Partition ran out of room, reinstall 6.3e from mfs possible?

[boody]

Hi All,
I was hacking tivoapp on my HR10 6.3e and I guess I wasn't watching closely cause somehow hda4 (124MB) ran out of room, I rebooted before looking at that, and it came up unwilling to boot- tivoapp was incomplete (how it ran out of space in the first place is another story cause I was replacing tivoapp). So, booted back up to hda7 (248MB) and ran an fsck which left hda4 with 30M usage...I'm no tivo superhacker, but that's looking to me like a useless data set- not even going to attempt a reboot. So, I'm wondering if doing this, while booted to hda7 (a 6.3a binary set running on a 6.3e database) will result in a clean, working reinstall of 6.3e to hda4:

cd /tvbin
installSW.itcl 6.3a-01-2-357

Or...do I have to download slices, etc. etc.

Givens:
(none):/$ echo mls /SwSystem | tivosh
Directory of /SwSystem starting at ''

Name Type FsId Date Time Size
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
6.3e-01-2-357 tyDb 2397146 12/10/07 23:55 804
ACTIVE tyDb 2397146 12/10/07 23:55 804

By the by, hda7 is 6.3a running on a 6.3e based database- although it's currently running fine, is this a really bad idea?

If the above upgrade is ok, anything special I should be aware of (need to do or alter)? If this can't be done, can I simply dd a 6.3e hda4/7 from another tivo onto mine w/o problems of any kind (no error 51, 81, etc)?

[tvtyme]

Your 6.3a-01-2-357 slices aren't in MFS anymore. Since you want 6.3e on /dev/hda4 you should allocate an additional 128Mb to it first. It's a tedious process, though:
(assuming your Tivo drive is the Secondary Master and a FAT16 drive is the Primary Master)
1. Boot a PTVupgrade CD
2. Mount your FAT16 drive as /mnt/c
3. Backup your Tivo drive (/dev/hdc) to a file on /mnt/c
4. Restore the backup with a swap of 768Mb (" -s 768") to the Tivo drive
5. Mount /dev/hdc7 (the v6.3a OS) as /tivo and tar its contents (root) to a file on the FAT16 drive
6. Use the attached tivopart.x86 (http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showpost.php?p=103860&postcount=1) to repartition hda1 through hda8. If you use the "-s 127" option it will use the extra space (768 minus 127) and create hda4 and hda7 at 256Mb
7. Use mke2fs to recreate the filesystems on /dev/hdc4 and /dev/hdc7
8. Mount /dev/hdc7 as /tivo and untar the tarfile in Step 5 back to /tivo
9. From the PTVUpgrade CD, dd the killhdinitrd'd 3.1.5 kernel to /dev/hdc6
10. Put the drive back in the Tivo, boot, and immediately initialize the swap
#/bin/mkswap -v1 /dev/hda8
#/bin/swapon -a
11. Reboot
12. Download the 6.3e slices, dbload them, edit the /tvbin/installSw.itcl script and run it:
#/tvbin/installSw.itcl 6.3f-01-2-357
13. Reboot under /dev/hda4 (6.3e) and reapply your hacks

L8r

[boody]

Thanks! I ended up grabbing (taring) 6.3e from another tivo i had...after re-mke2fs'ing hda4
Question, won't the restore and/or the re-partitioning you detailed wipe out recordings?

[crashHD]

yes, it would wipe out recordings. If you've got a tarball of the root filesystem of 6.3e, you can just mke2fs your root partition (not while booted from it, obviously), and unpack the tarball on that partition. If you've got a 256mb root partition, and a 128mb partition, I'd get the 128 set up and working, with enough hacks to get into the system (telnet, ftp). Then I'd copy over to the 256 and work from it. The elbow room will be useful, and then if you ever have trouble, you can flip the bootpage back to your other partition, which is already configured with the hacks you need to get into the box.

[boody]

Right, that's what I ended up doing- get at 6.3e tarball on the small part, and I would copy it to the 256M part, but I will instead sit tight for 6.3f and let it install properly on the big 256 rather than have to repeat the process.

[crashHD]

6.3f slices have been posted. No need to wait if you don't want to.