Drive restore problems - help needed

[Craig B]

My 120Gb drive failed last week and seems terminal. I had my original 40Gb disk which I made a backup from and also found an older backup image but had no luck restoring them. I got a large disk image from the requests thread but am getting the same problem with that also.

When I switch on the Tivo I don't get to the Powering on screen so am assuming that the drive is not being recognised. If I put in the original 40Gb disk it boots fine so I know the box is good.

I cannot follow the guides online exactly to restore as I migrated to macs last year and the only pc I have left is a small form factor one which has limited expansion. It only has Primary master, slave and secondary master cables, but only 2 power cables of the right size. To get round this I have been using the mfslive 1.3b image and then mounting a usb flash drive containing the backup image which works fine.

I run the backup using something like "restore -b -s 127 -xzpi /dos/tivo48.bak /dev/hdb" and this runs through fine. I can use bootpage -b /dev/hdb which returns 3 so then I run mount /dev/hdb4 /tivo and this mounts the partition fine and I can move into /tivo and look around.

I have tried using option 1 and option 2 on the mfslive boot choice and tried various combinations of -b or no -b, different swap sizes, -n and so on, connecting new drive to secondary master and using /dev/hdc but everything results in the same, ie. the Tivo doesn't seem to recognise it.

When the Tivo powers on you can hear it spinning but no drive activity, maybe there is a little blip at the start but it is difficult to tell. I have tried all the drive jumper settings, master, slave, cable select. The drive is a samsung 160gb which was the working disk from the sff pc so is known good.

Sorry for the rambling post but my wife is losing patience with no tivo. Thanks

[blindlemon]

Have you checked the IDE cable?

[Craig B]

I am presuming that it is ok as if I plug my 6-7 year old 40Gb drive it boots up fine. I think the new disk is good as it works fine in Windows and I also tried using the failed disk(although I wouldn't use this in production as it has already failed once). The failed disk does the same thing, you can mount it fine in Linux but just isn't recognised. Before it failed it used to stick at the Powering on screen so Tivo recognised it but wouldn't boot it.

I tried using maketivobootable but that didn't fix it.

[blindlemon]

In that case, something is clearly going wrong with your restore. Try this command:-

restore - s 300 -r4 -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo48.bak /dev/hdc

then reboot from the LBA48 boot CD and run copykern, choosing kernel option 1.

[Craig B]

Thanks for your help, that command was one of several I had already tried and gave exactly the same result. However, I noticed that on powerup the green light flashed which gave me the opportunity to try the kickstart commands.

I ran a 57, force mfs check and then a 58, mfs cleanup. It seemed to do nothing for a while but then just started working so a much better state than before.

I then setup my turbonet card and performed a call to get some guide data. 2 hours later it is still loading data, only 16% to go now. I cannot ping my tivo now although could before so am presuming that it is something to do with loading the data.

My only problem now is how to get all my hacks going again years after first doing them. I have a backup of /var/hack but no rc.sysinit so am reading old threads again. I'm so glad that there is a tivo community out there as it is very helpful.