HOWTO: Upgrade the Hard Drive in an HR20

[pheroy]

Thanks for the quick response, PlainBill.

As it turns out, I just tried a simple swap of the SATA cables, and now GParted is booting and I can see both drives. I still can't see the original HD in the BIOS though, which seems really odd. Hopefully the rest of this goes a little more smoothly.

[ntrance]

If you reboot the computer after gparted has spun-up the drive, your bios should see it, but it is not necessary for the procedure. Good luck with the rest of your upgrade. Here is the new thread over a dbstalk in case you were still interrested:
http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=148760

[pheroy]

Thanks for the link, ntrance.

So it took a bit of futzing (the new HD was pulled from a Windows box and I had to re-partition it with GParted before the HR20 seemed to even want to acknowledge it, though in retrospect it's possible that was unnecessary and I was just impatient with the HR20), but I got the drives set for the copy. (As in, each HD was pulled from the HR20 after doing the s/w reset, pulling the power cord just as the LEDs go out.) But when I started the xfsdump command as specified, it took a whopping 8 seconds to run. My original HD is not full, but it should certainly have taken longer than that. I was very, very careful to make sure I had the correct drives as "sda" and "sdb", with the partitions # 2 & 3 of each mounted as "fap" and "hr20" respectively - 100% confidence about that. I double and triple checked in the GParted window. But looking at the following command from the instructions:

xfsdump -J - /mnt/hr20 | xfsrestore -J - /mnt/fap

That just looks backward to me. "fap" is the mounted original HD, and "hr20" is the mounted new HD. Isn't this attempting to dump the new and restore it to the old, which is the opposite of what's desired?

[pheroy]

Oh, fudge. After re-re-re-reading the directions, I realize that I somehow glossed over that "sda" is the NEW HD, and "sdb" is the OLD HD.

Guess I'll get to find out shortly if dumping an empty filesystem actually erased the original HD.

[Edit: looks like it is going to work, the dump size is 211 MB. Nice... and I am definitely glad I tried this technique on this older HR20 which I'm really using as a secondary unit now, before doing it on my main HR21. Really just one archived recording that I'd hate to lose.]

[ntrance]

Guess I'll get to find out shortly if dumping an empty filesystem actually erased the original HD.

I'm curious to know what the answer to this is. My belief is that the original drive is not erased.

[pheroy]

I'm curious to know what the answer to this is. My belief is that the original drive is not erased.

And you would be correct. Everything is there, except for my favorite channels setup (which might have been reset by DTV recently - I can't verify that now, but I have seen a couple of s/w upgrades recently). Recorded shows, recording subscriptions, prioritizer, everything else seems to be there.

Now, if there was anything at all on the new drive, maybe that would not be the case. It worked, and it was a nice little learning experience - so now it's on to the 1.5 TB drive for the HR21 in my main HT room.

[ntrance]

Now, if there was anything at all on the new drive, maybe that would not be the case. It worked, and it was a nice little learning experience - so now it's on to the 1.5 TB drive for the HR21 in my main HT room.

I confirmed that it would work even if there were recordings on both drives. The playlists from both drives would be merged and all recordings would be playable.
http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.ph...77#post2229477

[airjrdn]

I wanted to chime in with something I just did.

I had a 1TB eSATA Calvary with about 90 or so tv episodes on it hooked to an owned HR20. I opened the HR20 & the external up, and replaced the internal 320G with the 1TB that was in the Calvary. Everything seems to be working as you'd expect, complete w/the existing recordings. I'll report back if any issues crop up.