# Hard drive with unknown image



## Ashalon (Feb 9, 2012)

I have a hard drive that I'm almost positive is an old DVR drive. I put it in my computer and, while Windows didn't recognize it, it could be found using Seatools from Seagate. I did both a short and a long diagnostics test and it passed both. I'm now trying to figure out which DVR it came from. We've had numerous brands come through the house over the years: Sony, Toshiba, Tivo, etc... So how do I find out which DVR this hard drive came from? (I can't use dos commands like 'cd..' or '/dir', can I, since I'm booting off a CD?) Thanks in advance.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Ashalon said:


> I have a hard drive that I'm almost positive is an old DVR drive. I put it in my computer and, while Windows didn't recognize it, it could be found using Seatools from Seagate. I did both a short and a long diagnostics test and it passed both. I'm now trying to figure out which DVR it came from. We've had numerous brands come through the house over the years: Sony, Toshiba, Tivo, etc... So how do I find out which DVR this hard drive came from? (I can't use dos commands like 'cd..' or '/dir', can I, since I'm booting off a CD?) Thanks in advance.


Go to mfslive.org, download the zip of the .iso of the MFS Live cd v1.4 and burn yourself a copy.

Boot with it.

Choose boot option 1. (just hit enter)

After it finishes booting and gets to the Linux command prompt, use shift+pageup to see what identifier it assigned to which drive.

PATA/IDE drives will be /dev/hda or /dev/hdb, etc., and SATA drives will be /dev/sda, etc.

At the command line line enter

fdisk -l

(that's a lowercase L)

and see what it has to say about each drive.

Then enter

pdisk -l

and see what it has to say.

If you get an indication of an Apple Partition Map on the mystery drive, let's say it was /dev/hda

then do

mfsinfo /dev/hda

and see what you get.

Report back and we'll go from there.

Is the drive a Seagate or a Maxtor and what's the model number on the sticker on the drive?


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

Ashalon said:


> I have a hard drive that I'm almost positive is an old DVR drive. I put it in my computer and, while Windows didn't recognize it, it could be found using Seatools from Seagate. I did both a short and a long diagnostics test and it passed both. I'm now trying to figure out which DVR it came from. We've had numerous brands come through the house over the years: Sony, Toshiba, Tivo, etc... So how do I find out which DVR this hard drive came from? (I can't use dos commands like 'cd..' or '/dir', can I, since I'm booting off a CD?) Thanks in advance.


If you are more comfortable in WIndows, the mfslive.org site also has WinMFS. That needs to be run in administrater mode for Vista or Win7. Run that, do a drive select, and it will come up with info if it is a TIvo drive. Then go to View, and it will give you all sorts of partition and drive info.


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## Ashalon (Feb 9, 2012)

The WinMFS worked very slick. (And on Win XP, to boot.) 

It says it's a Maxtor 6Y120L0, for Tivo series 1. (So this must have been for the SVR-2000 then.) Thank you, that's what I was looking for.

Out of curiosity, it says the size is 0 GB. (w/ 19152 sectors) Would that explain why the drive wasn't working? (It's like a DVR graveyard around here, a lot of old skeletons and no idea which goes with what anymore.) If the disk is good and just needs a new image, that could be helpful to know for spare parts.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Ashalon said:


> The WinMFS worked very slick. (And on Win XP, to boot.)
> 
> It says it's a Maxtor 6Y120L0, for Tivo series 1. (So this must have been for the SVR-2000 then.) Thank you, that's what I was looking for.
> 
> Out of curiosity, it says the size is 0 GB. (w/ 19152 sectors) Would that explain why the drive wasn't working? (It's like a DVR graveyard around here, a lot of old skeletons and no idea which goes with what anymore.) If the disk is good and just needs a new image, that could be helpful to know for spare parts.


If you'd used MFS Live like I told you to you could unlock it with diskutil


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## Ashalon (Feb 9, 2012)

Ah, I'd tried to use MFS Live, but I couldn't get it to boot. (All my other boot CDs are working, so I was a bit confuzzled as to why that one wasn't working.) I can give it another shot.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Ashalon said:


> Ah, I'd tried to use MFS Live, but I couldn't get it to boot. (All my other boot CDs are working, so I was a bit confuzzled as to why that one wasn't working.) I can give it another shot.


Bad burn, maybe?

Call it a coaster and try again.

Google

qunlock

and

diskutil

to find out what's going on and do not, repeat, do not, use qunlock.


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## Ashalon (Feb 9, 2012)

Yeah, must've been a bad burn. Second try worked.

It's only showing me one drive. (I've got an old Pentium computer I pulled out of the basement, and I just left the hard drive in. This is the drive it's showing me.)

So hda = computer hard drive
hdb = DVD player
hdc = should be my tivo drive but it's not showing.

When I type fdisk -l, I get:

Disk /dev/hda: 40 GB... and so on, but it's the only one that shows. No hdc (or hdd) at all. 

From what I read before, if it was a locked drive, there should be an hdc with, like, 9mb showing, right? As it is, I got diddly. (Weird that it showed with WinMFS and not here.)

(EDIT: NVM, I just fired up WinMFS up again, and it's not seeing the drive either now. I'm re-checking connections.)


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Ashalon said:


> Yeah, must've been a bad burn. Second try worked.
> 
> It's only showing me one drive. (I've got an old Pentium computer I pulled out of the basement, and I just left the hard drive in. This is the drive it's showing me.)
> 
> ...


What about

pdisk -l

?

That Maxtor is a 120GB drive, so that tells us it likely wasn't the original drive in an S1 and that you aren't having a problem caused by using a motherboard that can't see anything bigger than a 137GB drive, although if it's an old enough board that it can't see anything bigger than a 32GB drive that 40GB may have had drive overlay software installed.

Is that the same computer you ran WinMFS on?

When you say Pentium, Socket 4, Pentium 60 or 66? Socket 5 or 7 Pentium 75, 90, 100, 120, etc?

Slot 1 or socket 370 Pentium II or Celeron?

Pentium III?

Newer than that?

Pull the non-mystery drive, get it out of the equation, UNLESS IT'S A GIGABYTE BRAND MOTHERBOARD (if it is, let me know before you do anything else).

Check the master/slave/cable select jumper on all of the drives, make sure they're appropriate for the type of cable used.

If it ain't a GigaByte board, try it as primary master, primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave.


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## Ashalon (Feb 9, 2012)

I'm not sure what's going on, but now the drive is showing in msf live. The connections all seemed tight, so I'm not sure why it disappeared on me. I think this has been the main problem that's been slipping me up from the start, because every time I read something and try to execute it, the drive disappears and makes me question my sanity. But it's back now.

(I'm running a Pentium 4, for reference, with an Intel mobo, but it looks like that's not the problem.)

So, back to the beginning, with the drive now showing in MFS Live, I'm getting the following.

For fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/hdd: 10 mb, 10240000bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track 19 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008*512 = 516096 bytes

Disk /dev/hdd doesn't contain a valid partition table

...

And while I was typing this, the drive disappeared on me before I could write the rest down. I rebooted, but the drive is still gone.

So. Once I take the disappearing and re-appearing drive out of the equation, it looks like this has the 10 mb dealie where you have to unlock the drive by using the directions over at weaknees. 

It looks pretty straightforward (except for that niggling little problem of losing the drive.) So I'll dig around for a different IDE cable and try this tomorrow, I think. Thanks for all the help. I was going crazy trying to figure out what was going wrong.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Ashalon said:


> I'm not sure what's going on, but now the drive is showing in msf live. The connections all seemed tight, so I'm not sure why it disappeared on me. I think this has been the main problem that's been slipping me up from the start, because every time I read something and try to execute it, the drive disappears and makes me question my sanity. But it's back now.
> 
> (I'm running a Pentium 4, for reference, with an Intel mobo, but it looks like that's not the problem.)
> 
> ...


Remember, use diskutil, not qunlock.

What does

pdisk -l

have to say?

Take the cable off of the Windows drive and unplug its power as well.

Hook the mystery drive up as Primary Master (should show up as /dev/hda)

pdisk -l /dev/hda

mfsinfo /dev/hda

(that's booting with the MFS Live cd)


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## Ashalon (Feb 9, 2012)

Oh. Here's something new on my monitor. Okay, so I took out the computer hard drive and booted into mfs live.

(hda = tivo drive and hdb = dvd drive)

I typed pdisk -l and got a long list with apple stuff so I basically hit the apple motherload.

So 
Partition map (with 512 byte blocks on '/dev hda'
1. Apple_partition_map Apple
2. Image Bootstrap 1
3. Image Kernel 1
4. ... and so on

Device block size=512, Number of Blocks = 20000 (9.8M)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0


When I tried 
mfsinfo /dev/hda:

I got: "Invalid argument reading volume header."

I used diskutil off of the MFS Live cd to unlock it and it unlocked successfully. Unfortunately, I just ran a short test in Seatools and it failed, so now am running a long test to see if it can be fixed. But... your help didn't go unappreciated! I'm still working on fixing up a Toshiba SD-H400, so this knowledge will help me with that project. (I'm going to try to salvage an image off a bad hard drive with dd_rescue). After working through this, I feel much more comfortable with the whole TiVo upgrade and restore process. Thank you for all your help.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Ashalon said:


> Oh. Here's something new on my monitor. Okay, so I took out the computer hard drive and booted into mfs live.
> 
> (hda = tivo drive and hdb = dvd drive)
> 
> ...


That's a TiVo partition layout, but the mfsinfo result indicates it got corrupted somewhere along the line, which, unfortunately is not an unheard of occurrence.

See what WinMFS's mfsinfo has to say about it.

Also, see if the partitions add up to enough to fill 120GB.

I ran into a Sony with a 30 hour image (what ordinarily would come on a 30GB drive) on an 80GB Maxtor, with the rest of the space unused.

(pdisk, by the way, will show unused space as an Apple Free Partition, 'cause that's just the way the Apple Partition Map scheme works, the map itself is counted as the first partition and un-partitioned space is counted as a partition)

In the case of the 30 hour 80GB drive, it could be someone tried replacing the original but forgot or couldn't figure out how to expand, or it could be that the original 30GB Quantum drives were no longer available from Maxtor, who by that time had purchased Quantum, and they just used whatever they could get cheap in bulk from Maxtor.

Another explanation of the mfsinfo result is that it was part of a two drive set, and you need both drives to get mfsinfo to return an accurate report.

The syntax would be

mfsinfo /dev/hda /dev/hdb

if you had them hooked up on the same cable.

Inside the TiVo there's only one IDE header, so they have to be master and slave on the same cable, but in a computer they can be on either IDE controller as long as you do it like this

mfsinfs firstTiVodrive secondTiVodrive

One other test you can run on that drive is

hdparm -N /dev/hda

and see if the result it returns (number/number) shows any hidden or reserved areas.

Don't do anything else with hdparm except maybe

hdrparm -i /dev/hda

or

hdparm -I /dev/hda

as just about every other option for the hdparm command will make changes that'll screw things up.


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