# Does Instantcake for TiVo Series 3 Work?



## Barracuda

Has anyone used Instantcake to upgrade to a new SATA hard drive for a Series 3 unit? I have used Series 2 versions of Instantcake in the past without any problems. 

I just purchased the new Series 3 version of Instantcake and cannot get it to work. The software will not get past the initialization stage, it hangs up on a message that says "input: AT Translated Set 2 Keyboard as /class/input/input0". It never gets to the screens that ask you the questions about upgrading the hard drive. 

I'm using a SATA to IDE converter (on the secondary IDE cable) that I plugged into the 1TB SATA hard drive. 

Does anyone have any ideas about what I need to do to get things to work correctly? Thanks.


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## dwit

It could be the sata/ide adapter that is the problem. Does the adapter work in other applications?


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## Barracuda

I've tried the sata/ide adapter in other applications and it works fine. I haven't tried a usb/sata adapter yet. I read that the external usb/sata adapters are common to use for upgrades. I believe the Instantcake software is supposed to work with the sata/ide adapters like I have in my configuration.


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## HomeUser

Barracuda said:


> The software will not get past the initialization stage, it hangs up on a message that says "input: AT Translated Set 2 Keyboard as /class/input/input0". It never gets to the screens that ask you the questions about upgrading the hard drive.


 It might be that IC does not recognize your Keyboard or some other hardware? You might try MFSLive or WinMFS


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## Barracuda

I hope to get this version of IC to work, if not, I'll have to try MFSLive or WinMFS. Thanks for the advice.


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## dwit

Barracuda said:


> I hope to get this version of IC to work, if not, I'll have to try MFSLive or WinMFS. Thanks for the advice.


Don't forget about trying the sata to usb adapter if you have one or an enclosure you can use laying around.


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## tivoupgrade

Barracuda said:


> Has anyone used Instantcake to upgrade to a new SATA hard drive for a Series 3 unit? I have used Series 2 versions of Instantcake in the past without any problems.
> 
> I just purchased the new Series 3 version of Instantcake and cannot get it to work. The software will not get past the initialization stage, it hangs up on a message that says "input: AT Translated Set 2 Keyboard as /class/input/input0". It never gets to the screens that ask you the questions about upgrading the hard drive.
> 
> I'm using a SATA to IDE converter (on the secondary IDE cable) that I plugged into the 1TB SATA hard drive.
> 
> Does anyone have any ideas about what I need to do to get things to work correctly? Thanks.


What type of PC do you have?

I have one very old PC with a VIA chipset that the boot CD does not work on (the MFSlive CD does not work on it either) but I've found that on several other PC's I've tried, it works fine.

Lou


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## Barracuda

Good idea. I am using a 10 year old PC to do my TiVo hard drive upgrades on (it works fine for Series 2). I'll have to try my newer PC and see if that will work with the Series 3 boot CD. Thanks for the info!


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## pianoman

Try swapping your keyboard for another one and see if you can get past the error message.


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## Barracuda

I tried a newer PC and the Series 3 InstantCake boot CD worked just fine. The old PC uses a VIA chipset that does not allow the boot CD to work. All is well.


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## tjfall

My TiVo HD drive has been corrupted and is no longer usable, based on the support I got from TiVo. Ive used InstantCake to upgrade my Series2 in the past with grate success, and now I see that they have a version for the TiVo HD. Based on what Ive read from this form. Has any one replaced the internal drive with a new and larger drive then the factory standard drive by TiVo. Also does anyone know what model drives are compatible or will any SATA Drive Work? I know that the Series2 had drive size limitations, and of course there was the sound issue with certain models. Do these limitations still apply to the TiVo HD?

Thank you, your feed back is appreciated


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## artships

You've probably already moved on, but I'll record my experiences here for the next person.

I unplugged everything but the PATA CDROM and a virgin SATA drive destined for a tivohd. Motherboard contains both PATA and SATA connectors. CDROM is set to cable-select at the end of the ribbon, so it responds as Master. Boot from CD works, installation proceeds apace until it asks where the CDROM is. I tell it hdd, as that's how it shows up in the boot listing I see when I hit shift-page-up. Instantcake disagrees, dropping to a command prompt so I can practice mount commands until I find it. None of hda, hdb, hdc, or hdd works. Ok.

Set the CDROM to master. It's now hdc. Again installation begins just fine but when I tell Instantcake that the CDROM is hdc it stubbornly disagrees. I practice mount commands and /dev/hdc works - But only when I do it. Later I carefully read the instructions that said to do what you have to to make the CDROM Slave, not Master, but by then I'd moved on to MFSlive.


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## rocktopod

A couple of suggestions that I found on my own. I'm using InstantCake to build a new Tivo OS on a blank drive (not a backup/restore) on a series 3 Tivo and I had several problems:
1. My computer would report a device (likely a media card reader) right at the beginning of the script.
2. I couldn't get the CD-rom drive to mount correctly, even when I knew I had specified the correct /dev/hdX device and could mount the drive via the command line.
3. The hard drive reported "Instantcake restore backup target not large enough..." when the process finally started.

Resolutions:
1. Try not using the InstantCake script when it initially runs. Use Ctl-C and cancel out of the initial script. Start the InstantCake script again using "PTVbake3" at the command line. This resolved the problem with the media card device message output. Coincidentally, this also allowed the CD-rom drive to be found on the first try.

2. Use Ctl-C and cancel out of the initial script. Ensure that you're using the correct /dev/XXX device by following the syntax:
mount -o ro -t iso9660 /dev/xxx /cdrom
Start the InstantCake script again using "PTVbake3" at the command line and then keep tying /dev devices until you find one that works. 
**Note: Make sure your CD-rom device is set as the primary SLAVE using the jumpers on the back of your CD-rom drive. 

3. I was using what I thought was a 250GB hard drive, but I kept getting the "instantcake restore backup target not large enough..." error message. The best the forums could tell me was that my drive was corrupt, but I'd already validated this hard drive. Finally, I gave up and switched out hard drives and used a 500GB drive I had on the shelf. The 500GB drive worked without any problems. ***NOTE: after booting the 250GB drive using a Linux live-cd, the hard drive size was reported as 246GB. I had already used the same Linux live-cd to run Qpartd to clear out the disk.

Anyway, once I got the CD-rom recognized correctly, and increased the size of the hard drive, everything went smoothly.

Good luck everyone.


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## mr.unnatural

I haven't upgraded one of my S3's in a while but I seem to recall that if you have a Tivo HD you need to use MFSLive or WinMFS. If you're upgrading an older S3 Tivo drive then any of the recent MFSTools distributions should work. Instantcake should work fine for an S3 Tivo.

Note that not all SATA to PATA adapters will work with the Linux distributions. Here's one that I have found to work quite well with SATA drives used in an older PC with an IDE interface. I have tried others but they were not recognized by the Linux software. I used this same adapter to upgrade both my S3 Tivos on my old PC with absolutely no problems.


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## philmc200

rocktopod said:


> A couple of suggestions that I found on my own. I'm using InstantCake to build a new Tivo OS on a blank drive (not a backup/restore) on a series 3 Tivo and I had several problems:
> 1. My computer would report a device (likely a media card reader) right at the beginning of the script.
> 2. I couldn't get the CD-rom drive to mount correctly, even when I knew I had specified the correct /dev/hdX device and could mount the drive via the command line.
> 3. The hard drive reported "Instantcake restore backup target not large enough..." when the process finally started.
> 
> Resolutions:
> 1. Try not using the InstantCake script when it initially runs. Use Ctl-C and cancel out of the initial script. Start the InstantCake script again using "PTVbake3" at the command line. This resolved the problem with the media card device message output. Coincidentally, this also allowed the CD-rom drive to be found on the first try.
> 
> 2. Use Ctl-C and cancel out of the initial script. Ensure that you're using the correct /dev/XXX device by following the syntax:
> mount -o ro -t iso9660 /dev/xxx /cdrom
> Start the InstantCake script again using "PTVbake3" at the command line and then keep tying /dev devices until you find one that works.
> **Note: Make sure your CD-rom device is set as the primary SLAVE using the jumpers on the back of your CD-rom drive.
> 
> 3. I was using what I thought was a 250GB hard drive, but I kept getting the "instantcake restore backup target not large enough..." error message. The best the forums could tell me was that my drive was corrupt, but I'd already validated this hard drive. Finally, I gave up and switched out hard drives and used a 500GB drive I had on the shelf. The 500GB drive worked without any problems. ***NOTE: after booting the 250GB drive using a Linux live-cd, the hard drive size was reported as 246GB. I had already used the same Linux live-cd to run Qpartd to clear out the disk.
> 
> Anyway, once I got the CD-rom recognized correctly, and increased the size of the hard drive, everything went smoothly.
> 
> Good luck everyone.


I am in the same postion withe the restore backup target not large enough error. I am using a 160GB WD sata drive.

When I tired the exit PTVbake3 script and do a manual mount of the cdrom drive, PTVbake3 then hung when trying to execute the mount command.

My question is when you went to the larger drive, did you still need to perform the manual cdrom mounting or did the script work as expected?

Thanks and glad you were able to get your working.

Phil


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## Mfusick

do you have to pay for instant cake ?


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## dianebrat

Mfusick said:


> do you have to pay for instant cake ?


yes


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## lillevig

Mfusick said:


> do you have to pay for instant cake ?


Yes.


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## lillevig

As kind of a belated answer to the original thread question I will add my experience with InstantCake for my Series3 HD. I bought the HD on eBay when the owner upgraded to a Premiere. He had purchased InstantCake for the HD and had upgraded it to a 1 TB drive. As part of the deal he included the original 160 GB drive and the InstantCake CD. When I tried using the InstantCake CD on my laptop, it booted but I could not make it mount my CD drive. I have an MFSTools boot CD and found a post on that website with directions for copying the 000001 image from the InstantCake CD to a flash drive and then mounting the flashdrive while running the MFSTools and burning the image. I believe that InstantCake uses the MFSTools as a basis so I didn't even try mounting the CD drive from the MFSTools boot. I just followed the explicit instructions for using the flash drive and am now a happy camper.


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## aymanme

I think the real problem with the instantcake images is that they are designed for PATA or IDE CD-ROMS. They don't create the proper device nodes to use a SATA cd. You can ctrl-c out of the program, create the device node yourself, edit the PTVBake script and then restart and it works. Given that it is just supposed to work, that is kind of lame, but that is probably what you ran into.


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## lillevig

aymanme said:


> I think the real problem with the instantcake images is that they are designed for PATA or IDE CD-ROMS. They don't create the proper device nodes to use a SATA cd. You can ctrl-c out of the program, create the device node yourself, edit the PTVBake script and then restart and it works. Given that it is just supposed to work, that is kind of lame, but that is probably what you ran into.


Actually, InstantCake did ask if my DVD drive was IDE or SATA so I don't think that is the problem. After all, it was for the Tivo HD which uses a SATA hard drive so it would stand to reason that the DVD drive might also be a SATA connection (could be IDE or SATA). I'm a retired embedded systems software engineer but Linux is not part of my bag of tricks so editting those scripts is not my first choice.


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## AAADiver

Have wasted literally hours if not days trying to find my SATA CD and drive (new) using InstantCake for Tivo HD. I can get both drives recognized by the system during boot and on some configs have got my DVD called out in Instantcake boot sequence but never any luck having IC recognizing my new SATA (tied all combos - SATA & PATA). Dumb question, will the IC boot sequence every call out both DVD and HD? Does MSFLive make it any easier? Thanks for any guidance.


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## unitron

AAADiver said:


> Have wasted literally hours if not days trying to find my SATA CD and drive (new) using InstantCake for Tivo HD. I can get both drives recognized by the system during boot and on some configs have got my DVD called out in Instantcake boot sequence but never any luck having IC recognizing my new SATA (tied all combos - SATA & PATA). Dumb question, will the IC boot sequence every call out both DVD and HD? Does MSFLive make it any easier? Thanks for any guidance.


Did you really sign up 9 years ago and only get around to posting now?

Anyway, is your TiVo a TCD652160?

Are you sure the problem is the original 160GB hard drive and not the power supply going bad?

Both are strong possibilities with that model.

You can use either the MFS Live cd v1.4 or the WinMFS program (provided you're running Windows XP or newer on the PC you're going to do your TiVo wrangling on), and I can post links to images to use with either for that particular model.

WinMFS would probably be easiest.


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