I'm also curious about the technical format of a TIVO hard drive. It sounds like FAT32. Is the TIVO Operating System LINUX based? Or is the method used to backup/restore the only thing that is LINUX based?

It's not FAT32 - it's MFS. It's a Linux format that TiVo chose for these units.

There is no size limitation at this point.

Getting unexpected results when booting Linux CD

I burned the ISO image from Weaknees to a CD. I tried to bring the LINUX OS up booting directly from a CD drive and got unexpected results. More in a moment. So I went to my laptop to see if there would be a difference. The OS came up just fine on the laptop.

What happens on my desktop is that after booting and hitting ENTER to start the load, the screen ultimately goes blank. Touching shift will show the command prompt line. Hitting PgUp repeatedly does move me back to the start of the sequence, but onece I stop touching PgUP, the screen returns to the last prompt and goes blank again.

Have you seen this type of behavior before. Note that I have not attached any TIVO drives or new drives to the system. I simply wanted to see that the LINUX kernel would come up and I could review existing disk sized per the instructions.

For the DSR704, and size drive from 40 GB up will work.

We haven't seen exactly that before, but our guess is that your hardware is just incompatible with something (likely the drivers) on the CD. You've obviously burned the CD correctly if it boots the laptop. You could try removing other parts (USB devices, PCI cards, etc.).

FAT32 questions

WK-Michael,

Thanks. I will start pulling things to see if I can find the incompatability. I am a little concerned because my video is from an AGP card and my keyboard (and mouse) are USB. But I will let you know.

I have a question. If I bring up the kernel with the old TIVO drive as primary master and the new, untouched (I have just removed it from the box - no low level formatting or formatting of any kind) as primary slave, is there any need for a FAT32 partition on either drive to do the copy? (And does the Make File System command effectively format the new drive?).

Wireless Ethernet was not recognized

WK-Michael, the culprit was the wireless ethernet card. All is well.

If you have any guidance relative to the FAT32 question(s) above, I would be most grateful.

Successfully Upgraded to 300GB Hard Drive - Comments

I successfully followed instructions to upgrade from a 40GB hard drive to a 300GB hard drive. However, a few clarifications might help another person:

The documentation states very clearly that a FAT32 partition is needed in order to do the upgrade. A compressed (highly) file BACKUP.BAK is created from the source TIVO drive. I did not have a FAT32 partition available and so ended up using Partition Magic to create one. It turned out to be very important to 1) ensure that the FAT32 partition was a primary partition, not simply one that was extended 2) address that partition correctly during the mount process. In my case the drive to be used for backup was my "C" drive - primary master - hda. The NTFS file system on that drive was for Windows XP and was partition "1" in Linux. The FAT32 file system that I created was "H" in XP, but partition "2" in Linux.

The mount command became: mount /dev/hda2 /mnt : for both backup and restore.

This was not clear to me in the documentation.

One other observation. I didn't know how much to set aside for the FAT32 drive and BACKUP.BAK, so I made 40GB available. My 40GB TiVo was very full and I wanted to keep all of the programs. The actual required space was just 350MB.

Once I am certain that everything has worked for a week or so, I'll claim back the majority of the FAT32.

Hope this helps.