# winmfs



## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

I posted this question in the TiVo help forum and it was suggested that I head over to this forum with my question, so I'll give it a try here:

I'm trying to make a back-up hard drive for my Toshiba TX20 using winmfs, and I connected the TX20's IDE 250GB HD to my XP OS computer with both the TX and my computer HD jumpered to cable select, with my computer HD being in the master position on my IDE cable and the TX drive in the slave position, and after starting my computer I can't get out of BIOS and into Windows. Any suggestions?


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

McCormack said:


> I'm trying to make a back-up hard drive for my Toshiba TX20 using winmfs, and I connected the TX20's IDE 250GB HD to my XP OS computer with both the TX and my computer HD jumpered to cable select, with my computer HD being in the master position on my IDE cable and the TX drive in the slave position, and after starting my computer I can't get out of BIOS and into Windows. Any suggestions?


I never use cable select, but it sounds like you did it right. Are you sure the cable you're using is configured for it? You could try using jumpers to configure master and slave. Does the BIOS give you an error message?


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## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

My Bios gives me a boot failure message of the type that I get when forget to hook up a power or IDE cable when swap hard drives in and out, but I checked the connections on my TiVi set up and everything was tight.

I'm using the same cable that I regularly use to clone my hard drive to a backup HD, so it should be OK for what I'm trying to do with my TiVo HD. I'll give the master/slave configuration a try tomorrow and see what happens.

I'm using the NTFS file system on my XP, and I've heard that TiVo uses FAT 32... is it possible that there's a conflict between the two file systems and that's why it won't boot?


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

McCormack said:


> My Bios gives me a boot failure message of the type that I get when forget to hook up a power or IDE cable when swap hard drives in and out, but I checked the connections on my TiVi set up and everything was tight.
> 
> I'm using the same cable that I regularly use to clone my hard drive to a backup HD, so it should be OK for what I'm trying to do with my TiVo HD. I'll give the master/slave configuration a try tomorrow and see what happens.
> 
> I'm using the NTFS file system on my XP, and I've heard that TiVo uses FAT 32... is it possible that there's a conflict between the two file systems and that's why it won't boot?


All the TiVos I'm more familiar with (later models) use Apple Partition Map partitions, I think, which Windows itself can't see. Be careful never to do anything that might cause Windows to write to a TiVo drive. But if the BIOS can't see the drive, that sounds more like a hardware fault. What inspired you to want to make a backup in the first place? Was the drive misbehaving before you took it out of the TiVo?


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

Do you have a 2nd IDE connection on your motherboard? If so, connect your Tivo drive to that bus with a separate IDE cable. Configure the jumper on the Tivo drive as master. If you only have a single IDE connection, set the OS drive jumper as master and the Tivo drive as slave.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

Your BIOS may be trying to boot off of the wrong drive. This is why I always use cheap USB to PATA/SATA cables for Tivo imaging. Never have to crack open a PC and I can image using a laptop.


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## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

L David Matheny said:


> All the TiVos I'm more familiar with (later models) use Apple Partition Map partitions, I think, which Windows itself can't see. Be careful never to do anything that might cause Windows to write to a TiVo drive. But if the BIOS can't see the drive, that sounds more like a hardware fault. What inspired you to want to make a backup in the first place? Was the drive misbehaving before you took it out of the TiVo?


Thanks for the tips. I bought the the TiVo unit used, and seeing as hard drives don't last forever -especially when they're running 24/7 - I thought it would be prudent to make a backup HD so that when the one that's in there now does fail I can slap a replacement and be back in the game in short order.


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## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

mr.unnatural said:


> Do you have a 2nd IDE connection on your motherboard? If so, connect your Tivo drive to that bus with a separate IDE cable. Configure the jumper on the Tivo drive as master. If you only have a single IDE connection, set the OS drive jumper as master and the Tivo drive as slave.


I only have the one IDE connection on my board, and I'll give the master/slave configuration a shot later today and report back.


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## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

lillevig said:


> This is why I always use cheap USB to PATA/SATA cables for Tivo imaging.


How do you power up the TiVo HD?


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

McCormack said:


> How do you power up the TiVo HD?


The cable is actually a set. The other half of the set is the power adapter for PATA/SATA drives.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

McCormack said:


> I only have the one IDE connection on my board, and I'll give the master/slave configuration a shot later today and report back.


You should be able to just make a truncated backup image of the drive using WinMFS and then copy that back to another drive at a later time. That takes care of the issue of having to hook up two drives.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

When I upgraded the drives in my first two 649s, I put in the fancy yellow high-speed cable that came with the drives from DVRUpgrade. They wouldn't boot at all but going back to the gray (20 pin?) cable that came with the TiVo worked fine.

Maybe worth a shot. Also bend the heck out of the ribbon cable where it comes out of the connector so that it seats all the way in.

You DID check your BIOS settings and enable the IDE port, right?


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## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

lillevig said:


> The cable is actually a set. The other half of the set is the power adapter for PATA/SATA drives.


OK, thanks.


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## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

OK then, I don't know what I was doing wrong but I finally hit on the right jumper combination to get into Windows, and then the WinMFS process was fairly straight forward. 

But, after completing the back up process I tried both drives in my TiVo and neither of them would boot up. I get the message on my TV screen that it will be just a few more minutes to complete the process, but after 45 minutes nothing else happens. So, I'm trying the kickstart 57 procedure, and I got the message that it would take up to 3 hours for TiVo to repair itself, so I'm going to let it run and see what happens. I'll report back.


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## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

Well alright, a little bit of success - the TiVo kickstart procedure worked on my back up drive and it's singing merrily along, so the WinMFS operation was at least a partial success. Yay! When I get a moment I'll swap the original drive in and kickstart it to see if I can't get that one functioning too.


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## McCormack (Jan 14, 2013)

I swapped the original hard drive back into my TiVo, and after a bit of drama (unbeknownst to me the board end of the IDE cable came loose and I couldn't get the HD to boot), I got it to work, so theoretically I should be good to go when the drive eventually fails, which hopefully won't be for a long, long time.


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