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Newbie: Making a backup of a virgin A drive to CDR
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Posted by: tamorgen

In the hacking guide, it seems to indicate that you can make a backup to a CDR, but it doesn't seem to say exactly how. Has anybody done this? If so, how do I start. I'm going to put a Maxtor 80 GB drive in my Sony SVR-2000, but I don't want to screw it up, so I want to back up the drive to CDR first. Thanks.

Posted by: scooterboy

Section 2.18 of the FAQ

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"If you're not passing anyone, get the hell out of the passing lane!"

Posted by: tamorgen

Yeah, I read that, but it doesn't quite indicate how you get the 650 MB files from the HDD that you've back the virgin TIVO to, to the CDRs. Is this done from the Dylan's boot disk, or do you leave the back-up HDD in the slave slot, boot to put your regular OS drive back in, boot to windows, and then back up using Nero or what? So, the question remains: how do you get the virgin HDD to CD?

Posted by: midnightmaraude

DOn't be confused by the faq.. the faq is correct in first backing up the a drive to the hard drive on your computer.. When you do this.. the files will be saved in increments that will fit on a CDR. I ended up with 8 files. Once this is done you can just take the files and burn them onto the CDR's.. just like you would put a music file on a CDR.

Posted by: tamorgen

Thanks, that's pretty much what I'd thought. From what I can tell, the individual files will be on the FAT formatted HDD and I'll just be able to copy those files to CD from Windows, if I understand correctly. Am I right? Also, has anybody had any problems restoring from CDs? I had one person tell me that the CD backup is not the preferred method and to buy yet another hard drive to use as the A drive, and keeping the original A drive on the shelf. I don't know if I like the thought of spending yet more money if I lock the CD's away and don't touch them until I need them, they should work perfectly fine @ $.10 a disc, as opposed to another $100 for a 30 or 40 GB HD, when I just spent $200 to buy a 80GB HD.

Posted by: tortola

OK, let me get a say in this conversation. I followed FAQ 2.18 to the letter. Used a virgin drive from a HDR212. The fat32 files came out zipped to be “681,574,400” (650meg) & “542,565,060” (?). They were named “Tivodisk_aa” & “Tivodisk_ab” by Nero. To double-check the integrity of these files I restored them from cd to a Maxtor 60 g HD. On the HD they were named with the 8.3 filename spec to “Tivodi~1” & “Tivodi~2” I then used the FAQ 2.18 restore procedure

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt
cat /mnt/tivodi* (rather then tivodisk*) | gzip –dc | dd of=/dev/hdc obs=32k

Now the first question I have is what the screen reported to me.
43,999,200+0 in
687,487+1 out
If I divide the out into the in it happens to come out 2048. I happen to remember that this is a significant number. Clusters, Sectors ??? In a nut shell is this OK?

Second question, I could use some help on where to place the “runideturbo=false, because I think the faq has not taken the virgin status of the hard drive in consideration when wrote. A lot of the info on the rc.d file says run once only.

Any help would be appreciated greatly. This is a great forum.

Posted by: scooterboy

quote:
Originally posted by tamorgen:
Yeah, I read that, but it doesn't quite indicate how you get the 650 MB files from the HDD that you've back the virgin TIVO to, to the CDRs

Sorry bout that, misunderstood your question. As MM pointed out, once the 650mb files are on your FAT32 drive, you can then boot into Windows and write them to CDR the same way as you would for any other data CDR (EZCD, Nero, etc.).

Safety Tip #1: For safety's sake, I burned 2 sets of backup CDRs. You never know if an errant scratch will render a CDR useless.

Safety Tip #2: For each file that I burned to CD, I used the DOS File Compare command to verify that the file on the HD was copied exactly to the CDR. Assuming your files are on the C drive root and your CD drive is "D:", here's an example:

C:> fc -b c:\tivodisk_aa d:\tivodisk_aa

"-b" forces a binary compare, and adjust your drive letters and paths as needed.

Some CD burning programs have a "Verify" feature as an option - this would work as well.

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"If you're not passing anyone, get the hell out of the passing lane!"

Posted by: scooterboy

quote:
Originally posted by tortola:
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt
cat /mnt/tivodi* (rather then tivodisk*) | gzip –dc | dd of=/dev/hdc obs=32k

Now the first question I have is what the screen reported to me.
43,999,200+0 in
687,487+1 out
If I divide the out into the in it happens to come out 2048.

This is normal. It's reading from the FAT32 disk in blocks of 2048k, but writing to the target drive in blocks of 32k. Should work fine.

quote:
Second question, I could use some help on where to place the “runideturbo=false, because I think the faq has not taken the virgin status of the hard drive in consideration when wrote. A lot of the info on the rc.d file says run once only.

I can't help you with that one. I let my virgin drive upgrade to 2.0 before backing it up and upgrading, so the runideturbo setting wasn't needed. Perhaps a more informed member can jump in here...

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"If you're not passing anyone, get the hell out of the passing lane!"

Posted by: Worf

My tip: I also kept a copy of the backup on my hard drive (I mean, the backup was only 1.2 GB in size, so it does no harm to keep it on the hard drive).

Plus, I used the program called "CDCheck" (search the web for it, it's common - one link is here ), which not only reads through every file on a CD to ensure no errors, but can also do comparisons with files on the hard disk.

Posted by: zam1el

so, what you are all trying to say, is that since I have a 7.5 GB drive not in use, and a virgin TiVo, I can backup the A Drive onto CD's first, and do another bacup onto the 7.5 drive and leave both the drives and the CD-R backups on the shelf?

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Mark

Posted by: scooterboy

quote:
Originally posted by zam1el:
so, what you are all trying to say, is that since I have a 7.5 GB drive not in use, and a virgin TiVo, I can backup the A Drive onto CD's first, and do another bacup onto the 7.5 drive and leave both the drives and the CD-R backups on the shelf?

Assuming the virgin backup's total size is less than 7.5 gig (this can vary greatly), that would be a very safe plan.

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"If you're not passing anyone, get the hell out of the passing lane!"

Posted by: tamorgen

Okay, I've gotten my Tivo unit back from Sony. I put Dylan's boot disk in my floppy drive, left my windows disk in as primary master, and put the quantum a drive in as secondary master, just like 2.18 said. I entered this:

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt
dd if=/dev/hdc bs=32k | gzip -9c | split -b 650m -/mnt/tivodisk_

It returned
312 in
312 out

What the hell does this mean? It was over it about 10 seconds. I was expecting a lot more data and a lot longer time frame. Am I doing something wrong here? Do I need to unlock this drive? What's the story?

Posted by: hinsdale

quote:
Originally posted by tamorgen:

It returned
312 in
312 out

I believe you have a locked drive (im foggy today.. think its the heat so i may have misunderstood your problem).. check the FAQ and search this forum for the programs to unlock it.. one is a temporary unlock (DGLCHK) and one is permanant. Either one will work for your purposes.

[This message has been edited by hinsdale (edited 07-18-2001).]

Posted by: tamorgen

Thanks. That's what I thought, but I wasn't possitive. The annoying thing is, I had to really search for a dos boot disk. You can't make one from Win2k or WinME, so I didn't know if I could run the program to unlock the drive. Anyway, it's humming away, and I'm hoping it will be done by the time I come back from dinner!

Posted by: drewpt

You'll be glad (?) to know that WinXP supports creating DOS system disks again...

Posted by: deeremj

>>You can't make one from Win2k or WinME, <<

Actually, I recently did just that, I created a startup floppy boot disk on WinME via control panel add/remove programs, downloaded dglchk and unzipped it to the boot floppy, and was able to boot off it in ms-dos mode and unlock my drive.

Posted by: Worf

There's always bootdisks.com or whatever that site is...