Does dd work on large hard drives?

[nsolot]

I'm trying to replace the two drives on my Tivo Series 2 with new drives. The old drives work fine but they're going on 4 years, so I want to swap in new drives, before things go south.

The old drives are WD1600JB (160GB) and WD2500JB (250GB).
The new drives are WD1600AAJB and WD2500JB.

Everything I find on WD website indicate the drive geometry is the same (between drives of same size).

I boot up and the old drive comes up as hdc and new as hdd

I issue these commands:

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc
hdparm -d1 /dev/hdd
dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdd bs=1024k

The HD LED comes on for about 90 mins, then goes out. No report back from dd and no command prompt either.

Am I doing something wrong? Missing a command? Is there a better way to clone from old drive to new?

Thanks!

[WK-Jeff]

DD provides no feedback; when you press ctrl-z in the middle, does it show you that blocks have been copied?

[nsolot]

When it hit ctrl-z, it says:

[1]+ Stopped

and returns to /# prompt

BTW, I'm using PTVupgrade CD and select the lba48 option. That way the OS reports the drives at 160GB. When I try standard boot, or MFS Tools 2.0 CD, the OS only reports 127GB (maybe it's 137), not full size. Same motherboard/CPU I used way back when I installed the 160 & 250GB drives that are working now.

Thanks!

[WK-Jeff]

I have never used that CD, so I can't really help you. We would expect to see some sort of feedback when you stop the process, presuming that it is actually working. The dd command you issued looks right.

[nsolot]

which CD do you recommend? I'm willing to try your stuff. I just bought some stuff from you guys.

[WK-Jeff]

See:

www.upgrade-instructions.com

[nsolot]

OK, download and burned your CD last night.

When I issue the "hdparm" command to enable DMA, it comes back with "Command not found". Is there another way to do this with your CD?

dd has been running all night now.

What I recall, was that enabling DMA with "hdparm" reduced the time it took to do the mfsback/mfsrestore operation from several hours (6-8) to about 45 minutes back when I upgraded drives 4 years ago and wanted to save recordings.

[WK-Michael]

Sounds like hdparm just isn't on the version of the tools that you're running.