# Crashed wife's tivo...urgently need help.



## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

Please help.

My wife's R10 was the last tivo in the house to hack. After much struggles, I successfully swapped the proms. It boots a hacked drive with no problems. After testing this, I put it's original drive in and ran the zipper. Before I could realize what I had done, I hit y at the restore image prompt. This is my zipper disc that has a 6.2 (series2, dvr40) image on it. I immediately realized what I had done and Control-C'd out of it, but not before it could uncompress 6 megs. The drive no longer boots.

What does mfs restore do first?

pdisk shows what looks to me like it's original (correct) partition table, so hopefully that is ok.

Only 2 weeks ago, my wife let me get a 750GB for my tivo. I've got save her recordings or it will be the end of life as I know it.

Since all the recordings on this disc were done when it is unhacked, they should still be encrypted. If I have to dd in a new root partition, how do I preserve the encryption key (or is that somewhere in mfs?)

Thank you. Please help me.

<EDIT>

I spoke too soon. The current partition table of the drive is the one from the backup (incorrect) image. The original one is gone.

This is a 250GB drive. It was configured with Instantcake, so I should be able to reproduce it's partition table, with the exception of the MFS pair added when instantcake expanded to fill the rest of the drive. Figuring out that one will be tough.

</EDIT>


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## JWThiers (Apr 13, 2005)

Never had a problem like this that I have read here. I hope the dog house has room. 

Best bet (easiest anyway) would be to restore a 6.1 image (you said you had IC for it) and get it up unhacked again first. then try the hack. You will lose the recordings but the life you save may be your own.


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## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

If the problem was just to get it functional again, I could reimage, no sweat. The lost recordings are what would piss her off. She works irregular hours, night shift at the hospital. She's been working a lot of hours lately, and she uses the tivo to catch up on 2-3 weeks worth of tv when she has a few days off...been a few weeks since that.

I downloaded/installed vmware workstation, and created a virtual pc with a 233.8GB hard drive. I created it with the virtual hard drive in a file on my PC. That way, the size of the virtual hard drive file is only as big as the data on that virtual hard drive, i.e. my 233.8GB virtual hard drive took up less than a gig on my computers real, physical hard drive (only way I could make it fit). The size of my virtual drive was 68,801 blocks larger than the real drive, but that was as close as I could get it (VMware let me select hard drive size in xxx.xxGB, so I couldn't get exact, but that discrepancy works out to about 32KB difference...with 12 or so megs empty space at the end of the drive, it turns out not to matter (i think). After that, I dd'd in partitions 1 thru 9 from a freshly instantcaked disc. I have no idea which, if any of them, fixed the problem, but I did them all, and it seems to work now.

When all done, i ran mfsinfo to see what it said, figuring it does run some sort of sanity check on the mfs partition set. It did give me a note about a size discrepancy, but I don't recall the exact text of the error, and it didn't prevent the tivo from booting. I'm watching one of my wife's recordings right now .

Yay, I'm still married


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## JWThiers (Apr 13, 2005)

Dodged a bullet on that. Good to see someone who is tech savvy, 1. Actually mess it up in the first place. 2. Admit to it in a public way. 3. Able to fix it with a proverbial gun to his head quickly without a lot (if any) help. 4. Post about it so others can learn from his mistake. For the faint in heart I wouldn't recommend this, I think you were very lucky to get away with that. Have bought any lottery tickets.


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## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

Confucius say, "Man unwilling to bandage oneself should not shoot oneself in foot."

An even smarter dude than Confucius said, "Hey Stupid!! Don't shoot yourself in the foot!!"

If anyone is interested it the final results of this "misadventure", this is how it went.

<facts>
After restoring the tivo to bootable/working status, I hacked it with the zipper, and MRV'd everything out to another tivo. Everything but one show transferred. A one-hour show that played fine before this accident would not transfer out via MRV (MRV'ing tivo would just sit at 0:00 of the recording until I canceled the transfer). Also, the original tivo would not play that episode. Since I had mrv'd all the shows I wanted to keep out to another tivo, I had clearly damaged the software on the disk, and I would never be able to tell if my repair fixed everything until the next problem appeared, I went ahead and started over with a new drive image.
</facts>
<assumptions>
When I originally posted, one of the things I was seeking to learn was a little about the inner workings of mfsrestore, specifically what it does first. My assumption, from what I have observed (see "facts" listed above), is that it writes linearly from the beginning of the disk. Keeping in mind the out-of-order partitition map, that means the first thing hit is hda1 (apple partition map), and then into hda10 (first mfs partition, presumably where it damaged my one recording before I could cancel the errant mfsrestore process
</assumptions>


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## JWThiers (Apr 13, 2005)

Another smart person said... "If your gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough."


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