# mfs tools problem: tivo.bak: read-only file



## bruburk (Jan 28, 2006)

hi, i'm trying to upgrade a 2 drive series 1 and have followed hinsdales directions to the letter (a drive connected to secondary master, b to primary slave). i run these two commands:
mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
then when i run this command:
mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb 
i get this message:
tivo.bak: read-only
or something to that effect. so does this mean mfs tools can't write to my c drive? i have no idea why that would be the case. any one know how to solve this? have emailed hinsdale but so far no response. thanks.


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## captain_video (Mar 1, 2002)

Do you by any chance already have a file named tivo.bak on your C drive? If so then you're probably getting the error because mfsbackup is attempting to overwrite a file that's read-only and just stops. Try rerunning mfsbackup but assign a different name to your backup file. You can call it anything you want like dsr704_hacked.mfs or anything that would describe the file better than tivo.bak. I have several different makes and models of DTivos so I always like to name the backup image with something that identifies the image to the particular Tivo.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Is hda1 a FAT32 partition? NTFS partitions are mounted read-only.


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## bruburk (Jan 28, 2006)

Thanks captain_video and HomeUser. I just checked and yes, hda1 is NTFS. So no one that has an NTFS partitioned c drive can use mfstools? i'm surprised. isn't NTFS fairly common? there must be plenty of other people experiencing this problem? How can I get around it, short of reformatting my drive to be FAT32?


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## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

You can use mfstools fine. You just cannot write to ntfs under most linices, but can read fine.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

There are some Linux "run from CD that are able to read and write to the NTFS file system. The drivers are buggy as the information needed to build the drivers is the property of Microsoft and is kept very private. Because writing to NTFS could result in corrupting the drive most Linux NTFS drivers default to mounting in read only mode.

What you can do is format the new drive FAT32 and use it to transfer the backup image to the NTFS file system or CD with Windows.


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## bruburk (Jan 28, 2006)

good suggestion, homeuser. i did exactly what you said. wrote the tivo.bak file to my tivo upgrade drive, which i formatted as fat32 for this purpose. then copied the tivo.bak file to my ntfs drive. when i went to do the restore i got a decompression error.
i went through the whole process a second time, this time writing two files, tivo1.bak and tivo2.bak to the upgrade fat32 drive, then transferring to the ntfs drive. went to restore again and got a decompression error with both backup files.
do you know what's behind the decompression errors? does it have something to do with fat32 files being written to ntfs? or does the mfs tools not like reading from an ntfs drive?
i have sunk so much time into this, i really want to get it working. thanks.
oh, and i think i'll start a new thread to ask about this.


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