TiVo Community Forums Archives - Partition troubles after crash

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Partition troubles after crash
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Posted by: rbachelor

I've suffered a crash on my A drive on my dual drive series 1 Phillips but I'm kind of keen on recovering the data from the disk and perhaps even recovering from the crash. I've done a dd to copy the contents to a new disk and wanted to check out to see what's left of the disk however it appears that my partition table has been trashed (can't be read when I boot linux using the MFSTools CD). My first thought was to try to rebuild it using the partition table information in section 4.15 of the FAQ using pdisk, however when I initialize a new map and set partition 1 to 2K like the section says, I run out of memory to add the other partitions after I add only two partitions.

So, my question is can I re-create the partition table to have a ghost of a chance of seeing if the disk is undamaged enough to recover from this mess without starting from scratch with an (old) backup.

It almost seems like the TiVo is managing to pull some information off the disk as it manages to boot to the "almost there..." screen before it dies and starts to boot again.

Thanks
Rod

Posted by: Robert S

Are you booting MFS Tools 2.0? It's probably just a byteswapping issue. Try using a different TiVo boot disk and you should be able to read the partition table. The fact that your TiVo boots as far as 'Almost there' means your partition table and Linux partitions are OK.

Try booting the TiVo with just the A drive, then power down and reconnect the B drive. When the TiVo comes back up it should green screen and repair itself.

If your TiVo is >150Gb and you didn't increase swap the green screen will reboot after about 4 minutes without doing any useful work. See the Fixes thread in the Upgrade Centre for a rescue manuever to get around this problem.

Posted by: rbachelor

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately it didn't work -- just went into a reboot loop (gets all the way to "Almost done..." and then reboots). Is there any way to force a green screen fix?