Mfslive 1.3-pre w/ Tivo HD support

[spike]

Update 8/13/07

Public version is release now.

[joneSi]

grabbed it, will use and report, possibly thurs.

Thanks,
joneSi

[dvrupgrade]

Hi Spike,

Download the alpha release this morning and did some tests.

1) made a backup (backup -Tf 4138 -s -9) of a virgin TiVoHD drive with no errors, warnings or problems

2) restored to a 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB drive, using the following command:

restore -x -s 256 -r4 -zpi tivo.bak /dev/sdx (or /dev/hdx using an ide-sata adapter)

The 250GB and 500GB tests seemed to work just fine with the reported hours info matching those of WinMFS precisely, however the 750GB and 1TB drives went into a reboot loop with a GSOD...

Any info you need?

Lou

[spike]

Hi Spike,

Download the alpha release this morning and did some tests.

1) made a backup (backup -Tf 4138 -s -9) of a virgin TiVoHD drive with no errors, warnings or problems

2) restored to a 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB drive, using the following command:

restore -x -s 256 -r4 -zpi tivo.bak /dev/sdx (or /dev/hdx using an ide-sata adapter)

The 250GB and 500GB tests seemed to work just fine with the reported hours info matching those of WinMFS precisely, however the 750GB and 1TB drives went into a reboot loop with a GSOD...

Any info you need?

Lou

1) try backup -f 9999 -6so /dos/filename.bak /dev/sda

so we know there is no issue with truncated fsid for all the loopsets

2) That's is strange why it fails for 750 and 1TB.
Is your IDE to sata adapter compatible with big drives?
I've seen some USB to Ethernet adapters can't go beyond 400GB or 500Gb but I'm not sure what the specs are for your adapter.

Kernel log output would be useful.

[dvrupgrade]

Hi Spike,

Download the alpha release this morning and did some tests.

1) made a backup (backup -Tf 4138 -s -9) of a virgin TiVoHD drive with no errors, warnings or problems

2) restored to a 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB drive, using the following command:

restore -x -s 256 -r4 -zpi tivo.bak /dev/sdx (or /dev/hdx using an ide-sata adapter)

The 250GB and 500GB tests seemed to work just fine with the reported hours info matching those of WinMFS precisely, however the 750GB and 1TB drives went into a reboot loop with a GSOD...

Any info you need?

Lou

1) try backup -f 9999 -6so /dos/filename.bak /dev/sda

so we know there is no issue with truncated fsid for all the loopsets

2) That's is strange why it fails for 750 and 1TB.
Is your IDE to sata adapter compatible with big drives?
I've seen some USB to Ethernet adapters can't go beyond 400GB or 500Gb but I'm not sure what the specs are for your adapter.

Kernel log output would be useful.

OK, I will do that and follow-up tomorrow sometime.

We know that the IDA-SATA works fine with big drives, in fact, the SATA controller we use in the PC doesn't work with 750 and 1TB drives which is why we use the IDA/SATA controller for all of our big drive configs (it works fine with your previous version of mfstools for S3 builds and with WinMFS, as well).

Will follow up soon.

Thx again,
Lou

[zmaninatlanta]

I have a brand new Tivo HD Mdl #652160.
Took the virgin 160gb drive (before setup)

ran the MFS tools CD1.3
created a backup of the drive- and then did a restore

with a 4gb FAT partition on sda (/dev/sda2) mounted it as /dos
using backup -f 9999 -6so /dos/tivo_hd.bak /dev/sdb
powering off / swapping drives to a new 500Gb drive
using restore with the Hinsdale how-to flags

and Viola!
I have 607 SD hours of recording and something like 64 HD hours of recording.
I did not try the WINmfs - but the new mfstools worked for me

[tvofan]

I did a virgin backup using:
backup -9qTao - /dev/sda > /dos/tivohd.bak

I want to backup everything, so is that command correct or do I have to use -f 9999?

(I don't have another drive to test the restore.)

[spike]

I did a virgin backup using:
backup -9qTao - /dev/sda > /dos/tivohd.bak

I want to backup everything, so is that command correct or do I have to use -f 9999?

(I don't have another drive to test the restore.)

You can give it a try. If it's a virgin drive it might be 2GB or more.
If you have any kind of recordings, you might run out of disk space to backup.

[tvofan]

spike, thanks for the info. I ran the backup using the command line I listed above and it came out to 2.42GB for the virgin drive.

[spike]

spike, thanks for the info. I ran the backup using the command line I listed above and it came out to 2.42GB for the virgin drive.

That's not bad at all.

[dvrupgrade]

Spike,

Did some tests yesterday, but I've been tied up on another project, so my results aren't as comprehensive.

I did attempt to make a full backup from a virgin drive using the -Tf 9999 - I was unsuccessful in that at a little over 2GB the backup aborted. Tried this multiple times and what I'm wondering is if this is an lba issue; was this CD built with a full LBA48 kernel?

Another thing I noticed is that files I created with the 1.2 CD that had more than 8 characters in the filename were abbreviated in the old DOS fashion. IE; a file names this_is_test.txt might look like this... this_i~1.txt or something close to that...

Lastly, I was unable to use the new CD to do a restore from an older backup image (ie a Series3 tivo.bak file created using the 1.2 CD); I suspect this was due to the file naming issue, not the backup itself, but I did not do any experimentation to prove/disprove that.

Lou

[spike]

I did attempt to make a full backup from a virgin drive using the -Tf 9999 - I was unsuccessful in that at a little over 2GB the backup aborted. Tried this multiple times and what I'm wondering is if this is an lba issue; was this CD built with a full LBA48 kernel?

It is full lba48 aware kernel just like release 1.2

Another thing I noticed is that files I created with the 1.2 CD that had more than 8 characters in the filename were abbreviated in the old DOS fashion. IE; a file names this_is_test.txt might look like this... this_i~1.txt or something close to that...

I think you have to include mount -t vfat ... to get the full file names.

Lastly, I was unable to use the new CD to do a restore from an older backup image (ie a Series3 tivo.bak file created using the 1.2 CD); I suspect this was due to the file naming issue, not the backup itself, but I did not do any experimentation to prove/disprove that.

my guess is with ~ and truncated names and such, it might be hard to get the name correctly.

I had no problem with 500Gb.

[dvrupgrade]

I did attempt to make a full backup from a virgin drive using the -Tf 9999 - I was unsuccessful in that at a little over 2GB the backup aborted. Tried this multiple times and what I'm wondering is if this is an lba issue; was this CD built with a full LBA48 kernel?

It is full lba48 aware kernel just like release 1.2

Another thing I noticed is that files I created with the 1.2 CD that had more than 8 characters in the filename were abbreviated in the old DOS fashion. IE; a file names this_is_test.txt might look like this... this_i~1.txt or something close to that...

I think you have to include mount -t vfat ... to get the full file names.

Lastly, I was unable to use the new CD to do a restore from an older backup image (ie a Series3 tivo.bak file created using the 1.2 CD); I suspect this was due to the file naming issue, not the backup itself, but I did not do any experimentation to prove/disprove that.

my guess is with ~ and truncated names and such, it might be hard to get the name correctly.

I had no problem with 500Gb.

Hmm... not sure why I'd need the -t vfat; not using that with the 1.2 CD either. I'm actually mounting an ubuntu linux partition (not fat32) but either way, its really odd that one CD sees it differently than the other.

Again, I was successful making the backup with -Tf 4138 and restoring to drives 500GB or less; it was just a problem with the 750GB and 1TB; no success on the -Tf 9999 backup, though. I will take another run at it tomorrow and see if there is something I am overlooking...

Cheers,
Lou

[ceci]

Hey Spike,

First of all, thanks for your work on WinMFS and MfsLive!

I've tried to upgrade my Tivo HD with a 750MB HDD. At first I started out using the MfsLive 1.3 pre-alpha release and got the same result as dvrupgrade: When I put the 750 GB disk back into my Tivo it entered an infinte GSOD->reboot loop.

I've used the following command to do the upgrade:

backup -qTao - /dev/sda | restore -s 128 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/sdb

After this failed attempt I downloaded WinMfs (current version) and re-did the upgrade and this time it succeeded. (Well, I specified a custom swap size of 256MB this time, but I doubt that this was the problem...)

Both tests were done on exactly the same hardware (using a pair of USB<->SATA cables that were rated as "tested with 750GB disks".)

Keep up the great work!

regards,

ceci

[spike]

I just got 1TB drive from a local store so let me run some test on new mfstools and see if I can duplicate your problem.