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DD what could it be
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Posted by: lanman216

Trying to upgrade hughes DirecTivo system cause I finally have some time on my hands. Using a single drive config so I'm doing the dd command to a new 80 gb Maxtor. Keeping all shows already recorded @15hrs worth. All params are as hinsdale states in how-to. Started at 1am this morn now 11am. HD lights still going, but getting a sinking suspicion dd gave up. Did the same upgrade to a friends system about a month ago dd was done in about 1 hr. What gives?:confused: Starting to go through DirecTivo withdrawal. Any help would greatly be appreciated.

Posted by: stevel

If you connected both drives to the same IDE controller, copying takes a lot longer. 10 hours is not unreasonable for a 40GB drive if you have them on the same controller - I find one hour rather difficult to believe. Your PC's drive activity light should flash periodically as should a small LED that may be on the drive circuit board.

Posted by: lanman216

Hi Steve,
Thanks for getting back to me so soon. The drives were connected to different controllers to avoid taking so long. It seems that the new drive had info on it and DD was having a hard time rewriting to the drive. I rebooted and fdisked the drive and then it worked just fine. It actually took me 1:15min to DD with the now clean drive. Anyway, I am now proudly the owner of a 69 hr DTiVo system. Gotta go much Tivo to catch up with. Thanks again.

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quote:
Kinky is using a feather, Perverted is using the whole chicken

Posted by: stevel

I wouldn't think that DD cared at all what was on the target drive, but if you got it working, that's great.

Posted by: stormsweeper

It wouldn't care. And unless you did a "full format" after the fdisk part, the data would still be there anyways, just not "referred" to. Sounds like a fluke.

Posted by: lanman216

Well fdisk essentially marks the drive as a clean slate (short of a factory zeroing) so no data is accessible. I generally find that fdisk cleans up any sort of muck left on a used drive. I will definitely go back to my old tech tricks with any other used drives.

quote:
Kinky is using a feather, Perverted is using the whole Chicken

Posted by: stormsweeper

quote:
Originally posted by lanman216
Well fdisk essentially marks the drive as a clean slate (short of a factory zeroing) so no data is accessible. I generally find that fdisk cleans up any sort of muck left on a used drive. I will definitely go back to my old tech tricks with any other used drives.

But it doesn't actually remove the data, it just removes the first few bytes of the drive that say where that data is kept. dd doesn't use that, it just reads in from one file (or device) and spits it back out to the other. what's on the drive makes absolutely no difference.

Posted by: lanman216

Well whatever it was doesn't really matter now cause my tivos up and running with its 30 min delay.

Posted by: falz

quote:
Originally posted by stevel
I find one hour rather difficult to believe.

I realize this matter is basically closed, but for whomever reads it in the future, I finally got around to replacing my A drive (30gig quantum) with an 80gig 5400rpm maxtor using DD to preserve all of my recordings (it was full) and it took about 1 hour, 15 minutes. I was quite surprized, but all was well. Indeed this was using 'noswap' at boot time, and on different IDE controllers. Just don't want anyone to get freaked out about the time it takes. tata.

Posted by: kenr

If you're using the TiVo Boot CD, a DD goes MUCH quicker if you use the non-byte swapped, DMA boot option. The byte swapping is only needed if you actually want to mount the TiVo filesystem.