TiVo Community Forums Archives - No backup luck w/MFS Tools

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No backup luck w/MFS Tools
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Posted by: TiVohNOoo

Hy Pholx,
Using MFS Tools 2 CD and attempting to backup a 40g DirecTV Tivo drive, neither mfsbackup mode works for us. Unable to backup to windows drive, error message encountered: "specify file system". Total drive backup results in message: "Starting Restore", then system just idles for hours with no drive activity. Should we take up serious couch potatoeing??

Posted by: Robert S

It's actually mount that's failing, not mfsbackup. If mounting hda1 doesn't work, try hda2 and hda5 instead.

Posted by: TiVohNOoo

Hy & thanx for the response. The two of us have spent the better part of two days working on what we thought were well blazed trails. Ha, ha! I guess we're not clear about how Linux reads dos partitions. The Hinsdale documentation assumes that nothing varies from the standard set of assumptions. The frustrating thing is that when we abandoned the backup procedure requiring mounting stuff, and just decided to follow the procedure for copying the entire contents of the Tivo drive onto the same size backup drive, once the system said it had read the source drive and began restoring to the destination drive, it just sat there. No error messages, NO FURTHER ACCESSING OF THE DRIVES, no prompt, just an endless wait! We finally cntl-alt-deled to stop the system, the original drive was OK back in the Tivo, but we have nothing to show for all our time.
Up to this point, we were very impressed with how MFSTOOLS was able to read the drive sizes and even the partition information on the Tivo drives.
What are we missing?

Posted by: Robert S

MFS Tools seems to need to think for about 10 minutes before it starts to make the backup.

Posted by: TiVohNOoo

Hy again,
We're happy that it works elsewhere, but here, after at least two hours of its "think" time, with NO disk activity (NO lights or sounds), we didn't believe there was digital life so we rebooted. Quitting on the project for today - I've got a mountain to ski. Myke & Paul (who may take this further this week), as we were each trying to augment our respective TiVo units (mine - Sony, Paul's Philips 312 w/30g A & 80g blessed B). Thanx & Bye for now.