I just updated the image of my dreambox to the latest offical DMM release.

To get a clean start I did a manual backup of my settings located in /etc/enigma2. Actually the most valueable settings are the bouquets and the timer settings. So I just copied all files from /etc/enigma2 via FTP to my computer.

Restoring the bouquets is actually quite easy, just copy the bouquet files back to /etc/enigma2 and restart enigma. Voila!

But the timers.xml is totally different story. The timers.xml is being loaded into memory when enigma starts and is written back to disk when the box shutdowns. So just copying the timers.xml from the backup back to disk doesn’t do anything, since the file is being overwritten when enigma stops.

The solution is actually quite easy as well. Turn off enigma will flush the timers.xml to disk. To shutdown only enigma without turning off the dreambox you have to switch the runlevel. switching to init 4 will cause just this. Now you can copy the timers.xml from the backup to disk and then restart enigma with either init 3 or by starting enigma2.

So I finally got around to upgrade my hardware in my Dreambox from an old Maxtor 40GB harddisk to a nice and smooth Samsung Spinpoint HD400LD.

So on big effort is to backup all the movies from the in the meantime completely stuffed Maxtor. So the easiest way was to attach my notebook to the box (via a crosslink-cable) and copy everything to my harddisk.

Next step (after the Spinpoint was built in), was to “recover” all the data back to the new disk. Unfortunatly I had to experience a major performance-decrease. While I got about 7MB/s reading from the box, I only get about 4,3MB/s writing to the box … 🙁

Well, it turns out, that is behavior is be design 🙁 and is not subject to change. So I will have to spend a night or so copying everything to the box …