Why don't you post the transfer settings you used, and we can see what you did.

Also, you can't generally keep recordings in a two to one drive transfer.

I tried the mfstools (the tiger's as well as the older one that series 1 is supposed to use) from here: http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hins...o/MFSLBA48.zip

My tivo was a philips hdr 312 standalone but was factory upgraded. Now it has 2 30GB quantum drives.

I set up my pc so that cdrom drive is secondary master (hdd) and C: drive is hda. I put the tivo A drive on hdc and B drive on hdb.

MFStools cd boot up reported 30020 MB for both. Although the CHS is different: hdb is 3649/255/63 and hdc (drive A) is 58168/16/63.

Then I do the mkdir and mount and issued:
mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb, and got a message "source drive size is 30 hours, upgraded to 57 hours, backup will be 30 hours, backing up ... 816 megabytes"

Then I shut down, remove drive A and B from PC, and put the new large A drive (WD1600AVJB) on hdb and after mkdir and mount, ran: mfsrestore -r -4 -s 127 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb

This copied 816 megabytes. Then I umount and shutdown, and put this large A drive into tivo jumpered as master. It doesn't boot. I hear very little disk activity unlike booting the original set of A, B drive.

I repeated the above using both set of bootCD but neither one worked. I even mount the large A drive back into the PC and did a mfsbackup on it just to see if it is recognized as a tivo drive and mfsbackup reported it as a 30 hour drive.

I also repeated the whole thing using another WD1600 (but not an AV drive). Still the same result.
The tivo software is version 3.0-01-1-000 with 5: live time service.

The only anomaly I observed is if the large new drive is mounted as hdc (secondary master with CD as slave), then it will fail WD disk diagnostic with error 0134 busy timeout. However, it would still format and fdisk fine under windows. That is why I always mount it as hdb (with proper jumper) when running mfsrestore.

What do you suggest I try next? Would it be easier to do a 2 to 2 drive transfer?

When you booted again to restore onto your 160gb, what capacity did the PC show for your 160gb drive?

both BIOS and mfstools says it's 137G. WD's diagnostic CD says it's 160G
I'm using the latest BIOS for this old PC (dell dimension 4100). Is this a problem?

I ended up using an old 80G drive and avoided the 137G problem. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

OK - that's certainly the best.

In general, the mfs boot floppies have the kernel on them that is made to limit things at 137 GB.