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Help with original series3

1034 Views 7 Replies 2 Participants Last post by  funtoupgrade, 
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I've been away from the Tivo hacking for several years now and am having to relearn everything from scratch since I lost all my notes. I just restored a 1.5TB hard drive using an image from my original series3 hard drive using the lastest MFSlive for DOS. My image is on a PAT drive so I could not use WinMFS. The restore went fine except the new 1.5TB drive only reports up to 35 HD hours or 303 SD hours.

As I recall when using MFStools 2.0 there was a way to expand a drive like this to recoup the missing space. I think it was mfsadd or something. Is there a way to do this using MFSlive?

I'm totally baffled by all the mention of needing a hacked kernal and despite doing the recommended search on ************.com I cannot fathom how one changes the kernal since the ones offered for download are different than those mentioned in the link given on the MSlive forum.

I understand that currently I cannot use the full 1.5TB capacity but 35HD hours are unacceptable. Would appreciate some help with this problem.
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unitron
funtoupgrade said:
I've been away from the Tivo hacking for several years now and am having to relearn everything from scratch since I lost all my notes. I just restored a 1.5TB hard drive using an image from my original series3 hard drive using the lastest MFSlive for DOS. My image is on a PAT drive so I could not use WinMFS. The restore went fine except the new 1.5TB drive only reports up to 35 HD hours or 303 SD hours.

As I recall when using MFStools 2.0 there was a way to expand a drive like this to recoup the missing space. I think it was mfsadd or something. Is there a way to do this using MFSlive?

I'm totally baffled by all the mention of needing a hacked kernal and despite doing the recommended search on ************.com I cannot fathom how one changes the kernal since the ones offered for download are different than those mentioned in the link given on the MSlive forum.

I understand that currently I cannot use the full 1.5TB capacity but 35HD hours are unacceptable. Would appreciate some help with this problem.
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The MFS Live cd boots into a version of Linux, not DOS, although it is a command line interface, and not a Graphical User Interface.

WinMFS will work with both SATA and PATA drives provided you're running the program on a computer with the necessary hard drive controller. If you don't have any SATA ports, you can't use it on SATA drives (without some sort of adapter), and if you don't have PATA ports, you can't use PATA drives (without some sort of adapter).

mfslive.org has instructions for both the MFS Live cd and for WinMFS.

The mfsadd command is in the MFS Live cd version, although you can use the -x option of the restore command to get it to do the same thing.

If you made a backup with the old mfs tools, I think MFS Live can work with it, but WinMFS only works with backups made by WinMFS, and I don't think MFS Live can work with those.
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I did use the -x command when I restored which obviously did not work. I had the PATA backup drive in a USB external enclosure since the computer does not have any PATA ports.

What would be the mfsadd command in MFSLive that I should use on the 1.5TB drive?

And what about the hacked kernal stuff?
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unitron
funtoupgrade said:
I did use the -x command when I restored which obviously did not work. I had the PATA backup drive in a USB external enclosure since the computer does not have any PATA ports.

What would be the mfsadd command in MFSLive that I should use on the 1.5TB drive?

And what about the hacked kernal stuff?
Click to expand...
Can't help you with hacked kernal questions (except for how to use copykern on a Series 1 to get LBA48 support).

The MFS Live cd does have mfsadd, but you may have run into the limit on how many partitions you can have on one drive problem.

When you ran restore with the -x option, did you make the mistake of using the -q option that keeps you from seeing what's going on?

Did you get any kind of error message, like "no room to expand" or something like that?
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I used this restore command:

restore -s -r 4 -xzp1 /dos/series3.bak /dev/sda

As I recall there were no error messages.
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unitron
funtoupgrade said:
I used this restore command:

restore -s -r 4 -xzp1 /dos/series3.bak /dev/sda

As I recall there were no error messages.
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That 1 should have been an i, as in a lowercase I.

It stands for input and means that what comes next is where the restore command should look for its input source.

Also, the -s option should have been followed by a number specifying the size in MB to make the swap partition. Not putting in a number gets you the default size, but if you're restoring to a drive bigger than the original, you probably want to make it larger. There used to be a rule of thumb of 1 MB for every 2 GB of drive space, so, for instance, a 500GB drive would get a 250 entered after the -s (and a space after the s), for a swap partition size of 250 MB.

I don't think the -z option is really necessary.

As for the -r option, I'm not sure it's needed. You should go to mfslive.org and read and read and read.

There are cases where restore doesn't actually do anything (usually because you screwed up the command options), but doesn't return any error messages either.

What size was your original drive? Do you still have it safely tucked away somewhere?
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My mistake - I copied down the wrong command I used. Here is what I did:

restore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi /dos/series3.bak /dev/sda
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Problem solved! After reading through many posts on the forum I found that if one does not want to mess with hacked kernal then forget trying to use any hard drive larger than 1TB. I picked up a new 1TB hard drive yesterday and restored it using my USB PATA drive and MFSlive 1.4. The drive works normally and reports full capacity. Thanks for those of you who offered help on this issue. I am going to start a new thread for this problem in case future hackers can use the info in a search.
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