AltEPG

Trying to install the latest ALTEPG ISO on a new IDE drive but I get an error message that 'no valid disks were found attached to your PC'. It's definitely there in the BIOS though.

Tried with an earlier image, v1.0 (Based on oztivo 1.6.2) Released March 11 2011.

but although that detects the HD and restores the image it still ends with an error:

An error occurred mounting the device:
mount: Mounting /dev/hdg2 on /mnt/tovo/hack failed:
Invlid argument

Any clues ?

check your master/ slave selection.

I put my HDD on the 2nd IDE channel and ended up with all sorts of problems.

Put HDD on IDE master and CD on IDE slave?

I reckon the "/dev/hdg2" is the clue but I don't know enough about Linux kernels to understand what is going on.

However I'll explain what I do know in the hope that it moves thes thread further forward...

The PC architecture allows 4 IDE channels, and each channel can have a master and slave IDE device. From Google I see that Linux normally assigns these as follows:

hda (primary master)
hdb (primary slave)
hdc (secondary master)
hdd (secondary slave)
hde (tertiary master)
hdf (tertiary slave)
hdg (quaternary master)
hdh (quaternary slave)

Most motherboards don't have the tertiary and quaternary channels so hde through hdh will never have IDE devices on them.

However, elsewhere I've also seen claims that IDE channels on plug-in PCI cards are sometimes assigned to the device names reserved for the tertiary and quaternary channels. In otherwords:

hde (w/ pci ide card)
hdf (w/ pci ide card)
hdg (w/ pci ide card)
hdh (w/ pci ide card)

The '2' in the error message is the partition number. You can ignore that.

More puzzling is that your PC appears to have put the TiVo drive on the quaternary channel. That's not going to work because the installer requires byte swapping will is only available on the secondary channel.

This is where it gets awkward and highly specific to your PC. Some random questions:
Are you actually plugged into the motherboard or a PCI interface card?
Is the channel actually marked on the motherboard as the Secondar channel?
Have you tried altering any BIOS settings?

Thanks for the replies.

Master/slave issues were my first thought too.

Initially I had the HD as IDE0 master and CD-Rom as IDE1 master but after the failure i tried the reverse configuration plus combinations of master/slave on the same IDE channel but all to no avail.

I should add that this is on a PC which I have used to restore earlier Tivo images with no problems at all.

Puzzling !

Kin_El wrote:I should add that this is on a PC which I have used to restore earlier Tivo images with no problems at all.

Ah . That's the killer!

Puzzling !

Indeed!

Right, so something has changed and for once it's not the software.

The PC in question is an old one which I have kept specifically for these sort of jobs, I am all laptop otherwise.

The really odd thing is that I have restored a v1.0 image with this machine before and it only has has a CD-ROM drive and an IDE cable hanging off IDE0 waiting for a the next HD. I have 4 TiVo's so it's seen a bit of service !

It's a Seagate drive I'm trying to burn the image to if that makes any difference, I know there have been issues with certain makes of drive in the past.

Pretty well stuck now

My only thoughts are that the BIOS settings have changed.

For example, on some with BIOSes turning on SATA/IDE emulation with re-order the IDE devices so that the boot SATA device appears as the primary ide channel. That's just one example though, other options may also affect how IDE devices appear to the OS.

If you havn't changed the settings maybe the CMOS battery is running low?

Could you post the section of bootup messages which tells you which devices are assigned to which IDE channels, the bit that looks something like

Code: Select all

hda: [FUJITSU MPA3026AT]
hdb: [LS-120 VER5 00 UHD FLOPPY]
hdc: [HITACHI DVD-ROM GD-2500]
hdd: [MATSHITA CD-RW CD-7586]

so we can try to work out why your tivo HDD is being assigned /dev/hdg

The Bios battery is OK as the date was correct when I got the machine out of storage.

I'm not using SATA and the PC doesn't even support it.

I've tried changing the boot order and also physically swapped the CD-ROM to IDE1 and HD to IDE0.

This really does not make any sense to me. I'm very experienced and competent with PC's (20 years+ and cut my teeth on DOS) but a complete newby when it comes to Linux !

I may be able to rustle up another PC to try it on.