# Restore Season Passes



## PeteTV (May 6, 2006)

I have a Series 3 (original) and was having a reboot problem and eventually ended up buying a new hard drive and using InstantCake. I'm now back in business except I had LOTS of season passes and I'd like to get them back.

I still have the original drive and I don't believe there's anything wrong with the drive itself, the reboot problem seems to have been caused by some kind of data corruption.

Is there any way to extract just the Season Pass information (and possibly wish lists) from the original drive and load it onto the new drive?

I'm quite comfortable at the Linux command line, so if it requires any kind of command line utilities I have no problem doing that.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

The only way I'm aware of is with a hacked Tivo using TivoWebPlus for backing up and restoring season pass lists. Your Tivo would require a PROM mod in order to hack it. Your best bet would be to restore your season passes manually. It's a PITA but once you're done you shouldn't have to repeat the process unless your drive craps out again.


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## PeteTV (May 6, 2006)

mr.unnatural said:


> The only way I'm aware of is with a hacked Tivo using TivoWebPlus for backing up and restoring season pass lists. Your Tivo would require a PROM mod in order to hack it. Your best bet would be to restore your season passes manually. It's a PITA but once you're done you shouldn't have to repeat the process unless your drive craps out again.


I was afraid of that... using MFSLive I did find the "mls" command which allowed me to kind of list the Season passes in a rather cryptic way, but I couldn't find any tools to extract the information and load it. I suppose I could dig into the backup/restore C code and try to make something that only did the season passes.


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## PeteTV (May 6, 2006)

How about extracting just a list of the Season Passes... either from the original drive OR... how about extracting them from the WinMFS backup file, is that possible?

I had LOTS of Season Passes, so it's not just a matter of re-entering them... it's a matter of remembering them.  Even if I could just somehow get a list of the Season Passes that would be helpful.

Is there anything that explains the WinMFS backup file format and compression used? If I had that, I could probably write a perl script to extract what I need.

Is the source for WinMFS available anywhere? I've looked on the mfslive.org site, but could only find the source for the MFSLive Linux Boot CD.


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## herbierobinson (Aug 30, 2010)

I would like to know how to do that, too. When I get time I want to work on that (I'm a programmer).

I want to upgrade to HD, but this might work for you.

You might try saving your old drive and restoring it onto the new one. The drive in my series three died as far as TiVo usage was concerned, but I was able to back it up and restore it onto a new drive. It's been working since last winter. The main failure mode for drives these days is bad bearings. That will impair the drive's real time performance (i.e., video playback) before it fails completely. If you are going to try this, try it quickly -- once the bearings start to go they go fast and it's often from grease evaporating; so, they can degrade even when turned off.


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## PeteTV (May 6, 2006)

herbierobinson said:


> You might try saving your old drive and restoring it onto the new one.


That's the FIRST thing I tried. 

The problem I was having wasn't the drive, the drive checks out ok. I'm guessing some data got corrupted and it's the TiVo software deciding it needs to reboot. It will boot all the way into the system and I can even poke around in the menus, but only for about 10-20 seconds, then it reboots. I made a backup using WinMFS and restored it to a couple different drives, but it still does the same thing. Finally I resorted to InstantCake, which works, but I lost all my season passes.

I also mounted the var filesystem using the MFSTools boot CD and looked at the logs, but I don't know enough about the TiVo internals to know what the problem is. The last thing in the tverr log is:


```
Aug 29 19:46:20 (none) Activity TvInfluxRequestServiceA[372]: Tmk Fatal Error: Activity TvInfluxRequestServiceActivity <372>: unexpected signal 11
Aug 29 19:46:20 (none) Activity TvInfluxRequestServiceA[372]: Tmk Fatal Error: Thread died due to signal 11
Aug 29 19:46:20 (none) Activity TvInfluxRequestServiceA[372]: Invoking rule 834: rebooting system
```
I can certainly run more tests and/or provide more logs if anyone's willing to help me interpret them.


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## herbierobinson (Aug 30, 2010)

Yes, that does have a corrupted software ring to it. I haven't looked at the Linux sources TiVo is using; so, I don't know for sure, but I Googled "signal.h Linux" it signal 11 came up as SIGSEGV in the first two references I found. On a system that's been up and running for a long long time, corruption of one of the program files is a likely cause. If you look back further in that log, you might find the name of the program that the signal happened in. If you find that, you should be able to use mfs tools to compare the files in your image against the new ones in InstantCake. If there is only a few bytes different in a large file, it would be fairly safe to fix that file and see if it flies. The only catch is that if the InstantCake program is a different version or build.


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