# Hard disk dying, copying everything & lba48



## threadkiller (Dec 12, 2002)

One of my TiVo's hard drives appears to be dieing. It started with the TiVo occasionally appearing to have rebooted overnight, then blocky pics, (put this down to bad reception) and now yesterday, 2 different programmes have frozen part way through, requiring a reboot to get the TiVo working again.

So I need a new disk. Question is, which drive these days? how do I copy everything across programmes, settings network & tivoweb, and add LBA48?

Is it a case of still using Hinsdales guide, then using copykern? or am I better off with something like Hooch?

I'm running 2.5.5 on a 120G samsung spinpoint at the moment.

Any answers gratefully recieved


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

If you want to copy recordings then you need to use the LBA48 boot CD and then run copykern. A typical command for a 250gb target drive would be

*mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdX | mfsrestore -s 300 -r4 -xzpi - /dev/hdY
*
then run copykern.

As for suitable drives, the Samsung HA250JC available bare from www.ultratec.co.uk is excellent, and the new Green Power drives from WD seem very good too, although they will require the use of an IDE/SATA converter which will complicate matters, especially when it comes to making the copy.


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## pj280167 (Dec 21, 2005)

Ultratec are selling the highly recommended SAMSUNG HA250JC for less than £60 inc vat. I bought hooch and it was dead easy to use but make sure you type what's on the instructions and not what _you_ might expect.... So for a little over £80 inc postage and you've got a super quiet upgrade.

Oh well, it seems blindlemon beat me to an answer as I was typing


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## threadkiller (Dec 12, 2002)

Thanks for the reply. I have the LBA48 cd, you sent me with the last configured disk I bought:up:

Do I take it then I only need to boot from the LBA disk rather than MFStools? and use the command you've typed, (Subbing drive letters for the X's) or do I need to go though mounting the disks etc as I would normally?


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## colinwil (Oct 12, 2008)

I was having the same sort of problems with my Thomson PVR 10 UK. blocky pictures, stuttering, etc. I fixed it today by successfully installing a new hard disk drive  Basically I used the Hinsdale method. It was frustrating getting it all together, but in the end it went smoothly. Here's what I did.

1. Bought a new 500gb Western Digital IDE hard disk.

2. Formatted it to Fat32. This is a bit tricky from XP because it will only format 32gb Fat32 drives (!). The work around is to use XP's disk administrator to create the Fat32 partition - without formatting it, then use a thing called 'fat32format' from http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/download/fat32format.zip to do the actual formatting

3. I discovered later I needed to unlock the Tivo's original hard disk drive using qunlock. To use it you have to copy it onto a Dos floppy boot disk. My pc doesn't even have a floppy drive, but I dusted off an old one, installed it, found some floppies that still formatted ok, downloaded a DOS 6.22 image from www.bootdisk.com, downloaded qunlock from htp://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com

4. I downloaded msftools from www.dvrupgrade.com - just the free download, and created a bootable CD from the ISO image using Nero 8

5. I removed the XP hard disk from my PC, and replaced it with the new 500gb one, meaning it was the primary master. I installed my old TiVo hard disk as the secondary master, with my CD drive as the secondary slave. Booted the pc, and entered the Bios to enable 'boot from CD'.

6. It booted, I pressed 'return to continue' and thousands of lines of system information scrolled past - including the important details - what it thought my old TiVo disk capacity was. Luckily you can scroll back up by pressing Shift-Page Up. It said my disk old Tivo disk capacity was 10Gb - which according to Hinsdale means it needs to be unlocked.

7. I booted from the floppy disk I made in step 3, and ran qunlock and received a message saying that the instruction to unlock the disk had been sent. I rebooted from the CD, scrolled up through all the system information - and this time it indicated a TiVo disk capacity of 40Gb - the unlock had worked.

8. The Hinsdale instructions are very detailed, but hard to follow. In the end I used the command

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda

This is the 'slow option' - which preserves seasons passes, recorded programs etc, but it has the benefit that it doesn't need to use your XP OS disk at all. I don't know what the utility makes of NTFS but I wasn't going to risk it!

9. 5 hours later it finished doing its thing. The last thing it said was something like 'Expanding destination disk to full capacity' - this suprised me a bit, because I thought I'd have to do this as an extra step.

10. I removed the 500Gb disk from my pc and installed it in the TiVo. Plugged the TiVo into the TV & my freeview box & started it up. Everything went perfectly. It started up quickly, my recordings were still there, including this morning's Grand Prix, and best of all, System Information says I can record 175 hours, 11 minutes in best quality. I celebrated by watching the Grand Prix, with a beer in hand, no blocky picture, no stuttering. Result!

So, yes, the Hinsdale method still works, and everything you need is free


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

threadkiller said:


> Thanks for the reply. I have the LBA48 cd, you sent me with the last configured disk I bought:up:
> 
> Do I take it then I only need to boot from the LBA disk rather than MFStools? and use the command you've typed, (Subbing drive letters for the X's) or do I need to go though mounting the disks etc as I would normally?


Yes, just boot from the LBA48 boot CD (It contains a copy of mfstools) and then run the command using /dev/hdc or whatever ports your source and target drives are attached to.

There's no need to mount anything - just remember to run copykern and choose kernel option 1 after doing the drive copy


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Congratulations Colin, and welcome to the forum 

However, there are a few issues with the method you described.



colinwil said:


> 2. Formatted it to Fat32.


Not necessary. The mfsrestore command does everything you need.



colinwil said:


> mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -r 4 -*s 127 *-xzpi - /dev/hda


You should use at least -s 250 for a 500gb drive as otherwise if you get GSOD there is a danger it will not be able to run.



colinwil said:


> 10. I removed the 500Gb disk from my pc and installed it in the TiVo.


You need to run copykern from the LBA48 Boot CD after doing the data copy to install the LBA48 kernel and initialise the swap, otherwise every time the TiVo OS tries to write to a sector of the drive past 137gb it will wrap the addresses and write to the start of the drive instead, leading to corruption and eventual death.


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## colinwil (Oct 12, 2008)

Thanks for clarifying 

"You should use at least -s 250 for a 500gb drive as otherwise if you get GSOD there is a danger it will not be able to run."

Damn! Well I'm not going to go through the 5 hours copying again, so I'll just have to risk it - I've never had a GSOD yet. If I do ever get one I can always do the whole process again from my original TiVo disk. Is there a table somewhere that shows what the '-s' values mean, and what is optimal for particular disk sizes?

"You need to run copykern from the LBA48 Boot CD after doing the data copy ... "

Hmm - sounds like I'd better do that straight away


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## colinwil (Oct 12, 2008)

One thing about CopyKern...

The first time I ran it, it backed up the old kernel (to /mnt) - but then it gave an error - "/cdrom/s1_kernels/kernel-3.1/vmlinux-3.1.px" can not be found.

I'm not a linux expert, so I had to dig a bit for the solution:

You've got to 'mount' the cd rom device before running CopyKern.

I went back to the lines of system information and found that my CD was 'hdc', and my (new, 500Gb) hdd was 'hdb' ( I swapped things round since my last post!)

To mount the CDROM device I typed 'mount /dev/hdc /cdrom

I then ran CopyKern and it worked successfully


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

colinwil said:


> Damn! Well I'm not going to go through the 5 hours copying again, so I'll just have to risk it - I've never had a GSOD yet. If I do ever get one I can always do the whole process again from my original TiVo disk. Is there a table somewhere that shows what the '-s' values mean, and what is optimal for particular disk sizes?


The swap should be at least half as much in mb as the drive size in gb as a general rule of thumb. So for a 500gb drive you would need at least 250mb swap (the -s value).

There is a possible workaround in your situation as long as your software version is 2.5.5 and your system partition is 4.

As your swap partition (8) is adjacent to the unused 'spare' system partition (7) you can boot from the LBA48 boot CD in byteswapped mode (enter *vmlnodma hdx=bswap* at the "Boot:" prompt) and then use pdisk to merge the two partitions, creating a new 'spare' partition of 1 block in size instead of the 128mb currently used. This will increase your swap to 239.5mb which _should _be enough to allow a GSOD to run and complete.

After doing this you need to run copykern again to re-initialise the new swap.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

colinwil said:


> To mount the CDROM device I typed 'mount /dev/hdc /cdrom


The CD seems to assume that your CDROM will be on hdb, so this would have worked with your original configuration


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## threadkiller (Dec 12, 2002)

blindlemon said:


> Yes, just boot from the LBA48 boot CD (It contains a copy of mfstools) and then run the command using /dev/hdc or whatever ports your source and target drives are attached to.
> 
> There's no need to mount anything - just remember to run copykern and choose kernel option 1 after doing the drive copy


Cheers for that Steve. BL to the rescue again, If I didn't have to keep the recordings I'd have opted for the easy option & bought a new configured drive  :up:


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## colinwil (Oct 12, 2008)

blindlemon said:


> The CD seems to assume that your CDROM will be on hdb, so this would have worked with your original configuration


On my original configuration the CDROM was hdd (secondary slave) 

copykern's menu option give hdb..hdg as possible destinations for the kernel, so maybe it's assuming that hda is the CD?

Who knows - I'm just grateful that these tools exist at all (even though they're arcane!)


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## Ian_m (Jan 9, 2001)

colinwil said:


> Thanks for clarifying
> 
> "You should use at least -s 250 for a 500gb drive as otherwise if you get GSOD there is a danger it will not be able to run."
> 
> ...


 Yes you should redo the copy....

I have seen TiVo auto recovery a couple of times now, all when power was interupted shortly after TiVo starts booting. Once when I was having the kitchen electrics tested (they test the RCDs') and once when my shower pumped leaked (tripping the RCD) and I was turning electrics on and off trying to locate the fault.


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## threadkiller (Dec 12, 2002)

wrong post whoops


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## Olly (Sep 29, 2001)

Sorry to drag up an old thread but I used this one as a reminder when copying my existing 250GB drive to a new 500GB one.

However, when I clone the old drive it gets no further than the "Welcome, Powering up" screen. I am copying the drive usingthis:-

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 500 -r4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb

If I build the new drive using a backup image file (ala Hooch) it works perfectly.

I'm running copykern and reinstalling the cachecard drivers just in case.

Any suggestions please?

Update:

_incorrect info removed_

This is driving me up the wall, it's got to be something simple I'm missing. I can mount partitions 4 and 9 and check their contents and my rc.sysinit.author file and /var/hack directory. It just won't boot! There are no log files.


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## tonywalk (Sep 10, 2002)

Swapfile?


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

Olly said:


> mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 500 -r4 -xzpi - */dev/hdb*


hdb is a slave drive - you should set the jumper to master before putting it in a tivo.

Also, recent Western Digital IDE drives won't boot / work in a tivo at all due to the firmware being incompatible with tivo's IDE controller - the SATA drives are ok with an IDE-SATA convertor though.


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## Olly (Sep 29, 2001)

tonywalk said:


> Swapfile?


It wouldn't stop it from booting but you'll see from the command line I used that I configured a 500MB swapfile. Thanks for the thought.

I gave up trying to copy the original disk in the end and created the new drive from a standard-system backup I had made some time ago, which included all the extras I want like endpad and TivoWebPlus. Restored the season pass backup from a few days ago and it's now busy filling itself with fresh copies of all the old progs my wife likes to watch.


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## Olly (Sep 29, 2001)

mikerr said:


> hdb is a slave drive - you should set the jumper to master before putting it in a tivo.
> 
> Also, recent Western Digital IDE drives won't boot / work in a tivo at all due to the firmware being incompatible with tivo's IDE controller - the SATA drives are ok with an IDE-SATA convertor though.


Or it could be set to Cable Select. In my case it's a Samsung SATA Eco green drive with an IDE convertor.

I've had to give up for now and get it up and running with an empty drive (Same HD) so it can resume soap recording duties for the wife. In the meantime I have a 1TB drive I can continue experimenting with to get to the bottom of this problem.

Thanks for the feedback.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Olly said:


> In my case it's a Samsung SATA Eco green drive with an IDE convertor.


Which IDE converter? They are not all equally compatible, sadly.


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## Olly (Sep 29, 2001)

blindlemon said:


> Which IDE converter? They are not all equally compatible, sadly.


It's one which was recommended on these forums a few months ago and sourced from Hong Kong via ebay. It's working perfectly from an image I made last year


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## Rue (Apr 5, 2002)

My 1TB Samsung HD103SI EcoGreen F2 was showing as 33MB in Linux and the BIOS, and 8GB under WinXP. I 'transferred' my entire 500GB TiVo drive including recordings to it without any errors, not that it worked of course! Under XP's disk management I couldn't even create a partition (not sure of the error message now).

I fixed the drive using a tool called MHDD and this forum post at http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=57907



The useful part of the forum discussion said:


> Boot MHDD
> You should be able to uncut the drive to fix it, however this doesn't work. Nor do zero-fills ?
> So run the hpa command.
> 
> ...


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## threadkiller (Dec 12, 2002)

Damn, almost 12 months later, & another drive dies  Cant find my LBA48 bootable cd either, does anyone have a link I can download it from?


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