TiVo Community Forums Archives - Problems upgrading a sat-t60

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Problems upgrading a sat-t60
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Posted by: Hexis

I have an older sat-t60 dual drive model. I could not get mfsbackup to read from the two discs. So I used a friend's single drive sat-t60 as a basis and created an upgraded image on an 80gb drive.

I originally got a #51 error. Not knowing what to do I tried forcing a call, that worked, but did not fix the problem. So I dug up the "Restart and erase everything" fix and tried that. After that I can not dial up at all. It fails each time. I tried a number of times and waited up to an hour between each call attempt.

I put my original drives back in and everything look ok. The call test goes through perfectly.

My eventual goal is to have my unit upgraded to a 80+40 config. I don't really care how I get there. Maintaining my season passes is not really a big deal. I don't use TiVo suggestions, and can program in my SPs pretty easy. I have them written down. I don't care about maintaing my recordings at all.

Posted by: Robert S

Which version of MFS Tools are you using?

Did the BIOS recognise the TiVo drives as the right size?

Posted by: Hexis

I am using 2.0.

Yes, all the drives are seen by the bios/linux as the correct size.

Posted by: Robert S

OK, would try using dd to copy one of your drives (probably the A drive) onto the new drive and seeing if that behaves itself.

You'll have to be careful not to break the 'marriage' between your existing A & B drives - if you have the drives available it would be safer to dd both drives to new media and leave the old set untouched.

<edit>Changing my mind... It may be that your TiVo is locked to your hard drive. In that case dd'ing your B drive might work.</edit>

Does system information show the hard drive serial numbers?

Posted by: Hexis

I don't see a HD serial in the System Information screen.

I am leaving the original drives (30+15) as is for now. I'm trying to get it working on 2 new drives (80+40).

If I dd the drives to the new (larger) drive, can I still expand them to use all of the space?

Posted by: Robert S

Yes, dd each drive to one of the new ones and check they boot. If they do, I would recommend creating a larger swap partition manually as in the Fixes thread before using mfsadd to fill the unused space.

Posted by: steve457

I originally had the same problem trying to upgrade my friends really old T-60 (with two drives as well). I was using the latest MFSTOOLS 2.0, and when I tried using mfsbackup would get an error saying that it couldn't read the drives. I ended up trying mfsbackup just on the A drive (knowing that it probably wouldn't work, but tried anyways). That gave me another error saying some partition info was bad, which I expected. Then I tried using mfsbackup again, but this time with both drives /dev/hdb /dev/hdc, and for some reason it worked! (it was the exact same command that I originally used when it didn't work the first time). I'm not sure why it started to work, but I wasn't complaining. Anyways, succesfully upgraded the machine to 230 hrs (two 120gig drives) :)

-steve

Posted by: Hexis

Robert S, since I am only upgrading to 120gb total shouldn't I be ok with the default swap size? In your post you say that it's only a problem if you are upgrading beyond 140gb.

I don't really plan to upgrade beyond this stage. However, if I did I could address the swap problem at that point.

Posted by: Robert S

Yes, you'll be OK for now, but it's probably easier to increase swap now. Make the A drive the smaller drive so that the opportunity to increase swap will definitely arise if you upgrade again.

Posted by: Hexis

I really appreciate the help. It's up and running now with the 80 as the A and 40 as the B. 107 hours. mmmmmmmm

I'm going to leave it for now. My original drives are still standing by. After this week's rounds of premiers I'll go back and make the changes you suggest. Even tho 107 hours will be more than I ever need (35 was _almost_ enough). I'm sure the geek in me will want more at some point.