help sought in series 2 HD backup and or duplication to larger HD

[boborob]

I have been following he latest hinsdale instructions as closely as I can, but I can't get a decent backup saved on my windows c drive.

When I issue the backup command about 8% of the data gets compressed and then I get a weird error saying "Failed: mnt/dos/hda : success".

I don't know i it is starting to compress and then failing the first time it tries to write any data or if it is encountering corruption on the Tivo drive itself. Either way, I can't make a backup.

I read a lot of newsgroup postings and one guy said that even though the dd disk copy program spit out errors during the process he got his Tivo drive copied to another drive ok. So I tried that on two different hard drives, got read errors on the Tivo drive, but used the conv=noerror, sync options outlined in the hinsdale instructions, and I did get errors around 4305 records, but the dd continued and completed.

So now I have two drives with what I think should be working images (because I tested the original back in the DirecTV DVR and it still boots and plays shows for a while before freezing up) and since they are non-quantum drives I ran the TivoMad edit on them after booting in Kazmyr's CD with "noswap" enabled (so that I could get around the byteswap errors) and they still won't boot.

Maybe I'm not understanding the idea of "dd", but the instructions led me to think that it would be a direct image copy, byte for byte. So in theory if my original Tivo hard drives still lets my DirecTV DVR boot, then the other disks should be exact copies minus the few errors and should be able to boot the DirecTV DVR also. At least from that one guy's comment about getting errors during his dd copy and still having it work.

I have an orginal Tivo 40 GB Maxtor hard drive and copied to a Western Digital 120 GB and also a Maxtor 100 GB disks, have verified corect jumpers, etc.

any ideas or just telling me "the backup didn't work so give up" and explaining why it didn't work for me but did for someone else would be greatly appreciated.

Also, is there a way I can just get either of these two other drive to just work without needing my old shows? Assuming the original Tivo drive can't be backed up, that is?

thanks

boborob

[litzdog911]

Not sure what brand/model Tivo you're trying to upgrade, but the Hinsdale instructions are somewhat out of date. You might have better luck with the Weaknee's step-by-step instructions here ....
http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/

Also, check additional resources in the "Tivo Upgrade Center Forum" here.

[ForrestB]

If you've got errors on the original Tivo drive, then I wouldn't backup the shows (which comprise the majority of the hard drive space). You can backup the the drive image including Season Passes using the mfsbackup and mfsrestore commands shown at the Hinsdale site - which was last updated on Nov 15th, 2006

[wscannell]

I think that you may not have successfully mounted your FAT32 drive. Assuming that the FAT32 is the first partition on the drive, you need to
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
When specifying the name of the backup file, you need to use /mnt/dos/tivo.bak. You can replace tivo.bak with any name you desire to use for the backup file.

[boborob]

thanks for the responses.
I was specifying the full FAT 32 volume name as the hinsdale instructions told me to do, sorry if that was not apparent from the error message I reported. I will take a look at the weaknees doc. and try mfsbackup for just the non-program portions of the hard disk and see if those get me anywhere.

boborob

[wscannell]

Were you trying to back up everything including programs to the FAT32 drive? You cannot do that because the file size limitation of FAT32 is 4GB. A backup of a 40GB drive with programs will be nearly 40GB.

If you want to save programs, you need to use a piped mfsbackup to mfsrestore. The weaknees instructions tell you how to do this.

[boborob]

I was following the hinsdale directions which state that because of the compression used in the msftools backup process you need very little backup space, so I'm pretty sure it was not a file size limit issue, but I will look into what you said about the weakness instructions.

[wscannell]

What was the command you used? If you were trying to back up just the system and settings, the file is typically less than 1GB. If you were trying to back up with programs, the file will be large. MPEG media files do not compress much since they are already compressed.