# Copying a hard drive?



## RonEuC (Feb 6, 2007)

Have 2 hard drives in my old Sony SAT-T60, a 40 gig and an 80 gig. The 80 gig works when it's cool but crashes when it heats up. I'm wondering if there is a simple way to create a disk image and duplicate it onto another disk, so I can just replace that drive & save my recordings. I have a Mac. Anyone ever done this?


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## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

Get an old PC and check out mfslive.org. It will be easier than dealing with the Mac.


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## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

To save recordings, you can only copy the whole drive to another.


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## tbauer (Jan 21, 2015)

I just purchased a TiVo series 3 hd that came with a 160 gb drive in it. The friend also had a TiVo 2tb hard drive that he was going to install instead of the 160, but never got around to it. My question is can I just take the 2tb hard drive that is already TiVo ready and copy it to another new 2 tb drive without going through winmfs copy procedure. Not trying to hijack this message, thought I was starting a new post. Sorry


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

Yes. You can use a dd variant under Linux or HDD Raw Copy Tool under windows.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

tbauer said:


> I just purchased a TiVo series 3 hd that came with a 160 gb drive in it. The friend also had a TiVo 2tb hard drive that he was going to install instead of the 160, but never got around to it. My question is can I just take the 2tb hard drive that is already TiVo ready and copy it to another new 2 tb drive without going through winmfs copy procedure. Not trying to hijack this message, thought I was starting a new post. Sorry


Assuming that the model of TiVo you have is a TCD652160, did the friend buy a 2TB drive from weaKnees or the guy on eBay with the software for the TCD652160 already installed on it?

Then if there aren't any shows you care about saving on the drive that came in your TiVo, you should be able to install that 2TB drive, fire it up, and go through Guided Setup just like it was a never used TiVo.

If the drive had the software for any other model TiVo installed on it, however, we'll need to talk further.


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## tbauer (Jan 21, 2015)

The new drive is a ebay TiVo drive and the drive I purchased that I would like to copy the ebay drive to is the same as the ebay drive so I hopefully would have two 2 tb drives for my two TiVo hd's


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

tbauer said:


> The new drive is a ebay TiVo drive and the drive I purchased that I would like to copy the ebay drive to is the same as the ebay drive so I hopefully would have two 2 tb drives for my two TiVo hd's



Edited 2/2/15 to reflect having refreshed my memory on what's where in WinMFS--it's not all under File the way I misremembered.

Since you don't have recordings on that eBay drive, it would be quicker to use WinMFS's

mfscopy

than for you to burn "as an image" an MFS Live cd, v1.4, or a copy of The Ultimate Boot CD and then learn how to use the Linux command line and how to run

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

to "Xerox" the drive.

I think that

mfscopy

will copy over everything so that the target drive is expanded out to 2TB as well, but what you can do is go to

File, Select

to select the source drive (which you'll need to do anyway), and look at it with

View, mfsinfo

(and you can save the output of that as a text file for future reference)

and then when

Tools, mfscopy

is finished, you can go back to

Select

and this time select the target drive and look at it with

mfsinfo

and make sure it matches the source drive.

Of course, as long as that 160GB has been in operation recently enough to be running at least version 11.0h of the TiVo software (current version is 11.0m), you could mfscopy the 160 to the blank 2TB, then tell it no when it offers to expand (just trust me on this), and check it with

mfsinfo

(after having gone back to Select to switch the focus from the 160 to the 2TB)

and then expand with

Tools, mfsadd

about as quickly as copying one 2TB to the other.


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## rob4crib (Dec 24, 2014)

classicsat said:


> To save recordings, you can only copy the whole drive to another.


I just did a clone of my old humax dt400 80gb on to a 500gb drive. In my system settings the recording capacity still shows only 92 hrs of variable recording. I used ddrescue to do the clone,the new drive opened just fine and transferred all just as it should . I then did a clear and delete all to see if that would reset capacity. Is capacity a preset amount that doesn't update or did I do something wrong?
Thanks


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

You need to add the extra space using the mfsadd program from one of the MFSTools boot from CD's


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## rob4crib (Dec 24, 2014)

thanks i'll give it a try


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

rob4crib said:


> I just did a clone of my old humax dt400 80gb on to a 500gb drive. In my system settings the recording capacity still shows only 92 hrs of variable recording. I used ddrescue to do the clone,the new drive opened just fine and transferred all just as it should . I then did a clear and delete all to see if that would reset capacity. Is capacity a preset amount that doesn't update or did I do something wrong?
> Thanks


As Home User indicated, now that you've used a Linux utility to "Xerox" the drive to a larger one, you need a TiVo specific utility to expand into the extra space, to either put a 3rd MFS partition pair in that space, or, if you already have 3 MFS pairs, to expand the 3rd MFS Media partition into the rest of the space.

(Since the TiVo uses its own flavor of the old Apple Partition Map, and not the "MBR" scheme used by PCs, it does things differently from PCs)

You can use the WinMFS program running under Windows XP SP3 or newer, or burn "as an image" the MFS Live cd, v1.4 .iso file, and boot from that.

Either way, you'll be using the

mfsadd

command.

Holler if you need help finding where to download what.

EDIT: You don't need to re-copy the original drive.


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## bsd (Sep 30, 2002)

Is it still OK to use WinMFS or is there a more up to date method? I haven't done a drive update in a number of years (my old Series 3 that I have long gotten rid of) and it looks like the WinMFS website show that the download links haven't been updated since 2009. If there is a more up to date method or website, please let me know.

I plan to update my existing Premiere Elite drive to a WD30EURX (3TB) drive that is being sent to me by Amazon this week.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Regards,
Brett


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## sar840t2 (Mar 1, 2003)

I'm pretty sure you need to use JMFS these days - see http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=455968

And now a question (I had been looking and couldn't find the 'latest' answer to this) - what is the largest drive that the Premiere (and JMFS) can handle? I had thought it was 2TB - can it handle 3TB now?

Thanks ... Mike


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

bsd said:


> Is it still OK to use WinMFS or is there a more up to date method? I haven't done a drive update in a number of years (my old Series 3 that I have long gotten rid of) and it looks like the WinMFS website show that the download links haven't been updated since 2009. If there is a more up to date method or website, please let me know.
> 
> I plan to update my existing Premiere Elite drive to a WD30EURX (3TB) drive that is being sent to me by Amazon this week.
> 
> ...


When TiVo brought out the Series 4 platform (the Premiere), they changed something about the partition table/layout and/or file system, and that broke compatibility with WinMFS and the MFS Live cd and the old MFS Tools for anything newer than the Series 3 platform.

(For Series 1, 2, and 3 TiVos those software tools are as good as they ever were).

Copying a Series 4 drive to a larger one and using the extra space became possible with comer's development of jmfs, available as a Live cd .iso, and making backup images can now be done with the DvrBARS program.

Each has their own thread around here somewhere.


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