TiVo Community Forums Archives - First-time upgrade success after one small problem

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

First-time upgrade success after one small problem
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: ComPage

My first Tivo hack was last night and it was completed in 3 hours.
I have a 40 hour UK Thomson on software version 2.5.5 which is well out of warranty.
The A drive is a Quantum and I've added a 120Gb Maxtor 5400rpm as B.
The basic quality recording time available has gone up to 189 but as I generally use medium I'd guess that's about 112 hours (from 24ish).

I used the Hinsdale abbreviated how-to for relative newbies from http://www.newreleasesvideo.com. Thanks Hinsdale!
Making the boot CD was a breeze and I had no problem swapping drives in and out of the PC or the Tivo despite the fact that I was very nevous about the Tivo power supply after reading all the warnings.

All went well until I used the Linux command:
/mnt/dos/mfstool backup -l 32 -6 -s -o /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
which gave an error 3210, seek error.
I notice that Hinsdale has today revised the command to:
mfsbackup -l 32 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
so perhaps that would not have given the error I experienced.
Maybe the error was my fault as I interpreted the -l as -1 (difficult to tell the difference).

Anyway, after reading the text file that comes with mfstool v1.1 I used:
mfstool backup -o /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
which worked fine and resulted in a tivo.bak of just over 1Gb.

When restored to the new drive and inserted in the Tivo as drive A this worked fine so I continued by blessing the new drive and putting it into the Tivo as B with the old drive as A.

Many thanks to Hinsdale, Tiger for Mfs Tools, Kazymyr for the Boot Cd, and everyone else who has contributed to this project.
My wife now thinks I'm a genius and there is now room on the Tivo for some of her programmes as well as all my motor racing stuff.

A question...
Is there any way to get my 1Gb backup file onto CDs?

John the happy Tivo hacker.

Posted by: Robert S

My UK TiVo backup came out at 352Mb (360 million bytes), there shouldn't be any problem getting it onto a CD. The options are identical -6 -s -o is the same as -6so. Do you have lots of very short recordings? (A bit of a long shot, -l 32 picks up all recording shorter than 32Mb, which is only a few seconds).

Assuming you don't want to redo the backup to try and get the size down, you should be able to find tools on the Net to split a file into managable chunks.

Posted by: hinsdale

Actually the -l 32 filters out all streams over 32MB (test streams, demo materials, etc) that should result in a backup image under 500MB.