I was biting my nails for a while, not sure whether I would be able to fully recover from the debacle that is the misuse of the MFSADD -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb command, but in the end, it's done. It did take a larger drive and just over four hours to copy about 35GB of shows that were on the TiVo, but there were several episodes of Stargate Atlantis and Law and Order:Criminal Intent, not to mention several episodes of Blue's Clues (I love that game! ;-) that I didn't want to lose.
Throughout this whole process, I've been thinking about 'net guides, especially those for TiVo hacking. Don't get me wrong, I think guides are great, and I appreciate those who put their time into crafting such valuable resources. Still, guides can be dangerous (as I've so perfectly proven) because they provide you with enough instruction to be dangerous, but not enough understanding to make good, intelligent decisions.
My problem was that I didn't really understand the MFSADD -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb command before I hit the enter key. Sure, I understood generally that it expanded the MFS volume, but the guide I was using never explained all of the possible parameters for the command. Subsequent reading of the actually documentation for MFSTools 2.0 did provide me with that info, but not before I had made the mistake.
Perhaps the issue is that not everyone wants to understand what they're doing, they just want to know how to get the result in the fewest number of steps in the least amount of time.
Hopefully it was "lesson learned" for me, and the only real cost was the part of my weekend that I gave up to fix the problem I created. I guess only "time" will tell.
1 comment:
wow the tivo kernel uses mfs? is this the same as the old metadb that solaris 5.x used to use? since then they went to vxfs (veritas file system) but man, it's like only ancient solaris guys remember mfsadd and even then no one wanted to use it.
I wonder if it's the same deal or if we've gone full circle on the filesystems now.
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