Backup after the GSOD.

[Podwin]

Hi

I got the GSOD this weekend and reckon the two 120GB Samsung drives are probably worn out after 4 years, although I reckon a timer plug turning everything off at night for the last 2 weeks has probably caused this (not my idea but I should have thought).

I’ve not been on here for ages and I’m surprised (and pleased) to find out TiVo’s are now past the 136GB barrier and a single 250GB is the way to go.

I thought I’d try and backup my settings following the excellent guide by Steve Conrad as recommended on here.

Due to the GSOD I’m not surprised I’ve seen some errors, but can I get away with saving my settings? What do people think?

Even though there was screens of errors (see image) the backup started and completed, so is it OK? Do the errors refer to actual recordings which I am going to bin anyway, or could the backup of settings be corrupt?

http://i114.photobucket.com/albums/n250/podwin/Tivo/tivobackup.gif

Cheers

Martin

[blindlemon]

Not much way of telling until you try to restore the backup :(

If that fails you might have better luck making and restoring a backup with the CD from www.mfslive.org as that has more resilient and forgiving error checking and seems to do a better job salvaging a working backup from corrupt drives.

[Podwin]

I was going to restore this backup to a single drive, can I do that, or does it expect to be restored to 2 drives as I originally had?

[blindlemon]

That's not a divorced backup and from the messages on the screen I would think you have 3 MFS partitions which means you can restore it to a single drive >= 240gb but can't expand to fill the drive unless you use the MFSLive Beta CD with the -f option.

If you can get a divorced backup then you can restore that to any size drive >= 40gb.

[Podwin]

OK, please bare with me as I've forgotten all about this kind of stuff and haven't tinkered with the Tivo's for 4 years, just used them.

Basically I can restore the backup I now have onto a single 250GB drive, but it will only appear as a 240GB system, which would be fine.

The command from the Steve Conrad site below will do the job, is that right?
restore -x -s 300 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb

Then patch the kernel as he describes for a single drive system of this size.

I used to have 4 hard disks, and copy the entire contents in one go as a backup, using my specially built PC with SCSI CDROM. But my other set of HDs were Western Digitals and one failed. So I gave up, plus it took 11 hours to do, and I can't find my notes I need for my bad memory on how to do it.

[blindlemon]

You need to boot from the LBA48 CD and run the command almost as shown but specifying only one destination drive - eg.

mfsrestore -s 300 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

assuming your new 250gb drive is attached to secondary master.

Then run copykern, choosing hdc and kernel option 1.

[Podwin]

Cheers blindlemon, I was looking at the dual drive command.

Any thoughts on Hitachi drives? The Samsungs seem hard to get, most being out of stock at the moment. I am tempted by this http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/IDE/250GB+Hitachi+IDE+7200rpm+8MB+?productId=30207

I don't want Seagate and definately not WD or Maxstor.

[blindlemon]

I prefer Samsung - you can still get the excellent HA250JC media drives from Ultratec - www.ultratec.co.uk - and if you order within the next 15 minutes you may be lucky and have it dispatched today and with you tomorrow :up:

Failing that, I would prefer Seagate, followed by WD - Hitachi does not have a good reputation for noise, heat or reliability.

[Podwin]

Thanks :up:

[Podwin]

Hi

Drive came yesterday, great company as they reliable and quick.

Anyway, I am getting a decompression error (91%) when restoring. Could this be due to the drive failure and hence I should give up, or is it worth taking another backup without compression.

Though I was thinking of trying to take a backup again without the -s switch, but this is what I need to divorce the backup isn't it? Since I am going from 2 drives to 1.

Thanks

Martin

[Podwin]

I ran an another backup without compression (-so /blah/blah) then restored using the command you quoted (mfsrestore -s 300 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc).

The boot CD states to use restore and not mfsrestore, what's the difference?

I didn't see any of that due to booting using a SCSI CDROM drive, which I realised something was wrong when I couldn't run COPYKERN.

The restore completed though, I will see if it works in Tivo tonight.

Thanks for the pointers

[blindlemon]

So did you run copykern in the end?

[Podwin]

Hi

Yes, it all seemed OK with an IDE CDROM. It all looked good until I put it back in the Tivo.

It hung on the "Welcome Powering Up" screen, What does that mean?

Martin