# corrupt recordings



## random69 (Oct 4, 2006)

I recently upgraded my series 1 since the disk was getting very old...
I recall seeing this form of corruption once before the upgrade, but I'm seeing it quite a lot since.

For example, a corrupt recording plays ok for 15 minutes, then jumps back to the start
(or only does that if you press the rewind).
In the weirdest case, it is like the recording jumps forwards and backwards in the timeline.
Or several minutes of a different show appear in the middle.

As I said, I only saw this sort of thing once prior to upgrade - which is one reason I did it ;-)

Anyway, I used mfstools 2.0. 200G was the smallest disk I could find that wasn't SATA.
I made a backup of my original disk and restored it with

mfstool restore -s 127 -zxpi 

and all seemed to work fine. Most recordings on the upgraded box work fine,
and the thing reports able to record 246 hours. But clearly something is wrong.

Note that I deleted all the entries in the play list, and have reset the box a couple of times.
Next step may be to yank the disk out and boot it on a PC...

Better suggestions welcome.

Thanks


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Does your Series 1 have the kernel that supports Drives larger then 137G (LBA48)?


----------



## random69 (Oct 4, 2006)

HomeUser said:


> Does your Series 1 have the kernel that supports Drives larger then 137G (LBA48)?


I don't actually know. I originally assumed not. I recall reading that if I put my own kernel 
on there, and it got replaced with one that didn't, that corruption would result, so
I've left it with whatever tivo put there.

I assumed if it didn't support >137G, that it simply wouldn't use the whole disk.
My plan was to put a 120G disk in it - but couldn't find one ;-)
The fact that it claims 246 hours (200G disk), lead me to think that it might have support.
It is running 3.0 if that's any use.


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Don't know, Never had a Series1. My understanding is the only Series 1 that have a LBA48 kernel without a kernel hack is the Direct TV TiVo. If the kernel does not support the large HD would explain the corruption/reboot.


----------



## Darin (Dec 27, 2001)

FWIW, even the DirecTV series one TiVos aren't LBA48. But putting in a larger drive just causes it to ignore everything above 137GB. I added a 160gb drive to my S1 DirecTiVo nearly five years ago, and it's still going strong. The Tivo only reports recording time as if it's a 137GB drive.


----------



## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Darin said:


> FWIW, even the DirecTV series one TiVos aren't LBA48. But putting in a larger drive just causes it to ignore everything above 137GB. I added a 160gb drive to my S1 DirecTiVo nearly five years ago, and it's still going strong. The Tivo only reports recording time as if it's a 137GB drive.


 Thanks I'll try to remember that all Series 1 TiVos have non LBA48 kernels except the ones that have the LBA48 kernel hack.

MFSTools will not see the space above 137G if the Linux kernel MFSTools is booted from is also non LBA48. Boot Linux with LBA48 support and MFSTools will see the entire 160G.


----------



## random69 (Oct 4, 2006)

HomeUser said:


> Thanks I'll try to remember that all Series 1 TiVos have non LBA48 kernels except the ones that have the LBA48 kernel hack.
> 
> MFSTools will not see the space above 137G if the Linux kernel MFSTools is booted from is also non LBA48. Boot Linux with LBA48 support and MFSTools will see the entire 160G.


I think this is my problem. I ran mfstool on a machine that could see the full 200G.
I looked again at all the notes I have for mfstool and there doesn't seem to be an option to expand to less than the full size of the disk.

I'll probably end up yanking the disk out and setting the jumper that makes it pretend to only
be 137G and restore my backup to it again...


----------



## Darin (Dec 27, 2001)

random69 said:


> I think this is my problem. I ran mfstool on a machine that could see the full 200G.
> I looked again at all the notes I have for mfstool and there doesn't seem to be an option to expand to less than the full size of the disk.


I'm not the expert here, but I think if you use a copy of mfstool that is NOT lba48compatible, it won't see anything above 137G, and therefore won't try to "bless" any more than that. I can tell you this much: when I accidently used the standard (non-lba48) mfstools bootdisk, it reported my two 250GB drives from my HD-TiVo as 137GB drives, and could not read them correctly. And when I put a 160GB drive in my series 1 SD TiVo, I did not have to jumper it. In fact, I don't think I had to do anything special at all. But that was a long time ago - before the "easy" days of mfstools 2.0.


----------



## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

As previously stated, the best way for the series 1 is to use the non-LBA48 boot disk to upgrade.

If you want to use all the space on the drive, you can get the ptvupgrade.com LBA48 boot disk. Then restore to the drive and use copykern to copy an LBA48 kernel to the drive. More info is available in the Upgrade Forum.


----------



## random69 (Oct 4, 2006)

Ok, I looked through the upgrade forum, even tried a search, can't find an old version of mfstool
If someone has an older version of it (will it be able to restore the backup made with 2.0?)
I'd appreciate a pointer.

Or could I use the linux fdisk (or whatever it might be called) to create a suitably sized partition, that mfsadd can then use?

Right now, I'm back to a 200G pretendning to be 30G which is sub-optimal.

I don't like the idea of putting a hacked kernel on my tivo - since any upgrade by Tivo could then hose me (I assume).


----------



## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

Both weaknees.com and ptvupgrade.com have non-LBA48 versions of Linux boot disks available for free download. These include mfstools.


----------



## random69 (Oct 4, 2006)

Thanks, but either I'm just hopless at searching those sites or they no longer have free downloads of anything.


----------



## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

Try this link for non-LBA48 boot CD image:
http://hellcat.tyger.org/MFS/2.0/mfstools2noJ.iso


----------



## random69 (Oct 4, 2006)

Thanks! That does indeed see the disk as only 137G.
Unfortunately the ISO doesn't seem to support NFS, FTP, or any other means of getting at my backup.
It also only has about a 6M RAM disk which isn't enough to make a new backup.

Also if I just run 'mfsadd -x /dev/hdb' it tells me there is nothing to do, since the thing is already at 30 hours!
That's seems very weird.


----------



## random69 (Oct 4, 2006)

Ok, I totally give up. Since nothing else worked, I finally tried 

mfsadd -x /dev/hdb /dev/hdb12 /dev/hdb13

and it added a 162G partition - despite the kernel thinking the disk was only 137G
It would appear I'm back in the same situation I was over a week ago, having run mfstool on my BSD box.


----------



## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

random69 said:


> Thanks! That does indeed see the disk as only 137G.
> Unfortunately the ISO doesn't seem to support NFS, FTP, or any other means of getting at my backup.
> It also only has about a 6M RAM disk which isn't enough to make a new backup.


I believe that it should be able to mount an NTFS partition in read-only mode.

If not, then use a separate hard drive formatted with FAT32. The hard drive does not have to be very large. You can copy the backup to that drive under windows.


----------



## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

random69 said:


> Ok, I totally give up. Since nothing else worked, I finally tried
> 
> mfsadd -x /dev/hdb /dev/hdb12 /dev/hdb13
> 
> ...


Is it a 162GB partition or is the total size 162 hours. 162 hours is about right. Did you try it in your TiVo?

Also, I am not sure you need to have anything beyond
mfsadd -x /dev/hdb


----------

