TiVo Community Forums Archives - B drives after marriage

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B drives after marriage
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Posted by: entropy

Add my name to the list of successful upgraders. Thanks to the people who figured this out.

Having just installed an 80G Maxtor, I am curious as to what happens to the *B* drive after marriage. From what I understand, one approach to undoing a marriage is to restore partition 10. But what can one do to replace a damaged B drive without restoring the A drive?

It seems to me that if one were to track any changes to the B drive after marriage, one could make a *married* B drive in the same way you make a blessed drive. Replacing the B drive with such a drive would, of course, trash all the pointers to data on the drive--but in some cases, that would be preferable to restoring partition 10. (If all you lose is the video on the second drive, that's better than losing the prefs, IMO.)

We have a terabyte of disk space lying around here. If nobody has compared pre-and post-marriage B drives, I could put some of that to work doing a comparison, to see what the changes are. (Of course I could do that with something smaller than an 80G drive, if restoring partition 10 will restore the machine to an unmarried state....)

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

Posted by: mikebridge

terabyte is 1000 gigs, not 100. hehhe, not quite the order of magnitude you are worried about.

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"I'm coming for you, Pork Chop!"
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Posted by: entropy

Yep, that's a terabyte, and with that much drive space it isn't a problem to have two 80G backups around. But why spend the time waiting for the data to get from the Linux box to the drive array (using netcat, since NFS apparently can't handle files that large)? Even over FDDI, the backup of the original A drive took several hours.

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

Posted by: pschum

quote:
Originally posted by entropy:
...Having just installed an 80G Maxtor, I am curious as to what happens to the *B* drive after marriage. From what I understand, one approach to undoing a marriage is to restore partition 10. But what can one do to replace a damaged B drive without restoring the A drive?

It seems to me that if one were to track any changes to the B drive after marriage, one could make a *married* B drive in the same way you make a blessed drive.

<snip>

Actually, very little happens to the "B" drive. It's the "A" drive (specifically partition 10) that has all of the info about what and where the "B" drive is, and hda10 is quite small. You can image it (using dd and gzip) into hda4 or hda7 space quite easily and restore from there to "divorce" the drives. [Caution! Be sure myworld is not executing when backing up (invalidates the backup) or restoring (causes panic and GSOD)]. This is the method I use to fairly rapidly test marriages and divorces -- MUCH faster than full backups/restores. If I had the foresight to make such an image of the pre-married hda10 before my "B" drive failed, I could restore hda10 from that (internal) backup, then bless a new "B" drive (after having tested it thoroughly!) and let a new marriage happen.

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Paul Schumann
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