Empty Partition Table

[3v0]

I had a small problem and made it worse. This is a bit long but
the details on how I got to where I am at may be useful (or not).

I created a backup image using mfsbackup.
I restored the Image to a new 120Gig Maxtor.
Image booted SA Phillips tivo OK.
Installed turbonet card and set prefix.
Test call went OK
Used mfsadd to add rest of drive space.

When I tried to do the /floppy/script thing to copy the
turbonet stuff to partitions 4 and 7. It ran into a problem.
Mount failed because it could not mount hdb4. I attempted
to do so via

/# mount /dev/hdb4 /mnt
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

I checked via pdisk and foud that partitions 4 and 7 were
both Ext2 system.

/# mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb4 /mnt
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

Note that at this point I could mount partition hdb7.

After messing with various partition table tools thing got
worse in that

/# pdisk -l /dev/hdb
pdisk: No valid block 1 on '/dev/hdb'

So I decieded to start from scratch and did a "low level"
format on the drive. It worked and there were no errors.
(The low level format was from Maxtor, powermax maybe)

I then did the

/# mfsrestore -s 127 -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb

which worked. It resulted in an image which boots the tivo,
and expanded to use the full disk using mfsadd as above.
But pdisk still says "No valid block 1 on '/dev/hdb'"
and I can not mount any partitions.

Does anyone know what is wrong ?


Howard

[captain_video]

Are you by chance trying to mount the partitions by using the MFS Tools 2.0 disc to boot from? If this is the case, it won't work. The MFS Tools CD does not allow byteswapping or some such nonsense so you'll need to use a different boot CD. The 2.5Xtreme image, Turbonet installation software, or Superzap's 2.5.2/3.1 upgrade images all make fine boot CDs that allow you to mount your Tivo partitions. Note that you can boot to a bash prompt from any of these CDs but no software gets installed without typing in a specific command to begin installation of the particular software contained on that CD. The boot CDs load a basic Linux kernel into memory. Once you've booted to a bash prompt and get the prompt to login as root then you can do whatever you want using Linux commands.

[3v0]

You were right about me attempting to mount using the mfs2 disk.
Once I switched back to a CD that byte swaped hdb I could read
the partition table again.

But I still have a problem in that I can not mount partition 4 when
using an image from any of my backups.

I hacked the tivonet install script "/floppy/script" to only modify
partition 7 and got the job done, but I worry about what will
happen when they next attempt to update my TIVO software.

The good news is that I still have a set of two drives that I took
out of one of the Tivos and I can mount partion 4 using them.
I can start from scratch and try again.

Thanks
Howard