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Mfstools/AT&T unit for a Linuxgeek
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Posted by: ElJefe

Hello,

I have read the upgrade FAQs and have the boot cd and mfstools 1.1. I am planning to add a second drive to my AT&T series 2 unit.

The faq talks about having a windows/dos machine and having a fat partition to backup the original drive image to. What if I am a linux geek?

I can boot the Kazymyr CD on a linux box and have mfstools 1.1. Do I *need* a fat partition as the FAQ says or is that assuming the reader is not linux aware?

I dont want to go butchering things so I am asking up front. If I boot the CD on a box that already has an IDE attached ext2 filesystem will the Kazymyr CD kernel recognize them and allow me to use them as a back destination.

I am trying to avoid "Install Windows or DOS" as an additional step for the process.

Thanks!

El Jefe

Posted by: hinsdale

Linux partition as destination will work fine.. the How-To was just intended for Windows geeks.

Posted by: ElJefe

Thanks for the heads up. As any linux geek would do I saw the extra headache of booting Kazymyr's CD and then sourcing the mfstools-1.1 from another place to do work on a series 2 AT&T unit and updated Kazymyr's classy CD.

If anyone is intersted I made a new bootable CDROM image using Kazymyr's as a base and added the mfstools-1.1 to the ramdisk environment. Now after booting you will have mfstools-1.0 and mfstools-1.1 directories with their respective tool version there in.

If you think having this would be worthwhile reply to this message and I will send it to someone senior in the forum that knows where best to put such things as I am a newbie on this forum site.

=)

El Jefe

Posted by: hinsdale

Very kind of you.. sometimes cleaning up/updating existing utilites isnt very glamorous work. I have been meaning to add 1.1 to the Boot Cds for sometime but since its already done.....

you can PM or email me wregnery@attbi.com with an FTP locale and I will gratefully accept your offer. After testing and adjusting instructions will get it posted for everyone's use.

Posted by: ElJefe

I will put the file (14MB) up on a ftp and email the user/pass.

I tried the new CD image on my AT&T series 2 with 40GB Maxtor. Dropped in a WD 120GB/5400 and booted the CD on my P4 box. Used mfstool v1.1 to backup the original Tivo A drive to a third 20GB IDE.

After the backup I Blessed the new WD120. Dropped both drives back in the AT&T and fired it up. It now posts as having 183 hours of time (53 hours at best quality). Does 53 hours at best quality sound right for an original 40GB and an added 120GB?

Thanks

El Jefe

Posted by: kazymyr

Bravo, well done! I know I haven't updated the cd in a looong time - and, sadly, probably won't anytime soon. It's good to see someone else can do it.

Posted by: dmd

I'm in a similar position, Linux user using a Linux only machine for upgrades etc. The problem I am coming up with is that I have two IDE Linux disks already, and the second disk gets byteswapped when using the TiVoMad boot floppy. I want to use my second IDE drive to receive the TiVo backups. I could just produce a new boot floppy with amended lilo params, but at the moment I am messing with booting directly from hard disk using the kernel from the boot floppy, and having a very customised lilo.conf. Probably not very much use to many others, but I will let you know how I get on.

Posted by: ElJefe

Well since everyone wants my tweaked disc I will clean it up so it is more user friendly. /bin/mfstool is still symlinked to the v1.0 mfstool binary. I left the v1.0 binary in the image and made an additional mfstools-1.1 direcotry as well. I oculd not find enough documentation to ascertain if v1.1 was backward compatible in all of its functions to older TiVO widgets that mfstools-1.0 was known to work on. Can anyone comment on this? Shall I just replace the v1.0 mfstools with v1.1 or have them both available to cover all possible uses?

As a side note, does anyone know where the kernel config file can be found for the 2.4.4 kernel used in the boot cd? I'd like to play with compiling in a few more modules and apps to help with backups (nfs client, samba, cdrw, etc)

El Jefe

PS: Does anyone know how to get shell on a AT&T series 2 box? I'd like to monkey with the usb hardware for possible network or temp storage applications. I see two serial ports for a cable/vcr ir mouse. I thought I read the series 1 TiVO boxen having a db9 serial console.

Posted by: kazymyr

Well, as far as backups go, you don't need the CD at all if you have Linux. If you want a dd backup (and your TiVo A drive isn't locked) you can just do it in a xterm - but the backup will be byteswapped, and you'll need to remember that when you need to restore. Also, mfstool works even if the drive isn't byteswapped - just put mfstool somewhere in your home directory (or /usr/local/bin) and run it from there, as you would run any user program. That's what I did, even though I had the CD. :)

The .config file - I posted it a while ago on this forum. Do a search - if you can't find it, PM me.

The series 1 have the same as the series 2 as far as serial is concerned. The prompt-over-serial uses the DSS control port. See http://www.pineaus.com/HOWTO/Tivo-DSL-HOWTO.html

Posted by: Want1394

Just to interject a note from a user of this software -

ElJefe - some of the original work was done to keep the memory requirements small. Some folks doing upgrades have unbelievably small and old computers. I just mention this as you add things, the boot requirements don't start causing a new set of failures for (almost always) new and inexperienced users.