Need help understanding TiVo partitions

[Flyersfan72]

Hi. I'm looking for help with transferring recordings from one drive to another. What happened is I had an 80GB drive in an SD-H400 begin to fail. The TiVo was stuck on the "Welcome! Powering Up...." screen. I tried using MFSTools to copy from the 80GB to a 120GB drive but received errors during the backup/restore and when I tried the 120GB drive in the TiVo I got stuck on the same screen. I also tried dd_rescure with the same results.

I didn't have a backup (lesson learned!) so I bought an Instantcake image, applied that to my 120GB drive, put it in the Tivo and it worked as expected. Not a big deal at all. I went through the guided setup and then took the drive out and installed it back in my pc in the hopes of now copying the recordings from the old 80GB drive to the 120GB drive.

When I fired up MFSTools I noticed the following partitions on the old 80GB drive (mfsinfo):

hdc10 - 256MiB
hdc11 - 33887MiB
hdc12 - 256MiB
hdc13 - 42991MiB

When I checked the newly "caked" 120GB drive the partitions were different than those on the 80GB drive. I forget the exact numbers but hdc10,hdc11,hdc12 were not big at all - one or two were 0MiB. The majority of the space was set aside in hdc13.....almost all of the 120GB.

What I was expecting to do was to just use 'dd' to copy partition by partition from old drive to new drive.

So my question is how can I get the partitions on the new drive to be as big or bigger (since it IS a bigger drive afterall) so I can copy the data?

And am I way off base here or should I be able to do something like this?

They're actually my wife's recordings and after me mucking around with this off and on for a week or so, she's just ready to get her TiVo back - old shows or not. I really want to try to figure this out.

So any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

[Lou Jacob]

Hi. I'm looking for help with transferring recordings from one drive to another. What happened is I had an 80GB drive in an SD-H400 begin to fail. The TiVo was stuck on the "Welcome! Powering Up...." screen. I tried using MFSTools to copy from the 80GB to a 120GB drive but received errors during the backup/restore and when I tried the 120GB drive in the TiVo I got stuck on the same screen. I also tried dd_rescure with the same results.

I didn't have a backup (lesson learned!) so I bought an Instantcake image, applied that to my 120GB drive, put it in the Tivo and it worked as expected. Not a big deal at all. I went through the guided setup and then took the drive out and installed it back in my pc in the hopes of now copying the recordings from the old 80GB drive to the 120GB drive.

When I fired up MFSTools I noticed the following partitions on the old 80GB drive (mfsinfo):

hdc10 - 256MiB
hdc11 - 33887MiB
hdc12 - 256MiB
hdc13 - 42991MiB

When I checked the newly "caked" 120GB drive the partitions were different than those on the 80GB drive. I forget the exact numbers but hdc10,hdc11,hdc12 were not big at all - one or two were 0MiB. The majority of the space was set aside in hdc13.....almost all of the 120GB.

What I was expecting to do was to just use 'dd' to copy partition by partition from old drive to new drive.

So my question is how can I get the partitions on the new drive to be as big or bigger (since it IS a bigger drive afterall) so I can copy the data?

And am I way off base here or should I be able to do something like this?

They're actually my wife's recordings and after me mucking around with this off and on for a week or so, she's just ready to get her TiVo back - old shows or not. I really want to try to figure this out.

So any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

You are not going to be able to do this because its not just the data in the partitions that matters. There is also a database which contains indexes and other information about the data, and you can't update that database simply by copying the data from one partition on your old drive into the comparable partition on the new drive. It just won't work...

Your best bet is to start over from scratch with a clean install. Of course ensure that you've thoroughly checked the drive for any hardware problems before putting it into service on your TiVo.

[Flyersfan72]

Thank you for the response Lou.

I have the new drive installed and working now but isn't there some way to get the recordings off that old drive....assuming the bad sector(s) are not where the recordings are stored? I obviously don't understand how TiVo uses it's database and indexes but the recordings are there on the drive - there are only a few bad sectors and they were very early on in the copy process.

It's not even the recordings themselves at this point - my wife has long given up on the notion of ever watching them. It's more about principle than anything.