Did a little bit of cleanup tonight in the computer room ..... among other things I got my one pc back to it's original identity as a WinXP machine after it had been transformed into a linux boot device. I was trying to salvage recordings from out bedroom TiVo which ran into a little bit of a hard drive problem. Long story short - I was only half successful - I have the TiVo working again but I wasn't able to salvage any of the recordings for Christl. Going through all of this - first time unplanned - third time overall (previously upgraded capacities for my other TiVo from 80hr to 250hr and upgraded my dad's from 40hr to 250hr) prompted me to better document the chicken scratches I had accumulated from a myriad of websites. So I thought why not blog my notes. Someone else may stumble upon them and find them useful. I may lose my hardcopy and need to refer back to this. Who knows. Before I dump all that into this post I just wanted to mention that the kids had their last soccer practice of the spring session tonight. It was mostly just scrimmages against two other teams and it just didn't seem like any of the kids were really into it. Me and the boys stopped at Pieschler's - or I think now it's called Parkland Drive-In - Dyl got a vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles, J got a chocolate cone with rainbow sprinkles and I got a banana split. Tomorrow night we're planning to head up to the basketball courts and play a little hockey. They have two soccer games Saturday - not sure what else we're doing but then Monday night we head down to Florida! Should be a great time. christl is doing 99% of the planning without me even knowing a thing. So it'll be interesting to see what she has in store for us. Ok, so as promised, here are my TiVo upgrade notes:

TiVo Notes

Weaknees Interactive Upgrade Instructions can be found at http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/index.php

My summary:

REPLACE WORKING TIVO DRIVE WITH ANOTHER, PRESUMABLY LARGER DRIVE (INCREASED CAPACITY)
Create FAT32 partition for temporary storage of old TiVo drive image
* Mount NEW TiVo drive on /dev/hdb (primary slave)

* Boot into Windows and assign a drive letter

* Format with a FAT32 partition (Type 'C' in linux - WIN95 FAT32 LBA)
On P4FRITSCH in the root of C is a program to do this once a drive letter is assigned

Backup current TiVo image onto new Tivo drive in FAT32 partition
* Mount OLD TiVo drive as /dev/hdc (secondary master).....NEW TiVo drive should still be on /dev/hdb

* Insert and Boot from Weaknees MFSTool 2.0 Large Kernel Support Boot CD

* # mkdir /newtivo

* # mount /dev/hdb1 /newtivo (might get 'modprobe' errors - seems ok)

* mfsbackup -f 9999 -1s0 /newtivo/tivo_image_name.bak /dev/hdc (I try to include hardware model of TiVo and size in name)

* ctrl+alt+del then power off

* Remove OLD TiVo drive (/dev/hdc)

* Remove boot cd and boot into Windows

* Copy TiVo imgae file created above from NEW TiVo drive to C:\

* Shutdown

* Mount OLD TiVo drive (/dev/hdc)

* Insert and Boot from Weaknees MFSTool 2.0 Large Kernel Support Boot CD

Then go to #1 to Restore the image only (no recordings) or #2 to copy everything including recordings


#1 - RESTORE IMAGE ONLY

* # mkdir /tivo_image_drive

* # mount /dev/hda1 /tivo_image_drive

* # mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -zxpi /tivo_image_drive/tivo_image_name.bak /dev/hdb

Go To #3


#2 - COPY ALL DATA INCLUDING RECORDINGS

* # mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdb


#3 - INSTALL AND TEST

* Install NEW drive in TiVo remembering to jumper as Master

* Power on TiVo

* If you copied from a different physical TiVo you'll most likely get a message stating that you may not be able to record anything. Go into Messages & Settings and choose Delete Everything.

NOTE: This took about 1hr on a 250GB drive which was upgraded from an 80GB drive.

* Rerun Guided Setup and you're done!

Alternate method - just copy - no image backup

* Install OLD TiVo drive as /dev/hdc (secondary slave)

* Install NEW TiVo drive as /dev/hdb (primary slave)

* Insert and Boot from Weaknees MFSTool 2.0 Large Kernel Support Boot CD

* # dd conv=noerror,sync if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb


Also found references to this:

Insert the MFS tools 2.0 boot cd and turn on power. At the very first 'hit enter to boot', type in vmlnodma hdc=bswap then hit enter. After it boots, type in pdisk -l /dev/hdc hit enter. It should show 11 or 13 partitions, make a brief note of the number of partitions and the size of each - nothing too detailed, you just want to know if the second drive has approximately the same setup.

here: http://dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=44575



As of 5/2008 I don't know how to extract just the recordings and that's bugging me. The bedroom TiVo encountered errors which caused it to not boot. Upon running the above procedure I was unable to get as working copy of the O/S. I needed to purchase Instantcake for the SD-H400 as a means to get a working O/S image on the drive. I had hoped to then copy over the partitions from the bad drive which contain the recordings but according to the responses to my question about this it looks like the technology does not yet exist. I haven't scrapped the old drive yet though.

Memorial Day Weekend.

Yesterday was our family picnic at Bonnie and Joe's house. We had a beautiful day especially compared to last year when we had a freak hail storm. Most everyone showed up and there were only ver minor incidents - one or two kids got knocked over when they walked too close to the swingset, etc. The food was awesome....Joe made Turkey barbecue, Bonnie (Gary) made some fantastic (I think I kept calling it fabulous) potato salad. There was plenty of beer too. JT and Dylan spent a lot of time on the swingset and towards the end JT and I were throwing a ball and catching it with those little circular velcro catcher thingies.

Afterwards me and Christl took up Steven's offer to come up to his place. I had never been there but not for lack of wanting to go. He's got a ton of 'stuff' all around his property. Given my recent tractor purchase his tractors were of particular interest. The three dogs were very anxious to meet their company. I tried a Michelob Pale Ale - never knew they made it but it was pretty good.

Today we're having an informal picnic with the Christman's, my parents and possibly Christl's mom. Christl didn't want to have a ton of people over I guess because of the extra work. People should be showing up soon - Christl is back from the store - I've got beer chilled and the grill is ready to go. The pool is a different story though - I'm going to need to get some clarifier. Christl has done a great job vacuuming but the water just isn't clearing up.

Oh yeah - the Phoenix lander successfully landed near Mars' northern pole yesterday around 8pm EDT. The solar panels have fully deployed so it should be able to proceed with it's mission of looking under the surface, via a backhoe-like arm, for traces of frozen water and possibly for traces of life. The picture to the right is one of the initial pictures beamed back showing one of the landing struts. There are other pictures and information available at The Phoenix Mars Mission website.

Well, my MTD Yard Machines tractor finally bit the dust. I had put so many hours into fixing the thing over the years....this time I wasn't going to be able to fix it - even with help from my dad. Christl was driving it and said she head a banging noise and it stalled. She tried starting it but it stalled again. The third time she tried it wouldn't turn over. I feared the worst and when I got home and looked at it - I came to realize it's short life as my tractor had come to a close. Something apparently broke inside the engine and now it was seized. There was also a puddle of oil on one of the pulleys below the engine. There was oil on the dipstick but apparently something had caused oil to leak out of the block somewhere. I bought the tractor new from Hechinger's back in 1999. It was part of the greatest spending frenzy of my life. I bought the house, the shed AND the tractor. In MTD's defense, I must say that I didn't take the best care of the tractor. It had been left outside on several occasions. Even when stored in the shed it came under attack from mice making nests in the nice warm engine. I did change the oil and plugs, etc occasionally but most often it was while I was fixing some problem with the tractor.

Sooo, I decided it was time to test the John Deere name. I spent, what I consider, a ton of $$$ of this thing Saturday at Lowe's in Bethlehem. It has a 54" deck and a fairly tight turning radius - 18-inches. It also has a 23-hp Briggs & Stratton engine it it that I hope will last under whatever strain I can throw at it. I don't even know if I can hook up a tiller attachment to it but that might be one thing I'd do and possibly add a snowblower. Other than that I'm just hoping it'll handle the light to medium hauling I do without too much stress. It barely fits in my shed. That's going to be kind of a pain because I didn't have much room in there to begin with.
The big question now is what do I do with the old tractor. I'd like to think it's worth something to somebody. Maybe the engine isn't totally shot and can be fixed relatively easily? I don't know. Right now I'm just enjoying the back end of the long Memorial Day weekend. I'll probably try to do a little more planting since Christl is anxious for me to get all that stuff out of the foyer. Plus I'm sure I'll have to fire the tractor up when we have my parents and neighbors over today. My fingers are crossed.....I'm planning to be a little more PM conscious and I'm hoping the John Deere name lives up to it's reputation. I've read some posts in which people say not to spend the money on the LA100 line (mine is the LA175) but rather to go to the X-line. It was a considerable price jump to go to the X line and still get a 54-inch deck. I'm sure they're built even better than the LA100 series but (knock on wood) the LA175 has got to last longer than my old MTD. By the way, for posterity's sake - the MTD was a 20-hp 46-inch cut. I didn't want to go any smaller deck-wise. With John Deere's LA100 line it was either 42, 48 or 54-inch. The LA175 is the top of that series. As I said, my fingers are crossed.

Happy Memorial Day.

Just got done watching the Pens advance...not much more to say on that.

Now we can continue with "Nana and PopPop day. At least Dylan is happy.

Mmmmmm! Today started off with a stack of pancakes. Last night Dylan asked Christl something to the effect of "can we could do the thing where we have all those stacks of pancakes?" He's referring to the last time Christl made pancakes and she had a plate full of them with a paper towel covering them. It was like some kind of grand unveiling when she pulled tghe paper towel off and the steam started rising off this tower of pancakes. So apparently he remembered that. They decorated theirs with whipped cream, chocolate chips and sprinkles.

Something I wanted to note before forgetting again...so many things over the years get fgorgotten - little subtle statements the kids make or things they do. I just wanted to record for posterities sake that after playing Runescape for the longest time JT has now switched back to playing Adventure Quest.

It's been raining off and on pretty much all morning so no gardening was done today. It's about time to head down to my parents house.....we're about 15 minutes from the start of the Flyers game! Christl has the kids at some kind of party for someone she works with and is going to meet me there. I grabbed my Richards jersey and I'll be grabbing my "Kate Smith" VS hat on the way out. In fact, I'm going to quick check the web to see if there are any updates to Timonen and Coburns injuries........and the headline on the Flyers website is...........Timonen In Coburn Out. Ok.....still better than we thought just a couple days ago so I'll take it. I just really hope he's able to play through whatever lingering effects he still has without causing additional injury.

Alright, I'm outta here for now. LET'S GO FLYERS!!!!

Well, Andrew finally made it over and then Malcom came over as well. They (and Dylan) played together for awhile, I chatted with Keith and then with help from JT I planted a couple rows of carrots. We got them in the ground just in time for a little rain shower. Dinner tonight was a good one - Barbequed chicken, steak and hot dogs (for Dylan). Always love cooking on the grill! Well, the rain lasted long enough to really wet the garden so I'm done planting for today - hopefully I'll have some time tomorrow to get some more stuff in - especially the plats the kids started from seed.

Tomorrow we're planning to go to my paretns house a little early - to watch the Flyers/Pens Game 5 which starts at 3pm. Let's hope it's a good one!

It's been a couple days since a post. Thursday night the Flyers pounded the Pens to get the series to 3-1. They play tomorrow at 3pm in Pittsburgh. Word is that Timonen should be back and Coburn's return is possible as well. Getting either one back would be a great boost.

Today started out with JT and Dylan playing soccer. They both played very well. Dylan got to play 3 quarters in goal. The first quarter ended without a single shot against him. Our guys pretty much dominated. JT was playing a decent game on defense.

Brian asked Dylan if he wanted to keep playing goal for the second quarter .... Dyl responded with an enthusiastic "YES!". By the time the second half rolled around JT started finding his confidence again. He played a tremendous half - made several rushes/passes....finally got paid off for all the hard work by scoring in the fourth quarter. Dylan went on defense the third quarter but kind of looked lost. Brian put him back in goal for the fourth which was probably a good idea. Dyl got a few more touches and got to do a couple cherry bombs. He's still very tentative when it comes to making that split decision - do I grab the ball or not - but I think that the more he plays, the more confident he gets, the quicker he'll make those decisions.

When we got home I worked on getting the pool going. The filter is running now but the water is VERY G - R - E - E - N !!!! I should have gotten it running sooner but what would spring be without a pool full of green water! So that's finally underway and next up I'm going to get a few more things planted in the garden. The three rows of radishes are coming up now and I have 3 zucchini plants in too. I think I'll get some more radishes going and maybe carrots and beets. I still haven't planted any corn! I need to get going before the summer is over!!!

Andrew Loomis is supposed to be coming over today to play with the boys but he's about 2 hrs overdue at this point. They're kind of just floating around going from soccer to Pokemon cards and then back to soccer. They're getting so big now. It's sad that they're not the little boys they used to be.

Just got done watching the Stars beat the Wings 3-1....which happens to now be the score of the series. After Dallas looked to be in slow motion in game 3 they sure looked good tonight. Let's hope the Flyers have the same result tomorrow night!

We had our end of year den picnic at the Petrella's house tonight. Dylan said it was stupid - he had some trouble dealing with the kids crowding the plate during a kickball game. He was actually speaking up to the kids which is a step in the right direction for him. I let it go for a little but I could see he was getting REALLY frustrated. So I tried to help them understand the concept of a 'batting order'. JT said it was "awesome". Norm told me a story about women at Pocono during a race he went to see which shocked me. More than it was coming from Norm than anything! He's something else - he was pitching during the kickball game and I don't even remember how anymore but somehow he was trying to make a play - I think he was throwing a ball over to third base and he fell flat on his chest. He popped right back up though. Dylan McIntyre, Matthew Stiegerwalt, Ian Reinhard, Jacob Sell, my two guys and of course Nick Petrella were all there.

Tomorrow night I'm going to try to get the pool running. It's still pretty green but I think if I get the filter running it'll help clear it up. I'll shock the heck out of it and do some vacuuming. I'd also like to get some more of the garden planted. Still only have three rows of radish seeds planted. I think by now I should see some sprouts but as of yet - nothing. I used old seed tapes so it's possible they're just not going to work. The seeds the kids planted are doing great and should be planted soon. Also, I bought some zucchini plants from Audrey Wanamaker at work which I should get in the ground tomorrow.

Tomorrow night we have our final pack meeting of the year - the kids are advancing to the next cub scout rank which I think is going to be Bear.

One more thing - Dylan had been asking Christl for awhile to make the supper that had 'white noodles'. We had no idea what he was talking about. Then, the other night she made lasagna and when he saw it he got all excited and said that's what he was talking about. So for the first time in a few nights Dylan ate like a champ. He's going through a stage - hopefully that's all it is - in which he's being very picky about what he likes to eat.

I'm hoping tomorrow is a quiet day at work, I'm going to try to sneak out a little early to get home and do some gardening, etc before going to the pack meeting. Then it'll be time to watch the Flyers and Pens battle it out in game 4. GO FLYERS!

Uggggh! Just got home from watching the Flyers go down 0-3 to the Pens in the Conference Finals. I went with my dad and we had a good time basically, pretty much until the game started. The Flyers didn't come out with the jump I thought they needed. 5 minutes in Pittsburgh went up 1-0 and a couple minutes later it was already over....they were up 2-0 and the Flyers weren't showing any signs of life.
Before the game we took our turn at the dunk tank - I dunked the Penguin in 2 shots. Then we went over and shot on a Penguin goalie. He was pretty decent, shut out my dad and me both the first time around. Then we got back in line and he shut my dad down again. I stepped up and put a wrister low to the stick side and then on my final shot I backed up a couple steps and let one rip to the same spot - low stick side for a 2-0 victory over my dad. I ALMOST rode a mechanical bull. I gave my dad a multitude of excuses why I didn't do it. Right by the mechanical bull we saw Chris Therien, Al Morganti and Steve Coates. If I only had a marker!!!! I didn't get a sinlge autograph. Last time we were down - Game 3 of the Washington series, I was able to get autographs from Bernie Paretn, Gary Dornhoeffer and Bob Kelly. Not a very fun night in hindsight. They had a good run, they're banged up on the blueline, they've abused Kate Smith. Like Hillary Clinton is saying, it's not over till it's over. But I think it's close.

Got home from work and for whatever reason I got sidetracked on YouTube.com. I watched a video titled "The Shocking Video Hillary Does NOT Want You To See!". Sounded interesting so I clicked....
Pt 1 of 2

Pt 2 of 2


Interesting. But I'm definitely an equal opportunity kind of guy so I looked for some Obama videos that 'he might not want me to see' and found this on (among others)....



Can't we all just get along? Hillary and Obama seem to have put there differences aside......at least for one night.



And here are a couple of the current president for good measure....

Ok, now the Flyers' backs are against the wall. They fell 4-2 (again) to the Penguins Sunday night in Pittsburgh. To make matters worse - Braydon Coburn took a deflected shot to the face requiring somewhere between 40 and 50 stitches. They're saying it's "possible" he makes it back in time for game 3 tomorrown night. We'll see.

My parents were over for dinner last night. We took a walk around my property - specifically the northern border so they could get a peek at the neighbor's house which they've been eyeing up as a potential retiremnet home.

I started filling the pool yesterday as well. I, of course, have waited too long and the water is once again a lovely shade of green. Been there before - nothing a little shot and a lot of filtering can't take care of.

I'm hanging out at work right now....waiting for a 7pm implementation. I'm debating just going home now and doing the work from there or waiting here since it's close to the time anyway.

10:30am - Well, the Flyers came up short last night. I'm a little nervous to be honest. They lost 4-2. It seemed like the Flyers came out trying the same game plan that had gotten them to this point - offense first and then rely on the defense and Brion to pick up the slack. Well it was obvious that didn't work last night. The Flyers were playing well but the Pens put in an early goal. The Flyers then answered with two of their own to take a 2-1 lead. It was all Pens from then on. Game 2 is tomorrow night. Let's hope for a different outcome. I'm really thinking Stevens should try Kapanen back on the blueline. He's done it before. Modry only looked bad on the first goal though...other than that he was pretty solid. I think the Pens just showed they really came to play.

Toward the end of the game the boys asked if they could work on their stories. I'm oncall this week so I had the oncall laptop and my regular laptop so each was working on their stories while we watched the end of the game. They're not getting that far but they're trying!

11:00am - I'm about to take the boys out for breakfast and then to the fish hatchery. Something we did when they were younger, partly as a good-will gesture to Christl. It gives her a little time to herself which we all need.

9:15pm - Nana and PopPop came up for dinner tonight. We played street hockey for a little while. Both JT and Dylan took turns in goal. Christl is going over to Keith and Sue's house to watch a movie so the boys have the house to ourselves!!! Now Jt and Dylan have asked to create their very own website so I'm going to help them work on that. You can check out their handywork at http://johntfritsch.googlepages.com and http://dylanmfritsch.googlepages.com. Needless to say it's a little confusing for them but it's good exposure to some of the things they can do with computers. I had a moment when I was in the middle of helping them and JT shook his head and expressed how he was confused by the whole process. I thought back to my early days with computers. There was no internet, no World Wide Web. No tools to automatically create web pages for you - even if there were tools it would take forever to upload them at 300bps! Kind of funny. Maybe one day he'll read this in some kind of archive and point out to his kids that waaaay back we used to use a thing called the Internet. Who knows what my grandkids will have in place of it.

I have barely started my garden this year - right now I have a whole three rows of radishes planted. The kids have 1 each of watermelon, sunflower and pumpkin plants growing inside. We'll plant them outside pretty soon.

We (I) planted a silver maple tree not too far from the well. It was started naturally from a seed that fell into the garden last year. It came from Skip's tree between our house and the pond. It's real close to about 4ft tall now. I think it would be growing even quicker if the crab apple tree next to it were gone......I wonder how well crab apple wood burns? :)

5/9/2008 - Creating Google site

I just created a website using Google Pages today - no order to it, just getting familiar with the design tools.
The Flyers are playing the Penguins tonight in Game 1 of the 2008 Stanley Cup Conference Finals. We're very excited about it. Kimmo Timonen has been diagnosed with a blood clot in his foot and will be "out indefinitely". Not good news at all but hopefully the Flyers will continue to find ways to win hockey games.