Adding MFS support to my kernel

[maxwells_daemon]

Hi,

I have found Tiger's MFS Tools 2.0 CD and Sleeper's Knoppix-Lite CD very useful for upgrading my TiVo disk (UK S1 TiVo). Thank you both!

Since I have a couple more TiVos to upgrade (my mum and brother both want me to do theirs!), I thought it would be nice to add this functionality to my Debian installation, so it was available in my normal setup.

I copied the mfstools over to my Linux HDD and they work fine from there, but I don't know what changes are required to mount the MFS partitions (not needed to run mfstools, but required to access the filesystems with other commands). I guess this will require a kernel rebuild, but couldn't find the required patches. I believe there are three parts

1) automatically unlock the TiVo drives. I know there are standalone DOS utilities to do this (qunlock or diskutil), but it would be nice to borrow this functionality from the boot CDs.

2) enable byte-swapping on the TiVo drives. Is it sufficient to use the hdb=bswap kernel option?

3) mount the MFS partition. I did find this patch. Is that sufficient?

Thanks,
Tim.

[ronnythunder]

there's a better patch for the partition support (that's your number three item, though you call it "mfs partition support"); search on google for it.

there's no way to "mount" the mfs partitions outside of a tivo. we have some tools to look at them and extract various stuff, and as of late, make some *very* limited modifications (and i mean extremely limited), but nothing significant.

bswap is ok, but the other key is that you have to disable dma for this to work. most kernels support "ide=nodma" in the parms for this purpose. do understand that disk i/o will be very slow in this config; only use it when you're wanting to mount the root partitions of the tivo disk (partitions 4 or 7).

i'm pretty sure the unlock code used on the various boot disks is out there somewhere as well; again, i'd give google a search or maybe even search here.

ronny

[AlphaWolf]

MFS works more like an index and isn't really something that you can do file management in with something like bash, thus there'd be no point in mounting it in a linux PC.

There are no directories or filenames. All files have an FSID and the database tree has definitions for different things which will have reference to these FSIDs.

Besides that theres no way in hell you'd ever get write support.

[maxwells_daemon]

Hi Ronny and AlphaWolf,

Yes, you are quite right. I meant the root and var filesystems - and the like that contain normal files, not the recorded programs. Sorry for the confusion - I thought MFS referred to all the TiVo partition types (you can see that I'm new to TiVo hacking, if not to Linux hacking).

Thanks for the advice on bswap and disabling dma. That sounds like I have all I need for my point (2).

For the others (drive unlocking, and mounting the files' partitions), I already spent a couple of hours hunting round on Google and the DealDatabase/AVS fora for this information. Apart from what I mentioned, what I found was either very old (eg. tivohack sourceforce area) or referred just to the CDs, not the source code patches.

mfstools has all its source code available in CVS. Unfortunately that just seems to be for the tools, not the CD kernel.

If you or anyone could point me to the source code patches for either the MFS tools CD, or the Knoppix CD, or standalone patches for these features, I'd be very grateful.

Thanks,
Tim.

[rc3105]

Originally Posted by ronnythunder

there's no way to "mount" the mfs partitions outside of a tivo.

actually, I think there was a kernel module waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when (even before tivonet) that mapped mfs into the root filesystem (readonly). handy for browse or extract, tivoweb sorta eclipsed it's usefullness

[maxwells_daemon]

Well, I finally got TiVo partition support working in my kernel. Since it took me some time to find the relevant patch and it did not work until a friend told me that I needed to compile the IDE support directly into the kernel (it didn't see the kernel arguments when it was a loadable module), I thought it would be worth documenting what I did and the patch that I used.

I can now mount my TiVo's root and var partitions from my Linux box without needing to boot from a CD. Details are here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/maxwell...partition.html