Our web proxy stinks...

Google Forbidden

'Nuf said.

I want out of this bug-ridden and virus-ridden proxy that they force us all to use. I use a Mac and I don't want to have to have my web usage suffer because of other morons and the general incompetence of others.

[/ucirvine] permanent link

That was harder than it needed to be...

How much effort should it take to add an IDE drive to a Series 2 TiVo? It shouldn't have been that much. Now, my issue here really isn't TiVo's fault - it's that I didn't have a machine that had two spare IDE connections that could boot Linux. In the past, it has been fairly commonplace to have a machine with two IDE controllers for 4 IDE ports - so, you can boot a CD-ROM and the two TiVo drives to bless them.

Well, in the world of SATA and my dad's relatively new Sony Vaio PCV-RS720G, it's way harder.

So from the beginning...

Years ago, I had originally upgraded my parents' Series 1 TiVo with an 80GB IDE drive. The modem eventually failed on it, so they went and bought another TiVo and got it to use wireless and Tivo To Go and all that cool stuff.

However, it only had 40 hours at basic or about 29 hours at 'Medium' which is what they usually record at. The 80GB drive in the old TiVo still worked fine, so why not just plop them in the new TiVo? Shouldn't be too hard...

It turns out the Series 2 my dad has is a TCD 24004A which requires a special set of mounting braces. With the Series 1's I had previously upgraded, you didn't need any special parts. Okay, so, a few weeks ago, I ordered him a bare kit from weaknees.com.

This weekend, I finally had time to spare that I could go ahead and install it.

Following the printed directions from Weaknees and the overly verbose but good Hinsdale How-To with the MFS Boot CD, I started on my 'journey of exploration.'

First off, the MFS Boot CD wouldn't boot on the Vaio at all. So, I went off to fetch Knoppix. Wait for that to download, burn it, and then boot. It boots. Since Knoppix configures the Ethernet for you, it can get on the Internet and I can download stuff.

All is fine now, or so I think. Then, I opened up the case and discovered, 'Uh-oh, where's the secondary IDE head'. Nope. Not present. Uh-oh. Two IDE disks. IDE CD-ROM drives. WinXP on the 200GB SATA drive - so can't install Linux on there. Perhaps the bios will recognize our USB CD-R and boot from it? Nope.

Hmm. What to do? Back home, I have an Athlon tower that has 2 IDE controllers and getting Linux on there would be straightforward. Do I drive home and fetch it? Nope. I'm gonna stay here and figure out some way to do this.

What options do I have? Well, I had just ordered a 512MB compact flash card for my camera. And, the Sony Vaio's have a built-in CF reader. Lo and behold the BIOS says that it can boot off the CF reader. Interesting.

Yet, I only have a 512MB card. Knoppix is just over 700MB. Do some Googlin' on my mom's iBook and I find MiniKnoppix, which takes roughly 200MB. Sounds good. I download MiniKnoppix and burn it on to a CD-R from the iBook. And, instead of going back to the Sony, I boot with MiniKnoppix into my dad's laptop. (Note that this is computer #3 involved in this process.)

So, I boot into MiniKnoppix and use a spare USB 8-in-1 reader/writer to populate the CF card (re-formatted as ext2). I find some instructions on getting Linux on a CF. I then try to get grub on to the CF. However, MiniKnoppix doesn't come with the grub stage1 and stage2 loaders.

So, I go to iBook and download the latest Grub versions and put it onto a USB JumpDrive and stick it into the other laptop (no built-in wireless on there alas). I then copy it over and run setup.

Ah, this should work fine now, I think....

Oh no. Not I.

When I told the Vaio to boot from the CF, it said that it couldn't read the boot media. Hmm. Play with the BIOS options for about 45 minutes. There's some stuff about emulating a CD-ROM or a Hard drive. Try that. No effect. Hmm. Still doesn't boot. Crap.

What if I get grub on a boot floppy? Since neither of the laptops have a floppy, I disconnect the two TiVo drives and reconnect the !DVD-R drive and boot up with Knoppix. I now need to find a floppy.

My dad wanders in with his 'Are you done yet?' crack. I asked him where the floppies are. We eventually find a floppy drive and I'm starting to follow the directions. My dad then says, "You doing a Grub boot disk? What's this?" Sure enough, there is a floppy labeled "Grub Boot Disk" in my own handwriting. Okay, stop what I'm doing with this spare disk and let's try it.

Note that I could have driven to my apartment, had lunch, watched a movie, installed the new disks, and driven back by now. Not I. Onward Ho I go....

I get grub to boot from the floppy. What's this? root (hd2,0) shows the CF card! Maybe I'm on the right track after all? I boot up the kernel and it goes to la-la land since it can't find the root partition. Try various incarnations. Nope. Nothing going.

At this point, I'm persuaded to go have lunch, watch the 1st half of the Duke / North Carolina game, and take a shower. So, I go do that.

In the shower (where all great ideas spring), I thought, "Hey, what if I can somehow get Grub to boot off the floppy, pass control to the CF where it loads the kernel and initrd (I had forgotten about copying over the initrd) and then find the USB CD-ROM. That should work?

Re-invigorated, I go back and try that. Floppy->512 MB CF Card->USB CD-R. I followed Knoppix's strange init sequence by doing the following with grub:

• root (hd2,0)
• kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.27 ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init initrd=minirt24.gz boot_image=KNOPPIX
• initrd /boot/minirt24.gz
• boot

At that point, it worked. I was able to boot Linux without any of the IDE devices present. Knoppix detected the USB CD-R drive after the initial ram disk was loaded.

I went to reconnect the two TiVo drives and boot up using this setup. I was then able to download the MFS Tools and unzip the static.zip and run mfstool add /dev/hda /dev/hdb. Yipee. No IDE devices required to boot.

After blessing the drives, I followed the Weaknees instructions on putting the whole shebang together again and booted the TiVo. It came up and all looks fine...so far.

Now, you may ask why I'm doing this and blogging about it? Besides the fact that I spent most of my morning and afternoon doing this, it's also so that if some poor soul gets in the same predicament I'm in, they can go to Google and hopefully find something helpful. Yay for the Internet and collective thought-power.

[/random] permanent link