Coffee, Code and Candor

After a few days off due to other priorities I’m back at the TiVo restoration again. Since last time the computer I was using would simply not boot the InstantCake CD I thought perhaps it was the computer itself (as I tried booting various other bootable CDs to no avail). This time I’ve taken my primary family desktop computer, unleashed it from all of it’s cables, disconnected the two HDDs in it and the secondary CD-RW drive and hooked up the TiVo drive as the Primary Master and the CD-ROM drive as the secondary master.

Powered it up, set the BIOS to boot from the CD-ROM, restarted, inserted the CD-ROM and waited…. and it booted from the CD after about 20-30 seconds of delay post-BIOS.

I read back through the mess of stuff that is displayed by the Linux kernel when I finally got to the InstantCake Prompt (waiting for me to press enter) by hitting SHIFT-PAGE UP to scroll back through the text. I noted that it detected the Maxtor TiVo drive as hda as well as the CD-ROM drive.

hd1: C/H/S=0/0/0 from BIOS ignored

hda: Maxtor 6E040L0, ATA Disk Drive

hdc: _NEC DV-5800A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

ide0 at 0×1f0-0×1f7, 0×3f6 on irq 14

ide1 at 0×170-0×177,0×376 on irq 15

hda: 80293248 sectors (41110 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=4998/255/63, UDMA(100)

Being pleased with this information (which basically just confirms that the two drives I have connected are being properly detected by the InstantCake software), I proceeded. But first I took note of another bit if info it provided about the hda (Maxtor TiVo drive I’m attempting to fix).

Partition check:

hda: [mac] hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 hda10 hda11 hda12 hda13

That just says that there are 13 logical partitions on the disk (which I find surprising, but not problematic). Onward we go, then. I hit SHIFT-PAGE DOWN to get back to the InstantCake prompt and it said hit enter to bake my InstantCake, so I did.

I came to the InstantCake novice mode screen where it said that it expected my drives to be configured as follows

CDROM drive ——————————- primary slave
New Drive #1 for TiVo ———————- secondary master
New Drive #2 for TiVo ———————- secondary slave

Since this doesn’t match my configuration I decided to enter advanced mode which would allow me to reconfigure the drives in the software (i.e. I can tell the software the actual hardware configuration of my drives rather than reconfiguring the hardware itself). To do this I hit ‘a’ and ‘enter.’

The next screen was the advanced mode screen wherein it stated that I should be confident as to how my drives are configured and later the software would ask me to tell it the configuration. I hit ‘enter’ to continue.

The next screen asked how many TiVo drives are in my setup (one or two). I said one.

The next screen says, “How is your new TiVo A drive currently connected?” It is the Primary Master, so I typed hda according to its directions.

The next screen says, and I quote fully

We are now going to build a single-drive system using the drive you installed on /dev/hda.

This process will erase everything on the drive you connected.

Are you ready to continue? [y, n]?

I typed ‘y’ hit ‘enter’ and away it said “This distribution contains the following InstantCake image: TiVo Series2 TCD540 Models Version 7.2.0-oth-01-2-540 Standard Release” and then told me to ensure I’m installing the proper TiVo software for my particular model. Iam, so I continued.

The next screen said, “Your cake is in the oven! Please do not interrupt this process, it may take awhile…” The uncompressed backup size it reported was 754 megabytes. It proceeded to display a progress indicator which lasted for less than a minute until it said the restore was done. The output of the screen when it was all said and done was

Starting restore
Uncompressed backup size: 754 megabytes
Restoring 754 of 754 megabytes (100.00%) (83.30% compression)
Cleaning up restore. Please wait a moment.
Restore done!
Adding pair /dev/hda12-/dev/hda13
New estimated standalone size: 40 hours (39 more)

Please hit to continue…[]?

I hit enter and it told me to verify the success of the installation by checking the recording capacity under Message & Setup -> System Information and then run guided setup by going to Messages & Setup -> Restart or Reset System and then selecting ‘Repeat Guided Setup’ and follow the prompts. And it said now I should power down my PC and move the drive to the TiVo. So I did.

After connecting the drive to the TiVo, ensuring all connections were in place properly, I powered it on and watched what happened.  It went through the typical process of “Welcome! Powering up…” to “Almost there.  Just a few minutes more…” and then to “Preparing the service update.  This may take up to an hour, possibly more.”

This looks promising.  We’ll see what happens.