Overview of TiVo Capacity Upgrade Process

There are many TiVo upgrade guides floating around on internet and many people seem to have answers and quick to offer techniques. Some are good advises but most are outdated. If you are new to upgrading TiVo and want to save few bucks by doing it yourself instead of buying preformatted drives from places like weaknees.com or dvrupgrade.com, you have come to the right place.

I do not have all the answers but have spend significant amount of time testing and improving tools already out there. I have managed to come up with few new tools of my own.

First, read the full guide, quick guide, forums and try ICG. If you are stuck, you can contact me but I won't be able to get to them right away.

Overview goes something like this. Tivo capacity can be upgraded by getting a big hard drive that is compatible with your Tivo, hook your original Tivo drive along with a new big hard drive to a PC. Then, boot up using the latest mfstools included in Mfslive boot cd. Once you have successfully booted, type few commands to copy the software, Tivo files system and expand the drive.

What kind of hard drive do you need?

For Series 1 and 2, you will need PATA drive. For Series 3, you will need SATA drive.
Most brands will work but I recommend using Seagate DB35 drives which are made for DVR like TiVo. If you find that this site is useful and want to contribute, buying from my sponsor will offset some of the cost of operating this site.

About MFSLive Boot CD

Mfslive boot CD is lba48 aware so you can use large drives with mfstools. Mfstools included in this release has two important bug fixes. Version 1 linux swap size is no longer an issue. You can specify any size you want. Refer to FAQ section for more detail on the right size. Another fix is the alternate root/kernal size. Older release of mfstools set the alternate pair to 128/2MB. Now, restore will match the size of the active pair by default.

Also, you no longer need to reboot after restore. Unlike previous release of mfstools, partition table is refreshed after restore.

Minimum Hardware Requirements:

Intel Pentium MMX, 32MB RAM

You can use IDE, Serial ATA , USB drives to perform upgrade.

IDE drives will be mounted:

hda (primary master)
hdb (primary slave)
hdc (secondary master)
hdd (secondary slave)
hde (w/ pci ide card)
hdf (w/ pci ide card)
hdg (w/ pci ide card)
hdh (w/ pci ide card)

USB and SATA drives will be mounted:

sda, sdb, sdc, sdd, sde

 

Using Drives Greater Than 250GB

Most old computers' bios don't support hard drives larger than 250GB so reported size will be wrong. This is ok if you are using mfstools.

Using USB to IDE adapter

If you are using USB to IDE adapter, make sure your device support large hard drives. Most of the ones out there can support upto 400GB. Good thing about using USB is you don't have to reboot to connect drives. Just plug it in and it should be recognized. USB is little slower though using PATA or SATA interface.

Using eSATA drive as 2nd drive on Series 3

As you may have heard, eSATA port on Series 3 can be enabled by using Kickstart 62 or using updated mfstools included in MFSLive 1.2 or higher. Make sure you have a good quality eSATA II cable, good enclosure like Antec MX-1 that has active cooling capability. Review of the product is located here.

Boot with MFSLive Linux Boot CD

Change your computer bios setting to boot cdrom drive first. Or simply insert the cd to cdrom and boot to see if you get linux. If you did everything correct, you will get linux command prompt "[mfslive:/]#"

To mount dos drive:

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /dos

To mount cdrom:

mount /cdrom

or

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdb /cdrom

To mount a USB flash stick or USB drive:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /dos

To view partition info:

pdisk -l /dev/hdd

Byteswapping

If you want to work on TiVo Series 1 drive, byte swapping can be turned
on/off only for hdc and hdd drives. So if you want to access root or var
file system, mount your drive on hdc or hdd.

DMA Setting

DMA should be tuned on by default to speed things up.
You can check the DMA setting by doing:

hdparm -d /dev/hdc

where /dev/hdc is secondary master.

If you have trouble setting up your computer, refer to Computer Setup guide.

Next: Guide p1- Single to Single Upgrade

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