First off, this is not a problem anymore as I found the solution.

Here is what happened.

I upgraded my series2 and transferred all the recordings. This took about 16 hours because I was using 75gb of my 80gb drive. When the process finished, it told me that it was successful and I now had 503 more hours of record time! (I used a 500gb drive)

The excitement wore off quickly though because when I put the tivo back together and fired it up, it made it to the "just a few more minutes" screen and then rebooted to the welcome screen over and over. I tried Cable Select and Master settings but got the same results both ways. When I searched the forum, all I found were posts saying that the drive was most likely bad. I refused to believe this because I was using a brand new Seagate drive.

I decided to try to copy the drive without the recordings and no backup to see what happened. It fired right up and to my amazement, all my recordings were in the now playing list.

here are the commands I used. Old drive was primary master and new drive was primary slave

msfbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb (this transferred all my recordings but, would not boot)

mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb (this copied my system info and made the tivo boot while preserving all the recordings that I had transferred the first time around.)

Hope this helps somebody who runs into this issue.

Thanks to Weaknees for providing this great site and instructions on how to upgrade my tivo. I really appreciate it!