Mounting partitions in Linux using USB enclosure?

[Roland Deschain]

The title pretty much says it all...wondering if anyone has had success with various Linux distros attempting to mount any of the Tivo partitions when the drive is installed in an external USB enclosure?

I'm having to re-hack my DVR40 after DTV pushed out the 6.2a update a month or so ago.

I've got the Tivo drive in a USB enclosure plugged into my laptop running an RHEL4 distro (2.6.9-42 kernel). The device registers as sda as expected, and I can successfully run both pdisk and bootpage against it.

pdisk -p shows the following Ext2 partitions:
4: Root 1 (128M)
7: Root 2 (128M)
9: /var (128M)

bootpage -p returns this:
root=/dev/hda7 dsscon=true console=2,115200

However, attempting to mount any of these partitions returns this error:
[root@saggitarius tivo]# mount /dev/sda7 /media/tivo7
mount: special device /dev/sda7 does not exist

Yes, the target mount point exists. The result is the same regardless of the partition number used...I tried everything from sda1 to sda9, no joy.

So, is this an issue of RHEL not recognizing the goofy Apple partition structure used by the Tivo? If so, are there any distros that will recognize it? Knoppix, maybe?

EDIT:
Just tried it under Knoppix 5.1 - no joy. I'm going to attempt it booting under the MFSTOOLS ISO next.

[drez]

So, is this an issue of RHEL not recognizing the goofy Apple partition structure used by the Tivo?
Yes.


If so, are there any distros that will recognize it? Knoppix, maybe?

None that support it out of the box. You can get RHEL (or any other modern distro) to recognize your Tivo drive with tivopart (http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25219).

I think I tried it with FC6 so it should work with RHEL.

You can get your kernel to recognize your Tivo drive with this:

tivopart.x86 r /dev/sda
(run as root, note: it's r, not -r)

Then you should be able to mount it regularly.


Here's a thread with tivopart discussion towards the end: http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=51956

[Roland Deschain]

Thanks, drez. That was going to be my next step.

I had created a shell vmware machine to load the Knoppix ISO into. When that failed, I used the same shell to load the MSFTools ISO and it was able to mount everything nicely.

If for some reason I'm not able to get what I need done, I'll fall pack on tivopart.



EDIT:

Turned out to be too much damned trouble accessing the files I needed from within the MFSTools ISO boot...so, I wound up going back to Knoppix and using tivopart. Thanks again, drez.