# Easy HD Image of Tivo Disk?



## dgrrr (Jan 19, 2006)

How do I do a HD image backup (or restore) of my hard drive from my Series 2 Tivo with DVD burner (for safety before I try to do a hack)? I normally use the Acronis imaging program in Windows or from it's boot disk, but as I remember, neither the Windows version or boot disk version of Acronis can recognize the TIVO hd & Partition, becuase of the file system, or mounting issues or something.

Even when I use the tivo-friendly boot disks, I get lost quickly when I have to do stuff from a command line, like mount drives, unlock their read only status, etc.

Is there an easy way (presumably from a boot disk) to do an image of my tivo disk?


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## goony (Nov 20, 2003)

I don't know of any single, do-it-all-for-you utility when it comes to backup of Tivo disks - the problem is that the various filesystems that make up a Tivo aren't all the same: The OS is a Linux filesystem and the programs are stored using a filesystem called MFS, which is somewhat Apple-like. You're going to have to roll up your sleeves and do some learning to accomplish what you want.

*Easiest - clone the drive:*

To be "safe" you could/should obtain another hard drive and use something like *dd* (or better, *dd_rescue*) which will perform a block-for-block cloning of your original drive, then you "do your thang" to the copy and put the original away for safe keeping. dd is a general-use Linux/Unix utility that can do drive->drive, drive->file and file->drive operations no matter what operating system created the drive - I have used dd/dd_rescue to copy Linux, Windows and Tivo drives.

*More difficult to save to an image:*

With the right 'magic' of Unix "pipes" (the vertical bar | character) it would be possible to take the output of a dd program and "pipe" it into a compression utility such as *gzip* and output the resulting compressed file, which could then be written to a DVD disc. Don't plan on saving any programs with this approach as you would quickly blow past a 4.7GB-per-DVD size limit. Example:

```
dd if=/dev/hdc bs=32k | gzip -9c > /mnt/tivodisk.gz[/cdoe]

The mfstool(s) utility (commonly found on various Tivo utility boot discs, is a utility specific to messing with Tivo-based units and is "Tivo filesystem aware") has a backup capability too - you may want to search this forum and/or Google for the keywords [b]mfstool[/b] and [b]backup[/b] - you end up finding stuff like this: [URL]http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=176541[/URL] , or even [URL]http://www.dasmonkey.net/lba48.html[/URL] (look at the section "Backup old drive") for an example.
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## Mr_Bester (Jan 27, 2007)

mfslive is a pretty simple to use compilation of mfstools. www.mfslive.org
Dug


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