When you see the “boot:” prompt after booting to the CD, press Enter. The Linux kernel will load. When it is finished and you have the “weaknees#” shell prompt, press SHIFT-PAGEUP until you see where Linux detected your hard drives and verify that they are hda and hdb and that they are reporting the correct size. If they’re not, I can’t help you, so let’s assume everything’s fine and keep going.

If you were paying attention at the beginning, your new hard drive is already formatted as FAT32. Mount it by typing:

mount /dev/hdb /mnt

If you get some errors about exec-ing a modprobe, ignore them. Now, to backup your TiVo OS, type:

mfsbackup -f 9999 -1so /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hda

And remember, /dev/hda is your existing TiVo drive. This will show you a progress indicator. When it’s done, shut down your PC, disconnect the existing TiVo drive (but leave your new drive connected) and reconnect your Windows drive. Boot into Windows and move the backup.bak file from your new hard drive over to your main Windows drive for safekeeping. Shut down the computer, disconnect the Windows drive again, and put the existing TiVo drive back in as hda.

Expanding your space

Boot using the MFSTool CD as before. Once at the “weaknees#” prompt, type

mfsadd -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb

Remember, hda is your existing TiVo drive, hdb is your newer, larger drive. This will take only a second, then report your new estimated recording time (Figure 4). That’s it! Power down your computer and remove both drives.

Figure 4: When the space addition is completed, the screen shows the estimated number of recording hours (325 in this case).

 Next: Installing the hard drives in your TiVo