TiVo Community Forums Archives - restored drive not booting

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restored drive not booting
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Posted by: mpayson

I'm trying to add a new b drive using MFS 2.0. I get through the backup & restore steps fine, but when I try the new drive in the Tivo (Sony svr2000), it hangs at boot (Welcome. Powering up...). I've triple checked the cables & jumpers, and gone through the entire process twice with the same result. I believe I have v3.0 installed, but I tried "mad/edit_bootparms hdb -i", but that gave an error "invalid signature 0xfa33 on /dev/hdb". fdisk doesn't show any partitions on the disk.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Mike

Posted by: Robert S

You can't use tools like edit_bootparms without using a byte swapping boot mode (only MFS Tools supports byteswapping internally). fdisk doesn't understand the TiVo partition table, use pdisk (called pdiska on some disks) instead.

Have you tried putting an A drive image on this new disk to verify it's TiVo compatible.

Have you tried doing a restore/expand in one step?

mfsrestore -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb

Posted by: mpayson

Have you tried putting an A drive image on this new disk to verify it's TiVo compatible.

That's what I'm trying to do, steps 8 & 9 in the Hinsdale how-to. Is there any reason the drive would not be compatible (it's a WD 7200rpm 80gb)?

Have you tried doing a restore/expand in one step?

mfsrestore -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb

I'm hesitant to try this until I verify that the backup is good. I'm 98% sure the backup isn't the problem, but...

You can't use tools like edit_bootparms without using a byte swapping boot mode (only MFS Tools supports byteswapping internally). fdisk doesn't understand the TiVo partition table, use pdisk (called pdiska on some disks) instead.

pdisk also shows no partitions, and gives an error "No valid block 1 on '/dev/hdb'".

Thanks,
Mike

Posted by: Robert S

You said you were trying to add a B disk.

Perhaps 'TiVo compatible' isn't a good choice of words. Clearly there's a problem here, if you can make this disk a working A drive, it's probably not the disk. If you can't get an A drive on this disk, there might be a problem with it.

Have you tried dd'ing your working A drive onto the new drive.

0xfa33 (or 0x33fa) isn't a valid TiVo signature. Is there any reason to think MFS Tools has written to this disk at all?

Posted by: mpayson

btw, pdisk gives the same error under Kazmyr's disk with byteswapping enabled.

Posted by: mpayson

Have you tried dd'ing your working A drive onto the new drive.

What is the correct syntax to do this?

0xfa33 (or 0x33fa) isn't a valid TiVo signature. Is there any reason to think MFS Tools has written to this disk at all?

I'm not convinced it has. It says it was successful, but it doesn't look like ther's anything on the drive. Would it make a difference that the drive was very briefly formatted as 2 fat32 partitions before I changed my mind & decided to use it in the Tivo instead? It never had an OS installed on it, and was never booted into Windows.

Posted by: mpayson

Good news & bad news... First, the good news. I think I found the problem. I booted into Windows 2000 to backup the image to CD & discovered it was only 125MB instead of the 819mb it should have been, so it appears the backup is failing (though I tried it twice).

Now the bad news... I forgot to remove my Tivo drives before booting. Am I now completely hosed?

Posted by: mpayson

Drive A still boots the Tivo, so it looks like I'm not Hosed. Still have the failing backup, though...

Posted by: Robert S

dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=32k

if is the input device and of is the output.

Anything on the drive before you run restore is irrelevant. The reason you don't boot WinNT is because it corrupts the data that's on there, not because it prevents you restoring to the drive.

Can you take another backup from the original A drive?

Glad 2k didn't hose your drives.

Posted by: mpayson

Well, dd finished successfully, but the tivo still won't boot from the new drive.

The drive passes WD's extended diagnostics, but I tried installing Win2k on it & it won't boot either, so I suspect that it must be a bad hard drive. I'll exchange it & see if that does any better.

Thanks for your help,
Mike