Upgrade the Hard Drive in your 921?

[Scott Greczkowski]

Here is what I feel is a hot topic, this topic was recently censored at another site but I feel it is important enough to talk about.

Upgrading your Hard Drive in your 921.

Folks it looks like it can be done as someone has done it. they have updated their hard drive in this 921 to a 400 GB hard drive.

The link to this info is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishmod/message/5129 you must be a member of this Yahoogroup to see it.

Unlike other sites we WILL permit the discussion of upgrading of equipment you OWN as long as these upgrades do not talk about getting free service (ala hacking) or on how to pull video off the hard drives in its raw form.

I must warn everyone though that doing modifications such as upgrading you hard drive is a risky thing, if you decide you are technical enough and want to give it a shot, you do so at your own risk. SatelliteGuys.US assumes no responsibility if you destroy your equipment. SatelliteGuys would also like to state that you should only do these modification if you own your equipment, if your leasing it, its not yours to tinker with.

 

[David_Levin]

Thanks Scott, for allowing this thread.

He's got the drive in the box. It's working, and the main storage partition is correctly formatted to 388 gig.

But, his 921 is still showing 22 hours of record time. He'll have to fill up the drive before we know for sure that it is working.

 

[TuxCoder]

He's got the drive in the box. It's working, and the main storage partition is correctly formatted to 388 meg.

s/meg/gig/

 

[John Kotches]

Depending on the functionality of the tools used, it is possible that the partition is still formatted as if it is on the 250 Gig drive, which would mean no usable additional space.

I'm not as familiar with Linux as I am with Solaris, and doing this on Solaris is workable, I've done things similar to this in the past.

Cheers,

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Well so far it appears to be working. Is it using the entire 400 gig drive? Thats unknown. But this proves one important thing, it IS possible for customer to replace a failed hard drive on a 921.

Thats a great first step.

 

[TheForce]

I would be happy to just have the capability to swap 250G drives. They're cheap and I wonder if putting in a blank Maxtor drive will just work. Wish I had some free time this week, I'd give that a try. Sounds like this may be easier than doing a TIVO if the 921 formats a blank drive ready to go.

I wish them much success in doing the larger drives but from what I read it was a bit of a hassle to get the larger ones working.

 

[David_Levin]

Don,

Here's my understanding. You put in the blank hard drive and the 921 will automatically create the needed partitions.

After that it's stuck in a reboot loop because the Linux partition isn't there. You can use ghost to bring the partiton over from the original hard drive.

At this point you should be ok swapping between the drives.

 

[TheForce]

So as I understand you, David.

Step 1 is to remove the 921 original drive and put it into your computer as you would a Ghost source drive. Then image the Linux partition as an image file. Then record that image to the new drive with Ghost.
Now take the new drive with the Linux image and put it into the 921 and it will boot the new drive up to 921 use.

I deduced what you said to a step procedure that would allow the linux image to be stored on the computer drive for easy modification of future drives. Or, is the first step of letting the drive go into boot loop required to be before the Ghost process? It would save some work if we didn't have to go through that step.

edit- I just checked and I have Ghost 2003 so that may not be the correct version.

 

[David_Levin]

Haven't tried it myself. Just going by what the first person posted.

You need to get the partitions created on the new drive. You might be able to do it with ghost, or the 921 will create the partitions automatically.

The you need ghost to copy the partition containing the operating system. I don't think you need to copy the rest of the drive.

Not sure of the linux numbering (start from 0?), but this is from the original post:

hda5 - linux OS - I think - not explicitly stated
hda7 - swap (don't copy)
hda8 - pvr/video storage

 

[TheForce]

Thanks, David.

For clarification, I discovered that Ghost 2003 will not do Linux. You have to get the Boxed version of Ghost 9. There is a download version but there is a warning that that version doesn't include Linux capability.

 

[David_Levin]

If you're a Linux user aren't there os commands that can copy a drive?

 

[John Kotches]

David,

Assuming you can login to the box, or you have a machine around to do the dirty work, sure.

Cheers,

 

[David_Levin]

That's what I ment - if your PC is set up for Linux. You install the old a new drives and copy there. No need for Ghost.

pvrdse has posted an update:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishmod/message/5146

If I'm reading this right, he's not getting any extra space. Still a few more experiments to do.

 

[dfergie]

Thanks, David.

For clarification, I discovered that Ghost 2003 will not do Linux. You have to get the Boxed version of Ghost 9. There is a download version but there is a warning that that version doesn't include Linux capability.

What about Max blast the maxtor copy utility or the Seagate version?

 

[TheForce]

Max Blast? Hmmm... Hadn't thought of that but it may be worth looking into as well. I went ahead and ordered the Ghost 9 upgrade and I definitly plan to try the second 250G drive swap concept.

Philosophically speaking, the "experiment" was a partial success! Often, in science, our goals are not met, vis a vis upgrading to a larger hard drive, but we discover important benefits along the way. In this case, I see several tremendous benefits to the work that was done. Before, we believed that the 921, 1. had to be returned to E* for repair if the hard drive crashed. Now, for those with foresight, those who make the effort to do at least one hard drive spare, the software will be reserved to do the repair in the home with a quick hard drive swap Still, if you wait until the drive fails, you will not have the original drive's files to transfer so a lesson from the experiment is that now, even if you don't want a second drive to swap out, do it to be sure your 921's OS is backed up. #2, a second benefit is that we can have infinite storage and archive capability with the 921, once thought not possible. I know the advantages of doing this procedure with the HDTIVO and with 5 TIVO drives on the shelf holding archived content, I have a system of archived programs ready to play after a simple hard drive swap. With the HDTIVO the swap process takes a 4 minute reboot. I think the 921 will be about the same difficulty.
I plan to have at least 2 drives for the 921 as a result of the efforts made here.

Reviewing the history of the 921, we recall that they went from a 160 to a 200 to a 250 G drive during the development. It is not out of the question to think that a simple change of the software could allow the 921 to have the 400 G drive capability at some point in the future. But, I really believe the 921 will become obsolete much sooner with the MPEG4 move so, what's the point? The point being that the 3rd benefit to the work done here is this actually makes the 921 have a life after mpeg4 death blow by allowing it to finction as a basic playback unit for those who start now and archive hard drive programming. Even it it becomes useless as a DBS tuner for future recordings, it will still play those stored recordings you have archived.

So with 3 benefits, the work done is, IMO, a great accomplishment. I'm excited and thank those pioneers who have ventured into the unknown and discovered this process. 3 out of 4 benefits, ain't bad!

 

[dfergie]

I keep Drive image's of my Replay's on hand so I have all the partition info etc... and there is a utility that lets you use a second drive, perhaps someone will figure out how to do this with the 921...

 

[Faw]

... In this case, I see several tremendous benefits to the work that was done. Before, we believed that the 921, 1. had to be returned to E* for repair if the hard drive crashed. Now, for those with foresight, those who make the effort to do at least one hard drive spare, the software will be reserved to do the repair in the home with a quick hard drive swap Still, if you wait until the drive fails, you will not have the original drive's files to transfer so a lesson from the experiment is that now, even if you don't want a second drive to swap out, do it to be sure your 921's OS is backed up. #2, a second benefit is that we can have infinite storage and archive capability with the 921, once thought not possible. I know the advantages of doing this procedure with the HDTIVO and with 5 TIVO drives on the shelf holding archived content, I have a system of archived programs ready to play after a simple hard drive swap. With the HDTIVO the swap process takes a 4 minute reboot. I think the 921 will be about the same difficulty.
I plan to have at least 2 drives for the 921 as a result of the efforts made here.

Something that I thought would be interesting was to see if you could add a second drive to the 921 and extend the recordings partition to include the other disk (the XFS filesystem can do that, XFS rocks!). In theory, all you would need was a power connector splitter, a new IDE cable and a Linux computer (or a Linux Live CD) to do the process. The only problem would be if the 2 disks draw too much power I don't know what would happen. Anyway it could be an interesting experiment. Unfortunately I can't do those experiments with my 721. Hehe, while writing this message I realized something, the 721 can't deal with partitions larger than 124GB, but what if I created an extra partition and grew the filesystem to use it? I guess I have work to do.

 

[David_Levin]

The 400 Gig Result: No Extra Space

How Disappointing.....

The space is there. Linux know it's there. The 921 just will not let you use it. Seems the auto-delete (and space available) calculations assume a 250 gig drive without bothering to check what is really there.

This is what pvrdse ended up with when the 921 decided it was out of space http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishmod/message/5150

[in 1 Kb blocks]
size - 388,163,304
used - 166,558,300
free - 221,605,004

(LOOKS LIKE THERE'S ROOM FOR ANOTHER 30 HOURS OF RECORD TIME)

Don't know if this is a conscious effort on the part of Dish and Eldon, but it sure seems like something that would be easy to change.

Well, I appreciate the efforts of pvrdse, and at least we can swap a hard drive if one goes bad (assuming we have an image of the os partition).


Faw: I like your idea, but if the preceived size of the recording partition is in the software we're probably stuck.

 

[Faw]

Faw: I like your idea, but if the preceived size of the recording partition is in the software we're probably stuck.

Probably we are. Anyway for extending XFS there must be LVM (logical volume manager) support in the kernel, and some software has to be installed. DishLinux checks the disk for new programs (or scripts) and wont boot if there is something added or modified. I added a script to start the network driver, and it started a rebooting loop. Of course, I have another theory that I want to try. Dish adds software to the receivers and I don't think they have a list of valid files on flash memory. I think that what they do is compare the contents of Download.tar (latest software upgrade, found on /mnt/downloads partition) with the contents of the boot partition. I'm going to add a script to Downloads.tar to see if that it what it does. If it works good, if it doesn't I guess my experiments are over.

 

[Smith P.]

I recall kyo's experiments with PVR721 ( at DBSTalk.com ) - as he discovered there is no way to change binary componenets - DishLinux doing sanity checks based on MH5 signatures or so.