgrade using "BlessTivo" to add the 120GB to the stock 40GB.

Thanks in advance!

Posted by: Robert S

Objective #3 is not really achievable. As I understand it, only the 80Gb new partition that you'll create as part of the upgrade will have increased cluster size (unless you have a spare 120Gb drive you can't even attempt this anyway).

You will need to dd the 40Gb drive over to the new drive. You will then need to follow the manual swap increase procedure in the third post of the Fixes thread before you use mfsadd to expand your TiVo to use the extra space on the new drive.

The description of this procedure is very new - would appreciate feedback on how you get on.

Posted by: kgidley

I'm in a similar situation. I've got a DTivo that I upgraded awhile back by adding an 80GB drive to the existing 40GB drive. Now I'm wondering if I can squeeze those two drives onto a single 120GB drive, preferably with expanded swap so I can easily add in another drive at a later time.

From everything I've read so far, I don't think I'll have enough space on one 120GB drive to do want I want and keep all the recordings (that's always the rub, isn't it??).

I guess I'll end up going from 40GB+80GB => 120GB + 80GB using the MFS Tools 2.0 'pipe transfer' method to expand the swap and preserve the recordings. Then if I decide to add a larger second drive, I should be able to 'dd' the B drive onto a new bigger B drive and 'mfsadd' the extra space. That should work, shouldn't it?

Thanks for any input.

Posted by: Robert S

Well, you can certainly try getting both your drives onto a 120. It really does come down to the last block. If you have a largish 120 and smallish 80 it might fit. I'd be surprised if it was close enough that the size of the swap partition affected whether it's possible or not.

One other possibility is to dd the 40 onto the 120 and manually increase the swap partition as described in the Fixes thread. Apart from being technically more difficult to execute, the result of this is almost equivalent to your pipe transfer idea and will take less time.

Posted by: kgidley

quote:
Originally posted by Robert S
One other possibility is to dd the 40 onto the 120 and manually increase the swap partition as described in the Fixes thread. Apart from being technically more difficult to execute, the result of this is almost equivalent to your pipe transfer idea and will take less time.

Hmmm, hadn't considered that one. I took a quick glance at the Fixes thread, and I assume you're referring me to the third post and the section that talks about upgrading 'Twin-Drive Tivos'.

The thread looks pretty complete, but I'd like to read more about the 'pdisk' and 'mkswap' utilities. Are 'man' pages available on any of the boot disks? I'm fairly familiar with Unix, but not Linux.

I am a bit confused about what exactly this procedure is doing. I can grasp that it's creating a new partition and setting that partition as the new swap partition. What happens to the old partition? Is it freed up and used for recordings? Every MB helps... ;)

One thing I did notice in the section I mentioned above is that it says:

pdisk /dev/hda

C
12p
128m <-- is this OK? Should it be 127m?

I've read so many places about using "-s 127" to make sure the swap size is OK, that I've become paranoid of any number greater!

Thanks for your help,

Posted by: Robert S

All these how-to's take the attitude of 'I'm going to tell you exactly what to do, don't try to understand it', but you should be able to figure out what's going on.

mkswap just initialises swap files/partitions. The -v0 switch tells it to use the old-style swap format used by TiVo.

pdisk is fdisk hacked to work with TiVo's Apple-style partition table. You can experiment with pdisk - as long as you don't write your modified partition table out to disk it's quite safe.

We're not sure exactly why MFS Tools 2.0 doesn't create swap >127Mb correctly, but the actual limit is about 127.8 Mb. mkswap will give you a warning about truncating the swap to this value, but it creates a working swap partition.

I did get 'real' people (ie, people not involved with developing the procedure) to test those procedures before posting them, so I'm pretty confident that it'll work if you follow the instructions. Any feedback you might have is, of course, welcome.