imaging a harddrive

hi :)

im following the guide (sortof) and ive got a few possible problems, i think anyway.

first of all i burned the iso successfully, unplugged my hdd and stuck in the one i bought for the tivo (which hasnt arrived yet, but im an eager beaver.. anyway, i cant test it, hence my concern ive screwed something up). i probably should have asked this before trying, but... i didnt want to mess with the jumper settings on my cdrom, or rather unscrew it because it was being a pita and the screws were way too tight. i just changed the boot order to boot from cdrom. i do however have the single western digital 200gb drive set as single or master on the jumper settings. anyway.

when it comes to install time (got the cd to boot fine) the instructions on the cd say 'replace /dev/hdd with one of the following three words. and it lits hdb, hdc, hdd..' and it says i cant use hda. i used the mfsrestore command trying hdc, and i got the message "/dev/hdc: Read-only file system
Restore failed: unable to open destination device for writing.

so i figured hell, ill try hdb, as it says sometimes c doesnt work in the guide. for b i got the message /dev/hdb: no such device or address.

figured id try A, and it appeared to work, but i did not notice the instructions on the CD that say you can not use hda. i didnt notice them till after id done it that is.

sooo.. how badly have i ****ed up? it seemed to work at least.

'Starting restore
Uncompressed backup size: 694 megabytes
Restoring 694 of 694 megabytes (100.00%) (89.96% compression)
Cleaning up restore. Please wait a moment.
Restore done!
Adding pair /dev/hda12-/dev/hda13
New estimated standalne size: 222 hours (221 more)'

that makes me think i possibly did it right. but, on the offchance ive screwed it up totally.. how do i fix it? :P god, im happy i did this on a spare PC!

hrmhrm, im browsing the mailing list looking for possible solutions and i finally sorta kinda understand what hda, hdb, hdc refer to. and im thinking whats goin on is ive got the cords plugged in to the wrong devices. you know, i never knew the cords had specific places to be put into. figured you could mix and match!

im guessing i need to plug in the hdd to the hdc cable or something? well.. guess i needa format or something.. gah :/

while im here reading archives (still!) i have a question.

if i want to record a program (lets say law and order or something) yet also want to watch csi or something thats on at the same time.. can i watch it? through the tv or something. i know i can do it on the vcr i have attached now. could i in theory, record something on vcr, record something on tivo, and watch something on tv? its not a huge problem since i can just record to tape in another room but its something to look for in the future. thanks.. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by starchee

hrmhrm, im browsing the mailing list looking for possible solutions and i finally sorta kinda understand what hda, hdb, hdc refer to. and im thinking whats goin on is ive got the cords plugged in to the wrong devices. you know, i never knew the cords had specific places to be put into. figured you could mix and match!

im guessing i need to plug in the hdd to the hdc cable or something? well.. guess i needa format or something.. gah :/

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/dev/hda = Primary Master
/dev/hdb = Primary Slave
/dev/hdc = Secondary Master
/dev/hdd = Secondary Slave

Sounds like you have your CD ROM on the Secondary (IDE-2 or some boards where it starts at IDE-0, the second channel would be IDE-1) Channel

hmm, is there a problem with installing it onto hda? i dont mind going at it again im just gonna have to figure out which cord represents which hd-thing. i do ls at the /# prompt and it lists a bunch of directories, making me think that it has installed fine onto hda.. probably shouldnt have done this till my tivo arrived so i could test it myself though. if anything to save asking probably-stupid questions here :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by starchee

while im here reading archives (still!) i have a question.

if i want to record a program (lets say law and order or something) yet also want to watch csi or something thats on at the same time.. can i watch it? through the tv or something. i know i can do it on the vcr i have attached now. could i in theory, record something on vcr, record something on tivo, and watch something on tv? its not a huge problem since i can just record to tape in another room but its something to look for in the future. thanks.. :)

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Keeping in mind I am only using your example of shows....

I assume you don't have a TV Tuner in your TiVo.... in which case you'll be using your VCR to change channels. This means that TiVo will use your VCR Channels to record stuff. So, you would be able to let TiVo record "Law and Order" and watch "CSI" on TV. As long as you don't touch the VCR channel or TiVo will start recording "CSI" instead, but it won't know that you changed channels on it half way though.

Another commonly asked question is "Can TiVo record 2 things at once" and the short answer is "No".

or

"Can I watch LiveTV on TiVo while it is recording another channel".... the answer again, "No" because TiVo can only "see" one channel at a time.

You CAN however watch something in the 'recorded already' section known as "Now Showing" and let TiVo record the show you asked it to.

Hope this clears up some questions!

Ok here's the sure-fire way of imaging the hard disk and works for me EVERY time I do it (well over 100 to date with tuner installs):

Connect your CD ROM to be secondary slave device on your PC.


Make sure your PC can boot the CD (go into your BIOS and make sure the CD ROM is a bootable device).


Ensure new hard disk is set to master and NOT as cable select (CS)


Connect your new hard disk on the secondary master IDE chain (in linux parlay that is HDC)


Boot the CD


When you get to the linux command prompt type this:


fdisk /dev/hdc


you may see some complaints by linux but ignore them. Now type the following in this order with a return after every one:


o (lowercase letter "o")
n
p
1
(enter)
(enter)
w (lowercase "w")


The hard disk is now formatted.


Now you need to make the linux file system with the following command:


mke2fs /dev/hdc1


This will take a few minutes but when finished it is time to install the OzTiVo image onto the hard disk with this command:


mfstool restore -s 127 -xzpi /cdrom/hdr112.30.oztivo_emulator.release1.3 /dev/hdc


You will then see the restore process taking place. You will know when it is done because it will give you the amount of hours recording time available.


Now just simply do the usual PC reset (crtl-alt-del keys) to shutdown linux.


Disconnect TiVo drive


Place in TiVo set to master (it is already but just maks sure).


Boot TiVo. Wait a couple of minutes and you should then be into the "guided setup" screen.

Do all that verbatim and you will have absolutely no problems. Do not try and use HDA (primary master) for the hard disk as it has been proven to be unreliable.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by starchee

hmm, is there a problem with installing it onto hda? i dont mind going at it again im just gonna have to figure out which cord represents which hd-thing. i do ls at the /# prompt and it lists a bunch of directories, making me think that it has installed fine onto hda.. probably shouldnt have done this till my tivo arrived so i could test it myself though. if anything to save asking probably-stupid questions here :)

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There is never anything called a "Stupid Question" only because we were all at one stage "newbies" and had to ask questions to get where we are.

There isn't a problem installing onto HDA. If you want to learn a little bit more, experimentation is always a great way to get started, and I'll ask you to type "dmesg" without quotes of course. Somewhere in the middle, it should say (and it may look a little different because I dont have access to a TiVo boot CD at the moment):

Code:

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    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio
hda: QUANTUM FIREBALL ST4.3A, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: 8418816 sectors (4310 MB) w/81KiB Cache, CHS=524/255/63
Partition check:
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M

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This is actually just a snap shot of my linux firewall/server. You will notice that HDA is listed as a Hard Drive. (in my case, a 4 gig hdd). It also picked up something on HDC which is my CD Rom Drive, but didn't list it because it's not a Hard Drive.

From this info you can tell what position your HDD is. a, b, c or d.

If you don't get this info, please let me know, and I'll find another way to find it out.

yeah i got much the same info as you.. now to type it out. hurray for fast typing speed due to playing online games!

ide0: bm-dma at 0xb400-0xb407, bios settings: hda:DMA, hda:pio
ide1: bm-dma at 0xb408-0xb40f, bios settings: hda:DMA, hda:pio
hda:WDC WD2000JB-00GVA0, ATA DISK drive
hdc GCR-8521B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: 390721968 sectors (200050 MB) w/8192KiB cache, chs=24321/255/63
hdc: ATAPI 52x CD-ROM drive, 128kb cache
Uniform cd-rom driver revision: 3.12
partition check:
hda:
floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44m

anyway.. so assuming there is no problem installing on hda (i blame the information on the cdrom for sending me into a mild panic, saying you cant install to here) is there any way to check to see if its installed correctly other than sticking it in a tivo and hoping itll work? i still need to do the swap partition thing, but im waiting to see if i need to redo the whole thing on hdc first

I think you need to look at my post above. It answers pretty much all you need to know from the questions about your last post, especially "how will I know if it worked before I put it in the TiVo"

*IF* you want to put the hard disk on primary master (/dev/hda) then by all means do so, just substitute all hdc references in my above post to hda

But if it don't work because of the hda issue then don't blame me :)

i was going to follow your post once i figured out if i needed to. you wouldnt believe the issues i had getting my original harddrive unplugged, the power cable was in there like glue! and i wanted to avoid wrestling with it if i could. least now i know the cable thats in the cdrom right now is hdc.. so i can just flip the cables, assuming they actually reach, and not try and get the cdrom screws out because i cant get the stupid things to budge at all

Ok then. Good luck with it all :)

Put it this way: If you have a go and your usual PC hard drive is not connected you are not going to majorly break anything. And you will know when you have done everything right otherwise you'll see linux complain about not finding things.

V1.4 image is going to solve all this with it's question/answer menu interface, but it's not ready for wide public release yet.

alright, switching the cables wasnt so hard as they reached.. and ive now got the hdd as hdc! yay me! um, now to do all the stuff you typed up for me :)

and done! now that was relatively painless. i guess my whole problem can be summed up by not knowing the difference between the IDE cables.. which i still dont really understand. really did think they were all the same and could be used randomly :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by starchee

really did think they were all the same and could be used randomly :P

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LOL! spot the Windows 9x/me/xp user!!

No mate. You are talking old operating systems stuff here where you have to be a tad more specific. I guess I'm lucky growing up in the DOS days - probably when you were still in nappies :p