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"Tivo-format" a new, bare, small A-drive?
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Posted by: mkruse

Quick Question: Is there a way to install the tivo OS on a new, bare, small drive?

Here's the longer explanation why:
I have 2 tivo's. I bought one very early (14-hour, $500) and its modem died less than a year later. So I got a new tivo. I moved my old drive to the new Tivo to double my capacity, since the old unit was useless without a modem.

Now, I want to donate my old tivo to a diving coach to use. He wants to hook up a video camera to the tivo and basically just use its buffer. Show the live video camera picture delayed by 30 seconds so his divers can see their dive right after they get out of the pool. So, I want to put in just an old 1-gig drive if it will work.

But, I need to format the new drive from scratch because my old drive is now a slave drive in my new tivo http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

Does that make any sense? Can anyone help me out? Is there a good way to do this, yet?

Posted by: c3

How about upgrading yours and put one of the 14GB drives back to the one with broken modem?

Posted by: mkruse

Even if I do that, though, I'm still left needing to format the drive with a fresh copy of the tivo OS, which I don't have (since I didn't backup my original drive).

Posted by: ADent

There is no way to umarry the drives.

You can:
- Find a drive backup image from a single drive unit. (Buy one, borrow one, etc)

- Back up both current drives and drop them into the old unit. CompUSA is selling 20GB drives for $50 this week.

Posted by: bobino

quote:
Originally posted by ADent:
There is no way to umarry the drives.

You can:
- Find a drive backup image from a single drive unit. (Buy one, borrow one, etc)

- Back up both current drives and drop them into the old unit. CompUSA is selling 20GB drives for $50 this week.

I have one of the CompUSA drives, but my attempt at copying the image of a virgin 20 hour TiVo drive failed because it didn't fit (just barely - 1 block!).

Anyone know of a way to make it fit?

------------------
-Bob
bobino@sonic.net
www.sonic.net/~bobino

Posted by: mkruse

> - Find a drive backup image from a single drive unit. (Buy one, borrow one, etc)

Does anyone have one I can borrow? Since I own the machine (and paid $500 for it!) I legally own the right to the software. I just don't have it http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/frown.gif

Does anyone know for sure if there's a way to use a smaller drive than the one that the original image was taken from? Or is the minimum drive size in a tivo 14Gig? I have several 1-gig and 2-gig drives that would work beautifully for this. I don't want to have to charge him $50 for a new drive http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/frown.gif

Posted by: GBL

quote:
Originally posted by bobino:
I have one of the CompUSA drives, but my attempt at copying the image of a virgin 20 hour TiVo drive failed because it didn't fit (just barely - 1 block!).

Anyone know of a way to make it fit?

Use a 14-hour image and TivoMad utility to expand http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

------------------
GBL - 1 Sony (75hrs), 2 Philips (60 and 75hrs)
unpaid volunteer, TiVo army

Posted by: DanT

There's no public way to fit the Tivo software onto a 1G or 2G drive. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the MFS hackers had figured out a way to do it, but if so, they haven't said so publicly AFAIK.

Face it, you're gonna have to put a 15G drive in there, and find a copy of a 14hr unit to put on it.

Bobino -

Your copy probably failed by a lot more than 1 block. It's just that as soon as a block fails, dd stops. So it appears that the input was one block longer than the output, but if it had continued, it would have been more. If you look at the boot messages on DBD or one of the other Linux bootdisks, you'll see a description of each drive, along with a total count of the number of sectors. You can use that to see how much smaller your new 20G drive was compared to the Tivo drive.

------------------
Dan T.
RKBA!

Posted by: jeddy

If you are only off by one block in restoring an image, you might be able to "rob Peter to pay Paul".

Basically, you just make one partition smaller by a block or two.

If you are never going to hook this up to a phone line or have it upgraded in any way, you really don't need two copies of the root, kernel, bootstrap partitions, so you can steal a few blocks from one of those partitions (not the one you are booting from though).

Say your boot params are "root=/dev/hda4", then you are using partitions 1,2,3,4,8,9,10,11, but not partitions 5,6,7. You still need them as placeholders in your map, but they don't need to be full size.
If your params are "root=/dev/hda7", then you are using partitions 1,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, but not partitions 2,3,4.

Note: this assumes you are doing this on the tivo from a bash prompt, it can also be done from a DBD but the drive id's will need to be changed accordingly.

Note: do not type comments enclosed in << comment >>

First get a printout of you block layout using pdisk.
pdisk /dev/hda
p << will list the partiton layout>>
q << quit>>

on my single drive 80G this is what that looks like. The first 9 partitions should be the same layout as yours.

bash-2.02# pdisk /dev/hda

stat: mode = 060644, type=Block
size = 0, blocks = 0
HDIO_GETGEO: heads=16, sectors=63, cylinders=16383, start=0, total=16514064
/dev/hda
Command (? for help): p
Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/hda'
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1 ( 31.5K)
2: Image Bootstrap 1 4096 @ 64 ( 2.0M)
3: Image Kernel 1 4096 @ 4160 ( 2.0M)
4: EXT2 Root 1 262144 @ 8256 ( 128.0M)
5: Image Bootstrap 2 4096 @ 270400 ( 2.0M)
6: Image Kernel 2 4096 @ 274496 ( 2.0M)
7: EXT2 Root 2 262144 @ 278592 ( 128.0M)
8: Swap Linux swap 131072 @ 540736 ( 64.0M)
9: EXT2 /var 262144 @ 671808 ( 128.0M)
10: MFS MFS application region 1048576 @ 933952 ( 512.0M)
11: MFS MFS media region 24777856 @ 1982528 ( 11.8G)
12: MFS MFS app region 2 8192 @ 27808960 ( 4.0M)
13: MFS MFS media region 2 132269376 @ 27817152 ( 63.0G)
14: EXT2 Extra space 1048576 @ 26760384 ( 512.0M)
Command (? for help): q

now decide what partition to shrink (I would say either 2 or 5). Let's use 2 as our example:

!!Use a block size of 512 so the block numbers match the map!!

copy the disk up to (and including) that partition:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=4160

Now manually re-partition the drive:

pdisk -d /dev/hdb << -d gets you the extended access>>
i << initialize partition map>>
C 2p 1M "Bootstrap 1" Image <<shrink this to 1M from 2M>>
C 3p 2M "Kernel 1" Image <<leave as is>>
C 4p 128M "Root 1" Ext2 <<leave as is>>
C 5p 2M "Bootstrap 2" Image <<leave as is>>
C 6p 2M "Kernel 2" Image <<leave as is>>
C 7p 128M "Root 2" Ext2 <<leave as is>>
C 8p 64M "Linux swap" Swap <<leave as is>>
C 9p 128M "/var" Ext2 <<leave as is>>
C 10p 512M "MFS application region" MFS <<leave as is, your size may not be the same, but MUST match>>
C 11p 11p "MFS media region" MFS <<this will take the rest of the available drive space>>
x << access xtended features >>
m << set media flag >>
11 << on partition 11, if it says media flag is on, continue, if it says flag is off, give it another "m" and "11">>
x << exit extended features>>
p << this will list your new map. write this down or print it out. It will be needed below >>
w << write partition map >>
y << yes do it >>
q << quit pdisk >>

This will destroy your bootpage, so you need to re-make it.
I don't think you can do this from DBD, you need a bash prompt on the tivo.

bootpage -D /dev/hdb
bootpage -B 6 /dev/hdb << set primary kernel to partition 6>>
bootpage -A 3 /dev/hdb << set alternate kernel to partition 3>>

bootpage -P "root=/dev/hda7 runideturbo=false" /dev/hdb << this is assuming hda7 was your root to begin with>>

Ok, now you need to manually copy each partition (except for 2) over to the new drive. you can do this by using the skip and seek options to dd.

from dd's help:
seek=BLOCKS skip BLOCKS obs-sized blocks at start of output
skip=BLOCKS skip BLOCKS ibs-sized blocks at start of input

dd bs=512 if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb skip=4159 seek=2111

The skip is now going to start one block before the 3rd partition, on the source drive, and write to just one block before the 3rd partition on the destination drive. Note that these two numbers have to be exactly 2048 blocks apart, since we deleted 1M from the 2nd partition, and 2048 * 512 bytes = 1Mb. This offset lets us shift the data down on the destination drive and gain the needed space for the mfs data region.

It is also possible to copy this data by copying each partition seperately ex:
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/hdb2 << just copy them all>>
dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/dev/hdb3 << and let the partition map >>
dd if=/dev/hda4 of=/dev/hdb4 << sort out the offsets and sizes >>
dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/dev/hdb5
dd if=/dev/hda6 of=/dev/hdb6
dd if=/dev/hda7 of=/dev/hdb7
dd if=/dev/hda8 of=/dev/hdb8
dd if=/dev/hda9 of=/dev/hdb9
dd if=/dev/hda10 of=/dev/hdb10
dd if=/dev/hda11 of=/dev/hdb11

doing it this way will avoid the seek and skip calculations, but you have to either write a script, or type in a command, wait for it to complete, type next, etc..
This is not a big problem until you get to 10 and 11, so maybe it is safer.

Anyway, at this point, you should have a functioning tivo assuming you started with a non-married backup. You can not do this from a married drive, and it won't work on the b drive of a married pair, since you MUST have EXACTLY the same size partitions on hda10,hda11,hdb2,hdb3 that you had when you married the drives.

Tiger or another elite member may be able to tell you how to modify partition 10 (and maybe 2) to shrink the second mfs media section by a few blocks, but I haven't gotten to that point yet.

As to using a small (1Gb drive), you can fit the program stuff (partitions 1 to 9), but you must have enough space in the media partitions for at least the live buffer, and the tivo sounds, video shorts, backgrounds, screen templates, etc.. And I don't think all that would fit in 1GB. Not to mention you would need to be able to backup those files from MFS to EXT2 and put them on a freshly "formatted" drive.

If you are still interested in trying that. look for the file newdiskinit.tcl, This is a pretty good guide to building a tivo A drive from scratch.

see also: http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum6/HTML/004993.html
This link

[This message has been edited by jeddy (edited 06-25-2001).]

[This message has been edited by jeddy (edited 06-25-2001).]

[This message has been edited by jeddy (edited 06-25-2001).]

[This message has been edited by jeddy (edited 06-25-2001).]

Posted by: GBL

code:
From       http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/faq.html      
3.4. How much space do different size drives give me?

Here is a handy table that breaks down many popular capacity settings. 

 Quality    Hours/GB   14 Hour    30 Hour    52 Hour    70 Hour    91 Hour      108 Hour
                      (13.6 GB)  (27.8 GB)  (43.6 GB)  (57.2 GB)  (73.6 GB)    (87.2 GB)
 Basic        1.2       16.32      32.64      52.32      68.64      88.32        104.64
 Medium       0.7        9.52      19.04      30.52      40.04      51.52        61.04
 High         0.55       7.48      14.96      23.98      31.46      40.48        47.96
 Best         0.35       4.76       9.52      15.26      20.02      25.76        30.52

So you'll need at least 1.4GB for the live buffer (.5/.35 for 1/2 hour at best); don't think you could fit everything on 2GB drive; plan on at least a 4GB drive.

------------------
GBL - 1 Sony (75hrs), 2 Philips (60 and 75hrs)
unpaid volunteer, TiVo army

[This message has been edited by GBL (edited 06-25-2001).]