My hard drives are SATA. My mobo does have 2 IDE ports and I have optical drives as Master on each one. It would make it easier for me to leave the DVD drive as Primary Master so I'd only have to disconnect the DVD drive on the Secondary Ide channel to hook up the Tivo drive and the new HDD. Will MFSlive work like that or does the DVD drive have to be Primary Slave?
Thanks,
BGC
The MFS Live CD v1.4, is not as fussy as the ptvupgrade cd about drive placement (and is newer). There are some features that were written with specific assignments in mind (for instance I think it won't byte swap all 4 IDE devices), but most of it will let you get away with a lot. If your motherboard will let you attach a CD (or DVD) drive to a port and boot from it, you can do so with the MFS Live cd. For the most part, the assignments suggested in the FAQ and instructions are just that, suggestions, designed to allow relative novices to use it successfully without accidently wiping out the wrong hard drive.
You can read from hda through hd-somewhere around g or h I think, and from sda to about the same range. SATA drives and USB attached drives and other devices, like thumb drives, get classified as sd"x".
SCSI drives and devices, I have no idea, don't have any with which to play^H^H^experiment.
If you want to boot from hda, then you could do something like
backup -Tao - /dev/hdc | restore -s (swap size) -xpi - /dev/hdd
although
backup -Tao - /dev/hdb | restore -s (swap size) -xpi - /dev/hdc
or
backup -Tao - /dev/hdb | restore -s (swap size) -xpi - /dev/hdd
might be faster.
If I were using your equipment I'd leave both opticals attached and attach the drives as Primary and Secondary slaves.
That's provided that it was easy to physically attach the IDE cables and Molex power plugs that way.
Otherwise, I'd just go with whatever's easiest to hook up.
As long as your mobo will let you boot from whatever optical has a cd in it before it touches the hard drives, it should work for most things you want to do.
IF YOU HAVE A GIGABYTE MOTHERBOARD YOU MAY NEED A "SACRIFICIAL" IDE DRIVE.
Gigabyte motherboards from the past several years have a nasty (and apparently undefeatable) habit of creating Host Protected Areas on the first IDE drive in the food chain, or the first SATA hard drive if no IDE present.
TiVos aren't prepared to deal with that.
