Reuse B drive from another upgraded SVR-2000

[Banzai]

My friend had purchased an expansion drive from Weaknees. He no longer uses that unit but it didn't have a lifetime membership (mine does), so I just want to take the B drive out of his and put it into mine.

Just swapping it out, doesn't work. My TiVo doesn't see the additional storage space.

I'm assuming it has something to do with reimaging/reformatting the B drive.

However, everything I see posted has instructions for putting my existing A drive into my PC and telling it to accept the second drive.

But my friend did not have to do anything to his A drive at all when he received the Weaknees expansion drive. And even the downloadable instructions have you just putting the drive in.

So how do I make this drive usable again so I can just add it to my TiVo? Is there a command in MFSTOOLS that "refreshes" the drive?

[WK-Jason]

Here's a link for instructions on drive for TiVos:

www.upgrade-instructions.com

This site can walk you through the steps you'll need to take to use that drive.

[Banzai]

Yeah, I'd already found that site but every time I try to download the iso file (from the hellcat.tyger.org site) it errors; "connection with the server could not be established." I'd just figured it was a dead site.

[WK-Michael]

We don't know what the latest status is with that site. Sorry. But if you go to our site you should see the "files" link:

http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com

[WK-Jason]

more specifically:

http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/files.html

[Banzai]

Still seem to be missing something.

I'll try and make this concise.

When you order a drive from Weaknees, they send a drive. You open your TiVo, mount the drive, plug in power and data cables and, whammo! You're up and running.

Any instructions I find for MFSTools says that I must put both the A drive and the new B drive in your PC, boot up, run a command and, Whammo! You're done.

What I'm not understanding is how does Weaknees configure a drive without having to have my original drive? And why can't I do that.

I'm really paranoid of popping my A drive into my computer for fear I'm going to jack it up.

That said, here's a bit more details. The B drive I have originally came from Weaknees. A friend bought it but has since moved onto Dish Network. He gave me his old SVR-2000. His was a month-to-month service and mine is a lifetime. However, simply pulling the drive and putting it in mine didn't work.

I have placed the B drive in my PC and booted MFSTools. It clearly recognized the drive as HDB. Given I don't have the A drive in the PC, I tried running the mfsadd command as:

mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hdb

I got a success message but then something about
Input/output error
Unable to open MFS drives

(Should have written that down.)

So is there an equivalent command (or set of commands) that just prepares the drive, assuming that the error with mfsadd is just because I'm not adding?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[WK-Michael]

There's other software out there that allows for drop-in of B drives if the A drive is the factory drive. It's called "blessing" but our instructions don't deal with it. If you want to try that, you can google around for it.

Otherwise, that command you put down won't work with just one drive.