I finally have my Tivo upgraded with a 160GB Seagate Barracuda.
I ended up making space in my PC for all the requisite drives by taking out my WinXP boot disk and taking out my CD-RW drive. Booting from the CD, it gave me room to plug in the Tivo drive and backup to a new drive that I bought.
That was the first problem I ran into though. Backups. I still haven't quite figured out what the mfstool thinks a backup is. The regular backup backs up just the "essential" files and is quite small (around 800MB this time). However, it provides an option to backup everything (-a).
So, that's what I thought I would do. I would create a single backup of everything on my hard drive and store on my new 300GB disk. Sounded good in theory. Unfortunately, it turns out that the Linux kernel on the boot cd is version 2.4.4 from Aug-20-2001. Apparently, due to the tools used at the time, it suffers from a 2GB file size limit. (Needless to say, it took forever to figure out that was what was happening. I couldn't find mention of this 2GB file limit in any Linux FAQ.)
Having given up on making a full backup, I used the mfstool to backup and restore to the new drive over a pipe. No problem. It copied everything over. (many hours later.)
My next problem came when I tried to enable backdoors. I thought, "Hey! I'll do the hexedit nonsense while I have the drive in the PC before I put it in the Tivo." Silly me. Turns out the MFS Application Region partitions of the disk are blank after doing an mfstool backup/restore. I needed to boot up the Tivo once to populate the partitions with information that I could then change with hexedit.
Also, when using hexedit it took me a while to realize I was supposed to hit "TAB" before Ctrl-S to do the search for the key string. It was written in the book, I just missed step one and it turns out the editor defaults to searching for hexadecimal strings rather than ASCII strings.
But all is working. Took longer than expected. But which projects around my house don't seem to take longer than expected.
Posted by rob at November 21, 2003 11:36 AMHey Rob. nice BLOG.
(First comment. Woohoo!)
It's been several days since you've done this. Is it worth it? and, do you expect to have to do this again with the next software upgrade?
-Dave
Definitely it's worth it! Having more space is great!
We have two problems with our Tivo usage. First, we record a ton of kids shows so they'll be on hand when the kids want to watch their favorite shows. Second, we don't really keep up to date on our TV viewing since we got the Tivo. For example, I think I've only watched one episode of "Ed" this season and all the others are sitting on the Tivo. Ditto "Without a Trace". I don't want to have to archive them to tape, so a bigger hard drive was the only solution.
There's been one oddity that I haven't figured out yet. Even though I put in a 7200RPM drive, the system feels a little slower right now. When the Tivo changes screens, it sometimes pauses, so I'm a little confused by that.
Otherwise things are going great! The drive should keep working even if Tivo issues a new software upgrade. I might need to reopen the backdoors, but I really haven't been making significant use of them, so it's not going to be an emergency.
Thanks for visiting!
Posted by: rob at December 1, 2003 12:00 PM