TiVo Community Forums Archives - Back to when I bought it!

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Back to when I bought it!
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Posted by: tommymsw

I upgraded my Tivo Series 1 years ago when I bought it. I now bought a series 2 and took my second (upgraded) drive from my series 1 and put it in my series 2. I still have my old B drive from my series 1. I would like to put it back in and maybe give my series 1 away. I can not seem to find any info on bringing it back to factory new. I don't care about backups or saving my shows. I am sure I would need to unmarry the A drive to add the old B but I can not seem to find info on unmarrying anymore.

Posted by: Robert S

All you need to do is restore a compressed backup to the A drive. If you make a fresh one, you won't even lose your settings (although your recordings won't survive).

Instructions in Hinsdale. Note that restoring to the original A drive is a special case.

Posted by: tommymsw

Thank you for the rsponse but will that unmarry the two drives and then marry the other two? Also (here it is) I did this years ago and no longer have the backup. Now what do I do? Can I not treat the old B drive as a new B drive, just like I did when I replaced it in the first place? Also... I have no idea what Hinsdale is. Sorry... and that you again.

Posted by: Robert S

See the post by Hinsdale at the top of this Forum.

You can make a fresh compressed backup from the two drives currently in the S1, then restore that to the A drive, then use MFS Tools to 'marry' the B drive to the S2's A drive.

Posted by: tommymsw

Thank you... I think I am on the right track now. I have no idea why this happens to me but I can not believe that all of these people goto the websites and not report the problem or that I am too dumb to figure it out. As far as making a boot CD the directions on the site are as follows :In Windows:
-if you use Nero (of which you can get an evaluation copy at
bla bla bla go to the "file" menu, select "burn image...", then
choose the .iso image. The file selection dialog defaults to .nrg type
images, but you can select the .iso by changing to "file type: all *.*".
However there is no .iso file in the MFSTOOLS download. Furthermore any file I choose to write (attempting to write an ISO file) reads incorrect filetype. Anyway... the Floppy part works fine so I will have to work with that.

Posted by: tommymsw

ARGH! Forget it! The Hinsdale directions are filled with so many holes and wrong info that I expect even before I do something that it is not going to be correct. To start with the MFS tools CD that you burn from an ISO that does not exist in the download. Then I run it from a floppy and it tells me it can not make the backup perhaps because the drive is locked (I can not tell if the drive is locked because even though the directions tell you how to check... the information on drive size is not there. So I figure I will run the unlock anyway. Simply download qunlock to a disk and restart your system... wrong! If you do this you will get "non system disk" (oh and Ctrl-Alt-Delete does not give you a "no processes line" so you can shut down your PC. It actually restarts it. Anyway... I boot to DOS and run the qunlock program... I get a "comand sent" message. I have no idea if that worked or not because the directions mention nothing of what to expect if it works or does not. Anyway... I start my system over and still get the "drives may be locked". It sure was easy enough to do this the first time 4 years ago. It seems quite impossible to get it back. Is there no way to just put in a new drive and start from scratch? What would one do if a drive fails? Throuw out the unit?

Posted by: Robert S

Hinsdale links http://hellcat.tyger.org/MFS/2.0/mfstools2noJ.iso which seems to be working here. Exactly how you burn an ISO to disk depends on what software you use. Sometimes just double-clicking the file will start the burning software up in the right mode.

Running qunlock on a hunch is not a good idea as Very Bad Things can happen. You can run DiskUtil (www.upgrade-instructions.com) on a hunch. Locked disks detect as 10Mb in the BIOS and the Linux boot log. When the floppy boots there's a long pause when the disk list is on screen, so you shouldn't miss it.

'Non-system Disk' means you've tried to boot off a disk with no operating system on it. You're supposed to change disks between booting off a DOS floppy and running qunlock (or you can just put qunlock on a bootable floppy).

Different versions of Linux behave slightly differently when you press Ctrl-Alt-Del. It doesn't seem that this minor variation caused you a problem.

qunlock doesn't test whether the unlock worked (I don't think it can test it as you need to switch the PC off before the unlock takes effect).

Perhaps you should try PTVupgrade's InstantCake recovery CD?