Hack 24. Backing Up Your TiVo Software | Tivo Hacks. 100 Industrial-strength Tips Tools 2003

Hack 24 Backing Up Your TiVo Software

Before you get too involved in hacking your TiVo, back it up!

This is probably the most important thing you can do before you delve too far into hacking your TiVo. You don't want to be scouring the Internet frantically looking for somebody to give you their backup of the TiVo software (not only hard to find, but sometimes a beast to download) or left with a lemon underneath your television.

The backup itself needs to be made only once, and it can take up to 1.5 GB of space, although fully compressed it may be as small as 150 MB. Once you have made the backup and have confirmed that it works, feel free to burn it to a CD-R or a DVD-R somewhere and just keep it locked away for that one day when you might take your hacking a bit too far.

Install the TiVo hard drive or hard drives in your PC [Hack #22], make sure that you have a drive with about 1.5 GB of space on a FAT32 partition installed as the primary master on the IDE bus, and then boot up MFS Tools [Hack #23]. At the /# or # prompt, issue the following command:

 #  mount /dev/hda1 /mnt

If this command is successful, you will see another /# or # prompt and you will have mounted your FAT32 drive at the /mnt directory. If, instead, you get an error message stating that you must specify the file type, try:

 #  mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt

This forces MFS Tools to mount the drive as a Windows partition. If that still does not work, then you probably have to try again with a smaller FAT32 drive.

Next, we are going to back up your primary TiVo hard drive to the FAT32 drive now mounted at /mnt . There is a plethora of options to mfsbackup , the tool that we need to use.

If you have a one-drive TiVo, try backing up with a command similar to this:

 #  mfsbackup -9so /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hd     X

For a two-drive TiVo you can try this:

 #  mfsbackup -9so /mnt/backup.bak /dev/hd     X     /dev/hd     Y

As one more complication, if you are working on a TiVo based on architecture types 3 or 4 (see Section 2.3.1 at the beginning of this chapter), also add a -f 4200 to that command line, making it look like this:

 #  mfsbackup -f 4200 -9so /mnt/backup.back /dev/hd     X

This will make a compressed backup of the TiVo drive at /dev/hd X (or, in the case of the two-drive TiVo, a backup of the primary drive at /dev/hd X and a backup of the secondary drive at /dev/hd Y ) to a file named backup.bak in your FAT32 drive (it will just put it into c:\backup.bak ). If your TiVo drive or drives are located somewhere else, just specify the real location instead. Also, you can name your backup anything you want; just remember what you call it.

The -9 option controls how much compression to apply; the more you compress, the longer it is going to take. For the impatient, just don't bother putting a number thereit will be fine and quick, but it will produce a large file. -5 turns out to be a pretty good compromise. The -s flag also attempts to compress the data further by shrinking the volume in the backup to the smallest it can get, given the specific data that we are asking for it to back up.

And, lastly, there is no magic in the 4200 number. It modifies the default backup procedure to increase the maximum file size that MFS Tools will back up. The minimum value for this number varies among TiVo models, and this number is high enough to ensure a reliable backup in any current type 2 or type 4 units. Essentially, this number modifies the default backup procedure to increase the maximum file size that MFS Tool will back up. Without any -f switch, the backup is likely to be unreliable in type 2 and type 4 models.

While the backup is running, you should see a progress bar tick up generally for about 5 to 25 minutes. Once it is successful, press Control-Alt-Delete and wait for the No more processes ... text to appear or for your computer to start rebooting itself. You can then power down to remove the TiVo drive or drives from the PC.

Feel free to do whatever you want with that backup you just madeburn a CD, leave it on your hard drive, whateverjust keep it accessible. The one item not really covered in this hack is testing your backup to make sure it works properly. If you are replacing your factory-installed hard drive with another one, then you don't really need to test it. Simply restoring from backup [Hack #25] to the larger drives for the space increase will be that test. Inversely, if you are planning on keeping your factory drive, maybe it would be worth your time to restore your backup to another drivetemporarily installing it into your TiVo [Hack #27]and testing the backup [Hack #28] before you go for the rest.

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