# Creating Premiere image or backup



## Oregonian (May 1, 2012)

I've got what seems like it ought to be a common situation, but I've not seen any answers after a bit of searching.

My TiVo Premiere had a problem with the 1T hard drive. It was replaced (actually reformatted) under warranty and I've not fired it up yet. I would like to make some sort of copy of it so I have the ability to replace the drive myself if it ever fails.

My first thought was to copy it to a spare drive I have around (40-80G) while shrinking the partitions for programs. I'd make sure it worked in the TiVo (with little room to record anything), then keep it as the backup. If I ever needed to use it, I'd use jmfs to copy to a new drive, then resize it. Sounded pretty straightforward to me.

My problem is I'm not finding any solutions for doing the copy to a smaller drive. I set up Ubuntu on a system, but it doesn't like most of the partitions on the TiVo drive. I read about copying programs online, but not finding any that will work with the Premiere to a smaller drive.

Though I spend my days doing just about anything with Windows, I'm not a Linux guy at all. I can learn, though, with some good advice! That was the direction I was going with Ubuntu, but didn't get very far.

I tried gparted, but it read the drive as being unpartitioned.

I can see all the partitions in Windows (with LinuxReader, I believe), but several are not readable.

Any suggestions on how to back up this drive to an image file or a small drive for safekeeping?


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

Oregonian said:


> I've got what seems like it ought to be a common situation, but I've not seen any answers after a bit of searching.
> 
> My TiVo Premiere had a problem with the 1T hard drive. It was replaced (actually reformatted) under warranty and I've not fired it up yet. I would like to make some sort of copy of it so I have the ability to replace the drive myself if it ever fails.
> 
> ...


As been said in other posts, at this time there is no way to back up any TP except by a bit by bit copy to another drive of = or greater size. No image file maker exist now, and may never exist as it did with the Series 1 -Series 3 TiVos. If you could develop software that would give us an image, that would great !!


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## Oregonian (May 1, 2012)

The posts I saw that claimed it wasn't possible appeared to be old and some even gave clues about how the problems could be resolved. I had hoped that some clever Linux programmer had resolved it by now!

It seemed to be that it should be pretty straightforward:
read the partition map
write the same map to the new drive, resizing the program folder (larger or smaller, depending on relative drive sizes)
copy each partition to the new drive

Of course, it is ALWAYS "easy" when you expect someone else to do it!

Nevertheless, I am moving on, installing the drive, and putting aside the whole image question. If I need it someday, I'm hoping I'll be able to find one.

Thanks for the input!


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## steve614 (May 1, 2006)

This may help...



comer said:


> For technically inclined and adventurous:
> you can make a truncated backup manually. All recordings will be gone, but their names will be stuck in the list - so you must do C&DE after you restore such backup. Here's how to do it:
> *The parts where you identify drives/fdisk and such can be taken from JMFS instructions from post #1, Advanced usage. But think twice if you don't know what it is - you will have hard time to succeed.*
> 
> ...


http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8246398#post8246398


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