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Upgrade from hell
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Posted by: gglockner

With experience in Linux, Unix, and four successful TiVo upgrades, I had a seemingly simple project this weekend to swap a pair of TiVo disks. Last week, we upgraded from an SVR-2000 to a SD-DVR40. The idea was to swap the 120 GB Maxtor drive in the old SVR-2000 with the 40 GB Western Digital drive in the new SD-DVR40. We're keeping the SD-DVR40 and loaning the SVR-2000 to my sister-in-law to use with cable.

The first mistake was that I tried to use dd to copy the contents of the new 40 GB drive to the larger 120 GB Maxtor. After letting it run for six hours, I gave up and did a simple mfsbackup. Eventually, I realized that it was taking so much time because I connected the two TiVo drives to the same IDE channel, which I believe slowed things down. This was no big deal since there was little on the DirecTiVo that I actually cared to save.

So I backed up the DirecTiVo to a regular PC disk and restored the DirecTiVo to the larger 120 GB Maxtor drive. One down, one to go.

The other direction was a bigger problem. First, I found the CD-R where I had saved my old SVR-2000 backup. The problem was that something was corrupted on the CD, so I could not read the backup files for the SVR-2000! I found a second backup image from a friend's SVR-2000, but he had a strange system where Sony was shipping 40 GB drives partitioned as 30 GB drives. When I tried to restore his SVR-2000 image to the Western Digital drive, mfsrestore complained that the target drive was too small. It seems that the 40 GB Western Digital drive is slightly smaller than the Maxtor drive in my friend's SVR-2000.

I then started to worry. After a bit of thought, I realized that I still had my friend's old 40 GB drive -- I had installed it into my PC as a second hard disk. I could swap the 40 GB Maxtor (ex-SVR-2000) drive in my PC with the new Western Digital (ex-SD-DVR40). At first, XP did not want to partition the Western Digital drive, so I booted into Linux and deleted the partitions via fdisk, then rebooted into XP to repartition the Western Digital disk as NTFS. I copied all my PC files to the new Western Digital drive, then restored the SVR-2000 image to the original drive. Success! The only minor problem is that it is still a 30-hour TiVo because of the strange partitioning.

Lessons learned:

1. Connect source and destination drives to different IDE channels when doing backup and restore.

2. Make extra copies of your TiVo images. A 10-cent CD-R is cheaper than the aggravation of not having a valid TiVo backup.

Posted by: joker81

What you should do if you back stuff up to CD. Make about 5%-10% Par2 files.

If you don't know what pars are then read below.
Basically the way par2 files work is by making a RAID like file. If one part of the file is corrupted par2 files as long as you have enough will be able to fix it.

Learn More about it at http://www.quickpar.org.uk/index.htm