TiVo Community Forums Archives - Help with MakeTivoBootable!

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Help with MakeTivoBootable!
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Posted by: Kelmenson

So, I was an idiot... I did not realize that a window XP boot floppy would mess up the signature on my drive... So my tivo is not booting now.

I have found the program MakeTivoBootable that claims to solve this problem, but the documentation leaves a bit to be desired... (Described here...)

I am getting the message:
hdc:Signature 9214, be16 Signature 1492
16:00 first partition has signature 4d50 rather than 504d
Unknown partition table
when i boot up with MFSTools2.

Is there a way I can fix this? Or is it hopeless? Thanks...

Posted by: josetann

I'm no expert here, but it looks like you have a byteswapping issue. Either turn on byteswapping if it's off, or turn it off if it's on. Then try running that script again.

Posted by: msullivan

Just for clarification - we can actually create the MFSTools boot floppy in XP, or burn the CD in XP, correct? We just can't boot into XP with the drives attached, or at least that's what I've gathered through my research.

Posted by: Robert S

What sort of TiVo is it?

If it's a Series 1, then the MFS Tools 2.0 CD is a less than ideal choice (see the first post of the Fixes thread for a work-around, look for nodma).

Posted by: Kelmenson

Yes, this is a series 1. I'll try that nodma thing, thanks.

And yes, I know I'm having the byteswapping issue... My problem is all the posts I've found just say "turn on byteswapping" when I have no clue how to do that.

Hopefully I can avoid just blanking and starting over. Ugh.

Posted by: Robert S

Sorry, by 'less than ideal' I meant 'just use a different TiVo boot disk'.

Posted by: msullivan

So as long as we don't boot into XP upgraders should be OK? Does it matter what O/S you burn the CD in, or is that completely irrelevant? I've got XP and I burned the CD using XP (My Windows 95 machine can't access the internet and doesn't have a CD burner). If I understand this correctly, as long as I don't boot into XP (which I can't if I use my old 95 machine), I am ok?

Posted by: Robert S

The problem is that XP writes a 'signature' to its hard drives so that it can identify them later if you move them around. Unfortunatly this signature over-writes the TiVo's boot block and makes the A drive unbootable. As long as you don't boot XP while you have a live TiVo drive connected, there's no problem. As you might guess from the thread title, MTB can construct a working boot block to fix this problem.

There's also a problem writing data to NTFS partitions from Linux, which can make creating a backup file tricky, but has long as you have a FAT partition somewhere, you can manage.

How you create the boot disks has nothing to with it.

Posted by: Kelmenson

So, I'm still unclear... What options to MakeTivoBootable should I be using to fix my woes?

I've tried:

MakeTiVoBootable -d /dev/hdc --pk 3 --ak 6 --bp root=/dev/hda4

and

MakeTiVoBootable -d /dev/hdc --bswap --pk 3 --ak 6 --bp root=/dev/hda4

but neither fixed (and actually seem to have swapped a part of partition 1 too) my problem.

Also, different possible solution, it seems to me that BlessTivo also rewrites these partitions. Can I just re-bless my drive to fix this problem?

Posted by: Robert S

Is it just me, or do those command lines look rather similar?

Perhaps your active system set is 6/7 rather than 3/4?

Posted by: Kelmenson

quote:
Originally posted by Robert S
Is it just me, or do those command lines look rather similar?

Heh. One has --bswap and one doesn't... My thinking was that even if I set the wrong flags in there, that would still fix the "bytes swapped" warning, even if the values were wrong.

Posted by: Robert S

The thread you linked suggested that there's a problem with byteswapping in MTB, so I assume those two commands are identical. I would have expected you to try the /dev/hda7 version of the command

Posted by: clearcall

I'm getting a "permission denied" type error when I try to access Maketivobootable from my hda drive that is ntfs. I was able to use my image form there and it restored nicely but I booted into XP accidently during an earlier session. Any ideas? Does the executable have to be an a FAT part for some reason?

Can someone help me with syntax? I think I had it right. I cd into the /mnt/dos and then tried to executer mtb

Posted by: Robert S

Even when MTB is in the current directory, you still have to give a path name:

./MakeTiVoBootable ...

You can run it off a floppy (mount /dev/fd0) if it won't run from your NTFS partition (I don't see why it wouldn't, but I'll take your word for it). Or you could copy it into the RAM disk:

cd /
cp /mnt/dos/MakeTiVoBootable .
chmod +x MakeTiVoBootable
./MakeTiVoBootable ...

Of course, if the drive has just been reimaged and therefore has no recordings or data you want to keep, it might be easiest just to run mfsrestore again.

Posted by: clearcall

Are you saying that I did not have to do this? That mfsrestore will restore the boot partitions as well? I could have just re-run restore???? I thought MFSrestore was only changing tivo partitions not the boot 0. I think I just wasted hours of time!

I did get it to run by creating a fat32 partition with Bootit. It would not run from NTFS????? I cannot think why. FYI - When I did an LS, the names were in the old dos format?? which I though was odd "Make~1", something like that. Once I discovered that, it went fine. But... it did not work. The drive would not boot in the tivo past powering up. Maybe I did not wait long enough. I'm going to try it again later.

I looked on the disk and could see the partitions, they were numbered differently than the examples, instead of 3, 6 and 4 it was something like 2, 5 and 3 but it seemed very obvious when looking at the partition descriptions. Again, maybe I should have stuck with the example but the partitions were definitely different. This could be another problem. Plus, the image sent to me probably was not right.

When I restored to a new 80gb drive and got tivo to boot it, it went through set-up and said it had a hardware error, I did a delete and restore option and this morning I was able to set up. So I suspect the image was not the right one.

I was going to use the old 40gb tivo drive in my pc, but based on your next feedback, I might give it one more try to make it boot in the tivo

Thanks for all your help. It was all very simple with a new drive.

Advice for newbies: Use a fresh HD, use a proven image from the "official" ftp site, be very careful about booting XP/NT, create a fat32 2gb partition. Don't be lazy and try to cut corners!

Posted by: Robert S

If you look back through my posts I don't think you can accuse me of not try to tell people that the NT signature is nothing special. If you ask for help with MTB, though, it's natural to assume that there's something on the TiVo you want to save.

I hadn't considered the naming issue. As 'MakeTiVoBootable' is longer than eight letters, some name munging may come into effect. I find that Linux doesn't always pick up on the long filenames on a FAT partition - sometimes I have to use -t vfat to get the long names working. You should be able to invoke MTB as /mnt/dos/MakeTi~1, though.

Most people find that they can mount their NTFS partitions and read the backup off it. If the backup is called tivo.bak then name munging should not be a factor. You should be able to read the backup directly from a CD. I would hope that repartitioning the computer's own hard drive to create a FAT partition can always be avoided.

For all DTiVoes and Series 2 stand alones with 4.0 and later there's an encryption system that ties the image to the mobo. When you move the image to a new mobo (for example by restoring a downloaded backup to your drive) you'll get error #51. To fix this you need to do a Clear and Delete Everything reset to reinitialise the encryption. When you've completed the C&D and got the TiVo set up for normal operations you might want to make a fresh compressed backup.