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HELP: Unable To Restore From Image tivo.bak
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Posted by: Agent_C

I get a series of errors when trying to follow the procedure outlined in the Hinsdale instructions and a specific command string I've been given in this forum. Please help...

CONFIGURATION:

IDE-0 – (master) - 4 GB FAT32 drive, single partition, where tivo.bak file is stored. I've tried it in the root directory or in a folder called “DOS”, with the same results.
IDE-0 – (slave) – vacant
---
IDE-1 - (master) --Tivo A drive
IDE-1 - (slave) ---Tivo B drive

ERROR MESSAGES:

When issuing the mount command mount /dev/hda /mnt/dos I get (3) error messages:

1) FAT: Bogus logical sector size 55438
2) VFS: Can't find a valid FAT file system on dev 03:00
3) mount: You must specify the filesystem type

And then... When issuing the following command string:

mfstool restore -s 127 -xpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

I get (1) error message: "No such file or directory".

If someone could help me sort this all out, I'd be very grateful.

A_C

Posted by: Spence

If you really typed

"mount /dev/had /mnt/dos"

that is not correct, it should be:

"mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos"

Posted by: Agent_C

Actually, the correct command string turned out to be:

mount /dev/hda5 /mnt

After which, I was able to do the restore in one step using the following:

mfstool restore -s 127 -xpi /mnt/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

With the expert help of Robert S <cudos>, I was able to figure it all out.

Regards,

A_C

Posted by: kenr

Agent_C,
Why was it hda5 in your case? I assume it was because your Windows drive had multiple partitions. Perhaps what you learned could help other here.

Posted by: Agent_C

quote:
Originally posted by kenr
Agent_C,
Why was it hda5 in your case? I assume it was because your Windows drive had multiple partitions. Perhaps what you learned could help others here.

If I knew what hda(5) means it might shed some light... but frankly, I know next to nothing about Linux and relied solely on the kindness of strangers to help me figure this out.

The master drive on IDE-0 was an old WD 4GB, on which I've deleted and redefined partitions many times. For this upgrade, I deleted all partitions and defined a single FAT32, using Partition Magic. The tivo.bak file was in the root directory and there was nothing else on the drive.

The 2 Tivo drives on IDE-1 were current Maxtors.

Hope this helps.

A_C

Posted by: Robert S

This isn't a Linux thing it's a feature of the DOS partition table. You can have four 'primary' partitions (hda1-4), which can be bootable (only one can be bootable at any given time, and it's fiddly to change, so people tend to use a boot manager like lilo instead). To allow more flexibility, one of your primary partitions can be formatted as an 'extended' partition, which can be subdivided into a large number of partitions. hda5 is the first partition in the extended partition.

The DOS FDISK utility is rather inflexible, if you want to setup a complex partitioning scheme, use a linux boot disk (not a TiVo boot disk) and fdisk. It's harder to use, but gives you a lot of control.

Posted by: kenr

Robert, I would have expected Agent_C to tell me he was booting off a logical drive in an extended partition as you described, but he states he's using a drive with one and only one partition. I'm confused as to why he has to use hda5 in that case.

Also, a partition and boot manager I love and strongly recommend is BootIt Next Generation available at http://www.bootitng.com/bootitng.html

Posted by: Robert S

I think this was news to him too!

I would guess this is something Partition Magic has done at some point. It wouldn't be visible at all to someone using the disk with DOS or Windows (unless they ran FDISK).

He PM'd me to ask why it wasn't working, I said use dmesg to view the boot log and look at the partition table, which made the problem obvious.

I wasn't really recommending lilo (I think Grub is the OS boot loader of choice these days), just making the point that there's a huge kludge here that means that partitions 1-4 are very different to partitions with higher numbers.

Posted by: kenr

I bet you partition magic made the whole drive an extended partition, then made his boot drive a logical drive consuming the entire extended partition.

Posted by: Agent_C

For the restore, I was booting off the Hinsdale floppy, with all the utilities on it.

My normal boot drive was disabled during this process. It's a SCSI drive on an Adaptec controller.

A_C

Posted by: Robert S

Well, it's hard to say without seeing the drive, but if PM's bootloader is too big to fit in the boot block, partition 1 would hold PM. It would make sense, then to put the user partitions in an extended partition.