How to create a drive image ?

[P-r0t]

Sadly I've never had a need for linux till now. What's the best way to create an image of a Tivo hard drive ? Especially a virgin drive

P-r0t

[Lure]

U really need to back up: that's a fact.

so what is the best way? I suggest you read :

the tivoinside crash course
or
The Whole Hacking The TiVo FAQ

the first one got it's info almost for 80% from the second one. You still have to do some thinking your self-)

As soon as tiger's mfstool is being relaised the this would be the best way (in my humble opinion) fast and small and backs up from and linux version. Other back up progs need special disks like Dylan or madtivo. i suggest you start looking for the boot cd. I found that easy to use. ( find it, burn , boot it-))

anyway: do extensive reading befor you start.

good luck

It's not the fact that yyou make mistakes that worries me, but the destructive size does

[P-r0t]

I read through those faqs but it doesn't really answer my question. I guess I should have worded my question properly :P

What I really want to do is backup a virgin "A" drive (s*ny) to an image file

I need to get this image file onto a fat32 or ntfs windows partition so I can rar it up & back it up onto cd or what not

I have only basic linux/unix understanding, mainly a dos/windows guy

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I believe the end result might benfiit a few people


Thanks

P-r0t

[aram1s]

2 different ways to proceed. Depends on whether you are using a single box or 2 boxen (that's linux plural for box).

Either way, I will assume that you plugged the tivo drive in as secondary master (/dev/hdc).
----------------------------

2 machines:
Be sure you have a published share on the windows box (no password is easiest) and that the linux box has the SMB filesystem and sharing proggies (specifically smbmount) on it (RedHat has both).

Boot both machines. Log into the linux box as root. mount the windows share:
mkdir /mnt/winbox
smbmount //winbox/sharename /mnt/winbox
(when it asks for the password just press return)

(now jump down to "either one, cntd" below
--------------------------
1 box:
You have to either add a second drive for linux or partition part of your HD for it (or find a linux boot CD and use that).
Either way, let's assume that /dev/hda1 is your windows partition.

You just have to mount the windows partition locally:
mkdir /mnt/winbox
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/winbox

--------------------------
either one, cntd

assuming this worked you should be able to type:
ls /mnt/winbox
and see everything that in on the windows share or partition that you just mounted.

Change directory to the windows mount:
cd /mnt/winbox
and you are ready to do your copy. You have 2 choices. You can do a straight copy with no compression:
dd if=/dev/hdc of=tivohd.img
or you can do it with compression:
dd if=/dev/hdc|bzip2 -9>tivohd.img.bz

When this is done (many hours later with the compression) you should sync and unmount the drive:
cd /; sync; umount /mnt/winbox
then you are done. You can shutdown and remove the drive:
/sbin/shutdown -h now

Have Fun!
A