TiVo Community Forums Archives - unknown partition table? help!

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unknown partition table? help!
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Posted by: Trench

I have a philips SA 30+80 tivo with turbonet and telnet/ftpd engaged in my rc.sysinit. I also have tivoWeb installed in /hack/tivoweb-tcl. Last night I tried to update the ui.itcl for the new genres, and figured I'd add /hack/tivoweb-tcl/tivoweb to the end of my rc.sysinit. I restarted the tivo and now it won't boot up. (Hangs on the 'please wait while your tivo starts up' page).

I figured, 'crap, my sysinit is hosed, I'll pop the drives in my pc and fix it'.
So, I put the 30g 'a' into the pc, and boot to the the mfstools2.0 disk i got from 9thttee last November. The drive shows as a 30gig on hdb.

When I try 'mount /dev/hdb4 /mnt/tivo' I get:
mount; you must speccify the filesystem type

I read in the FAQ that the partition is ext2, so I try
'mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb4 /mnt/tivo' and I get:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb4, or too many mounted filesystems

So, I pageup to see what was reported on startup, and it says:
hdb:Signature 1492, be16 Signature 9214
03:40: block 0 has signature 9214 rather than 1492
unknown partition table

oh boy. This doesn't sound good. I'm not sure what to try next.
Any and all suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks in advance to all respondents, and thanks in arrears to all who've made this such a wonderful forum!

Posted by: Trench

Ok, I've seen some posts that suggest using the boot floppy instead,
and I just tried that. The mfstools boot floppy mentioned on Hinsdale's how-to page has the same problem.

But...

I just tried booting with kazymr's 2_6 boot cd, and it works.
The partition table is read fine, and I can mount the tivo partitiions with no options to "mount".

Now all I have to do is fix the various broken files. (great).

Sorry for posting before I went searching the old posts. Hopefully someone else will find this information useful.

Posted by: cclaunch

The root problem was that, since TiVo uses a PowerPC processor, the order of bits/bytes is different than for the Intel processors used on PCs. As a consequence, to read and write to a TiVo disk the Linux system has to be set up to "byteswap" the devices where the disk is mounted.

Some of the floppy and CD images we use for TiVo manipulation come up with byte swapping set up for /dev/hdb and /dev/hdc automatically, while others do NOT. The reason they would not is that they use the MFSTOOLS program which does its own internal byteswapping so the Linux function is not needed.

The way you spot this is the bootup message

03:40: block 0 has signature 9214 rather than 1492
unknown partition table

This tells you that the TiVo disk is not set up with byteswapping. You can, in this case, run the MFSTOOLS but cannot mount the partitions.

Using a different Linux image that has default byte swapping, as you did, lets Linux "see" the disk correctly so that a mount works. Most of the Linux floppy or CD images that do not use byteswapping by default can be booted with special options to enable the swapping -- search the forum for byteswap to see how.