dd (drive copy) command going on 36 hours

[sonan]

I have two Toshiba SD-H400 TiVos, originally with 80 GB drives. A few months ago, one of them went bad and I replaced it with a 200 GB drive I had lying around. I used the "dd" command to copy the good 80 GB drive from the working TiVo over to the 200 GB drive and everything worked fine.

Now the other 80 GB drive has gone bad, so I'm attempting to do the same thing again, copying the 200 GB drive onto a new 500 GB drive. However, I issued the "dd" command over 36 hours ago and it's still going!

Is it reasonable to believe it's actually doing anything and will eventually finish? Or should I just terminate it and try again? Is it safe to terminate it? I really don't want to mess up the good drive. Any advice would be appreciated.

[WK-Jeff]

That is a mighty long time. Halting it won't damage either drive, but you'll have to start over if for some reason it's still going. It's more likely, though, that your drive is so far gone that the copy has no chance of succeeding.

[sonan]

Well, the drive I'm copying from should be good. It's the one I pulled from the working TiVo. And I'm copying to a brand new drive.

I decided to terminate it this morning (after almost a full 48 hours running), so I pressed ESC. Nothing happened, so I pressed ctrl-break. Still nothing, so I pressed ctrl-alt-del. Then I noticed that it put out the following messages:

147957+0 records in
147957+0 records out

The system is going down NOW!

I'm going on the assumption that it didn't really finish and that something I did caused it to stop where it was and display results. Just for kicks, I'm going to put the new drive in a TiVo to see what happens, but I know I'm probably going to have to do the copy again. Wish me luck, and thanks for the reply!

[WK-Michael]

No reason not to try installing it - tell us how it goes!

[sonan]

Well, I put it in and powered up, and after a few minutes got the welcome animation and menus. But it warned me of a hardware problem and suggested that I restart the system. And a few of the recordings had flashing flags next to them. Figuring the copy hadn't gotten all of the recordings, I opted to skip the restart and went straight to a reset to clear everything out. That seemed to work fine, and when I got to the guided setup, I shut it down and pulled the drive to do the expansion step.

Unfortunately, mfsadd said it couldn't expand the drive because it would use too many partitions. "mfstool info" showed 222 hours of recording capacity, so I just put the drive back into the TiVo and closed it all up.

Guided setup went smoothly, and everything seems to be working great. So I'm not going to mess with it anymore, unless someone has a solution to the "too many partitions" error mfsadd gave me.

Oh, one last thing. I tried to make a backup of the good drive, onto a drive from an XP machine formatted NTFS which I mounted, but it said the volume was read only. I confirmed I had the right drive mounted with "dir." Not sure what was going on there.

Anyway, thanks for the replies and for making these forums and information available to us!

[WK-Michael]

Right - you can't re-expand an already-larger A drive.

If the Windows drive was hda, that's the problem. The tools prevent writing to that position in an effort to help people not overwrite their C: drive.

[sonan]

If the Windows drive was hda, that's the problem. The tools prevent writing to that position in an effort to help people not overwrite their C: drive.

That sounds like a useful feature, however in this case I was using an SATA drive that was identified as hde. By the way, under System Information on the TiVo, my 500 GB drive still only shows 83 hours of recording capacity. So I'm not sure I'm getting any additional capacity out of my new drive, but at least I have my TiVo back!

As "fun" as it is digging in and trying to do these kinds of things on my own, I'm thinking the next time one of my TiVos needs a new drive I'll just go with one of your pre-configured ones!

Edit: I was browsing your site some more and found the interactive upgrade instructions, which includes something I didn't find in the ones I used: sd-h400_unlock -w /dev/hdZ I bet that's why it's still showing 83 hours of recording capacity. I might just have to pull the drive again and try this out. It couldn't hurt...

[WK-Michael]

Right - the Toshiba does have an unusual locking issue with drive expansion. This is also found on some Pioneer units.

[cma371]

SD-H400 Upgrade

I upgraded to a 300gb drive. After I did the restore it reported 300hrs. Put back in the Tivo, still says 80hrs and won't update from 7.2 to 9.3.

[WK-Jeff]

It might be that TiVo's servers aren't updating that version of the software if your unit has already updated. That is a pretty old version. Your SD-H400 has the locking feature that Michael referenced above.

[cma371]

I used the unlock command and worked. It finally also updated to 9.3. Thanks