Upgraded from 3.1.5f to 6.3c - lost hacks (obviously) how do I get them back?

[Andy in NYC]

My machine updated itself correctly to 6.3c which is nice and is faster. I've lost my hacks of course.

Is there a way at this point to rehack it without losing all my settings and recordings?

Gah, just when I thought I was out, it pulls me back in.

andrew

[PlainBill]

Sure. There are a number of 'How to's' written by/for the challenged which direct you to use an Instantcake image. It is cheaper and as easy to hack a copy of your existing drive. For obvious reasons I would NEVER suggest hacking the original drive without making a backup.

Start with Captain Video's TiVo hacking 101 in the newbie section.

PlainBill

[Andy in NYC]

Thanks Bill,

What I meant, however, is that "Is there an easy was to restore my hacks since they should be on the old partition?"

I know I can start from scratch, but then I need to back up my dual 400GB drives to (something) and do a complete new install. Probably not going to happen.

Andrew

[PlainBill]

Thanks Bill,

What I meant, however, is that "Is there an easy was to restore my hacks since they should be on the old partition?"
Some of those hacks apply to 3.1.5f and won't do you any good with 6.3c. Others are probably outdated.

I know I can start from scratch, but then I need to back up my dual 400GB drives to (something) and do a complete new install. Probably not going to happen.

Andrew
This is one of the popular myths. It is NOT necessary to do a completely new install. It never was, and almost certainly never will be. Yes, a number of dummies have written 'step by step' procedures that start with restoring an instantcake image. And even more dummies have followed those 'guides' without learning a darn thing.

1. You cannot go back to 3.1.5f; the upgrade has made changes to the mfs database that cannot be easily rolled back.
2. It is easy to hack your present system, using nothing more than a killhdinitrd kernel, AlphaWolf's Series 2 binaries, and a tools cd. I routinely did this to upgrade 4 systems to 6.2, and never lost a recording in the process.
3. Admittedly, a novice doing so has a significant chance of losing his recordings, and backing up all your recordings (or even copying 2 400 Gig drives) is a major undertaking.
4. My final suggestion is this: Make a backup of your present drives, shrinking the image, and abandoning the recordings. Restore this image to a single 250 Gig drive. Hack this drive. Test it, tweak it, break it, and start over until you KNOW the steps. This should take one or two evenings, during which your present drives are allowing your family to watch TV. Then copy the active root partition and the active boot partition from the hacked drive to your present 'master' drive, and if necessary adjust the boot parameters.
At this point you have a hacked system with all recordings intact.

PlainBill

[iMagic]

Andy, All your hacks should remain on your old root partition. You can mount it somewhere under new root and copy them over. That's what I did and everything worked OK. If you use cp, just make sure to tell it to preserve links. I saw a post saying to use -Rfpd. I've always been using -rd, but this time TiVo kept getting stuck on the same file. So, I just tar'ed my hack folders and untar'ed them on the new drive. Hope this answers your question.

DZ