# dd TiVo Drives on a Mac?



## Marconi (Sep 8, 2001)

I've heretofore been using mfs backup and restore to copy TiVo drives to replacement drives. I do this on an Intel iMac by booting to the mfsLive CD. Of course, to do this with an iMac requires that SATA (or PATA)/USB adapters be used and transfers are limited to USB speeds.

Tonight I plan to copy one 1 TB drive from a TiVo HD to another so I can change the model of the drive in one of my THDs. I'm thinking that I ought to be able to do this using my Mac Pro which has a two-bay external eSATA enclosure. I'm thinking I can put both drives into this enclosure and just dd one to the other at faster speeds than I can get with USB adapters.

My experience has been that, if I put a TiVo drive into this enclosure, Mac OS says I've inserted a drive that it cannot read and offers to let me eject | initialize | ignore. To my knowledge, when I tell it to ignore the TiVo drive, it does. It doesn't scan the drive with Spotlight, it doesn't back it up with Time machine. It seems to truly ignore the drive and not write anything to it. The ignored drive is not mounted.

That is, it seems to do no harm. Does anyone know differently?

Are there any reasons why I should not trust OS X with my TiVo drive when I dd drive contents to a new drive?


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## z28freak86 (Apr 25, 2010)

Still the best way to do anything with TIVO is with a windows based operating system. tivo used linux, which is a command prompt opperating system. if you dont do everything in the correct order or write out the commands exactly correct, you can damage your HD. with that said, with a MAC would be very difficult to determine what it may do to your drive regardless.


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

Well, the Mac is a Unix core, and it is possible to port the Linux tools to Mac OS.

Just that MacOS X is more BSD oriented so the disk names are different, but if one is confident with the command line, it should be possible.

It doesn't mount in MacOS X because it doesn't understand the filesystem. But the device nodes will be there (they have to as that's the only way to "talk" to the drive).


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## Marconi (Sep 8, 2001)

z28freak86 said:


> Still the best way to do anything with TIVO is with a windows based operating system. .... with that said, with a MAC would be very difficult to determine what it may do to your drive regardless.


FWIW, dd worked perfectly well. I cloned a 1 TB drive in about 5.5 hours.


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