LJ's TiVo page | 300GB disk upgrade

300GB disk upgrade

This page explains the method I used to upgrade my TiVo to a 300GB drive. I've changed some of the later steps from what I actually did, but the effect should be the same... ;)
My TiVo now reports 103 hrs, 23 min Best Quality; 361 hrs, 41 min Basic Quality.
Thanks to Todd for writing the new kernels, das Monkey for his write up and Robert S for his advice. The TiVoCommunity thread is here.

Ingredients to start

PC with BIOS that supports > 128GB disks
Exisiting 40GB Quantum and 80GB Maxtor disks
New 300GB Maxtor disk - I got mine from Dabs - Quicklinx 2P3JWS
Knoppix bootable CD - Beware! Takes a while to download as it's almost 700MB!
MFSTools 2 bootable CD
Qunlock on a bootable floppy disk.
EditTitle3.tcl to erase unwanted programmes from the TiVo. Here's a version where I've added an option to undelete and erase a programme in one step
One of Todd's kernels
Todd's modified mkswap
Tridge's modified bootpage

Erase unwanted programmes on the TiVo

When you delete a programme on your TiVo it keeps it until it needs the space to record new programmes. MFSTools copies the deleted programmes to your new disk. To speed up copying, I erased all my deleted programmes and pared Now Playing to the bare minimum.

FTP across to /var/hack, chmod +x and run from the command line.

Copy the new kernel, mkswap and bootpage to the TiVo

I created an 'lba48' directory under /var/hack on my TiVo and downloaded Todd's 2.5 kernel.lba48+big_swap kernel & modified mkswap and Tridge's bootpage to my PC. Then I FTPed them across to /var/hack/lba48.

Unlocking the Quantum

I powered down the TiVo and the PC, crowbared the lid off the TiVo, removed the drives, connected just the Quantum to the primary IDE channel in the PC and booted with the Qunlock floppy.

qunlock 0

...should send the unlock command to the disk. I did this with no other drives installed just to be on the safe side - didn't want to risk locking the new 300Gb by mistake!

Connecting up the disks

I changed the jumpers on the new disk to make it a slave and connected the drives up as follows:

Primary Master	Quantum 40GB	/dev/hda
Primary Slave	Maxtor 80GB	/dev/hdb
Secondary Master	CD Drive
Secondary Slave	Maxtor 300GB	/dev/hdd

Boot Knoppix and download MFSTools

Booted up from the Knoppix CD and ran up a root shell from KNOPPIX | KNOPPIX | Root Shell.

Then I started up the Ethernet card and set the default route:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.xxx.xxx netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add default gw 192.168.xxx.xxx

Then I fired up the Konqueror web browser and entered:

http://208.45.95.220/MFS/

...and downloaded the Statically linked gzipped tar, 'gzip -d'ed and 'tar -xvf'ed it.

Copying to the new disk

Now I cded into the mfstools-2.0 directory and issued the following command:

./mfstool backup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | ./mfstool restore -s 255 -pxi - /dev/hdd

MFSTools scanned the disks and copied the data across.

Several cups of tea later... ;)

Once the copy was complete I shut down:

shutdown -h 0

...swapped over the CD to the MFSTools 2 CD and rebooted.

I booted into byteswapping mode:

vmlnodma hdd=bswap

...mounted up the original TiVo disk to get at the tools:

mkdir /setup
mount /dev/hda7 /setup
cd /setup/var/hack/lba48

...and ran bootpage to check how the boot partitions were set. I decided to copy the kernel to both:

dd if=./kernel.lba48+big_swap of=/dev/hdd3
dd if=./kernel.lba48+big_swap of=/dev/hdd3

Last task was to set up the swap:

./mkswap -v1 /dev/hdd8

Once that's complete, shutdown by pressing Control-Alt-Delete.

Back on TV

Now change the jumpers on the new drive to make it a master, put it back in the TiVo and reboot.

Once the TiVo's rebooted check that the right amount of disk and swap space are reported on the Info screen of TiVoWeb.

That's it!

Home	Last updated: 2nd August 2003