# Need help with a drive & MFSlive



## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

Im working on a what I thought was a bad drive in a Premiere, it is stuck at the powering up screen and couldn't kickstart 54 it to test the drive.

I have created a MFSlive boot cd, hooked up the drive out of the premeire and booted the live cd. I thought there was a text menu but I see that it's just a command line only.

Need help with basic MFS commands, what do I do to list the drive and at the least see if the drive is bad or not? The drive is recognized to the computer and I presume to MFS but I'm Linux dummy, I know enough to be dangerous and that's all! I saw the command line generator over at the MFSlive site but those are strictly operational guides to accomplish drive copy and expansion task, I need to first just get my feet wet with the command line without killing anything.

If possible I would like to back the drive up if it's accessible and copy the image to another drive as I have several around that should work.


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## Cybernut (Oct 1, 2013)

Are you using mfs live or jmfs live? I believe for Premieres you need jmfs live - thread here -> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=455968


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

eboydog said:


> Im working on a what I thought was a bad drive in a Premiere, it is stuck at the powering up screen and couldn't kickstart 54 it to test the drive.
> 
> I have created a MFSlive boot cd, hooked up the drive out of the premeire and booted the live cd. I thought there was a text menu but I see that it's just a command line only.
> 
> ...


The MFS Live cd, which spike based on the old MFS Tools, and WinMFS, which he wrote to run on Windows, still work fine on Series 1, 2, and 3 TiVos, but when TiVo created the Series 4 platform, the first of which was the Premiere, they changed some stuff about the file system and the partitions which makes MFS Live and WinMFS not only useless on anything newer than the S3 platform, but possibly dangerous to them.

comer created the jmfs cd to copy Premiere drives to bigger ones and expand, but that's all it can do--it can't do backups or restore backups.

You need to read the DvrBARS thread:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=503261

and you need to run the drive manufacturer's own diagnostic software on the current drive instead of any of the Kickstart stuff.

Go here:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Go to the bottom of that page where it says Mirror Sites

Select one near you geographically.

Click on the drive icon










left of the mirror site and just to the right of where it says ISO to download the .iso file which you then burn "as an image" (same as you should have had to do for the MFS Live cd) to a cd-r so that it'll be bootable.

That disk will have all sorts of stuff on it, including diagnostic software from practically all the drive makers.

Run the long test to make sure whether the drive itself has any problems or not.

The UBCD also has a utility that does byte for byte copying, including making multiple attempts to read problem areas, called

ddrescue

which can be used to "Xerox" one drive to another (it's what the jmfs cd uses to do the copy phase of what it does), and it can work around problems with the source drive if they aren't too severe.

It could be that the drive itself is okay but the software on it has gotten scrambled, if so, someone on the DvrBARS thread should be able to help with an image.

The MFS Live cd is worth keeping around for some of the stuff on it that's not necessarily TiVo-specific.


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

Me dumb... I burned MFSLive, I got mixed up. That makes sense as I couldn't find anything on series 4 boxes on the Mfs site. 

Let me get reorganized and start over. 

I suspect the Premiere the drive came out of is bad as so far the drive has tested good out the Tivo but I haven't ran anything too extensive for fear of damaging anything on the drive. 

Thank you for pointing out my mistake.!


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

eboydog said:


> Me dumb... I burned MFSLive, I got mixed up. That makes sense as I couldn't find anything on series 4 boxes on the Mfs site.
> 
> Let me get reorganized and start over.
> 
> ...


"...so far the drive has tested good out the Tivo..."

Do you mean the original 320GB drive from the Premiere?

Did you hook it to a PC?

How and with what did you test it?


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

unitron said:


> "...so far the drive has tested good out the Tivo..."
> 
> Do you mean the original 320GB drive from the Premiere?
> 
> ...


Yes, orginal 320gb drive. Hooked up to PC SATA, PC recognized it and the on-board bios smartdrive diag indicated drive reported OK with no errors and I have yet to run any further tests. I have a Western Digital diag boot disk, all I did with it was boot it and see if the WD program could see the drive.

I waited over 10 minutes for Tivo to come up when the drive was in the Premiere and wasn't able to run Kickstart as the Tivo never seemed to access the drive, as if a drive wasn't installed.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

eboydog said:


> Yes, orginal 320gb drive. Hooked up to PC SATA, PC recognized it and the on-board bios smartdrive diag indicated drive reported OK with no errors and I have yet to run any further tests. I have a Western Digital diag boot disk, all I did with it was boot it and see if the WD program could see the drive.
> 
> I waited over 10 minutes for Tivo to come up when the drive was in the Premiere and wasn't able to run Kickstart as the Tivo never seemed to access the drive, as if a drive wasn't installed.


Don't test it with the TiVo, don't test it with the PC motherboard, test it with the WD long test, although if you launch Parted Magic from the UBCD, it'll launch into a graphical interface kind of like Windows and there will be a thing on there called Smart Control that you can click on and it'll let you see detailed S.M.A.R.T. information on your hard drives.

But you still need to run the WD long test at some point before putting that new drive into service.


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

Ok, after further testing Smart drive diagnostics look good i'm running a full backup with Dvrbars however I'm getting "Read File errors" and I'm not sure what that means however such in context doesn't look good?










How fast should the progress indicator move during the DvrBars full backup with a 320gb drive?


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

Microsoft defines that error code as ERROR_IO_DEVICE. Probably not a good sign since it indicates a fairly generic error reading the drive.

If you click OK it should continue, and in Full Backup mode it may not even be reading sectors that are involved in any way with your TiVo's operation. On the other hand, it could be catastrophic.

Speed is variable depending on the connection and your PC. If it's USB 2.0 I would expect about 3-4 hours for a 320GB drive. On a PC with a faster motherboard and a direct SATA or USB 3.0 connection it should be a fraction of that time. My PC maxes out at around 1.5Gbps, so 2-3 hours per TB is the best I can do.


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

The full backup didn't seem to be getting anywhere so I tried a modified backup as there was msg thread refering to a better success if there were bad segments but received this error and the backup stopped.


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

ggieseke said:


> Microsoft defines that error code as ERROR_IO_DEVICE. Probably not a good sign since it indicates a fairly generic error reading the drive.
> 
> If you click OK it should continue, and in Full Backup mode it may not even be reading sectors that are involved in any way with your TiVo's operation. On the other hand, it could be catastrophic.
> 
> Speed is variable depending on the connection and your PC. If it's USB 2.0 I would expect about 3-4 hours for a 320GB drive. On a PC with a faster motherboard and a direct SATA or USB 3.0 connection it should be a fraction of that time. My PC maxes out at around 1.5Gbps, so 2-3 hours per TB is the best I can do.


I think it's hosed, ran the extended WD diag test on it and it failed, I'm doing a full write zeros to it now and see how bad it is afterwards.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

If it died while scanning the SQLite partition you can forget your recordings.

The next step would have been scanning the MFS partitions, but even if they're OK the recordings would be lost without the SQLite database.

I suspect that the write zeroes test will fail miserably, but if it succeeds you can start over from scratch with that drive. I'll send you a link to the 746320 image.


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