TiVo Community Forums Archives - MFSTools, Backing Up/Upgrading, and Win XP

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MFSTools, Backing Up/Upgrading, and Win XP
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Posted by: NFLnut

Whoa dudes! My wife's DTiVo (Series 1 w/ single 120GB drive) has gone GSOD on me. Time to try to copy that one over to a new A: and see if the existing GSOD drive is actually bad. If not, I'll be adding that back as a B:

My question is this. It's been a while since I've UG'd a TiVo. Last was ~2 years ago, with Tiger's MFSTools 1. In reading Hinsdale's latest, I notice the warning re: Win XP. If I boot my computer direct to the CD, and the only HDs I have hooked up are the existing (GSOD) TiVo drive, and the new target TiVo drive, do I have to worry about XP messing up my TiVo drives at all? I would assume not, but I also know what often happens when I assume..

Sorry if this seems a dumb question. I hope it helps someone else in the future.

Posted by: Robert S

MFS Tools won't touch a drive that's in the GSOD state. You can try using dd to clone the drive and then give the GSOD another chance to clear.

The problems with XP are that if it boots while you have a bootable TiVo drive attached, the boot block may become corrupted (which is a pain) and XP is usually installed on NTFS, which Linux has read-only support for.

Posted by: NFLnut

Actually, I should've mentioned that I was first going to use dd. Do I use the "-s 127" switch to increase the swap size, or does dd have the capability to do so?

I should add that I want to keep the recordings, settings, thumbs, SPs, WLs, etc. Otherwise I would just drop an image onto a fresh drive and go.

Also, if there are no other drives other than the CD with the Linux boot disk and the two TiVo drives, will this cause me a problem?

Posted by: Robert S

dd is a /very/ dumb tool, which happens to be exactly what's needed for this job (this is a common theme in Unix - simple tools that can be linked together). It knows nothing of TiVoes, Apple-style partition tables, swap, MFS, recordings, Thumbs or anything else. All it knows is how to copy its input to its outputs in blocks (which makes for /much/ faster transfers). When it completes the new drive should be an identical copy of the original.

The hope therefore is that given the same data on a working drive the GSOD will be able to repair the problem and allow the TiVo to boot up.

Running with just the boot disk and two hard drives is the way to go - dd will not warn you if you're about to do something dumb (like copy a blank drive on to one full of data) so it's best if the other drives are safely disconnected.

Posted by: NFLnut

Thanks! Now it's off to the cpu and I'll keep fingers crossed for a coupla hours! :rolleyes: