Copying a Harddrive

[dburckh]

I've now tried the Hinsdale method 3 times to upgrade various Tivos and I have three failures.

Here's what I have:

HR10-250 - InstantCaked to 300GB.
Shinny new 500GB Seagate 7200.9

What I've done:
1. Boot to InstantCake CD.
2. Did "mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc"
This fails saying the destination is too small, if I remove the "x" it appears to work. I estimated it was going to take 48hours, so I killed it.
3. Did "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc -bs1024k". It took 48 hours and APPEARED to work.
4. Tried mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hdc. Said nothing to expand. Grrrrr.
5. Did BlessTiVo /dev/hdc. Reported correct size. It said it was erasing sectors (not a good sign in my mind).
6. Tried to mount /dev/hdc4. Nothing.

I'm not willing to commit another 48 hours to have it fail again.

I'm down to this:

I've modified TySuiteJ to extract as .tmf. I'll instant cake the new drive, copy over the kernal/root and reload everything via mfs_ftp. That's brutal though.

Any ideas?

[captain_video]

Have you tried to just create a backup image of the original drive to a FAT32 drive and then restore the backup image to the new drive? This is a 2-step process instead of the all-in-one method you're using. The backup will take about 15 minutes and another 5 or so for the restore. If you used Instantcake for the original upgrade then the easiest method would be to simply use it agin on the new drive since it doesn't appear that you're trying to preserve any recordings.

[dburckh]

Cap. Video,

I am definitely trying to preserve the shows. I believe the -Tao and dd method do that.

[crashHD]

It looks like an upgrade/save recordings will be difficult.

When you instantcaked that 300GB drive, if you just ran instantcake with its default parameters, it would have restored the 250GB image, and expanded to use the rest of the drive, creating a third mfs partition pair, making for 15 partitions total.

I can think of 3 solutions:

1) Instantcake new drive. Insert recordings from 300GB drive (difficult, time consuming)

2) mfsbackup|mfsrestore to the 500GB without the -p option, and merge the MFS partitions (difficult, reportedly produces a drive which can no mfsbackup can no longer handle correctly).

3) Use mfslive beta. It reportedly has a method of expanding a drive which already has an mfs set of 3 pairs (-f option).

Can you run pdisk or mfsinfo on your 300GB drive and post how many MFS partitions it has?

[dburckh]

/dev/hda10 has 1048576 sectors
/dev/hda11 has 216091648 sectors
/dev/hda12 has 1048576 sectors
/dev/hda13 has 268617728 sectors
/dev/hda14 has 1024 sectors
/dev/hda15 has 98172928 sectors


I think you hit it on the head. It looks like I have 3 pairs.

So there's a 15 partition limit? Is this a Linux thing or a general disk thing?

[crashHD]

There's a 16 partition limit. You have 15, but mfs partitions must always be added in pairs (dunno why, but that's how it is). If you post at mfslive.org, tell them you have a 300GB with 3 mfs pairs, and you want to upgrade preserving recordings. Ask to be added to the beta test group. That will allow you to download the latest beta (only the beta expands partitions).

[dburckh]

There's a 16 partition limit. You have 15, but mfs partitions must always be added in pairs (dunno why, but that's how it is). If you post at mfslive.org, tell them you have a 300GB with 3 mfs pairs, and you want to upgrade preserving recordings. Ask to be added to the beta test group. That will allow you to download the latest beta (only the beta expands partitions).

Thanks for the info man. I'm out of town next week, again, so I won't be able to get this done until like May. :(

[dburckh]

Not only did mfslive work, it was wicked fast! 3 hours for 300GB as opposed to 48 hours. Awesome program.

[crashHD]

When you say mfslive worked, did you use it to go from your 300GB drive to the 500 and preserving all recordings? I will be needing to do the same thing soon, my wife's tivo is an R10 with a 250GB disk (3 mfs pairs), and it needs an upgrade this summer.

Mfslive is fast. I used it the other night to dd my old pc drive (250GB) to a new one (500). I left it to run all night. I woke up about 4 hours later and decided to check on it since I was up...done already, in 4 hours (or less). I had expected it to take until morning.

[dburckh]

Yeah. It copied my InstantCaked 300GB (3 pairs) to a new 500GB including all recordings. The 500GB still had 3 pairs, but I'm very happy. It did it all in about 3 hours!