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dd from 60GB to 60GB?
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Posted by: schiavonir

I upgraded one of my unit's A drives from the original 13.6GB to a Maxtor 60GB. (The B drive is a 60GB Western Digital) Everything went great, except the Maxtor is making a lot of noise. A clicking sound, over and over, like it's trying to read something and can't. After 3 days, I've experienced no problems other than this.

This obviously worries me, and I don't want to lose this drive. I made an image backup, but I'd like to save my recordings as well. Now, for the question. Through some dealings with a friend, I will end up with another 60GB WD drive which I would like to swap for the possibly bad Maxtor that's in there. The problem I'm anticipating is that the "dd" operation requires that the destination drive be at least as large as the source drive. Makes sense. However, not all 60GB drives are equal. In fact, of the two that are in there, I know one of them registers as 60,000+ MB and the other is 61,000+ MB.

Will this be an issue as I'm anticipating, or are there some unused portions of the disk that will help account for the drive differences? Any other ways around this with what I have to work with?

One other possibility. I have an 80GB drive that I can use temporarily. If I delete a bunch of stuff from this TiVo, is it possible to dd from the two 60GB drives to the one 80GB drive, or does the amount of programming not make a difference to the space used on disk? If that is possible, then once I have everything on one 80GB, I can start fresh with my two good 60GB drives.

Any help/suggestions appreciated.

Roger

Posted by: Robert S

Both partition 8 (swap) and 9 (/var) are shrinkable. MFS Tools 2.0's -s and -v options let you adjust the size of the swap and var partitions (both default to 64Mb). You should be able to safely steal 1 or 2 Mb from these partitions to make the data fit.

Unfortunately MFS Tools can only duplicate an entire drive set, not just the A or just the B drive of a two-drive set.

You can do it 'by hand' with dd. Most of the background for this is in the first few posts of the Fixes thread.

Boot byteswapping. dd partition 1 on to the new drive and then use pdisk to resize the partitions so they'll fit on the smaller disk (your patition table is cloned from the larger drive, so you'll end up with a phantom 'Free' partition at the end).

Once you've recreated the MFS partitions to be the same size, but in slightly different places, on the disk, you can dd all the partitions over from the original drive. (You only need to copy 2,3 and 4 OR 5,6 and 7 as only one of those triples will be active).

Obviously you can't dd the partition you resize. If you resize partition 9, I think TiVo can recreate the /var filing system itself. If you resize partition 8, use mkswap -v0 to reinitialise the swap partition.

Copying the MFS Media partitions will take a very long time!