TiVo Community Forums Archives - Did Knoppix zap my hard drive?

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

Did Knoppix zap my hard drive?
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: juanian

My question is this: Can booting from a Knoppix CD make some change to a hard drive or BIOS that would change how the drive is identified? And, I am curious where the drive identification is kept - in 'ROM' on the hard drive (which can respond whether or not the drive is crashed), or on a platter, and is it a string (like "WDC WD800AW-00DDK1"), or just a code?

Background:
I have been preparing to recover the programs recorded on an 80MB Western Digital drive which started to go bad. I had been using the Mfs Tools Boot CD to see what state the drive was in. The drive was properly recognized as a WDC WD800AW-00DDK1, and the partition map looked OK. I was going to use dd, but on closer examination of other posts, I figured that dd_rescue was exactly what I needed.

So, I made a CD with Knoppix 3.3. Unfortunately, I only had 64 MB in my test machine, and no mouse when I first booted it. (I thought that there was going to be an option to boot without X-windows.) So, after a few messages about memory, the GUI came up, but the system was hung, and the keyboard wasn't working (not even CTL-ALT-DEL). With no keyboard or mouse, I had to power off the PC.

After adding memory and a mouse, I rebooted. This time, I received messages about errors reading the superblock/partition table. After safely shutting down, I noticed that the drive showed up in the BIOS as an 8.4GB drive, not an 80GB drive. Worse, when I booted back with the MFS Tools CD, it also showed the drive as 8 GB, identified as a WDC WD800AB (which is also an 80 GB drive, but not this particular drive).

I've done all I can try in the BIOS to get the drive recognized. (The BIOS does "properly" recognize a Seagate 160 GB drive as 137 GB.)

Here is text from dmesg booting from the Mfs Tools CD when the drive was properly recognized:

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ALI15X3: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 78
ALI15X3: chipset revision 32
ALI15X3: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0x7090-0x7097, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0x7098-0x709f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
hda: 12X8X32, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdb: WDC WD800AW-00DDK1, ATA DISK drive
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
hdc: ST3160023A, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hdb: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=9729/255/63, (U)DMA
hdc: 268435455 sectors (137439 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=266305/16/63, (U)DMA
hda: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 4096kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
Partition check:
hdb:Signature 9214, be16 Signature 1492
Blocks in Map = d
mac st=1 sz=3f name='Apple' t='Apple_partition_map' bim=d
hdb1 mac st=51fbc0a sz=1 name='Bootstrap 1' t='Image' bim=d
. . .

Here is text from dmesg booting from the Mfs Tools CD after having booted from the Knoppix CD:
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ALI15X3: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 78
ALI15X3: chipset revision 32
ALI15X3: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0x7090-0x7097, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0x7098-0x709f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
hda: 12X8X32, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdb: WDC WD800AB, ATA DISK drive
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
hdc: ST3160023A, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hdb: 16514064 sectors (8455 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=1027/255/63, DMA
hdc: 268435455 sectors (137439 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=266305/16/63, (U)DMA
hda: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 4096kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
Partition check:
hdb:hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound }, CHS=0/0/1, sector=0
hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
. . .
hdb: DMA disabled
ide0: reset: success
hdb: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hdb: read_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound }, CHS=0/0/1, sector=0
. . .
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:40 (hdb), sector 0
unable to read partition table

This is being tested on an IBM Aptiva E3N (2153) with a 300MHz AMD-K6-2, 128MB memory. Per drive, the BIOS allows setting of "Hard Disk Block Mode" (Auto/Disabled), "Advanced PIO Mode" (Auto/Mode 0/Mode 1/Mode 2/Mode 3/Mode 4), "Hard Disk Size > 520MB" (Auto/Disabled), "Hard Disk 32 Bit Access" (Enabled/Disabled), "DMA Transfer Mode" (Auto/Multiword Mode0/1/2/Ultra Mode0/1/2). All settings are Auto or Enabled. There is a User drive type available, but it won't go above 16383/16/63 cylinders (and Auto or User shows 16383/16/63/8455MB for the 80 GB drive, and Auto shows -/-/-/137438MB for the 160 GB drive, with User showing 16383/16/63/137438MB). (Oddly, the unused Secondary IDE shows zeros, except 63 for sectors; setting it to None doesn't help.) The failed TiVo is a Series 2 80-hour (with the fan in back) new from TiVo.

Now, I'm "pretty sure" that the drive capacity showed up as 80 GB before in the BIOS, but I am positive that the MFS Tools boot used to see the full 80 GB.

Can someone who may have some insight into this situation please help me? Hopefully, my lengthy post has included answers to some of the initial questions that might be asked.

Thanks
Juan
Bummed (when returning from a three-week trip) to find that the TiVo didn't gleefully record all the desired shows!
(sorry for the re-post)

Posted by: Cletus

Can't give you a definitive answer, but my guess would be that it's because your drive is bad, not Knoppix doing something, and the fact that it happened between booting it twice is a coincidence. But as I'm not a hard drive expert, I can't comment more.

Posted by: juanian

The drive is on its last leg, so that could be a contributing factor, but it is odd that the drive would change its identification from one valid descriptor (WDC WD800AW-00DDK1) to another valid descriptor (WDC WD800AB).

Thanks
Juan

Posted by: gardavis

My 120GB Maxtor has some bad sectors so I am attempting a replacement. I received my warranty replacement and booted Knoppix with the old drive attached (hdd) and after booting Knoppix, it did not recognize the Tivo drive partitions. It saw hdd but not any of the partitions (from fdisk -l).

Plugging the drive back in to the Tivo showed it was still OK (the bad sectors don't seem to affect much - cachecard driver pointed them out).

I think I will try the Kaz cdrom with the dd_rescue program from Knoppix.

Gary

Posted by: juanian

dd_rescue does sound like the perfect program to use to copy off of a flaky drive (when the proper blocksize parameters are used!). Unfortunately, my drive seems to have finally given up just when I had successfully booted the Knoppix CD (sob).

One set of the blocksize parameters I had found in the "dd_rescue copy time - tests results and optimum way to salvage a bad drive" thread is:

-B 1b -b 2M

I think the URL to the post is http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...368#post1598368

Good Luck!
Juan

Posted by: juanian

Gary,
One last thought -- if you boot from the MFS Tools CD, does the partition info show properly?

Juan

Posted by: gardavis

I was able to successfully copy my bad 120GB Maxtor to a replacement (described here using dd_rescue and dd_rhelp.

After I posted my previous msg I realized that I did not need to mount the failing drive's partition(s) since I was going to make a device copy, not a partition copy. I did not need the mfstools boot (which would have seen the partitions due to the byteswap issue).

BTW, Try dd_rhelp - it calls dd_rescue to copy all the good portions of the failing drive first and then it concentrates on the bad areas. When I tried using dd_rescue directly, it got to a bad spot on the drive that required me to power-off to get the drive to stop clunking. dd_rhelp's bouncing around avoided this problem till the end and then all but about 300MB had been copied off - enough for me.

Gary