TiVo Community Forums Archives - Plain DOS FAt32 as Primary Ch1 Master

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

Plain DOS FAt32 as Primary Ch1 Master
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: irt1239

Looking at the Hindsdale Original How To...

I have an old 2 GB IDE drive that I have laying around but don't want to go through the trouble of loading Win98 on it. Can I just boot to it with a bootable floppy and FDISK and format it FAT32 and use that as my primary Channel 1 master to backup my original Tivo A drive to before I bless my new drive? (How's that for a run on sentence?)

thx

Posted by: Robert S

Yes, that's fine, there's no need for any software on the backupd drive.

Use MFS Tools 2.0's mfsadd function to exand on to the B drive rather than blessing it - and consider copying your A drive on to the new one so you can expand swap and do your upgrade without altering the A drive.

Once you're happy everything has worked (give it a month) you can add your old A drive as a B drive if you want the extra space.

Posted by: irt1239

So what will this buy me? I will still have 2 drives (30 GB original) plus the new 120 MB in the machine? Wouldn't it be easier just to bless the new 120 gb drive?

thx

Posted by: Robert S

Use mfsadd instead of BlessTiVo because it gives you a faster TiVo.

Copying the drive allows you to increase swap, which isn't important for a 120 or even a 30+120, but might be important if you upgrade further.

The main point is insurance agains drive failure - once the B drive is married to the A drive, if one of them starts to fail you'll have great fun fixing it. (Obviously if you've copied the drive you recover from a drive problem by putting the old one back in).

Posted by: irt1239

If the main reason if I'm doing a 30+120 is four insurance, wouldn't I just restore my backed up image from my 2 GB spare drive to a new 30/40 GB hard drive if one of them fails? btw thanks for all this inuput.

Posted by: Robert S

Obviously I have no vested interest in what you choose to do - you now can't blame me if things go pear-shaped! :)

If you have a drive failure in a twin your immediate problem is to identify which of the two drives is failing. Although the manufacturers diagnostics will help you do this, they don't always find problems that make drives unusable in a TiVo.

Then, having identified the failing drive you have to fix the problem by restoring a backup or copying the drive to a good one.

Somehow just plugging the old A drive back in seems like an easier resolution to that problem.

If you're not bothered about saving your recordings, restoring your backup to the new drive will have it working in about ten minutes.