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Restore Giving me "Unknown Partition Table"
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Posted by: Another1

I have spent many hours, over a dozen attempts, and quite a few reads of Hinsdale, so I am hoping that one of the experts here can help me figure out what is going on. As far as I can tell, I'm following all the steps properly and my hard drive is fine, but I can't seem to do a mfsrestore without corrupting a partition...here is the story

I have a SAT T-60 and was going to upgrade from the single 40 gig drive to two WD 120Gig (SE) drives. I botched the backup of my Maxtor drive and was forced to do my upgrade from a general image backup.

Now I can’t even restore a single 120gig volume to use in the T-60. Here is what I have done. I keep getting unknown partition table errors and these are images that have been used quite a bit so I must be doing something wrong. Please have a look at this….

OK here is what I'm doing...
1. Use Western Digital HD toolkit to format 1 partition on drive
2. Put drive in as PRIMARY SLAVE (hdb) with appropriate slave jumpers
1. boot to floppy Western Digital data lifeguard tools HD install and prep.
2. “Unformatted Drive Found: WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1 would you like to format it now?”
3. Select the drive and format as standard NTFS volume size 114470MB
4. Boot to MFSTools 2 CD
5. accept default boot
6. Boot log reports:
(in partition reports)
hda: hda1
hdb: hdb1
7. mkdir /mnt/dos
8. mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
9. mfsrestore -s 127 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb
Process restores 1364 megabytes in a couple of minutes. Restore done! No errors reported
10. umount -f -a -r
11. ctrl alt del
12. when I reboot into UNIX, the partition check reports:
“hdb: Signature 1492, be16 Signature 9214
03:40: block 0 has signature 9214 rather than 1492
unknown partition table
13. So I repeat all 12 steps with 2 other images (first was 2.5, then 2.0.1, then 2.0) – same result

now I’m testing the hard drive more extensively but I don’t see a problem with it thus far.

Oh, in case your wondering what happens if i put the HD in the Tivo, it says "Starting Up..." and then reboots in a loop approx 15-20 seconds later. Never gets to "Almost there" or tivo guy.

Posted by: Robert S

Your partition error is simply due to byteswapping (you'll notice 9214 is a transposition of 1492). Byteswapping is broken on the MFS Tools 2.0 disks, see the first post in the Fixes thread.

Some people have reported that they need to do the procedure to set runideturbo=false with TiVoMad's disk (I think this is in Old Hinsdale) to get their T60's to work.

Posted by: Another1

OK so there is the Original Hinsdale that uses TiVoBless, etc. Hinsdale 2.0 that uses MFSTools and then whatever is indicated by the thread you mentioned. Do I have that correctly? It is just very confusing to know which instructions to follow...

I will read up on byteswap. I thought that was the thread on the -s 127 but I guess not :)

Posted by: Another1

Robert, if I'm doing an MFSRESTORE from a standard image shouldn't that fix the swap issue - I'm using the -s 127. So why would i need to go through all this? I gave up on restoring my data since I formatted it in NTFS like a fool.

Posted by: Robert S

Whilst it's true that swap issues do play a significant part in the thread title 'Fixes for MFS Tools 2.0 swap problems', the first few posts attempt to cover all the problems with MFS Tools and to explain how to deal with problems arising from having insufficient swap in your TiVo.

If you're just upgrading your TiVo then you should find Hinsdale's instructions enable you to avoid problems with swap.

Don't confuse swap with byteswapping. The term 'swap' refers to the paging file for the virtual memory system.

'Byteswapping' refers to the transposition of each pair of bytes written by the TiVo. This results from an obscure design choice in the CPU's used by the TiVo and PC. It has nothing to do with -s 127.

I recall someone saying that they couldn't get their DTiVo to boot until they used TiVoMad's disk to follow Hinsdale's procedure for installing pre-2.0.1 software, even though they were actually installing a later version. Worth looking into - there's no other obvious reason why your TiVo won't boot.

Posted by: Another1

so do I need to do the NOSWAP option at boot on the pre-2.0. I'm trying to work through it right now.

Posted by: Another1

Update: I did NOSWAP and madtivo for the restore of identical image I've been working with and it worked like a charm. For me, MFSTools 2.0 is a curse... but now I need to add the second drive! :)

Posted by: Robert S

What is the 'madtivo' of which you speak? (Seriously, what did you do differently?)

I would think mfsadd would be able to expand your TiVo now it's working properly, although you might want to let it upgrade to 3.1 and take a new backup file before you fiddle with it further.

Posted by: Another1

Lets see if I can recount what I did....

I have worked perhaps 8-10 hours on this over the past two days.

I used the OLDER Hinsdale instructions here

http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hin...-to/index2.html

See section 4

"For most all common upgrades you should download Kazymyr's Boot Cd v2.6i (8.7MB) containing all necessary utilities. Or, if you are planning on using a new larger A drive in a DirecTiVo unit, you will need to download the DTiVoMad Boot Cd nuboot6.iso (24.2MB - use Microsoft IE Browser to download properly) which is an altered larger version of Kazymyr's Boot Cd v2.6g containing DTiVoMad 4.0 and all necessary utilities."

http://www.trevor.heartfield.zen.co.uk/nuboot6.iso

I burned a CD from that image

I booted the CD
Typed "NOSWAP" (not sure if it would have worked if I didn't do this)
mfstool restore -zi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb
umount -f -a -r

rebooted
typed enter
root
maddtb4/setupcd.sh (special for DirecTivo)
answered questions
boom it was done and it worked great

So this is what I want to know... surely others have used a T-60 and MFSTools 2.0 - why couldn't I get it to work? Perhaps I needed ot type that cryptic phrase on bootup that i read about in the swap thread.

In any case, Hinsdale 1.0 or 1.1 or whatever it is worked fine the first time.

Very very very frustrating - and I'm not such a techie either. But I got it to work, thanks for the tip. Let me know if you have other questions or thoughts on this.

Posted by: Robert S

I have no idea why MFS Tools 2.0 wouldn't work - it's generally extremely reliable. However, I will pass your experience on to anyone else having problems getting their T60 to boot.