My problems upgrading my DSR7000 TiVo
Iwas having problems with my DSR7000 TiVo intermittingly rebooting, I read on theTiVocommunity forums that sometimesthe intermittent rebooting can be a sign of a failing hard drive so I took theopportunity to not only replace it but also upgrade the size. I ordered a 160 GBMaxtor from outpostfor a very good price and quickly received it. My next step was to download the mfstoolsfrom the web and study the documentation,I found out that the most my TiVo would recognize was 137GB due to the Linuxkernel TiVo runs. This limitation was fine with me since 137GB is still a bigjump from the 40GB I was upgrading from. When I installed the new drive into thePC I was using to do the upgrade I noticed that the new drive was alsorecognized as a 137GB by this PC. I performed the test mfsbackup and mfsrestorewith no problem, but when I restored my test backup to my new drive andinstalled it into my TiVo my animated backgrounds were missing. Everything elseseemed to work ok, but the "now playing list" was on a clearbackground over live television. This is pretty cool but very hard to see. Itook the new drive out and tried again this time I used the dd method outlinedin the mfstools docs I know that dd copies everything so I figured it would haveto get the backgrounds also. The dd took a couple of hours and finished with noerrors. I put the new drive back into the TiVo and to my amazement still noanimated backgrounds. I removed the new drive and put the original drive back inand was back where I started. This made no since to me, at one point I though tomyself that indeed my hard drive must be messed up and the bad area is probablythe animated backgrounds but that theory didn’t really make sense because:
1. When using my TiVo I never had any type of problem when the animatedbackgrounds were in use.
2. I received no hardware error during the dd process, which would tell methat there is a physical problem with the disk at that location on the disk.
Ibegan to think about the 137GB issue, and wondered if the PC I was using wasscrewing up the drive because it was using some wacked out geometry? The onlyway to test was to try a smaller drive below the 137GB limit. I ordered a 80GBdrive, this time from zipzoomflyand received it quickly. I took my original TiVo drive back out and carefullydid the dd process from it to my new 80GB. I then did the mfsadd routine to makesure TiVo would use the extra space. I installed the new drive into my TiVo andperformed the tests the animated backgrounds were there and all functions seemedto work great. This confirmed my theory about the 137GB limit being the key tomy problem. I could have just left the 80GB drive in the TiVo and been happywith the doubling of my recording space, but now I had a 160GB drive lyingaround. I knew there was a utility available from Western Digital that isexecuted on a PC and specifies to the drive what size it is to appear as to thePC it is installed in, I figured if I could run this tool and tell the drive toshow as slightly below the 137gb limit I would increase my storage even more andutilize my big drive. This utility is on the “Data Lifeguard Tools 11 forDOS” floppy available on the Western DigitalWebsite. One trick to using this utility is you must tell the PC that thereis no hard drive connected to the IDE port via the setup routine, I guess thisallows the tool to talk directly to the drive without any type of translationbeing done by the BIOS. Once I had hooked up my new drive to my PC, told thesetup program there was no hard drive connected to the slave port and booted to“the Data Lifeguard Tools 11 for DOS” floppy I went to the utility menu andselected the “Set Hard Drive Size” option I was then presented a screen thatshowed Native Maximum LBA number, the Current Maximum LBA and a field to enter anumber for the LBA that I wanted to use. I entered 250,000,000 into this field,because 250,000,000 x 512 (bytes per sector) would give me 128,000,000,000 or128GB. I got a message from the Western Digital tool that the option completedsuccessfully, I then rebooted the machine went into setup and set the hard drivesetting to auto , rebooted again and when back into setup and indeed the systemdid see the drive as 128GB. I hooked up my original TiVo drive to my PC, did thedd process to copy the original drive to the new drive. It took a couple ofhours to finish with no errors. I put the new apparent 128GB drive into my TiVOfor the ultimate test, I powered up, saw the animated backgrounds, went tosetup/system information and I now had 127 hours of recording time. HOORAY!
Goodexplanation of the 137GB limit