TiVo Community Forums Archives - Bad Partition table on A Drive!

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Bad Partition table on A Drive!
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Posted by: NickNOC

ok, I don't think it's related to what I was doing, but in the midst of performing a ppp-over-ethernet hack, my Tivo decides to not boot anymore. It shows the initial black Tivo screen, but never moves to the "Just a few more minutes" screen. I put the drive in my PC, and booted from the Boot CD. THe partitions are mountable, and I can make modifications, however, when I run MFS tools to do anything, it tells me that I have a corrupt "zone map"

here's the error reported by MFS Tools (2.0)

mfs_load_zone_map: Primary zone map corrupt, loading backup.
mfs_load_zone_map: Secondary zone map corrupt, giving up.
mfs_load_zone_map: Zone map checksum error.

Also, if I try plain old fdisk, it shows no partitions, and if I run anything but the Boot CD, I get nothing (presumably because of byteswapping).

So I think I'm looking at a corrupted partition table. My questions is, what should I use to repair it? The data seems to still be intact, and I'm not sure if I can use standard linux tools on the drive without damaging the TiVo setup.

THis is an HDR 312 Philips unit, with a 30GB factory A drive, married to a WD 60GB B drive.

Thanks in advance.

Posted by: captain_video

I don't believe that fdisk will recognize Tivo Linux partitions. I once tried checking a Tivo drive using Partition Magic (via DOS boot disk) and it showed the drive as being blank. However, it worked fine when I put it back in my DTivo. Were you doing anything that involved modifications to the rc.sysinit file? If the rc.sysinit file gets hosed then you won't boot. My area of expertise lies in DirecTivos so I may be offbase here but it may be something to look into.

Posted by: NickNOC

I was modifying the rc.sysinit file, however, I have replaced them with the original backups, with no effect. (I was doing the modifications over the serial port, per the HowTo)

Some more info, also:

I don't think it ever loads the OS, because it stays at the "Starting Up" screen. Also, the hard drive sounds like there's a lot of activity, then spins down, spins back up, alot of activity, then the TiVo resets. (purple flash, then "Starting Up" again.

Posted by: captain_video

You need to make the rc.sysinit file executable for it to function. Navigate to the /etc/rc.d file and do the following:

chmod +x rc.sysinit

If you don't make it executable, it won't run at bootup. If it doesn't run the you'll sit at the "Welcome. Powering up..." screen forever because there are no instructions being loaded to tell the OS what to do next.

Posted by: Robert S

Series 1 TiVoes are byteswapped, so you need to boot a byteswapping boot disk or you'll get an 'invalid partition signature' error. (MFS Tools can cope with byteswapped disks, so it's not an issue if you're just upgrading the disk).

All TiVoes use the Apple-style partition tables and not the DOS-style tables fdisk and Partition Magic expect. pdisk (or pdiska on TiVoMad) is fdisk rewritten for the Apple partition table. I don't know if it can repair your disk, though.

Posted by: NickNOC

Sorry I've been gone for so long. I have had some progress; however I still can't revive my old drives.

I have restored a backup from March to a 30gb IBM. Worked great, spent hours doing a software upgrade to 3.0, etc...

Unfortunately, there were many valuable programs on my old drive set, which I would like to at least dub to my computer.

I have tried to fix the init scripts, by copying the clean ones from the newly restored (and updated to the same SW version) drive, with no success.

The only information I have right now, is that when I boot from the Kazymyr Boot CD, I can mount all the partitions fine, and "cat /proc/partitions" works and shows everything, but when I run fdisk, it shows the drive as blank. It's rather confusing. I think there may be a problem with the boot sector... Can I use traditional Linux repair utilities on the drive, and if so, how? I haven't had much experience with disk repair under Linux.

Posted by: Robert S

fdisk? Try pdisk, it's been rewritten to understand the TiVo partition table.

Posted by: NickNOC

yes, I checked into pdisk, and it shows the partitions normally. Is there a way to repair the boot sector, or rebuild the partition table? a la "fdisk /mbr" ?

Posted by: Robert S

Look for MakeTiVoBootable.

Posted by: NickNOC

OK well I found a program called "bootpage" which I think I can use to fix the boot area on my A drive... But can I run this without trashing the existing partitions?

The page I was looking at is here:

http://pvrhack.sonnik.com/tivo/d18c7db/TiVo-Restore.htm

Posted by: NickNOC

I also had one other question...

Are there any boot-time logs or kernel logs on the TiVo?

Posted by: Robert S

The logs are (as in any Unix system) in /var/log. /var is partition 9 on a TiVo. You mount it with

mount /dev/hdX9 /mnt

and then move into the log directory with

cd /mnt/log

Obviously you need to boot byteswapping for this to work.

I suggest you

cd /

then

umount /mnt

before you reboot/switch off.

The only reference I have for MakeTiVoBootable is this thread on recovering from a WinNT signature. Google's never heard of it, though.

Posted by: NickNOC

OK, first, I just have to admit... I was WAY off on what was wrong with it...

Turns out that some of the binaries in the /bin and /sbin directories had gotten overwritten with BusyBox symlinks...

I copied the sbin and bin directories over from the newer working 20 gig restore I had, and *poof* it came right up!

I am now dubbing all of my programs off to DivX!

THanks guys for all your help, and it was the tip about the logs being on hda9 that really helped... I saw a mention of busybox in the kernel log, and that's what tipped me off.

Happy TiVo-ing!