Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

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Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

Postby jpmoriarty » Sat Jul 07, 2012 9:58 am

Good morning, I hope someone is willing and able to assist me!

About a year ago I successfully installed a 2TB drive in my sky HD box, however I discovered shortly after installing it that I'd not quite done the set up correctly (I think I reinitialised the drive using the onscreen menus), and as such my drive was actually only formatted to 1TB. I now have a number of programmes recorded and am at about 20% free, so wanted to see about actions to claim back my unused 1TB of space.

I would be grateful for any instructions (ideally) or pointers (less optimal since I tried to follow those last time, but found that there weren't really instructions, just extremely long discussion topics which I insist is why I must have missed a step somewhere!) on what I should do. I would guess that I need to copy everything off the drive, and then resize the partition so that it's taking up the full drive rather than only half of it, before putting the recordings back onto the newly formatted drive. Of course if it's possible to resize the partition without taking all the recordings off it first, that would be fantastic (and I presume much quicker).

I'd be really grateful for any suggestions. Many thanks to you all in advance,

John
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Re: Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

Postby huddy1000000 » Sun Jul 08, 2012 2:39 pm

Hi John.
The first question which I need an answer to is what make and model of box do you have?
Kind regards.
Mark.
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Re: Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

Postby jpmoriarty » Sun Jul 08, 2012 5:01 pm

Hello Mark

Amstrad Sky HD box. Not the 1TB, was whatever the original one was (got it about 2 years ago). I installed a 2TB drive into it, but set it up incorrectly.

Let me know if you need anything more!

J
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Re: Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

Postby jpmoriarty » Wed Aug 15, 2012 3:13 pm

*bump*
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Re: Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

Postby jpmoriarty » Wed Sep 26, 2012 1:49 pm

Is there really no way to resize a drive which already has recordings on it?!
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Re: Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

Postby pcbbc » Wed Sep 26, 2012 2:17 pm

No.

The way XTVFS has been implemented, the FAT32 partition is effectively sub-partitioned into two "virtual" parts:
* The first part is used for the normal FAT32 files that are common to XTVFS and FAT32.
* The second part is used for video files, which are stored completely outside of the FAT32 standard.

Where the boundary between the two virtual parts is located is determined entirely by the size of the real FAT32 partition and reference to a fixed formula. It is NOT stored and reference via an on disk structure (the way other FAT32 parameters are in the BPB for example).

So, if you change the size of the FAT32 partition (i.e. resize the disk dynamically), it also changes the position of the boundary. This necessitates moving ALL video recordings so that they:
1. Occur within the second part of the drive
2. Are aligned with the start of the boundary
It also involves potentially moving all/some of the FAT32 files as well, to make way for certain on disk structures used by the (now larger) "virtual" video partition.

No tools exist to do this. While it would be feasible to write one, for the number of people who require it it simply isn't viable.
Also in order to make it fault tolerant would be very difficult. If the process "crashed" half way through the drive would be left in a completely incoherent state. Some recordings moved to the new alignment, some left at the old alignment.
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Re: Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

Postby adhawkins » Mon Oct 01, 2012 5:19 pm

Can't you take an image of the drive, then restore this image back, telling it to use the whole disk (the same procedure you'd do to transfer the recordings to a new bigger disk)?

Andy
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Re: Resizing 2TB drive currently formatted to 1TB

Postby pcbbc » Mon Oct 01, 2012 9:10 pm

If you've been upgraded to Darwin, unfortunately not. As Copy+ is not compatible with Darwin.
But if you are still on the non-Darwin EPG then that is how to do it, yes.
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