Linux Gurus Needed: Help me recover from GSoD

[destinydog]

Hey all!

Let me just start by saying that this forum has been invaluable to me over the years. I thank all the contributors for all the efforts they have put in. Awesome info.

This is a long post. For a quick summary of what I am asking for, Skip to the section "What I need"". It's in bold near the bottom of the post. I have included the rest of the post simply to explain that I have done my research and am not a lazy noob errantly posting. It's just this problem is beyond my knowledge.

Background:
I have a series 1 phillips tivo that I have upgraded a few times in the past. I am reasonably proficient with the hinsdale guide on how to upgrade (as I said I've used it a few times to upgrade drives in my system). I followed the guide step by step every time and was successful in every attempt to add storage space with the exception of the step to "back up" the existing drive.

As we all know, the guide highly recommends backing up your original drive (including shows) in the event that something goes wrong you can have a backup image ready to go. When I fist upgraded years ago, I could never get the backup portion of mfstools to work. I initially tried backing up the entire drive (shows included) but when it failed to complete, I then simply tried the system/bare essentials portion of the drive. The process always stalled and never completed successfully. Frustrated, I simply skipped the backup process and proceeded to upgrade my storage without any hitches.

I've done this three times now, each time changing/upgrading drives and every time I've been unable to backup my original, but the upgrade always works...

The problem:
About a year or so ago, I started noticing some atifacts and stutters on some of my recordings. After some research on this very forum, I determined that it was probably due to a failing drive or bad/corrupt sectors. Again I researched the appropraite actions to take (on this forum) and proceeded to swap out the drives. Here's where the problem occurred. Apparently, the bad sectors on the drive prevented me from properly upgrading to new drives. I tried to replace the A drive (the older on and the one which I figured was giving me the trouble) with a new one, but i was unable to complete the copy of this drive to the new one. It always stalled and never completed.

What's worse, the Tivo itself quit working. When I tried to reboot, I got the GSoD telling me that the unit was reparing itself, but it never did. Again, I did some substantial research on this forum which pointed me to spinerite, dd-resuce and the like. I tried spinrite and was able to repair quite a few sectors of the A drive. The B drive was not affected according to spinrite (as i suspected). Despite the "fixes" (apparently the boot sectors or some essetial sectors were some of the "non-recovered" sectors because) the Tivo still boots to the GSoD and nothing else.

At this point I went into disaster recovery mode. What could I do to minimize my loses? Could I recover my programs? In fact, since I didn't have a recovery image, could I even use my Tivo again? The unit has a lifetime membership... What a loss!

My search went even more underground. I read again about potentially freezing the drive and then trying some other recovery options. At the time, extracting programs from the drive to a pc file or dvd was taboo, though I believe that has now changed? I found some 20 page article somepace that explained in detail how to extract shows directly from the drive itself using linux commands. Exactly what I wanted to do (for legit purposes i might add) but I didn't want to go into the depths of the article. I had already spent hours and hours trying to recover the stupid thing.... how much more time could I spend?

So I gave up....

The Present:
I popped out a tape from my VCR after having to watch one show and then record the other on VHS... The tape ran out and I missed the ending... and while trying to rewind I missed that start of another show.... I stopped.

There had to be a better way. I was reduced to using a VCR. For years i had told people that Tivo was the best thing that ever happened to TV since color. And that once you had a tivo, you could never go back. What was i doing?

So I have decided that I want to ressurrect my tivo. I appologize for the length of this post, but I wanted to relate that I had done my homework. I have tried to solve this problem on my own, but was unable to. So I am asking anybody out there who can help me to do so.

What I need:
After thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that when i first upgraded my tivo for more space by adding a 2nd drive, that the original must have had some bad sectors at that time. That's why the "backup" command would never complete.

So here's a run down of the problem and my needs

Phillips series 1 Tivo w/lifetime membership
Upgraded A drive (not original) Blessed B drive
permanent GSoD on Boot

A) Want to be able to use my Tivo again. I'm a legit user but my A drive is fried (or should I say very meticulously fried... according to spinrite there are only like 10 bad sectors but they must be the important ones) with no backup.... What are my options?
B) I'd like to salvage the recordings on the existing drives (A&B). Like I said, i believe this is possible to do these days? Correct?
C)I'm looking for as close to a "step by step" guide as possible. Or al least pointing me in the right direction. I'm desperate! I've been without a Tivo for over a year and a half. I've done the research, but it's all over a year old. I'm hoping you all will take pity on me. I've seriously put in many, many hours trying to recover this on my own. I don't know if I have the gumption to start from scratch again...

Yo dude! Why not get a new bloody Tivo!??!?!?
Simply because I'm planning on going HD in a little while, but not there yet. I want something to use until then and besides, this unit does have a lifetime membership. Once I do end up going HD, I can certainly use this as a secondary unit for other rooms. It's worth salvaging for present and future use. If by some bizzare twist it cannot be done, then I would at least like to get the shows off the drives. I know they are there since most of the HDD space is corruption free

Thanks for reading.

DD

[jerrymc]

Try dd_rescue to do an exact copy of your A drive to a new drive that's at least as large. If you're original A drive is a Maxtor, you'll need to copy to a Maxtor of the same or larger size, or to a larger size of any other drive. (Maxtor 40GB is larger than a WD 40GB for example.) I believe dd_rescue is available on the current version of the PTVUpgrade mfstools ISO. It may also be on the mfslive image (www.mfslive.com).

You can search this forum for lots of info on useing dd_rescue. It's been well documented.

-Jerry

[destinydog]

Try dd_rescue to do an exact copy of your A drive to a new drive that's at least as large. If you're original A drive is a Maxtor, you'll need to copy to a Maxtor of the same or larger size, or to a larger size of any other drive. (Maxtor 40GB is larger than a WD 40GB for example.) I believe dd_rescue is available on the current version of the PTVUpgrade mfstools ISO. It may also be on the mfslive image

You can search this forum for lots of info on useing dd_rescue. It's been well documented.

-Jerry

Thanks for the reply Jerry. I can't recall if I tried dd-rescue specfically, but I know that the issue was that an exact image of the drive won't work simply since the essintial sectors seem to be corrupt. That's why I tried spinrite. I managed to recover most of the sectors, but not enough for the drive to boot..

I guess I've been trying hard to salvage the drive along with the shows all at the same time. Is there a way to do this separately? IE. Maybe I just ditch this drive. Get new one. Make it bootable. And then transfer/recover programs individually from the old drive. I just forgo the bad sectors entirely. Is that even doable?

Although I'd like to recover the recordings, I guess at this point it seems more important to revive the unit itself.

DD

[BTUx9]

reviving the unit can be attempted with an instantcake image (or begging one here)

saving the recordings in a PC would probably work best with mfs_tmfstream, but if your unit was not hacked previously, you'd also need to retrieve and restore the current disk encryption key.

The only tool that currently works for re-inserting recordings is mfs_ftp, which means you'd need networking running, too.

p.s. even though we're talking about repair of a broken system, this is a gray area of extraction, and in general shouldn't be discussed on this forum

[destinydog]

reviving the unit can be attempted with an instantcake image (or begging one here)

saving the recordings in a PC would probably work best with mfs_tmfstream, but if your unit was not hacked previously, you'd also need to retrieve and restore the current disk encryption key.

The only tool that currently works for re-inserting recordings is mfs_ftp, which means you'd need networking running, too.

p.s. even though we're talking about repair of a broken system, this is a gray area of extraction, and in general shouldn't be discussed on this forum

THanks for the info!

As for the image. My Unit is a Phillips Ser 1 HDR312. With 40+ hrs combined of troubleshooting over the past year and a half or so, with zero success, consider me begging!

As an alternative, I do still have the original factory A drive from the tivo. I tried to reinsert this one, but it wouldn't work since it had been "blessed" to work with a B drive. Is there a way to "unbless" this drive to make it work as a solo drive again?

As far as the extraction, I'd probably be more interested at this point in simply archiving the shows to DVD or something, rather than actually reinserting them into the new drives(although that is an interesting option; didn't even know that was possible). That way I could open up some space on the drives. But my question, why all the secrecy? There seems to be so many utilities to archive shows to a pc or dvd, including tivotogo. I figured it was no longer an issue. I guess I was wrong about the taboo being lifted!

As far as the encryption key (which I'm assuminging is the "Voldemort" of these forums), I'm almost certain my unit has not been "hacked". The only thing I ever did was upgrade my drives and I know that with the last upgrade I was running up against a 137GB ceiling for drive recognition. My current setup is a 120gb A drive and a 100gb B drive. But do I even need the key to simply archive this stuff? And do I have to actually network my tivo (something I was considering doing until it died) or can this work by connecting drives directly to a PC?

If this can't be discussed here, I understand. All I want is to get my unit up and running and salvage some shows. I know it's possible to do but I just don't have the knowledge. But I know others do...

Thanks for all your help guys!

DD

[BTUx9]

As far as the extraction, I'd probably be more interested at this point in simply archiving the shows to DVD or something, rather than actually reinserting them into the new drives(although that is an interesting option; didn't even know that was possible). That way I could open up some space on the drives. But my question, why all the secrecy? There seems to be so many utilities to archive shows to a pc or dvd, including tivotogo. I figured it was no longer an issue. I guess I was wrong about the taboo being lifted!
That decision has been made by the owner of the board, and has never been reversed.

Given that you ARE talking about an unhacked tivo, the only thing that can be done with the extracted recordings is to put them back on the original tivo (as there are NO tools available to decrypt then on a PC)

Feel free to contact me via IM, if you want to delve into more details that can't be discussed here.