InstantCake Restore failed: Backup target not large enough

[csp122]

Howdy folks,

I suspect that the hard drive in my stock DSR7000R/17 DirecTiVo has finally bitten the dust following a cross-country move... It's perpetually stuck on the 'Welcome...Powering Up' screen, and I've tried TiVo's suggestion of cycling the power, to no avail.

I called DirecTV, and they want to replace my family's beloved TiVo with one of their own DVRs, so... I purchased a copy of InstantCake for my model of TiVo and burned a CD-ROM from the .ISO download.

Unfortunately, the only non-SATA drives that were available at my local computer shop were a stack of 40GB Seagate ST340015A Barracudas... That's OK, I thought, we've never really needed any extra space on that particular TiVo (believe me, 35 hours of Spongebob, Diego, Einsteins, and Backyardigans is PLENTY), so... I bought one 40GB disk.

The first issue I encountered was that my PC wouldn't boot to the InstantCake CD when I had the CD-ROM drive as the primary IDE slave device and the new Barracuda as the secondary master device... I double-checked that I had the jumpers installed correctly, but... For some reason, both had to be the master device on their own respective IDE channels.

After reading about the PTVbake-special script, I located and downloaded the PTVLBA48-4.04 .ISO, and burned a companion CD-ROM for InstantCake... I then booted to the LBA disc with no special parameters, and edited the /bin/PTVbake-special script to set the CDROM variable to 'hda'. I then executed the ./bin/PTVbake-special script and answered the prompts as follows:

Choose E to expand or N for normal restore [E, N] ? E
Are you building a single or dual-drive TiVo? [1, 2] ? 1
Do you want a 127MB swap file? [y, n] ? n

When instructed to do so, I removed the companion CD, and replaced it with the standard InstantCake CD. The script located an image for a "Philips DSR7000 Software Version 6.2-01-2-101 Standard Release", which I believe is correct. However, when I allowed the script to continue, I received the following error message:

Restore failed: Backup target not large enough for entire backup by itself.


I believe this is 'mfstool' telling me that my 40GB Barracuda just isn't big enough for the InstantCake image. I find this odd because when I remounted the cdrom, and listed the directory of '/cdrom/.images/000001', there appeared to be a 35.6GB image residing there:

-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 285359245 Mar 24 2005 /cdrom/.images/000001*


First, using the 'Shift-Page Up' key combination, I checked to see if the Linux underpinning for InstantCake recognized my Barracuda correctly:

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta4-2.4
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
hda: SONY DVD-ROM DDU1615, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: ST340015A, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hdc: attached ide-disk driver.
hdc: host protected area => 1
hdc: 78165360 sectors (40021 MB) w/2048 KiB Cache, CHS=77545/16/63
hda: attached ide-cdrom driver.
hda: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM drive, 254kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
Partition check:
hdc: (0x4b41) unknown partition table


After finding this information, I believe the InstantCake CD recognized the full capacity of the 40GB Seagate disk...

Thinking maybe the computer shop sold me a bum drive, I downloaded the SeaTools for DOS v1.10PH bootable diskette from Seagate, and ran the "LONG Test", but... It passed with the following results:

Start Read Scan on 8/22/2008 @ 0:03.21
LBA 78129920
Read Scan PASSED on 8/22/2008 @ 0:21.31

Device 0 is Seagate device ST340015A FW 3.75
On Generic PCI ATA
Device is 28 Bit Addressed - Max LBA 78165360 ( 40.021 GB )
This drive supports Security Features
SMART Is Supported and ENABLED
SMART Has NOT Been Tripped
DST Is Supported
Logging Feature Set Is NOT Supported
POH 9554 Current Temp 41 Worst Temp 49


I also downloaded the DISKUTIL software that is referenced in "other" TiVo upgrading documentation that's available on the web. Then, I copied the .EXE to a bootable FreeDOS diskette, and attempted to use the /PermUnlock switch against drive #2, but... The utility returned the following error:

Drive error - not locked - aborting


I'm stuck... Can somebody help me figure out why I can't bake my InstantCake? Will a simple 'dd' command work?

dd if=/cdrom/.images/000001 of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k

[BruceS]

I am not familiar with your particular mode of Tivo, but I think you need a bigger drive.

I haven't checked, but I suspect that there are compressed files on the InstantCake CD that are expanded during the install.

Also, during the install multiple partitions are created. The size of the files on the CD have little relation to the amount of space that is needed on the hard drive.

[csp122]

The original DSR7000 drive had the following characteristics:

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta4-2.4
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
hda: SONY DVD-ROM DDU1615, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: Maxtor 2F040L0, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hdc: attached ide-disk driver.
hdc: host protected area => 1
hdc: 80293248 sectors (41110 MB) w/2048 KiB Cache, CHS=4998/255/63
hda: attached ide-cdrom driver.
hda: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM drive, 254kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
Partition check:
hdc: (0x0) unknown partition table


I suspect you're correct that a bigger disk would accomodate the extra 2,127,888 sectors (1,089 MB) of data... I guess I've learned the hard way that 40GB to one manufacturer may not mean the same to another.

In any case, I used SeaTools to determine nothing was wrong with my existing Maxtor drive (except maybe a weird temperature reading of 253!):

Start Read Scan on 8/25/2008 @ 22:32.27
LBA 80293248
Read Scan PASSED on 8/25/2008 @ 23:01.32

Device 0 is Seagate device Maxtor2F040L0 FW VAM51JJ0
On Generic PCI ATA
Device is 48 Bit Addressed - Max LBA 80293248 ( 41.110 GB )
This drive supports Security Features
SMART Is Supported and ENABLED
SMART Has NOT Been Tripped
DST Is Supported
Logging Feature Set Is NOT Supported
POH 1395 Current Temp 253


At this point, I'm fairly convinced that the power supply is preventing my DirecTiVo from booting... Does anybody know where I can pickup an inexpensive power supply for DSR7000?

[csp122]

The C18 capacitor on the power supply was shot... I replaced it with a 2200uF 25VDC radial from my local electronics store and now my DirecTiVo is working! All it took was $0.50 for the capacitor, a soldering iron, a tiny bead of solder, a #10 Torx driver, and something to nip off the capacitor leads.