In general, can data from bad TiVo HDs be salvaged?

The other possibility is that your TiVo's power supply is failing. But in case your hard drive is in the process of failing, you could try cloning it ASAP with Gnu ddrescue as found on the SystemRescueCd (my new favorite rescue CD). You would need a target drive of equal or larger size. Search for threads here that mention ddrescue. And be careful of your ddrescue parameters, since it will happily copy an empty drive over your TiVo drive if you tell it to do so. And you might want to read "How To Clone Your Failing TiVo Drive With ddrescue", which is a sort of TiVo-specific tutorial. I believe you could also use Dvr Backup And Restore Software for Windows (DvrBARS), but I haven't tried it yet.

 

How the hard drive and just curious if it updated to the most recent version?

Scott

 

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If you happen to already have burned yourself a copy of the MFS Live cd, it has

dd_rescue

which is very similar to

ddrescue

and you could use either to "Xerox" the drive to another of the same size, or perhaps larger.

 

If you're going to use a GigaByte brand PC motherboard to do the work, don't hook any drives to it 'til we've talked about how to avoid getting them messed up because of the tendency of those boards to slap Host Protected Areas on drives without warning. There is a way around that.

As far as I know, that's the only brand that offers that particular danger.



Series 1 and Series 2 TiVos used the older PATA/IDE data connectors for hard drives, but they switched over to SATA beginning with the first Series 3.


One thing to keep in mind in a Linux-type environment is that something in uppercase letters is probably not the same thing as the same thing in lowercase letters.



Something like

dd_rescue -?

should bring up a help screen of sorts, kind of like DOS files would with

somefile.exe /?

back in the command line days.

In fact, the list of options, which are invoked in the form

dd_rescue -x

where x is a letter, will probably show you that you could get that same help screen with

dd_rescue -h

the "h" standing for "help".



As for your MFS Live cd, it should offer 4 choices when it boots and the first choice should work fine. It's the default, so if you make no choice, it'll choose that one and continue booting after 10 or 20 seconds or so.

Eventually you should get a command prompt that looks like this

[mfslive:/]#


but if you have any drives connected by USB you may get that prompt, and then some other stuff related to the USB stuff, and then it finishes and sits, but not at that command prompt.

If so, hitting Enter should get it to finish up and get back to


[mfslive:/]#


Once you're there, entering

fdisk -l


(which will look like

[mfslive:/]# fdisk -l


on the screen)

should show you what drives are connected and which one is called what.

The naming convention is the first PATA/IDE drive, if any, would be

/dev/hda

the next one would be

/devhdb

and so on through the alphabet.

The first SATA drive would be

/dev/sda


but the "s" was originally, in early Linux/Unix days, to differentiate between PATA/IDE and SCSI drives.

Nowadays SCSI, SATA, and USB connected drives are all

/dev/sda

or

/dev/sdb

and so on.

You'll need to know for certain which drive is being called what by that version of Linux that boot cd loads so that you don't write anything to the wrong drives.


If there's a cd or dvd drive, that version of

fdisk

will probably "choke" when it gets to it, and if it's not last on the list of drives connected, you won't see the one(s) that follow(s).


But, there's another little program on that cd/built into the OS the cd loads into the PC's memory.

That program is

pdisk

and is similar to

fdisk

but what it does is tell you about drives which have been formatted, not with the DOS/IBM Master Boot Record scheme that

fdisk

can detect, but with the Apple Partition Map which TiVos use.


So

pdisk -l

can help you find which drives are TiVo drives, which are not TiVo drives, and which are not yet TiVo drives.

Also, you can, instead of adding a global "list" option to fdisk or pdisk, with

-l


you can target either at a particular drive.

For example,

fdisk -l /dev/sdd

if you have 3 hard drives and a cd drive and the cd drive is 3rd (/dev/sdc) on the list and you know it shouldn't stop the list there.

So, once you're sure which disk is which, let's assume for illustration that your Windows hard drive (which you bypassed when you booted from the cd) is /dev/sda, the cd drive shows up as /dev/sdb, the TiVo drive you want to copy is /dev/sdc, and the new blank drive is /dev/sdd.

The general form is

command (options) source target

so you'd do

dd_rescue -v /dev/sdc /dev/sdd

where -v tells it to use verbose mode, which gives info on what it's doing as it's doing it.

There are other options, including some to specify how many bytes to try to copy at once and how many fewer to fall back to if it hits a snag, but the defaults will probably suffice in your case.

 

I had to do some memory refreshing myself before writing that.

If you don't work with the stuff all the time, the details start getting fuzzy.

 

There's about 3 phases to a linux boot, that have completely different hardware drivers.

BIOS, bootloader, and linux kernel.

Differences between the three's version of supported hardware, can lead to scenarios where hardware that was working later disappears.

Just grab a keyboard from another computer and move one. (If ps2, try USB. If USB, try ps2. If AT, get a new computer)

 

I seem to recall there being some older, like maybe pre-DDR type RAM era, AMD CPU-based motherboards that the version of Linux on the MFS Live cd had problems with.

 

Not recognizing the CD drive is something that might be fixed when using a newer Linux disk.

 

An IDE/PATA ribbon cable is right at just about 2 inches wide.

If the one in your eMachines that goes to the DVD drive has a blue connector plugged into the motherboard, and on the other end a black connector and near that a gray connector, it's the newer 80 conductor 40 connector type, which is strictly Cable Select when it come to figuring out which is Master and which is Slave, therefore both the DVD drive and any IDE hard drive you connect need to be jumpered CS.

The black plug on the end is the Master, and the gray plug about 6 inches away from it is the Slave.


If you're using WinMFS or the MFS Live cd, it probably doesn't matter whether the DVD drive is Master and the hard drive is Slave or the other way around.

The old Instant Cake cd's, and maybe the old PTV cd were fussy about that, but you probably shouldn't need either of those for anything these days.

If you need to use a cd-r with a TiVo image on it while running the MFS Live cd, you should first copy the image to a partition on the computer's main hard drive (the SATA one it boots Windows from) and then mount that partition while on the command line after booting with the MFS Live cd and point the restore command towards that.

The main hard drive will be referred to as

/dev/sdX

(Probably /dev/sda)

and the other hard drive, being non-SATA, will be

/dev/hdX

with X depending on stuff, like is it the first SATA port or is it the Master or Slave on the IDE cable.

First port or Master would be "a", second port or slave would be "b", etc.

(If you were using a SATA drive with a SATA/IDE adapter connected to the IDE cable, the computer, and therefore the version of Live Linux the MFS Live cd boots into, would still see it as an IDE device and therefore as a /dev/hdX)


Are you sure you wouldn't rather do all this in WinMFS?

I can probably hook you up with the needed image.