# Troubles Replacing TiVo Drive In Series 3



## djsting (Mar 6, 2002)

I have a Series 3 (the one with the OLED display) and the drive is going out so I bought a new one. Put both the old and new drives in the PC an booted up my MFSLive 1.4 CD. I then either the following command:
backup -qTao -/dev/sda | restore -s 128 -zpi -/dev/sdb
then all I get is the listing of options for both the backup and restore commands.

What gives!?!?

I've used MFSLive1.4 with success before.

Both drives are mounted, the old TiVo drive as sda and the new blank drive as sdb (I watched them mount and can do an ls command on sda with success).

The drives are of the same brand and size so it's a simple copy, no expanding or anything like that.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

djsting said:


> I have a Series 3 (the one with the OLED display) and the drive is going out so I bought a new one. Put both the old and new drives in the PC an booted up my MFSLive 1.4 CD. I then either the following command:
> backup -qTao -/dev/sda | restore -s 128 -zpi -/dev/sdb
> then all I get is the listing of options for both the backup and restore commands.
> 
> ...


That PC doesn't have a GigaByte brand motherboard, does it?

If so, we may have a problem that'll need working around.

Otherwise boot with that same cd and

dd_rescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

should "Xerox" the old drive (sda) to the new one (sdb)

But first

fdisk -l

and then

pdisk -l

to be sure you have the drives hooked up correctly.

I'm assuming your optical drive is sdc or sdd, otherwise

fdisk -l

will choke on it before it gets to both hard drives.


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## djsting (Mar 6, 2002)

Why yes it is, it's a Gigabyte GA-6VX-4X. That board only has IDE ports so I have an I/O Crest PCI Serial ATA Host Controller Card installed for the SATA drives. 

The CD drive is an IDE drive.

fdisk -l indicates that both drives (sda and sdb) do not contain a valid partition table, I presume that is because they are a TiVo drive rather than a true Linux drive with is what the MFSLive CD appears to be.

pdisk -l shows what is on sda and indicates "no valid block 1 on /dev/sdb" which is what I'd expect to see, sdb is brand new out of the box and thus completely blank.

The dd_rescue command is running now. We'll see how that goes in a few hours.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

djsting said:


> Why yes it is, it's a Gigabyte GA-6VX-4X. That board only has IDE ports so I have an I/O Crest PCI Serial ATA Host Controller Card installed for the SATA drives.
> 
> The CD drive is an IDE drive.
> 
> ...


Do you have a "sacrificial" drive installed as the Primary Master IDE/PATA drive?

I'm not sure how long they've been doing it, but in recent past years GigaByte boards have been slapping Host Protected Areas on whatever they consider the "first" hard drive (the one they expect you to be running Windows on), and apparently it took them several years to get the notion that they should provide an option in the CMOS/BIOS setup menus to turn this behavior off, so if your board does it, it's old enough that you can't defeat it.

When it finishes up, run

hdparm -N /dev/sda

and then

hdparm -N /dev/sdb

and make sure that for both drives when it displays

1stnumber/2ndnumber

that the two numbers are identical and both are equal to the LBA number on the drive label.


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## djsting (Mar 6, 2002)

So at this point it's been running for about 31 hours. This is a 2TB drive. How long should I expect this to take? I know it's a big drive and will take a while...this seems to be way too long though.


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## djsting (Mar 6, 2002)

Another 24hrs has now past and I'm certain something is wrong as there's no way this process should have taken this long. I've attached a screen shot I took this morning...it is the same kind of thing that continues to scroll across the screen.

What next?


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

Definitely not right. Hopefully someone with a real Linux background can tell you what could be causing the error you are seeing.

When I copied my full 1TB drives to new 2TB drives I want to say it tool something like 5 hours or so.

Scott


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## telemark (Nov 12, 2013)

I'm not an S3 person but what I do know:

2TB/33MB/s in hours = 17hours

That's assuming the drive is healthy and goes the full speed of the interface.
The drive's not healthy though, so it'll go a lot slower over trouble sections.

Bad drives, cause error messages like that. Not much you can do about it.
Loose IDE cables can also cause similar messages.

dd_rescue or ddrescue is the command you want to use. Particularly after you start one of them, you'll want to watch the progress indicator, which tells you how much is done. Ideally you want to run it long enough it makes a whole pass through the trouble drive.

Edit: Here's a tutorial-
http://www.technibble.com/guide-using-ddrescue-recover-data/
You don't need PartedMagic, just any CD with the program on it.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

It looks like it's going nowhere fast.

That PCI SATA card may be, just co-incidentally, failing.

It looks like it keeps trying to connect to the drive and meeting with failure, causing it to start again from the top, but without having been there and seen the screen from the beginning I can't be sure.

If you do not have a PATA drive installed that shows up as /dev/hda (or hdb if the cd drive is hda), then you've probably got an HPA on sda that you'll need to undo, but you won't be able to undo it until you install a sacrificial drive as hda or hdb or hdc or hdd assuming it's got two IDE headers.

This means you won't, until you undo the HPA, be able to get the entire image off of the old drive 'cause some of it is now on the other side of the HPA "border".

Suggest you reboot and run those 

hdparm

commands I posted previously and report back.


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## telemark (Nov 12, 2013)

Are both these drives Advanced Format?

Could you post the partition map on both drives?
tivopart does this

The partitions should ideally be unmounted, before starting the cloning.
mount will tell you what you need to unmount.


If it's 4k aligned, then you can do the cloning along the partition boundaries. This will tell you what kind of data was lost, and get the most important data off first.

After checking the block0 and APM...
Do the kernel, root, and bootstrap first.
Skip Swap.
/var 
MFS application regions
MFS media regions


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

telemark said:


> Are both these drives Advanced Format?
> 
> Could you post the partition map on both drives?
> tivopart does this
> ...


I think I just heard the OP running away screaming in fear and confusion.


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## telemark (Nov 12, 2013)

unitron said:


> I think I just heard the OP running away screaming in fear and confusion.


Ya, I know. But, it's not much harder than what OP has already done.

It would just be something like:

ddrescue /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 logfile2.txt
ddrescue /dev/sda5 /dev/sdb5 logfile5.txt

ddrescue /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 logfile3.txt
ddrescue /dev/sda6 /dev/sdb6 logfile6.txt

ddrescue /dev/sda4 /dev/sdb4 logfile4.txt
ddrescue /dev/sda7 /dev/sdb7 logfile7.txt

... (idk the S3 partition map)

I just didn't want to suggest it unless the partitions are 4k aligned.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

telemark said:


> I just didn't want to suggest it unless the partitions are 4k aligned.


Unlikely on a Series 3.


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

Or he could use the Tivo Tools shell scripts to copy and align the partitions on an S3.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=519991

Scott


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

But first we really need to eliminate the possibility of that GigaByte motherboard having put an HPA on either drive.


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## djsting (Mar 6, 2002)

So I decided to take an extreme step and tear apart my primary workstation and use it for this (that's why I've been off for a while). Doing this eliminated the PCI SATA card as a possible issue. It also eliminated the GigaByte motherboard as a possible issue (my primary workstation has an ASUS). The results were positive as can be seen in the attached screen shot. My TiVo is back up and running with the new drive now!!!  So it seems that it was a bad drive as suspected. Uncertain what was causing the issue in my test machine with the copy. I will say that even in my primary workstation using the backup -qTao command I got the same results, using the dd_rescue command is what did the trick for me.

Thank you all for such great assistance on this!! I LOVE this forum, I've been able to do so many things with my TiVo units over the years all thanks to this group.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

djsting said:


> So I decided to take an extreme step and tear apart my primary workstation and use it for this (that's why I've been off for a while). Doing this eliminated the PCI SATA card as a possible issue. It also eliminated the GigaByte motherboard as a possible issue (my primary workstation has an ASUS). The results were positive as can be seen in the attached screen shot. My TiVo is back up and running with the new drive now!!!  So it seems that it was a bad drive as suspected. Uncertain what was causing the issue in my test machine with the copy. I will say that even in my primary workstation using the backup -qTao command I got the same results, using the dd_rescue command is what did the trick for me.
> 
> Thank you all for such great assistance on this!! I LOVE this forum, I've been able to do so many things with my TiVo units over the years all thanks to this group.


Never, never use the

-q

option-you want to be able to see what's going on, not surpress the on-screen display.

And skip

-z

and don't use

-x

instead of

-x

run

mfsadd

separately later on to expand.

(That last part is also my advice when using WinMFS--do the expansion after checking the results of a restore or copy with

mfsinfo

because I don't exactly know why, but trust me, it works better and more consistently the way it should that way).


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

In my experience, MFSLive commands do not handle images larger than 1TB well (problem with using signed 32 bit variables for sector counting). ddrescue or tivo tools is the way to go.


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## djsting (Mar 6, 2002)

jmbach said:


> In my experience, MFSLive commands do not handle images larger than 1TB well (problem with using signed 32 bit variables for sector counting). ddrescue or tivo tools is the way to go.


That's good info to have, thank you for sharing.


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