# WinMFS error when restoring



## EUner

Trying to restore TiVo drive using WinMFS and getting this error:

GUI TOOLS TO BACKUP RESTORE EXPAND FIX TIVO HARD DRIVES HAS STOPPED WORKING.
A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and will notify you if a solution is available."

TiVo hard drive appeared to be going bad so I'm replacing it. Backed up the old hard drive using WinMFS with no issues. Went to restore the backup to a new drive. Restore ran, progress bar completed, but then I got the error. Trying restoring to a different drive and the same thing. After I get the error once, I will get it if I relaunch WinMFS and try to select the drive I attempted to restore (same error as above).
Windows 7 (UAC is off and I'm running WinMFS as an Administrator). Using an external USB2 HD case.

Any suggestions?
The original Tivo drive is from my mom's TiVo HD. She's visiting and I don't have access to a TiVo HD - I have a S3 and a Premier.


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## lillevig

EUner said:


> Trying to restore TiVo drive using WinMFS and getting this error:
> 
> GUI TOOLS TO BACKUP RESTORE EXPAND FIX TIVO HARD DRIVES HAS STOPPED WORKING.
> A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and will notify you if a solution is available."
> 
> TiVo hard drive appeared to be going bad so I'm replacing it. Backed up the old hard drive using WinMFS with no issues. Went to restore the backup to a new drive. Restore ran, progress bar completed, but then I got the error. Trying restoring to a different drive and the same thing. After I get the error once, I will get it if I relaunch WinMFS and try to select the drive I attempted to restore (same error as above).
> Windows 7 (UAC is off and I'm running WinMFS as an Administrator). Using an external USB2 HD case.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> The original Tivo drive is from my mom's TiVo HD. She's visiting and I don't have access to a TiVo HD - I have a S3 and a Premier.


I will PM you with a link to a virgin HD image (from a 160GB drive - hope that is the model you have). Maybe your backup image is defective.


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## motorcycle_rider

I have gotten that on a few times myself, usually a reboot and reopen of WinMFS resolved it. the only times I have seen it is when I am connected via USB. I do have a image myself also of the HD if you wish to try another.

I took these steps the last time i have seen the error,

Reboot, launch winmfs, restore the kernel, reboot, restore the image. I think, the last time it happened was a long time ago.


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## unitron

EUner said:


> Trying to restore TiVo drive using WinMFS and getting this error:
> 
> GUI TOOLS TO BACKUP RESTORE EXPAND FIX TIVO HARD DRIVES HAS STOPPED WORKING.
> A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and will notify you if a solution is available."
> 
> TiVo hard drive appeared to be going bad so I'm replacing it. Backed up the old hard drive using WinMFS with no issues. Went to restore the backup to a new drive. Restore ran, progress bar completed, but then I got the error. Trying restoring to a different drive and the same thing. After I get the error once, I will get it if I relaunch WinMFS and try to select the drive I attempted to restore (same error as above).
> Windows 7 (UAC is off and I'm running WinMFS as an Administrator). Using an external USB2 HD case.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> The original Tivo drive is from my mom's TiVo HD. She's visiting and I don't have access to a TiVo HD - I have a S3 and a Premier.


Does WinMFS crash as soon as you try to select the original TiVo drive?


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## Squirrel_Nut

I have the same exact problem. The weird thing is it let me make the backups of two different working drives but then when I try to restore from those backups it won't let me and crashes. Things I tried: Turning off the firewall, Turning off the antivirus, Running it off of a Fat32 format flash drive, Running in safe mode (WinMFS and the backups disappeared from my desktop then), changing the jumpers and IDE ribbon positions of the two Quickviews, Deleting them in disk management, Formatting the drive with Fat32 using Maxblast5, deleting programs like SeaTools , DotNet Framework 4 and Maxblast5. I can't for the life of me figure out what it could be. I'm running Win XP Pro SP3 on an Hp xw8400 Workstation Xeon 3 GHz 4GB Ram. One thing I'm wondering about is that it has hardware "Execute Disable Bit" and "Data Execution Prevention" Not sure if they are the same thing or not. So ya, you are not alone.


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## Squirrel_Nut

Just now i tried specifically setting Winmfs to be exempt from Data Execution Prevention and deleting and redownloading Winmfs. 
Nothing helps. I'm open to suggestions. I have a TCD24004A and I was relying on those images in case my Twinbreeze made of two used drives has problems in the future. Stupid me I didn't make the backups with MfsLive because I'm kind of apprehensive of the command line Linux where one character out of place and bad things can happen. 
Well they happened anyway. All I do now is select the drive and Crash. 
I had two good images: 40GB Quickview original drive and a 160GB Quickview I got from Weaknees preformatted. 
Now squat is what I got. I'm not even sure if the images are corrupted or what cause I can't load them to a drive. 
Maybe one of you kind people could give me a .bak image for a TCD24004A 40GB? Please?


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## sbourgeo

That stinks. Do you have another PC that you could try running the restore on or have you tried a USB hard drive adapter? Failing that, if the image isn't too large maybe you could host it online and one of us could try restoring it on a spare drive just to see if it's a valid backup image.


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## Squirrel_Nut

sbourgeo,
The 160GB drive has been written over and is now married to a 400GB in my Twinbreeze setup. The truncated image for that is 178MB tbk. The 40GB drive, which used to work, had an error when I was attempting to do something with it in WinMfs and now when installed it just goes grey screen (powering up. . . ) to orange screen (just a few minutes more. . .) to grey screen again. Lather, rinse, repeat loop. That image, which I suspect is hosed like the drive, is 166MB .tbk. I don't have a hosting account anywhere. I just now tried 2 times to use FileDropper.com to upload the 160GB one and it stalled at 11% both times. Thanks in advance for any further suggestions.


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## Squirrel_Nut

The filedropper wants you to link your paypal to it I think Before you upload. Thats confusing because the opening screen sort of says two steps 1 upload file 2 share your personal link. No mention of step 0 agree to pay us $5 in one week with paypal. Is that the one to use or are there other better free ones?


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## sbourgeo

I would have unitron hook you up with a referral for a free dropbox account. He patrols this forum religiously, but a pm to him couldn't hurt.


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## unitron

Squirrel_Nut said:


> sbourgeo,
> The 160GB drive has been written over and is now married to a 400GB in my Twinbreeze setup. The truncated image for that is 178MB tbk. The 40GB drive, which used to work, had an error when I was attempting to do something with it in WinMfs and now when installed it just goes grey screen (powering up. . . ) to orange screen (just a few minutes more. . .) to grey screen again. Lather, rinse, repeat loop. That image, which I suspect is hosed like the drive, is 166MB .tbk. I don't have a hosting account anywhere. I just now tried 2 times to use FileDropper.com to upload the 160GB one and it stalled at 11% both times. Thanks in advance for any further suggestions.


What's the LBA number of that 40GB drive?


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## unitron

If "Execute Disable Bit" and "Data Execution Prevention" are popping up, are you sure you don't have a virus/trojan/worm/whatever problem on the PC?

I don't see where they should interfere with WinMFS running any more than they do with your web browser or any other 3rd party software.


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## Squirrel_Nut

Unitron,
They are not poping up, I am just racking my brain to figure out what it is about me or my computer that the WinMfs doesn't like. I have Avira antivirus and no other issues at all.
The LBA on this Quickview is 80293248. It is old, from Mfg date of 20sept2003. It passed Seatools SelfTest and Short Generic tests. that's all I ran on them because the Long Generic is well, Long.
I just tried to use the WinMfs in my old retired PII 700MHz running XP Pro SP2. I was going to try to put the 160GB truncated image onto a spare Maxtor Diamondmax21 320GB drive which I put on primary slave. 
Again, as soon as I selected the drive it crashed just like the guy above. 
I wish when it crashes it would give some helpful hint about what it is having a problem with.
I am stumped. Thank you guys for helping me.


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## unitron

Unfotunately my 240 image is for an 80GB drive, but if you get a 40GB image that came off of a Maxtor at least it'll fit on that one.

The Maxtors of that era had a slightly higher LBA number than contemporary WDs and Seagates.

I've got a 540 image that'll fit it, but I don't think that'll do you any good except as an experiment.

You could try it to see if it'll restore to the drive without problem, but it won't do you any good in the TiVo.


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## unitron

Is it crashing WinMFS as soon as you click select drive and try to choose it, or does the crash happen after clicking mfsinfo?


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## sbourgeo

This may be a dumb question, but what version of winmfs are you running, 9.3f?


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## unitron

sbourgeo said:


> This may be a dumb question, but what version of winmfs are you running, 9.3f?


Actually it's a question the "smart people" should have thought to ask.


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## Squirrel_Nut

Yes winmfs_beta9_3f and the thing is, when I was making the backups I was able to select the drives most of the time with no trouble.
I was able to make the 400GB A drive with MfsCopy but when I tried to marry it to the 160GB drive with Mfsadd it errored and crashed. 
Then the A drive thought it was married and the B drive did not and when installed in the Tivo I got that blue screen that says an external drive is missing or not plugged in blah blah. 
Press select to divorce and lose most of your programs etc. So about this time I was at a dead end with winmfs and so turned to mfslive which in retrospect I should have been using all along. 
So then I had to make a bootable flash drive of that iso and finally that worked and they married and seem to be working now after resolving several issues that it was having. 
Its weird how at first it worked sort-of with a few errors and now it crashes at select a drive before you even ask it to do anything.


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## unitron

So WinMFS is crashing when you click select drive?

Are you intending to restore an image onto the drive which you are trying to select, so that anything now on that drive will be overwritten?


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## Squirrel_Nut

Yes. For years now I have had that 40GB original drive in a box behind my sofa because I know what hard drives do. They work for about 3-4 years if you're lucky and then they fail. And on that day you're gonna need a working hard drive to use to troubleshoot or just to use the Tivo until you can get another drive.
The 320GB Maxtor is just being used to test to see if I can get any image to restore onto any drive at this point. It is not a Quickview or a DB35 (like the 400GB Seagate in the Tivo now). The 320GB Maxtor is blank except it is formatted Fat32 because I thought that was what the WinMfs would like.
Basically my policy has been to have a spare virgin image on a drive, in a box, where it is safe for (not if) When I will need it.


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## unitron

Squirrel_Nut said:


> Yes. For years now I have had that 40GB original drive in a box behind my sofa because I know what hard drives do. They work for about 3-4 years if you're lucky and then they fail. And on that day you're gonna need a working hard drive to use to troubleshoot or just to use the Tivo until you can get another drive.
> The 320GB Maxtor is just being used to test to see if I can get any image to restore onto any drive at this point. It is not a Quickview or a DB35 (like the 400GB Seagate in the Tivo now). The 320GB Maxtor is blank except it is formatted Fat32 because I thought that was what the WinMfs would like.
> Basically my policy has been to have a spare virgin image on a drive, in a box, where it is safe for (not if) When I will need it.


Is the 320 the one that's crashing WinMFS?

Is there a GigaByte brand motherboard involved in there anywhere?


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## Squirrel_Nut

When I try to backup the 40GB Quickview, it crashes or says there is not enough space (that image was made from this drive so that's quite odd).
The 320, it just crashes every time I try.
The motherboard is not Gigabyte. It is: HP XW8400 Dual Intel LGA771 Xeon Motherboard 1066MHz FSB .
Thank you for all your help.


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## Squirrel_Nut

The other one I tried using with the 320GB and WinMfs was a Gateway Pentium III 700MHz
Motherboard: Gateway 4000532 Slot 1 System Board - Intel AA 744110-205


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## unitron

Squirrel_Nut said:


> When I try to backup the 40GB Quickview, it crashes or says there is not enough space (that image was made from this drive so that's quite odd).
> The 320, it just crashes every time I try.
> The motherboard is not Gigabyte. It is: HP XW8400 Dual Intel LGA771 Xeon Motherboard 1066MHz FSB .
> Thank you for all your help.


Don't you mean when you try to restore onto the 40GB it says not enough room?

Otherwise it means there's not enough room on your PC's regular hard drive for the truncated image.

But if 2 different drives are causing crashes, there's something screwy going on and I'm not sure if a successful long distance diagnosis is possible, at least not by me.


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## Squirrel_Nut

Yes, I meant restore from the truncated image. And you have to factor in the other guy who is having this with his drive so its not just confined to me. I also have 2 SAS drives in my computer in RAID 0. I'm wondering if its not shutting itself down out of an abundance of caution to avoid accidentally writing to them. But then that still does not explain why it would do it on another computer. I'm going to try the previous version of WinMfs next along with low level formatting of the 320GB Maxtor. On my scrapped PIII computer of course. Thanks again for trying to help me figure this stuff out.


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## Squirrel_Nut

Okay I low level formatted the 320GB drive with zeros and then used WinMfs to restore the 40GB truncated image to it. 
It did not have any errors on the old obsolete PIII this time. Put it in the Tivo. 
Stayed on grey screen and never booted up. So I assume that image is corrupted.
Then I tried to restore the 160GB image to the same drive. When I selected the drive it errored and crashed. 
So again I low level formatted the drive. 
Tried again to restore the second image. 
Selected the drive no problem restored the image (the progress bar filled all the way up) and Then it errored and crashed. So I tried this one in the Tivo. 
It booted up to the screen that says external drive missing press select to continue and lose all recorded programs. 
So I did that and it restarted and booted to that same screen. An error loop. 
I tried all four major kickstart codes on both of these corrupted restorations. They are beyond repair.

To anyone who gets crashes when selecting a drive, this is how I solved that problem: 
1)get Darik's Boot and Nuke (This is an Extremely Dangerous program that used improperly can Wipe All Your Drives!) 
2)Put the DBAN on a floppy or USB flash drive
3)Turn off your computer
4)Hook up the drive you want to wipe and [[[Unplug All Other Drives you Don't Want Wiped.]]]
5)Boot to DBAN and choose the "write all zeros" option, Unselect "Verify"(Verify makes it Even Slower) and choose your target drive and run it.
6)Wait about an hour. By this time DBAN will be about 5 or 10% done putting zeros on the drive. This is good enough to take out where your Master Boot Record was. Unplug the computer when you feel your drive is cooked enough.
7) Remove the DBAN floppy or jump drive. Replug your other drives.
8) Turn your computer back on. WinMfs should now accept the raw drive and at least won't crash at selection of the drive.
Good Luck!

Thank you to everyone who helped me to at least find out what is up with these backups.


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## unitron

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 count=1

should be all the zero writing necessary. It'll be done before you get your hand back off of the Enter key.

Of course you have to be absolutely certain that the drive you want erased is /dev/sda, or perhaps in your case /dev/hda, or that you've changed

of=

to the correct /dev/? to reflect where the drive actually is.

Otherwise you learn why the nickname for 

dd

is data destroyer.



That screen about the missing external means that the image was made from an internal drive that was on a TiVo that was using an external drive.

Although Series 1 and Series 2 TiVos can use two drives on their single PATA ribbon cable and single IDE controller, as far as I know it was never intended for them to use an external drive, and you should only get that message if you were restoring from a Series 3 platform image.

The original S3 image would require at least a 250GB drive and the S3 HD at least a 160GB drive.

And for an S3 drive to get anywhere at all booting in an S2 is surprising.


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## Squirrel_Nut

Weird I know. But that image was made from my 160GB Quickview that came out of my Series2 Tivo. Its horribly corrupted but its defiantly not from an S3. I don't have any S3 Tivos or images.


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## jmbach

EUner said:


> Trying to restore TiVo drive using WinMFS and getting this error:
> 
> GUI TOOLS TO BACKUP RESTORE EXPAND FIX TIVO HARD DRIVES HAS STOPPED WORKING.
> A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and will notify you if a solution is available."
> 
> TiVo hard drive appeared to be going bad so I'm replacing it. Backed up the old hard drive using WinMFS with no issues. Went to restore the backup to a new drive. Restore ran, progress bar completed, but then I got the error. Trying restoring to a different drive and the same thing. After I get the error once, I will get it if I relaunch WinMFS and try to select the drive I attempted to restore (same error as above).
> Windows 7 (UAC is off and I'm running WinMFS as an Administrator). Using an external USB2 HD case.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> The original Tivo drive is from my mom's TiVo HD. She's visiting and I don't have access to a TiVo HD - I have a S3 and a Premier.


Sometimes making sure you "run as administrator" (even if you already have administrator privileges especially true in Vista and new versions of windows) will solve some issues.


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## jmbach

Squirrel_Nut said:


> The 320, it just crashes every time I try.


I may have missed it, but did you run the manufacturers diagnostic on the 320Gb drive you are using?


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## Squirrel_Nut

Turns out that the 40 GB drive did have an "irreconcilable read error". So therefore the backup made from that was corrupt. Still don't know why the 160 GB backup was corrupt, but it was also. 

All's well that ends well tho. My Tivo is working fine with the two drives and extra 400 GB of space. I was able to get an image from a very nice member here and make myself a backup that I can use in the future.

Thank you to everyone.


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## scsiguy72

The same issue is happening to me.

Trying to restore TiVo HD drive using WinMFS and getting this error:

GUI TOOLS TO BACKUP RESTORE EXPAND FIX TIVO HARD DRIVES HAS STOPPED WORKING.
A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and will notify you if a solution is available."


I upgraded my Tivo HD a few years ago from the original drive to a 500 gig. Ran fine for years and now is rebooting and erroring out.

So I have an old terabyte drive that I am trying to use. I can back-up the 500 Gig drive no problem, but when I remove the 500 and install the 1000 drive in my PC, winmfs crashes as soon as I try to select it. If I do like the OP did and zero out the drive it will select and restrore until it gets to the end and then it crashes with the same error message. 

Tried to restore in safe mode, program runs but still crashes with same error. Tried a few different drives (smaller) they all fail.

I am at a loss. I have upgraded many of my past Tivos and never had a problem. Using newest WinMFS


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## lessd

scsiguy72 said:


> The same issue is happening to me.
> 
> Trying to restore TiVo HD drive using WinMFS and getting this error:
> 
> GUI TOOLS TO BACKUP RESTORE EXPAND FIX TIVO HARD DRIVES HAS STOPPED WORKING.
> A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and will notify you if a solution is available."
> 
> I upgraded my Tivo HD a few years ago from the original drive to a 500 gig. Ran fine for years and now is rebooting and erroring out.
> 
> So I have an old terabyte drive that I am trying to use. I can back-up the 500 Gig drive no problem, but when I remove the 500 and install the 1000 drive in my PC, winmfs crashes as soon as I try to select it. If I do like the OP did and zero out the drive it will select and restrore until it gets to the end and then it crashes with the same error message.
> 
> Tried to restore in safe mode, program runs but still crashes with same error. Tried a few different drives (smaller) they all fail.
> 
> I am at a loss. I have upgraded many of my past Tivos and never had a problem. Using newest WinMFS


This is how I solved that problem, I have a CD boot disk Max Blast, I ran that program and did a low level format on the drive, after that WinMFS worked without problems on that drive.


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## jmbach

scsiguy72 said:


> The same issue is happening to me.
> 
> Trying to restore TiVo HD drive using WinMFS and getting this error:
> 
> GUI TOOLS TO BACKUP RESTORE EXPAND FIX TIVO HARD DRIVES HAS STOPPED WORKING.
> A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and will notify you if a solution is available."
> 
> I upgraded my Tivo HD a few years ago from the original drive to a 500 gig. Ran fine for years and now is rebooting and erroring out.
> 
> So I have an old terabyte drive that I am trying to use. I can back-up the 500 Gig drive no problem, but when I remove the 500 and install the 1000 drive in my PC, winmfs crashes as soon as I try to select it. If I do like the OP did and zero out the drive it will select and restrore until it gets to the end and then it crashes with the same error message.
> 
> Tried to restore in safe mode, program runs but still crashes with same error. Tried a few different drives (smaller) they all fail.
> 
> I am at a loss. I have upgraded many of my past Tivos and never had a problem. Using newest WinMFS


Might try using DvrBARS to backup the 500GB and restore it to the 1TB drive. Then use WinMFS to expand.


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## scsiguy72

It continues...

I upgraded the firmware on the seagate drive, Low level formatted (zeroed out) and WinFMS worked fine. After the restore it told me I had extra room on the disk and asked me if I wanted to expanded it, I said yes.

Pulled the Hard Drive out of my PC and put it back in the HD. Booted up and after 5 minutes of "starting please wait" I got the green screen saying a major error occurred and Tivo was trying to fix it, this could take 3 hours.

So now i am waiting.

Update:

after about an hour and a half, the green screen went away, Tivo Rebooted and everything worked.

This was one of the most troublesome updates I have ever done, Not sure why, but everything went wrong. I was looking at prices of new Tivos when it finished and started working.


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## unitron

scsiguy72 said:


> It continues...
> 
> I upgraded the firmware on the seagate drive, Low level formatted (zeroed out) and WinFMS worked fine. After the restore it told me I had extra room on the disk and asked me if I wanted to expanded it, I said yes.
> 
> Pulled the Hard Drive out of my PC and put it back in the HD. Booted up and after 5 minutes of "starting please wait" I got the green screen saying a major error occurred and Tivo was trying to fix it, this could take 3 hours.
> 
> So now i am waiting.
> 
> Update:
> 
> after about an hour and a half, the green screen went away, Tivo Rebooted and everything worked.
> 
> This was one of the most troublesome updates I have ever done, Not sure why, but everything went wrong. I was looking at prices of new Tivos when it finished and started working.


When you restore and it says you have extra space do you want to expand, tell it no.

Then click on mfsinfo to make sure everything looks okay.

Then click on mfsadd to expand.

I don't know why it has to be that way, but it does.


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## chadfetter

Can anyone PM me a valid image for a Tivo Series 3 HD? Model Number: TCD652160

Thanks in advance!


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## joe.masters

I could use one for a TCD648, if anyone has one handy.


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