Tivo Hard Drive Upgrade III

 My mom’s Tivo has a problem where it will only record 15 hours on the best quality, even though it shows 49 hours when you check in set up.  With the 2 disk drives there should be more than 15 hours.

 So I set out to fix it.

I got the hard drives put in my computer, actually the cable was just long enough to reach one of the hard drives in the Tivo and the 2nd one I had mounted with duct tape so it came out very easy, and I just propped it up on the edge of the Tivo and that worked just fine. The cable from my computer was stretched all the way out, but it saved me some time since I didn’t have to take the hard drives out, and I didn’t have to disconnect any power plugs on any of the hard drives.

Next I started looking for my old boot disk, I have an old floppy boot disk that I used when I did my last Tivo hard drive upgrade. But when I tried it this time the commands would not work.

Next I went to their site and downloaded a new floppy disk image and made a new floppy disk.

I booted from the new floppy disk because I thought they might have changed something so I could have been using a new command on an old disk, well nothing worked on the new disk either.

Then I started looking for my CD that I got when I bought a hard drive.  I found it after a while and booted from the CD then tried the same command again.

Msfadd –r 4 –x /dev/had /dev/hdb

Right before I did this I scrolled up (hold down shift key and press page up) and checked to make sure the drives were a and b, they were.

Anyway, it worked this time, and gave me the following message.

Current estimated standalone size: 163 hours

Nothing to add!

The nothing to add worried me a little, but I unhooked the cable from the computer and connected the cable from the Tivo back up.

Then I hooked the TV back up to the Tivo and realized that my mom had delete every single show off of her Tivo.  So this means I have to record for 16 hours before I can tell if it’s using the 2nd drive or not.

Oh well, tomorrow sometime I will figure out if this did anything or not.

I think part of the problem was that it went so smooth on the first Tivo that I installed that I started thinking it was easy.  This one has been quite a bit more complicated, and I don’t understand enough about unix to be able to fix anything when the standard commands don’t work.

Tivo Hard Drive Upgrade - back to page 1