PTV300 upgrade trouble - sorry everyone

[DennyH]

I'm trying to add a drive to my PTV300. I've been through the guide numerous times and I think I'm doing pretty much everything by the book but something isn't working. I'm using Windows ME, which could be the problem, but when I boot up with the drives installed and Boot CD in the cd-rom, I don't get the Linux Prompt screen it says I should see in the Hinsdale guide. So I've tried making a boot floppy instead and now it brings me to some screen that asks me how to startup, either with or without the aid of a cd, so I tried it with the CD. So it goes through a long startup process but it leaves me in DOS mode with the A:/ and I just have no clue where to go from here, or if here is where I'm actually supposed to be. Please save me, I've been at this for 4 hours and I haven't even gotten passed the first steps. Thanks everyone.

[ForrestB]

You should not be seeing DOS or an A:\ prompt at all. Change your BIOS settings (press F9 at startup) and boot from your CD only. Disable all other bootup drives. If you're still having problems, disconnect all drives except the CDROM and your Tivo hard drive.

[DennyH]

thanks for the fast response, I'll give that a shot now. One more question for you, on Hinsdales guide it says the primary master is the one that was originally plugged into the c: drive but on jenkins site, is says that the master on channel 2 is connected to the c: drive. I dont see any markings distinguishing the primary and secondary IDE cables on my board so this also might be causing my problems. Thanks

[DennyH]

Tried using F9 to get to the BIOS but it won't seem to let me. All that works is esc, but it doesn't seem to be the right menu.

[DennyH]

Sorry-- just got the linux prompt to come up but when I verified the drive sizes, they are all correct except for the Tivo original A drive. It only reports 10 mbs. Should I use Qunlock. I've heard some bad things about it, so I'm quite unsure whether or not to use it.

[DennyH]

Update: got everything working through to HInsdale's step 8- restoring the backup image. I'm getting a error: "restore failed: decompression error .5%) (81.81% compression) Not sure what to do, but I'm going to try to backup again. Any ideas would be great, thanks

[ForrestB]

This error may be caused by the compression level. If you're using something like:
mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
the -6 is the compression level. Try a lower compression level by substituting -3 for -6.

[DennyH]

Thank you for all your help forrest! I'm finally finished after a long long day of work. There were only those few problems that held me back. Hopefully, next time I upgrade, I can do it in less than an hour, like everyone else. Thanks again forrest.

[ForrestB]

Your welcome - glad you got it working.