Partial install of wrong image. Crashed wife's tivo. Please help

[crashHD]

Hello.

Today, after installing a new prom in my wife's DTV R10, I put it's drive in my computer to hack it. Through a combination of having too much stuff on one boot cd, and one wrong keystroke, I accidentally began installing a backup image from a RCA DVR40. I knew it was wrong as soon as I saw it on the screen, and I Control-C'd out of it as fast as I could find the keys. At that point, mfsrestore said it had uncompressed 6 megs. The drive no longer boots, and the partition table is incorrect. Apparently, the partition table from the backup image was among the first things it did.
This drive is a 250GB Maxtor. It was configured with Instantcake, so I can reproduce it's partition table for everything except the last MFS pair which should go from the beginning of the empty space to the end of the drive.

Knowns:
(1) Hardware is fine (prom mod tested, successfully boots an unhacked system, and successfully boots a hacked system (tested w/spare disk).
(2) I'm a dumba s s

Unknowns:
(1) What gets written during the first 6 megs of an mfsrestore operation
(2) If I can reproduce the partition table manually, is the data from the original MFS partitions still on the drive, undamaged?
(3) If (2), can this be solved if I can duplicate the original partition table, dd in known good kernel, root, and boot partitions?
(4) Where is the encryption key stored? If it is not salvaged, saving any recordings would be all for naught anyway, correct?

Thank you for reading. Please help

[PlainBill]

I'm assuming some recordings your wife wanted to watch were on the drive. If not, I'd suggest getting an image and restoring it.

If that IS the problem, try flowers and chocolates. Next, try groveling. If all else fails, jewelery may be required. Something with diamonds....

PlainBill

[ocntscha]

This drive is a 250GB Maxtor. It was configured with Instantcake, so I can reproduce it's partition table for everything except the last MFS pair which should go from the beginning of the empty space to the end of the drive.

I can't say if your drive is salvageable or not although just taking a guess at it I'd sure think so. As far as encryption keys, I don't know where else they'd be stored if not in the MFS database so assuming mfsrestore just restores sequentially from the beginning of the drive to the end you should be ok, but that is an assumption on my part.

What I'm really posting to say though, and its pretty obvious so you've likely thought if it already, but just in case you haven't..

If you happen to have another identical 250Gig drive you could Instantcake it, or if can locate someone else who has a 250 Gig and Instantcaked theirs, then you could find out yourself or from them what the partition table was that you overwrote.

Or, if you don't have an identical drive, but you've got a lot of hard drive space available.. You could use dd to backup you screwed up drive to a great big file, then Instantcake it to find out how the partition table is created, then restore the drive back its screwed up state with dd, then fix the partition table.

[crashHD]

Success!!!

I downloaded/installed vmware workstation, and created a virtual pc with a 233.8GB hard drive. I created it with the virtual hard drive in a file on my PC. That way, the size of the virtual hard drive file is only as big as the data on that virtual hard drive, i.e. my 233.8GB virtual hard drive took up less than a gig on my computers real, physical hard drive (only way I could make it fit). The size of my virtual drive was 68,801 blocks larger than the real drive, but that was as close as I could get it (VMware let me select hard drive size in xxx.xxGB, so I couldn't get exact, but that discrepancy works out to about 32KB difference...with 12 or so megs empty space at the end of the drive, it turns out not to matter (i think). After that, I dd'd in partitions 1 thru 9 from a freshly instantcaked disc. I have no idea which, if any of them, fixed the problem, but I did them all, and it seems to work now.

When all done, i ran mfsinfo to see what it said, figuring it does run some sort of sanity check on the mfs partition set. It did give me a note about a size discrepancy, but I don't recall the exact text of the error, and it didn't prevent the tivo from booting. I'm watching one of my wife's playboy channel recordings right now .

Yay, I'm still married, and that jewelry money can now go to another hard drive.

[imaloserbaby]

...installed vmware workstation, and created a virtual pc with a 233.8GB hard drive.

Out of interest, what version of vmware did you use and do you have a dual-core machine? (Mine is, but I'm not sure if that's relevant). It's just that I got this hideous error restoring at around 99.x% :

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vmx)
ASSERT C:/ob/bora-34685/bora/lib/disklib/dataCache.c:1967 bugNr=33326
.... blah blah.

I'm using version 5.5.3 build-34685

[crashHD]

5.5.2 build 29772, and my machine is a Pentium 3 (Tualatin core) at 1.2 GHz.

I'm just running the demo version, and my evaluation time is almost up, if that means anything or not.

[imaloserbaby]

5.5.2 build 29772, and my machine is a Pentium 3 (Tualatin core) at 1.2 GHz.

Hmm, I might try that version and see, but I fear something funky on my PC in particular, who knows. Interestingly (I had tried until now) the 99.x% had "finished" (albeit with a horrible "crash" dump dialog). I'm now trying to take that drive and put it on another virtual drive, just to "validate" somewhat. Maybe there is a problem with the mfs image I have, I'll try another.

EDIT: Interesting! The error seems to be the result of the dvrupgrade(free) / mfstools boot cd!! I used the MFSLive (.org) and WeaKnees (SATA support) boot cd's and both of those gave an error free restore! See:

http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/sh...559#post275559

[imaloserbaby]

I'm just running the demo version, and my evaluation time is almost up, if that means anything or not.

I meant to say BTW, the Server version of VMware is free now, and you can install it on a regular desktop install of XP (for some stupid reason I thought it required 2003 Server to install on). Works out to be a very nice (free!) VM setup. Then you can download ubuntu vmware images (virtual appliances) and build a very nice cross compiler environment to do some MIPS disassembly, etc.