After you restore the image onto the new drive and put it into the other TiVo, you do the C&D in the TiVo...so once the drive is in it's final home, do the C&D in that TiVo. You are going to lose all of the recordings; that is how the process has to work.

Thanks, I'll give this another shot......once my 40hr tivo A drive is restored, can i try to 'expand' it again. The drive i'm using to make a restore image from is an 80hr tivo and has never been expanded

OK - so just to be clear, the 80 GB image will only fit on a drive that size or larger. You can't put the 80 GB image on a 40 GB drive, because the partitions (even unexpanded) are already too large.

No problem. I was planning to rebuild my 40hr tivo with a 160gb drive; the old 40gb drive is a bit noisy now and smaller size EIDE hard drives are hard to find at your local retailer these days. Once this drive (or any drive, really) is restored using a pre-expanded image, can I restore back to this image and try to expand again if my next attempt fails? (or really, if i mess up again!)

thanks.

Yes - any time you make an image file, you shrink back to the original size that came in that unit, and you can re-expand from there.

Well, I retried this all over on my 2nd 80hr tivo with fingers crossed and all went well. I made a backup of the original tivo A drive (which appeared to go ok), added a western digital 500gb for a new tivo B drive, and it now reflects about 650hrs of recording time with all programs and preferences intact. Thanks for all your help!!

How can i verify if the backup image is good or even there? When I tried the backup process, it stated 'successful' with the source and the image being 80hrs. But when i try to restore this image to a new 160gb drive, with the following command:


mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -bzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hda

i get the following error

/mnt/dos/tivo.bak: No such file or directory

here's the drive setup:

primary master - new tivo a
primary slave - windows c: with recovery/backup
secondary master - dvd rom
secondary slave - cdrw


any suggestions?

*i've already lost all the programming on this one & i'm close to sending it in but i'm stubborn; i'm sure i get this one running!!

Had you mounted the C: drive before running that command?

I tried the mount command:

mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/dos

with the following error:

/dev/hdb1/: Invalid argument
mount: mount point /mnt/dos does not exist

was I supposed to enter both lines:

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/dos

Yes, first you have to make the directory /mnt/dos using "mkdir /mnt/dos"

Then you can mount the directory.

When I enter the 2nd line - 'mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/dos' - I get the following error:

/dev/hdb1: Invalid argument
FAT: unable to read boot sector
mount: you must specify the filesystem type


along with way too many lines of the following to retype:

hdbb1: bad access: block =0
end request: I/O error...............

any advice? thanks!!

Just an update:

after a jumper adjustment and several attempts, all was resolved. Much thanks for all your help; my tivos now have a combined recording capacity of over 1400 hours!! Outstanding!!! (no more recording at horrible 'basic' quality!)

thanks again for your help

OK - that's great. It sounded like you had a bad drive in there, but if it's working now, wonderful.