# restore failed backup target not large enough to hold entire backup by itself



## ebeighe (Jun 28, 2004)

[edit: see edits below; i haven't fixed it yet but at least i know what's going on...]

hi there. i have a friend's toshiba sd-h400 (circa 2004) tivo with a failed hard drive (i have an identical one).
I've done this before a number of times for other friends over the years; i have an older pc in garage all set to go, it boots up PTVupgrade LBA48 off of a CD (linux)...
i got my backup image mounted just fine (for simplicity lets say it's a backup of the original Maxtor 80G that came with the unit; it was never hacked or whatever)...

when i do with the new/target drive as hdd (secondary slave):
mfsrestore -s 127 -zpi /mnt/e/file.tiv /dev/hdd

all i get is an immediate error
restore failed backup target not large enough to hold entire backup by itself

Other attempts yield same error, e.g. i plugged in my origianl maxtor (that still works fine; it's been in a drawer for probably 10 years) and tried piping mfsback to mfsrestore and got same error.

I've tried two different target drives: a 160G [edit #1 -- oops, something wrong with the way bios or whatever is detecting drive capacity; hdparm is only seeing 32G] and an 800G [edit #2 -- oops, this is an 80GB drive, not 800!]... i.e. both clearly larger than 80G

Help? How do i tell what mfs tools sees as the target drives size?


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## ebeighe (Jun 28, 2004)

All better now 

As mentioned above; the difficulties had more to do with IDE, and the bios not correctly identifying things.

p.s. the command that comes in handy with regard to disks and capacities is hdparm, e.g.
hdparm /dev/hda
It's on the PTVupgrade bootable disk.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

You have to watch out for truncated images taken from Maxtor drives, as back in the S2 days they tended to have a slightly higher LBA number than other brands for any given size in GBs, and so one from, say, a 40GB Maxtor wouldn't restore to a 40GB WD or Seagate.

I prefer the MFS Live cd myself, but I've pretty much moved on to WinMFS except for times when I need something on the cd, like hdparm or dd_rescue.

That report of the drive only being 32GB is a PC motherboard bios thing, it (the bios) needs to be updated to be able to count higher than that.

fdisk -l

and 

pdisk -l

should show you which drive is which /dev/?


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## ebeighe (Jun 28, 2004)

yeah, many of the hard disks i have aren't recognized properly by the old PC's bios (but curiously, the Maxtor 80's work fine so it's not as if it's simply a 32G limit); I finally found one, a 120GB seagate and that all went smoothly using my standard procedure circa 2004 using mfstools from the ptvlba48-3.01 bootable linux cd: made a backup of my fresh drive, then restored/expanded onto the new drive, then ran sd-h400_unlock (to allow the toshiba to "see" the extra capacity) and that all works.

So you got me interested in WinMFS. I dredged up a newer older PC from my warehouse. That newer pc detects all my IDE drives, including a wd 320G that I would like to use to replace my aging (10+ years) hitachi/deskstar 160G...
(i don't care about the content).
so i used WinMFS to prepare the wd320. That all went fine and i can boot off of it and it work in the tivo.
The only problem is when i run the sd-h400_unlock program (from MFSLive cd) it throws an error "crc mismatch ... sector wrong in zone ..."
and fails.
And another thing to mention: I can't get ptvlba48-3.01 to boot in ANY of m y newer machines; it just hangs before it gets to the bash prompt :-(

So I have this puzzle... The tools on the old pc seem to work fine for what i need them to do but won't recognize any of the drives i want use.
The newer computers that recognize the IDE drives i want to use cannot boot the old tools that worked for me in the past. And the newer computers that do recognize the drives can't seem to do the toshiba unlock when using WinMFS to prepare the drive.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

ebeighe said:


> yeah, many of the hard disks i have aren't recognized properly by the old PC's bios (but curiously, the Maxtor 80's work fine so it's not as if it's simply a 32G limit); I finally found one, a 120GB seagate and that all went smoothly using my standard procedure circa 2004 using mfstools from the ptvlba48-3.01 bootable linux cd: made a backup of my fresh drive, then restored/expanded onto the new drive, then ran sd-h400_unlock (to allow the toshiba to "see" the extra capacity) and that all works.
> 
> So you got me interested in WinMFS. I dredged up a newer older PC from my warehouse. That newer pc detects all my IDE drives, including a wd 320G that I would like to use to replace my aging (10+ years) hitachi/deskstar 160G...
> (i don't care about the content).
> ...


If you're going to keep messing with S2s, you need to familiarize yourself with the SATA adapter thread.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=416883

PATA/IDE drives are only going to get more scarce and more expensive, and used ones will probably be passed off as new.

And you get a lot more GB/$ with SATA.

I thought it was only S1s that did that drive locking thing, but apparently not.

The MFS Live cd has both

diskutil

for unlocking S1 drives and the

sd-h400_unlock

program as well, so download the .iso and burn yourself a copy "as an image"

http://mfslive.org/forums/download/file.php?id=89

Also download the release notes

http://www.mfslive.org/readme.txt

and go here

http://www.mfslive.org/

and read the full guide.

Especially see

http://www.mfslive.org/softwareguidep6.htm#othertools

for instructions on using

sd-h400_unlock

You should only need to unlock a drive that's already been in the TiVo when it was powered up.

And you should be able to "permanently" unlock it with the right switch with

sd-h400_unlock

and have it survive the reboot into Windows to switch over to WinMFS.

Using WinMFS, you should be able to take a drive bigger than 80GB (or an 80GB Maxtor from that era) and write this image to it

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49887720/Winmfs_SD-H400/sd-h400.tbk

I've never used it myself because I don't have that particular model but I grabbed a copy when someone mentioned having it a few years ago.

It'll have to go through the Clear and Delete Everything and then Guided Setup because it came from a machine with a different TiVo Service Number, but if nothing else it'll let you test the unit to make sure the hard drive is the only problem.

When copying drives or restoring backups with either the MFS Live cd or with WinMFS, do the expansion into the extra space on a drive larger than the original as a separate process later on.

That means not using the -x option on the command line and answering NO when WinMFS offers to expand.

Check the drive with

mfsinfo

and make sure everything looks okay (and make sure you're looking at the right drive), and then use

mfsadd

to do the expansion as its own separate step.

Sometimes doing it as part of the copy or restore process goes wrong, so spend a few extra seconds to avoid any chance of that.


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## ebeighe (Jun 28, 2004)

Thanks for all your tips and encouragement 

yeah, MFSLive is the way to go; somewhere along the line, i misunderstood what that was.
I just re-did everything (as an exercise) using MFSLive iso and it all worked like a champ including the sd-h400 unlock.

in all likelihood i won't need to go the sata converter route, since i have a small handful of suitable ide drives on hand... but it's good to know there's a backup plan just in case!


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

ebeighe said:


> Thanks for all your tips and encouragement
> 
> yeah, MFSLive is the way to go; somewhere along the line, i misunderstood what that was.
> I just re-did everything (as an exercise) using MFSLive iso and it all worked like a champ including the sd-h400 unlock.
> ...


Glad it worked out for you.

The link in your sig seems broken.


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