TiVo Community Forums Archives - Swapfile assistance please?

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Swapfile assistance please?
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Posted by: smokie

I have bought a 2nd 120Gb drive to go into my TiVo.

This time around, I couldn't get the backup to complete but was fairly sure I had used the command to increase swapfile size when previously upgrading. So I went ahead and added the second disk. (The backup just seemed to stop once it had reported it had done 53 of 1586 mb).

However, I am now getting the GSOD after the Just a little longer screen. I'm guessing my swapfile is not large enough.

Is there a command I can use to increase it, or a way to use mfsrestore without actually restoring (as I understand that if I restore an old backup I will lose all my recordings...?)

And a supplementary question - given that I have not successfully used the second drive, what's the command to reverse an mfsadd command? Or isn't there one??

I know the answer must be here someplace, but I am asking this while searching, as I really could do with TiVo back for tonight!!!

Thanks in advance

Edit@15:35 - I am going to search for how to divorce drives and slowly roll everything back. I have recordings I'd sooner not lose! If I manage to divorce it then I will not proceed without a backup!

Edit@16:05 Looks like to divorce them requires 240gb disk which I don't have! I'm wondering if I've already lost all recordings... taking drives back to TiVo to try again...making sure cables properly seated etc.

Posted by: sanderton

Sounds more like your original disk has a problem - the backup stopping part way through is NOT normal!

Expanded swap allows you to recover from a GSOD, but lack of it doesn't cause one.

You could try the procedures for recoverinmg from a GSOD with too little swap, they are in the Undergound I think.

Posted by: smokie

Thanks Stuart, just found that thread.

The old disk was working fine. I'm wodering if the destination PC disk is the problem with the backup - but there is no informaiton to tell me that.

I wonder if/when I will have to own up to the Mrs that I might have lost all her proggies... :-(

Posted by: Robert S

You can check the amount of swap by booting a byteswapping boot disk and doing

pdisk -l /dev/hdc

The 'fix' for a stuck GSOD is in the Fixes thread at the top of the Upgrade Centre (post #3).

The backup won't complete if you mount the wrong partition. After doing

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos

do

ls /mnt/dos

(that's LS) and check that you see the files and directories from your C: drive listed. If you don't, hda1 is a hidden maintenance partition and C: is actually hda2 or hda5.

Posted by: smokie

Thanks Robert

I *think* I'd already checked that the dos partition showed me the right files (windows stuff) so I'm not sure that's the problem. Will check again, however
I'm currently initialising a spare 120gb drive to try the backup again. (The original windows drive had some DMA errors during Linux boot which I wasn't keen on!)

I've already read a few pages of the Fixes thread and next step is to try to manually create a swapfile with a byteswapping disk (I'm not sure how to find whether the swapfile size is already 127).

I've given up on the divorce idea as it apparently needs 240gb of disk space which I don't have. It's annoying that all I need to do (I guess) is take the new disk out of some "header" and maybe partition table and I will be back to square one, and I don't seem able to do that (I haven't written anything to the new disk yet except whatever the mfsadd does).

I'm still trying to retain recordings. If eventually I go back to an OLD backup, will I lost them?

Edit: My God, DOS format IS slow...over 40 mins so far - now at 90%

Posted by: Robert S

Well, you only need a gig or so for the backup. No need to format the whole 120Gb.

If you can make a fresh backup and restore it with /exactly/ the same options as when you created the drive, your recordings /might/ survive. But then, UK backups don't always divorce, so you might have to restore the backup to two drives, which might not change anything at all.

Posted by: smokie

Thanks Robert. Before I read your post, I had completed an mfsbackup successfully to the new drive and started a restore, using the command from Hinsdale. So I'm guessing I now have 127mb swap and it's no different, I still have the GSOD.

I now have a tivo.bak file which DOS reports as 888,000,000 bytes. Seems that might be everything, incl recordings? Just need to work out how to zap the disks (or just one of them) and get it on there... (NB backup was done using mfsbackup -l 32 6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

mfsinfo confirms it's a two drive TiVo now, and I can see the partitions appear to be correct. I guess it's the database which is knackered.

I really don't see what's gone wrong in this whole process. OK, i should have done a backup before I started, but that's just a safety thing, right? Effectively all I did was the mfsadd command from Hinsdale. Maybe the original disk was knackered...but it's a 9 month old Samsung and was working fine.

Posted by: smokie

Just tried mfstool mls /dev/hdc /dev/hdd and I get:

/dev/hda10: Success
mfs_load_volume_header: mfsvol_read_data: Input/output error
mfs_init: failed, bailing

Posted by: smokie

Errrrm....

Now I've actually *read* the GSOD, I notice that if I leave it running it might fix itself. What's the likliehood? It seems to want a connection too, but I usually use the network, not dial up, so it isn't configured for dial up.

Posted by: Robert S

900Mb seems a bit big (mine come in at about 370Mb!), but that doesn't include the recordings. You might have some very short recordings that got swept up by the -l 32 option, but if you had all the recordings, you'd have a backup that was at least 120Gb.

mfsadd seems very reliable. Many people post here to report problems with upgrades, but its very rarely the mfsadd step that's going wrong (sometimes mfsadd erroneously reports 'nothing to add', but that's benign). Even so, I guess things can occasionally go wrong (one could imagine that a marginally faulty IDE cable might cause problems, for example).

So it's a good idea to make a fresh compressed backup whenever you work on your TiVo drives. If you restore that backup back over your original drive(s), the recordings may survive (I hesitate to say 'will' as there's plenty that can go wrong!) and thus reverse the upgrade. You have to get the partitions exactly the same as before, though, which can be tricky. The main problem is the -p option, which reorders the partitions to put the system and MFS App partitions in the middle of the disk.

Posted by: sanderton

I've had a couple of GSODs fix themselves - that's what they're for. :)

Posted by: smokie

I'll leave it overnight and see what happens...

Robert and Stuart - thanks for responding quickly, you can take the evening off (as far as I'm concerned at least!) :-)

Bear in miond Robert that I hadn't even used the new drive config in the TiVo, that's probably why it's just a little under 120gb...

Posted by: smokie

Well, that's that.

The GSOD DID finally go away and lo and behold, there was my Now Showing in all it's glory. However, the pointers to the location on disk were obviously shot through as some shows pointed to blank bits of disk, and some pointed to random bits of other programmes.

That'll teach me to risk doing things without having a proper backup. (How many times have I said that?)

I think if I'd not panicked when I saw the GSOD I might have been OK. I should have left it at that time to rebuild (and read the screen!!) It's the messing around I've done since which probably spoilt it.

Ah well, Mrs S doesn't seem TOO angry, and I definitely have an increased capacity TiVo. I'll leave it alone for a bit now...

Once again, thanks for your help and responsiveness guys.