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Problems making backup of "a" drive

I have tried several times to backup my 30hr tivo disk (Quantum lct 10)I have the two drives on the secondary cable. I am using an identical Quantum lct 10 - on auto my bios sees the Tivo disk as a 9GB drive and the new disk as 30GB - I set the new disk
manually to match the Tivo disk. My system sees the Tivo drive as having 19 Cyl, 16 hds, 63 sectors.

I am using a 600MHz system with a 133MHz bus and 128MB ram.

I used diskpro - it took about 30 seconds - didn't work

I used dolly - it took about 1 minute - it didn't work

I tried the tivoboot disk - I used "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs-512"

I got this message:
[root]/> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs-512
dd /dev/hda: Operation not supported by device
[dd: exited with 1]
[root]/>

I tried the tivoboot disk - I used "dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdd bs-512"
it didn't work and I got:
20000+0 records in
20000+0 records out

What am I doing wrong? - The Tivo disk still works fine in the Tivo

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Registered: Jan 2000
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Posts: 2401

Until your machine will recognize the drives properly the rest of the commands you're trying are a waste of time.

Maybe you could try plugging the TiVo drive into the Primary Master connector, and the new drive in the Secondary Master controller?

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Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Posts: 185

Art sent me an email on this also. I replied to him there before seeing it here too.

I basically said the same thing as Rick just did, but will post a few of the highlights.

I told him the reason that Dolly and Diskpro went so fast is they thought the one drive had 19 cylinders instead of the 16,383 it really has!

I mentioned he should check to make sure he has LBA turned on in the BIOS for both drives. I would almost bet LBA is either turned off or set to AUTO and is not getting detected for the one drive.

His "dd" command is wrong also in Linux.

It should be

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512

He had bs-512 instead of the equals command. I also mentioned that when using Dylan's boot disk he should avoid using /dev/hda. That drive is not byte swapped while the others are. It "may" not be a problem when using dd, but I would avoid it.

Regardless neither will work if any program thinks one of the drive has 19 clyinders.

------------------
Belboz
belboz@cinci.rr.com

[This message has been edited by Mr. Belboz (edited July 16, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Mr. Belboz (edited July 16, 2000).]

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Registered: Sep 2001
Location: Coral Springs, FL
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The problem you are seeing is the "drive lock" issue. I just finished my upgrade this weekend and saw the same BIOS results. Unless the drive is first powered up in the Tivo, the drive will not support LBA mode and thus not allow you to access the entire drive.

As previously described in this forum, you must power up your Tivo with the original drive attached, after a few minutes you need to remove the IDE cable with the power still on and attach it to your PC (PC should be off). When the PC boots, the BIOS should be able to use LBA mode and see the entire drive. Please take care during these steps since the Tivo power supply is unshielded and there is always some risk in swapping IDE cables with a powered drive.

Dave

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I've had the same problem today....ow.

So, when I move the drive over to the PC do I still leave it powered by the Tivo? Leaving the Tivo up the whole time?

By the way, my unit (just arrived today from Mercata), is a PHILIPS 31202!

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Oh, and when would be a good time to unplug it from the Tivo?

Mine is in 'retail demo' mode, which means when i reboot it there is a menu with a 15 minute countdown before it automatically takes an action. Would this countdown be a good time?

The idea of unplugging the drive when the Tivo might be talking to it gives me the creeps!

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Registered: Feb 2000
Location: Outside Philly, PA
Posts: 4

Maybe it would be easier to power the drive with the PC power supply, with the data cable attached to the TiVo, then move the data cable to the PC?

Is it only a problem with the BIOS getting the wrong parameters from IDENTIFY? If so, Linux (and other OSs maybe) can override the drives reported geometry...

- Mike

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Registered: Sep 2001
Location: Coral Springs, FL
Posts: 0

I started with the drive powered by the TiVo since I wanted to connect to my PC which was off. After doing the cable swap, I powered on the PC which allowed the BIOS to correctly see the drive. So during this entire backup procedure, the TiVo is just providing power to the original drive.

It makes sense to swap the cable when the TiVo is not busy. When I swapped mine, I had to stop it from starting a recording before continuing. What I don't know is if you disconnect all the video sources, does TiVo still write to its 30min buffer?

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From listening to the drive, it seems to me that if you disconnect all sources and go to the main menu, drive access will stop after a few seconds.

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