Tearing my hair out - all help appreciated

[worm]

I networked my trusty old TiVo about a billion years ago. Well ok, about 8.

Now, for some reason, it's decided to start ignoring the network, and the modem so I can't get it to fetch any data.

I decided to switch it over to the AltEPG system, but I need to get access to the drive to make sure it's all set up right. In theory I just need to put in a new DIal Prefix, but it seem to be trying to use the network (which isn't working) and because it's not working, I'm stuck in a catch 22 where I can't get to it via the network to tell it to stop using the network (if that makes sense)

So I resorted to pulling the drive to stick in a PC and get sorted that way.

Of course, just to be awkward, I've got a Maxtor drive that will need to be unlocked with diskutil, but no way to get a boot floppy, and no floppy drive to put it in even if I had one. Is there any way to get a boot CD with diskutil on it?

[drgeoff]

Some of the CDs automatically unlock disks when necessary. I don't have a list of which do and which don't .

[millsb]

The AltEPG ISO CD (viewtopic.php?f=16&t=626) automatically unlocks your drive when it boots.

[worm]

aha!

right will give that a go...

[worm]

argh

Restore failed: First target drive too small.
devsize: 20000

20000 what? and it's a 160GB disk.

grrrrr.

[LDJ]

I have the same problem:

Restore failed: First target drive too small.

[worm]

So at least it's not just me.

Anyone have any idea what's going on?

[nick1austin]

20000 what? and it's a 160GB disk.

I'll take a guess that it's 20000 sectors.

1 sector is 512 bytes
20000 sectors is 10240000 bytes or 10000 kbytes or 10 mbytes.

That means that the drive is still locked.

[worm]

bottoms.

so we're back to the original problem...how to unlock the drive without a floppy?

[tivofantastic]

Can you not just install your drive as a secondary drive. Boot your PC as normal and then run diskutil from a DOS prompt?

There is a supposedly a risk of Windows overwriting the MBR on the TiVo drive if you are using Windows version before Windows 2000 sp2, but even that is fixable.

See this page, and in particular the section entitled "Mounting drives"
http://www.mfslive.org/winmfs/

[worm]

no windows on the machine. only Linux.

[tivofantastic]

Try this or similar:
http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/usbkeys

[tivofantastic]

Extract from http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/usbkeys:

•On Linux you just need to load the usb-storage module.

?To format the drive in superfloppy format, you simply do:
mkdosfs -I /dev/sda

?Formatting in harddisk requires more steps, if it's not allready formatted that way:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
to erase the start of the USB Key. After that you can do a "fdisk /dev/sda" and create a new FAT partition (FAT16 is suitable). To install a MBR and format the key afterwards, do
install-mbr /dev/sda --force
mkdosfs -I /dev/sda1

?Now the USB key is ready to be loaded with systemfiles. If you use FreeDOS, MS-DOS, IBM-DOS or DR-/Novell-DOS is up to you.

Since install-mbr is Debian specific, you might do this on other systems:
dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr bs=512 count=1
dd if=mbr of=/dev/sda
Repartition your USBkey using fdisk to clean up the partition table using fdisk and format your partition afterwards with
mkdosfs -I /dev/sda1
/dev/hda would in this case be your harddisk, /dev/sda would be your usb key.

[tivofantastic]

Or, if you can lay your hands on a Windows PC just to prepare the USB stick i.e. make a bootable DOS USB stick then you can use the attached "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool V2.2.3"

[tivofantastic]

Alternatively, I suspsect the MFSLive iso has an unlock tool or unlocks the drive automatically, although that's just a guess:
http://www.mfslive.org/download.htm