[Neil F]

Hi everyone,

I was hoping for a bit of advice from the more experienced TIVO hackers on here.

I had a hard drive failure in about September so replaced the failed B drive (original 30gig A drive) with a 250gig. I made the 120gig which was my A drive the B in the new set up.

Anyway, I come to watch CBB4 launch last night and blank screen on the TIVO and no response to the peanut.

After a few reboots I got it to come back to life and upon checking the kernal log found this entry occured a few times:-

Jan 5 10:40:05 (none) kernel: Stopping immediate on Ide
Jan 5 10:40:05 (none) kernel: IDE: tivo DMA engine aborted
Jan 5 10:40:05 (none) kernel: hda: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Jan 5 10:40:05 (none) kernel: hda: irq timeout: error=0xd0 { BadSector UncorrectableError SectorIdNotFound }, secCnt=208, LBAsect=13684944
Jan 5 10:40:05 (none) kernel: hda: disabled DMA
Jan 5 10:40:05 (none) kernel: hda: ide-tivo re-enabled DMA
Jan 5 10:40:05 (none) kernel: hdb: disabled DMA
Jan 5 10:40:05 (none) kernel: hdb: ide-tivo re-enabled DMA
Jan 5 10:40:06 (none) kernel: ide0: reset: success

So it looks like I have a bad sector?? I take it hda will be the master drive in the TIVO?

The few times it occured, it always said LBAsect=13684944. Will Tivo map out this bad sector?

I have just backed up my season passes and tarballed my /var/hack/ as a 1st precaution but things look bad The 'clouds' animation that plays in the background of the menus now has a pixellation glitch in it that repeats every few secs.

Anyone any suggestions on how to fix this most painlessly? It's took me ages to get all the hacks running since I rebuilt a few months ago and I don't know If I could face doing it all again so soon hehe

thanks
Neil

 

[Glesgie]

Yes hda is the Master drive.

A copy of the drive using ddrescue is your best hope for retaining your data and recordings.

 

[Neil F]

Hiya

Thanks for the reply.

I take it that backup would be the same size as the original though?

I have 250gig + 120gig drives, So I take it I would need a 370gig drive to put the image on? Or does it copy direct from old A drive to new A drive and I could leave my B drive as is?

To be honest, losing my recordings wouldn't be the end of the world for me. I'm more worried about losing all the hours I've put into getting modeØ, turbonet, tivowebplus, hackman, endpad etc etc etc working nice

ta
Neil

 

[blindlemon]

With just one bad sector there's a good chance you will be able to make a minimal MFSTools backup of the system - so just preserving your settings and hacks etc.

If I didn't want the recordings I would try that first as it only takes 10 minutes if it works

If you have to use dd_rescue then you can leave the "B" drive untouched. However, if the corruption has damaged your system files or the MFS then you may still end up with a non-working system.

 

[Neil F]

Thank you for that info.

I'm just looking at the hard drive selection i can buy locally. I notice thread in the past have said you can't replace manufacturer 'A' with 'B' because their drive is slightly smaller. With this in mind could you suggest a good replacement from these as I have no idea how to work that out and wouldnt like to buy one thats smaller than what I have.

the failing drive I have in is a maxtor 250gig 7L250S0. this has a 5 year warranty so it will be going back!

Drives in stock that I can get locally:-

250 GB Samsung SP2514N 7200rpm 8Mb Cache IDE ATA133 (3yr Warranty)
Manufacturers Code: SP2514N

250 GB Western Digital Caviar 8MB Cache 7200rpm ATA100 Fluid Bearings (JB)
Manufacturers Code: WD2500JB

250 GB Seagate Barracuda® 8MB Cache 7200rpm ATA100 (Manufacturer's 5yr Warranty)
Manufacturers Code: ST3250823A

250 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 lead free 7200rpm 16MB ATA133 Cache
Manufacturers Code: 6L250R0

I don't suppose you have any idea which is big enough to allow me to restore my image? Or is there a way round restoring to a smaller drive these days?

Many thanks
Neil

 

[blindlemon]

Unfortunately, the only drive likely to be as big as your failed Maxtor is the other Maxtor

The drive I would recommend out of the above would be the Seagate, but that's definitely smaller. However, if you can get a divorced minimal backup (-l32 -so) then you should be able to restore that to any drive >= 30GB.

 

[Neil F]

Thanks again blindlemon. Your a star!

I'll go with the seagate then and hope i can get a 'divorced minimal backup'! I don't fancy getting another maxtor...3 months out of a brand new drive and it was meant to be industrial strength for 24/7 use!

I may be back with more questions about divirced backups later hehe

Once again your help is much appreciated - Thanks

Neil

 

[Neil F]

Hi

I think i need a bit more advice now. I have connected the drives up to my PC, run mfstool 2 CD and created a backup but it says:-

Source drive is 30 hours
- upgraded to 283 hours
-upgraded to 427 hours

Backup image will be 427 hours

I would have expected the image to be 30 hours for it to fit on my new disk? Is that correct?
I tried the mfsbackup command with:-

mfsbackup -l 32 -so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb
and
mfsbackup -l 32 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb

but both said 427 hours. What is the relevance of the '6'? Anyone any suggestions before I revert back tp my older image with no hacks etc

 

[blindlemon]

Your backup has failed to divorce due to small recordings scattered over various data partitions.

You need to put the drive back in your TiVo, telnet in and run my DeleteAll script from the bash prompt to clear out all the recordings. Then when you retry the backup it should divorce cleanly (discarding the additional partitions) and give you a 30 hour image.

The 6 is the compression factor for the backup if you use the built-in compression. However, it's buggy, which is why people sometimes get a "compression error" when trying to restore a vital backup - so I now always leave it out. An uncompressed backup will be about 1.4GB in size (compared to 350mb for a compressed one) but can be zipped down to around 350mb if you need to - and Winzip doesn't suffer from compression errors, AFAIK

 

[Neil F]

Fantastic! I will get right onto that

Thanks for explaining the '6' too. I have an old 5gig FAT drive I'm using, so size doesnt matter (so they say lol)

Thanks again and I'll let you know how I get on..
Neil

 

[Neil F]

Thanks a million Blindlemon

All went well and it's up and running. One problem, I'm still left with the glitchy graphics in the menus. I think its either the clouds anim but its hard to tell exactly because its at the top near the title of the menu.
I've read about this 'kickstart' that reinstalls the operating system and wonder if that would be a good option. I might give it a try. at least I have a good 30hour backup if it all goes nasty!

Neil

 

[Neil F]

Ok I tried the following and i'm now stuck in a reboot loop..I think i better face the music and restore from my clean image and use the tarball of /var/hack that i have

bash-2.02# mfscheck
EventSwitcher stopped
mfscheck scan begins
Segmentation fault
bash-2.02# mfsassert -please
Filesystem assert: false && "mfsassert" at fsassert_main.C line 37 in int fsasse
rt_main(int, char **)
Filesystem flagged as inconsistent!
Tmk Assertion Failure: false && "mfsassert"
int fsassert_main(int, char **), line 37 (fsassert_main.C)
Tmk Fatal Error: Thread mfsassert <177> died due to signal -2
1a344ec 1a32a44 1a1a604 1a160f8 1c28cd4 1800134