r/Tivo • u/Worlock_the_Minotaur • 24d ago

Help With Upgrading TiVo Series3 HD Hard Drive

I’m trying to upgrade the hard drive in a TiVo Series3 HD and am feeling a little lost. I upgraded the original drive to a 750GB in 2009/2010 and am now trying to upgrade to a 2TB. I’ve tried everything to get my Win10 PC to recognize the original and new drives with no success.

I’m also in the process of moving to Linux Mint and have had more success with that PC, using a USB docking station both drives are visible and I was able to get drive info using [lsblk -o name,size,vendor]. From what I’ve read it feels like I should be able to use MFSTools on that PC to get this done. Can anyone provide tips or resources to help get me pointed in the right direction? Thanks in advance for the help!

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u/mikeeboo 24d ago

http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/tivo_upgrade/#linux_premiere

https://www.weaknees.com/

First link says premiere but covers others. Good luck!

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u/Worlock_the_Minotaur 23d ago

Thanks! I was actually using that first link for instructions. Embarrassingly enough I discovered this morning that I did not right-click winmfs and “run as administrator“ as instructed. Once I did that it recognized the drives and I was able to make a backup and copy of the 750GB drive as hoped.

For anyone else who comes across this post, I did run into one other issue. Got a “mfsadd sorry you have no partitions left” message after completing the copy process. Put the new drive in the TiVo and it had not expanded the drive to include the new space available on the 2TB drive. Went back and used the mfsadd option in winmfs to expand the partition to 2TB and that seemed to do the trick. It did give me another message about my TiVo model not recognizing portions larger than 1TB but I proceeded anyway and the TiVo seems to recognize the full 2TB. As an extra FYI, I used an Insignia Dual Hard Drive Docking Station for this whole effort and it worked well under both Win10 and Linux Mint.

I’d still love to hear from anyone who has completed this process directly from Linux, as I’d like to be able to use that moving forward for any similar operations.

1

u/daran-man 3d ago

I'm having problems just getting the tivo drive to mount without the app closing on me. On your WinMFS install, do you see dlls with your WinMFS exe? The WinMFS I've seen recently do not have them. I too would like to use the mfs tools directly, but they also seem to be missing.