Can I 'dd' hda4 & hda7 to a broken drive?

[Wolffpack]

I've got a HDVR3 and a SDVR40 both Sleepered, both on 120GB drives. The SDVR40 recently stopped accepting Telnet, Tivoweb, FTP and MFSFTP requests. I reloaded the software by connecting it to my PC using the PTV boot CD without any luck.

I haven't connected my PC via serial to see what is happening at boot, but as my HDVR3 works fine, can I mount the HDVR3 as hdb and the SDDVR40 as hda and "dd" /dev/hdb4 to /dev/hda4 and /dev/hdb7 to /dev/hda7 in hopes of getting this to work once again? All I want to do is get the recordings off this drive ad them plan on starting the process to upgrade to 6.2 and dump Sleeper.

Any problems with doing this? Do I need to know the "bs", if so, does anyone know how to tell or what it is?

Thanks.

[PlainBill]

That might work IF they both use the same boot partition, have the same software version, etc. Rather than going in blind, it would be a good idea comparing the two installations. In this case, bootpage is your friend.

PlainBill

[Wolffpack]

Thanks PlainBill.

That seems to have fixed it. I could not get into telnet, TivoWebPlus or MFS_FTP. I could ping the unit but nothing else. 'bootpage's between the two were the same, same software and even same size drive.

However, I initially forgot to copy hda9 to hdb9. Once I dd'ed 4, 7 and 9 everything's working fine.

Thanks again.

[PlainBill]

Sounds like /var got wiped. It happens. That's why we prefer to put hacks in a directory in root.

PlainBill