Two drives to one quick upgrade question

[limbob]

Hi,

First off I truly apologise for yet another upgrade question which has probably been answered a million times before.
I have searched and read a fair bit, I just want to clarify what I think I have learnt...
Current Situation:

I have 200GB A Drive and 40GB B Drive
I want to upgrade to single 250GB Drive
Maximum number of upgrades has been reached i.e. I have 16 partitions on the A Drive plus some more on the B Drive so I know that I need to upgrade minus recordings.

OK so used the PTVUpgrade disk and Steve Conrads instructions that worked fine for me last time but when I try to restore the backup I get the old "backup target not large enough for entire backup by itself"
Used commands
mfsbackup -l 32 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb
and then reboot, connect up the new drive and restore
restore -x -s 300 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
also tried
restore -zi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
and a few other combinations but still the same error message : "backup target not large enough for entire backup by itself"
Initially thought the BIOS wasn't seeing the whole 250GB drive so flashed the BIOS and messed around with the settings plus tested it with an older tivo.bak I had and it worked fine.

So questions:

Is there something obvious I am doing wrong?
Whenever I use the various boot CD's the bootup information scrolls past so fast that I cannot see the reported hard drive sizes, is there any way to pause it or a command that would give me it? I have tried pause/break to no avail.
The -s option on the backup should truncate the partitions so I assume there is no technical limitation to stop me doing the upgrade?


My next plan is to use the MFSLive disk and if that doesn't work then to use the old tivo backup from a previous upgrade and then copykern, reinstall the cachecard drivers, restore season pass settings using the tivoweb module.

Apologies again for yet another upgrade question.

[blindlemon]

I would suspect your backup isn't divorcing successfully (ie. not dropping all the extra partitions that have been added over time) due to the -l 32 flag you need to keep the backgrounds also picking up sme small recording streams in one or more of your added partitions.

When you do the mfsbackup command it shoud tell you how many hours the backup will be. That should be 30 or 40 depending on the size of your original factory "A" drive. If it's larger, then you need to delete your recordings and clear them from the database using my DeleteAll (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=4658244#post4658244) script prior to attempting the backup again.

[limbob]

OK,

Used MFSLIVE (www.mfslive.org) and it worked first time (even unlocked the single Maxtor disk using the native diskutil).

backup -6qso /dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdx /dev/hdy

then

restore -s 300 -xzi /dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdx

didn't require -r 4 as I only replaced with a 250GB disk.

so essentially, didn't work with PTVUpgrade CD but worked fine with MFSLive

Al

[blindlemon]

Sorry, but it's not the MFSLive CD that has 'fixed' your problem, just the fact that you haven't used the -l32 switch in your backup command (presumably because the MFSLive command generator doesn't understand UK TiVos).

However, you need this or you will lose the backgrounds to some menu screens - eg. search by title - so you'll need to redo the backup with it included. If the backup still doesn't divorce then use my DeleteAll script to clear out the MFS streams for user recordings before trying again.

Also check whether you have the LBA48 kernel installed as, although the MFSLive CD fixes the swap header initialisation for swaps > 127mb, I don't believe it installs the LBA48 kernel - with the version I have you still need to run copykern from the old LBA48 CD to do that.

Sorry to rain or your parade :o

[limbob]

Thanks very much blindlemon for the technical support.

I guess I knew that the -l 32 option must be important since you mentioned it but carried on regardless in the hope that everything would just work magically!

OK, at least I feel fully armed to make it work now especially with you script!

Cheers


Al