Tortuous Upgrade Path - Nanvue can help?

[AMc]

Hi,

I had a 30GB+15GB Tivo which I upgraded in the dark ages to 120GB+30GB
That borked any possibility of a further upgrade to a single 400GB drive with recordings. The Tivo also has a Cachecard with RAM.

I want to replace the disc, I want to keep some recordings & I want to minimise the Tivo downtime.

So I have a plan...
- Back up my season passes (with TivoWeb)
- Backup my /var (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=384570&highlight=backup+var)
- Back up rc.sysinit.author
- Back up the recordings - about 100GB onto my PC

Then
- Restore a fresh image to the 400GB drive...
- Install the network drivers.
- Swap discs
- Run Guided Setup
- Replace /var and rc.sysinit.author with FTP and telnet
- Squirt my recordings back over time with Tivo up and running.

I now have built the new 400GB, copykerned and installed the Cachecard drivers. Assuming I've done that properly it should just drop in once I've done getting some big files from Tivo over a very long Cat5e cable (PC in the office Tivo in the lounge and wireless 'g' not cutting it).

I have run a test to put things back, which worked OK but I ended up using DOS ftp on port 3105 as I couldn't make head or tail of profiles in NV?!? Google and the other place have failed me on "nanvue how to" or "nanvue instructions" searches.

So finally the question -
Does anyone know where I can find more information on Nanvue use?
PM appreciated as we can't talk much if at all about this here, but I can't see where else to ask?

[Pete77]

So finally the question -
Does anyone know where I can find more information on Nanvue use?
PM appreciated as we can't talk much if at all about this here, but I can't see where else to ask?

Surely you already did though?:rolleyes:

I don't use it myself but I can manage to type in a few characters on my keyboard in Google though.;):p

See http://tivoza.nanfo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=423

If you join the forum presumably you can ask Site Admin a question?

[AMc]

I don't use it myself but I can manage to type in a few characters on my keyboard in Google though.
So can I Pete77:rolleyes: but there is no "how to" , "walkthrough" or anything remotely resembling documentation. Just 16 topics and 72 posts in more than 18 months.
I'm hoping one of the people who've posted here in the past has a clue they can provide.

[Pete77]

Are you aware of this previous thread though as if you were then surely you would have made a post there rather than start this new thread?

See www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=368981&highlight=nanvue

Perhaps RichardJH or coolstream can help if you PM them as both seem to use this software.

[AMc]

Pete77 I'm sure you're trying to help but I can do a search and I can use Google. Having exhausted all those options I posted this thread.

I don't think that was an appropriate thread for my question (nor the other threads here and in the archive with nanvue in them) - I'm trying to get around an irritating problem upgrading a previously upgraded 2 disc Tivo with recordings I want to keep. I'm hoping that this novel approach will get around that and that this will help future posters if it works.

[Pete77]

This is a very niche piece of software so inevitably it comes with little support because so few people use it.

Surely if you start a new thread you only minimise your chances of those with previous experience of the software and perhaps able to point you to a walk through guide from even being aware of your question. Also wouldn't the creator of the software be the most likely person to know if any such guide exists?

[AMc]

So after quite a lot of fiddling and a great deal of waiting the upgrade is over :up::):up:
End to end took just under a week but a lot of that was setting things going and discovering hours later that they'd stalled out.

It went...
- Back up my season passes (with TivoWeb)
OK

- Backup my /var
Didn't check the file ('cos my Linux is pants) and discovered it was 4MB and didn't work :( Thankfully I had an earlier one around 10MB which was OK.

- Back up rc.sysinit.author
Also back up .profile from the root. It's not arduous to recreate, but it's easier to copy it.

- Back up the recordings - about 100GB onto my PC
Putting Tivo into Standby sped up transfer. I ran a long ethernet cable and it still only transfered a bit faster than real time (1 hour taking around 45 mins).

Then
- Restore a fresh image to the 400GB drive...
Easy enough once I'd got the right boot disc ptv-mfstools2-large-disk.iso Don't forget to Copykern!

- Install the network drivers.
Also OK

- Swap discs
Easy Peasey apart from disconnecting Tivo from the bottom of the AV stack - shudder.

- Run Guided Setup
I should have run a 'clear and delete everything' first. I inherited some Now Playing entries and Season Passes from the owner of the original image. That meant 'House Doctor' and a few other things were scheduled in before I noticed and that caused some trouble with conflicts.

- Replace /var and rc.sysinit.author with FTP and telnet and .profile
Oh God, where to start?
My advice is to set read/write on the disk, then FTP your /var image back into the root, decompress from there then mount as read only.
I ended up with /var/hack/var/hack at one point :(. I really wish I knew more about Linux as tidying up would have been better if I'd known how to zap the /var folder structure quickly from the telnet command line.

In a moment of panic I installed TivoWeb using tivoheaven's script which did some other things I should have checked before I started. Absolutely nothing wrong with the script (which is very clever) but I made my own life more complicated once I'd worked out how to install 'my' Tivoweb later on but was left with some remnants of both installs.

While trying to clean up my /var restore I managed to corrupt my cachecard driver so it stopped caching but kept networking. Thankfully I was able to rerun the install over the network without pulling the drive again using stuff from http://www.silicondust.com/forum/

- Restore my season passes (with TivoWeb)
Once GS and indexing were complete. This wasn't too bad, but I then had to go and prune the SP's from the image which were in the first 30 positions.
Something I failed to anticipatem, I lost all my thumbs (ouch!) which isn't likely to bother me much but might some people I suppose.

- Squirt my recordings back over time with Tivo up and running.
Took a long time, about 1/2 the speed of getting recordings off though not 'chasing Tivo' recording new programmes and us watching and deleting things made that more bearable. I did have one file that transfered then crashed out each time. I ended up transcoding that and then putting it back. They arrive as suggestions so I turned recording suggestions off until I'd got everything over and set them as keep until...
Something to watch for if you put your programmes back is that Tivo doesn't know much about them. I lost some new programmes while Tivo re-recorded episodes that the 28 day rule would have known were repeats of stuff in Now Playing.

Nanvue did help as it had a slightly prettier interface, but I actually did a lot of the grunt work using DOS ftp. I found the underlying process was quite fond of giving up without explanation, so I did a lot of babysitting and I would give yourself a LONG time to use this way to upgrade and keep your recordings.

I had a really horrible moment when I came down in the morning and found Tivo humming away in the cabinet. The new drive was resonating the case which meant I had to move the drive from one mounting point to the other and tighten the mounting screws more than I had.

Hopefully that will help someone else out there who's stuck with a 2 drive to 2 drive upgraded Tivo and more recordings than time to watch them!

Thanks again to the hacking communities who made the software and forum threads that made it possible to upgrade again!

[Pete77]

Hopefully that will help someone else out there who's stuck with a 2 drive to 2 drive upgraded Tivo and more recordings than time to watch them!

I am indeed in that position with about 400 hours of such programs but to be honest if it ever came to it I would simply give up on them rather than going through what sound like the Herculean struggles you have been through to keep them on the Tivo. Most of the ones I don't watch are not that important to me. A lot of its F1 Grand Prix stuff I didn't fully watch due to the convenience of having Tivo and then found I could never get down to in the same way as watching the 3 hours if they were actually on live. Yet if my Tivo records a new episode of Air Crash Investigation I cannot resist watching it within 24 hours.

As my drives are two Samsung HA250JCs I'm just hoping they may actually last until Tivo withdraws UK Tivo service but as that may be another 3 or 4 years away then again perhaps they won't. Or perhaps Tivo will pull the current service sooner if they can replace it with a superior PC offering and give us the chance to upgrade our Lifetime Subs free of charge in order to become free marketing agents for them in the UK.

[ColinYounger]

I've wondered in the past if there's an easier way to back up recordings. One route I thought of was to use an FTP client on TiVo to connect to itself, then 'transfer' the programmes out of the MFS into files which are on TiVo. Then tar it all up and FTP it off normally.

When restoring, you FTP the tarball back onto TiVo and FTP the programmes back onto itself.

Unfortunately, I haven't got enough play time at the moment to try this out. Anyone else?

[Pete77]

I've wondered in the past if there's an easier way to back up recordings. One route I thought of was to use an FTP client on TiVo to connect to itself, then 'transfer' the programmes out of the MFS into files which are on TiVo. Then tar it all up and FTP it off normally.

When restoring, you FTP the tarball back onto TiVo and FTP the programmes back onto itself.

Unfortunately, I haven't got enough play time at the moment to try this out. Anyone else?

I think mikerr has some impressive method to ensure that everything is totally backed up (including programs) and could be easily restored in the event of the worst happening.

[AMc]

I've wondered in the past if there's an easier way to back up recordings. One route I thought of was to use an FTP client on TiVo to connect to itself, then 'transfer' the programmes out of the MFS into files which are on TiVo. Then tar it all up and FTP it off normally.

When restoring, you FTP the tarball back onto TiVo and FTP the programmes back onto itself.
I've basically done what you're suggesting but using a PC to manage the Tivo. I'm not sure I understand what you win by using Tivo? I thought the point about MFS was to deal elegantly with very large files. If your Tivo is quite full and you want to upgrade you're unlikely to have enough free space to duplicate the programmes in MFS as individual recordings as well or to create new partitions for storage only. The tar would help to consolidate lots of files into one, but (based on my experience) that just increases the chances of the transfer failing. You aren't going to gain any compression over the MPEG2 already in use.

If you simply want to allow tivo to schedule recordings and move them elsewhere automagically then take a look at Nanvue and see if you can work out how the heck it works...

[ColinYounger]

Accepted that the usual upgrade path means that you'd need the disk-space first...

I suppose I'm just musing - Main Tivo refuses to call by network and the only solution for me as far as I can see is to re-image. But the chances of getting it empty are small and I'll get shouted at if I lose the programs. :o

[RichardJH]

and I'll get shouted at if I lose the programs.
NanVue will certainly help out. Send all the progs to the PC and then send them back to the re-imaged Tivo.

You will lose the dates on the replaced programmes and from my experience the channel recorded will show as ffmpeg. but they are all working OK albeit Mikerr's SortNP has trouble ordering them correctly.

[Pete77]

Main Tivo refuses to call by network and the only solution for me as far as I can see is to re-image.

Trying re-running Guided Setup to a different platform then cold and warm rebooting (after indexing is finished) and then moving from that platform back to your actual platform via Guided Setup again and then cold rebooting and warm rebooting again often seems to do the trick. Also I take it you do have an & sign at the end of each line in your rc.sysinit, rc.sysinit.author or rc.sysinit.author.edit file?

What is the size of you swap file as this is another known problem area.

[ColinYounger]

Pete - appreciate the suggestions. I think I'll give the GS route a go.

The rc.sysinit.author is fine, and I'm pretty sure the person who supplied the disk originally on the main TiVo set the swap file OK. ;)

[TCM2007]

Main Tivo refuses to call by network and the only solution for me as far as I can see is to re-image.

Is there another thread on this? You shouldn't have to re-image, just fifure out where the wrong setting is.

[mikerr]

If you simply want to allow tivo to schedule recordings and move them elsewhere automagically then take a look at Nanvue and see if you can work out how the heck it works...

eTivo is better for that IMO, but it doesn't put them back.

( daily call over network)

Pulling the drive and running "nic_install cachecard" to reinstall the drivers and reset the dialup settings has always worked for me - that's a relatively quick, non-destructive fix.

nic_config_tivo on the tivo sometimes doesn't work for changing dialup settings...

[ColinYounger]

Re daily call - yes there's another thread. I've tried all the usual fixes and the only thing that fixed play TiVo was a reimage.

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