# Difficulty in partitioning new hard drives so that they can receive image



## timckelley (Oct 15, 2002)

Hello, my problem started when I tried to do the mfsrestore command to receive the image. It said something about the first target drive being too small to receive the image. This drive is 80G, which is way bigger than the image.

Now, when I boot to Windows and go into Disk Management, it shows this disk as "Disk 1" with a red circle next to it. Under that it says "Unknown 9 MB Not Initialized". Having only 9 MB that explains why it's too small to accept the image.

But it's 80G, and by the way, this drive came from my TiVo. It's a 2 drive TiVo, where one drive went bad but I'm trying to salvage the other one.

Anyway, according to Windows doc, I should be able to initialize this drive and there's supposed to be wizard that pops up automatically for me, but it doesn't. There is no menu option to initialize this drive. I'm guessing I need to initialize it to gain access to the 80G. Is that right?

I have a second drive (only 20G, Western Digital) that used to be a PC drive that's already partitioned using NTFS. Since I also want to use that in my TiVo, isn't it true that I should repartition that drive as FAT32 before attempting to do a MFSRESTORE command onto it? I'm pretty sure I do, but my first question above about gaining access to 80G instead of 9MB is the most important one. I've googled around the web for my problem but can't find it.

Out of curiosity, I put both TiVo drives in my PC, and they both say the same thing: 9MB Unallocated. Could it be the Windows XP is simply not compatible with those drives? They are:

Maxtor D540X-4K

If Windows XP can't read these drives, but TiVo can, then what are my options for installing the image onto them?


----------



## 1283 (Sep 8, 2000)

It's a locked drive. I have always used qunlock, but many people here prefer a safer program to unlock the drive. I thought the TiVo boot CD already includes the unlock code???


----------



## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

They are both locked and you should use DiskUtil (available here) to unlock them as Qunlock is not safe with Maxtor drives.

However, you may now find that they won't boot in your TiVo anyway as putting a TiVo drive into a Windows box and booting into Windows is *a very bad idea*


----------



## funtoupgrade (Mar 15, 2005)

Once you get the drives unlocked you don't need to do any other drive prep for mfsrestore. It wipes the disk clean and formats it on the fly for use in TiVo as part of the restore process.


----------



## timckelley (Oct 15, 2002)

blindlemon said:


> They are both locked and you should use DiskUtil (available here) to unlock them as Qunlock is not safe with Maxtor drives.
> 
> However, you may now find that they won't boot in your TiVo anyway as putting a TiVo drive into a Windows box and booting into Windows is *a very bad idea*


Thank you very much for that link.

BTW, I never installed the Maxtor as a primary master, except once, and even then, I booted to a boot floppy and not to the Maxter drive.

The reason I booted into Windows was to see if I could format it with FAT32, but as I can see from another response in this thread, that's unnecessary.


----------



## timckelley (Oct 15, 2002)

blindlemon said:


> However, you may now find that they won't boot in your TiVo anyway as putting a TiVo drive into a Windows box and booting into Windows is *a very bad idea*





funtoupgrade said:


> Once you get the drives unlocked you don't need to do any other drive prep for mfsrestore. It wipes the disk clean and formats it on the fly for use in TiVo as part of the restore process.


If it wipes it clean and formats it, then my common sense tells that any damage I might have done putting it into a Windows box would be undone that this utility.

I'm also wondering if this "lockage" has prevented my hard drive fitness utilities to do an accurate job of testing the disks. I thought they ran too quickly to be true. Maybe they only read the 9 MB I alluded to earlier, and not the whole 80Gigabytes. I'm starting to think after I unlock the drives, I should retest them for fitness.


----------



## timckelley (Oct 15, 2002)

Oh, questions about Diskutil:

1) Should I use "DiskUtil/TempUnlock DriveNo", or "DiskUtil/PermUnlock DriveNo"?
2) Does DriveNo, mean the drive letter associated with the drive?
3) Can I run this from a DOS prompt after booting to Windows XP, or is it unsafe to boot to Windows XP?


----------



## funtoupgrade (Mar 15, 2005)

Use Diskutil.exe/PermUnlock 0 for primary master, Use Diskutil.exe/PermUnlock 1 for primary slave, Use Diskutil.exe/PermUnlock 2 for secondary master, and Use Diskutil.exe/PermUnlock 3 for secondary slave.

I've never tried it from the DOS prompt within Windows but would think it should work.

Wouldn't hurt to run diags on disks once unlocked just to be sure.

As you surmise making a new restore to a disk would wipe out any problem on a Tivo drive that had been booted into XP. There is also a utility that can be run to make one of these again bootable in Tivo.


----------



## timckelley (Oct 15, 2002)

funtoupgrade said:


> Use Diskutil.exe/PermUnlock 0 for primary master, Use Diskutil.exe/PermUnlock 1 for primary slave, Use Diskutil.exe/PermUnlock 2 for secondary master, and Use Diskutil.exe/PermUnlock 3 for secondary slave.
> 
> I've never tried it from the DOS prompt within Windows but would think it should work.
> 
> ...


Thanks for those useful answers. To be safe, maybe I'll put diskutil.exe onto my Maxter fitness utility diskette. That diskette is already bootable, and it boots to DR DOS. I'm planning on working on this late this evening after my son goes to bed.


----------



## timckelley (Oct 15, 2002)

I did all the above and got sort of strange results on the diagnostics. There's a quick 90 second basic test (it really takes a few minutes), and a more through test, and then there's something called a burn test. One drive passed all three. The second drive passed the first two, but the 3rd test wouldn't even run. Normally you see the sectors counting by, but I left it in there for hours, and the 3rd diagnostic wouldn't run. This is also the same drive that earlier reported errors.

So I figured I'd assume it's a bad drive, and so I replaced it (Maxter 80G) with my only other spare drive I have hanging around (WD 20G). The WD was already formatted NTFS, so I went into Windows and deleted the partition and reset it to FAT32.

Also, on my good Maxter 80G, Diskutil worked fine.

My MFSrestore and expand worked fine. I put my two drives (totalling 100G) into my TiVo, and powered up.

Viola! It seems to work fine, and it recognizes all my space. Right now I'm in the middle of a clear and delete operation (I wasn't sure if I should do that, but thought I would to be safe. There are no recordings on either drive I wanted to save, and no settings/SPs either... I really wanted a fresh TiVo.) I'm hoping that once I put this in operation, the symptoms I had that started all this will not be there. (Frequent stuttering/pixelation/freezing of operations/reboots needed)

I'd like, at this point, to thank everybody who helped me through this. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to accomplish this stuff without the sage wisdom I got from this forum. :up:


----------

