# ghost TiVo drive to former XP drive?



## sean67854 (Jul 11, 2001)

I am going to attempt another upgrade on my R10, but since the last one went hinky, I wan to back up my original drive first. 

I know that XP puts a signature file on drives once you boot into XP with them attached, but if I boot to a Ghost boot disk and clone my tivo drive to a drive that was formerly a secondary XP drive, will that overwrite the contents of the destination drive, including the signature file?


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## funtoupgrade (Mar 15, 2005)

Won't work. You need to backup and restore using MFStools (Linux) as outlined in the stickies at the top of this forum.


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## sean67854 (Jul 11, 2001)

funtoupgrade said:


> Won't work. You need to backup and restore using MFStools (Linux) as outlined in the stickies at the top of this forum.


Why won't the direct clone work? Is it the XP drive, or do the mfstools provide something that a disc clone won't?


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## emp (Feb 11, 2005)

sean67854 said:


> Why won't the direct clone work? Is it the XP drive, or do the mfstools provide something that a disc clone won't?


I believe that ghost does not actually copy bit for bit so it misses some data because the tivo drive is not standard windows file format.

you can use dd or dd_rescue to clone the drive but you're best off just using mfsbackup/mfsrestore


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## BobCamp1 (May 15, 2002)

Cloning also doesn't let your Tivo use all the available space on the new drive, which I assume is bigger than the old drive.

Just use mfsbackup/mfsrestore. It will also overwrite the XP boot signature.


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## sean67854 (Jul 11, 2001)

BobCamp1 said:


> Cloning also doesn't let your Tivo use all the available space on the new drive, which I assume is bigger than the old drive.
> 
> Just use mfsbackup/mfsrestore. It will also overwrite the XP boot signature.


No, all i'm doing is making a backup so that if I royally screw something up during adding a second drive, that I can just drop my backup drive in and go.


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## BobCamp1 (May 15, 2002)

But the backup Tivo image can easily fit on one CD if you use Mfstools. How many CDs (or DVDs) would you need to clone your entire R10 hard drive?


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## sean67854 (Jul 11, 2001)

BobCamp1 said:


> But the backup Tivo image can easily fit on one CD if you use Mfstools. How many CDs (or DVDs) would you need to clone your entire R10 hard drive?


I'm not cloning it to cd. I have a spare 80GB drive that I want to clone it to until I know I won't break anything.

I realize that I could use the mfs tools, but the cloning seems like a much simpler way to preserve my recordings, etc.


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## David Platt (Dec 13, 2001)

As somebody already mentioned, Ghost can't be used to clone a TiVo drive. Ghost doesn't understand the partition system that TiVo hard drives have on them.


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## sean67854 (Jul 11, 2001)

Okay, so just so I understand, Ghost is not a bitwise disk clone, there is some interpretation going on?


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## BobCamp1 (May 15, 2002)

Only the bit-by-bit cloning option in Ghost has a chance of working. Modern versions of Ghost have this feature. It is not known if it is truly bit-by-bit, so I can't say for 100% certainty that it will work. It should work. Try it and see, and let us know if it works!

Even if you are doing a direct hard to hard drive clone, it's nice to have a backup image on CD in case one of the hard drives dies in the future. It could save you $20 down the road, and since you already have the Tivo drive attached to your PC, why not back up the image?

You can't use the Windows version of Ghost, as booting Windows 2000 or XP with the Tivo drive attached is a big no-no. (In fact, unplugging your XP hard drive is a good idea. ) You'll have to use the Ghost bootable CD-ROM.

Finaly, the Linux "dd" command is truly a bit-by-bit copy and has been verified to work for Tivo drives. 

Good luck!


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## sean67854 (Jul 11, 2001)

BobCamp1 said:


> Only the bit-by-bit cloning option in Ghost has a chance of working. Modern versions of Ghost have this feature. It is not known if it is truly bit-by-bit, so I can't say for 100% certainty that it will work. It should work. Try it and see, and let us know if it works!
> 
> Even if you are doing a direct hard to hard drive clone, it's nice to have a backup image on CD in case one of the hard drives dies in the future. It could save you $20 down the road, and since you already have the Tivo drive attached to your PC, why not back up the image?
> 
> ...


I'll give it a go and see what happens.

Could I boot from a "live" linux cd and use the dd command?


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Yes you can use the dd command from Linux to copy the image from one drive to a drive the same size or larger. 

For the record a couple of years ago I used an older version of Ghost to binary copy an 80G TiVo drive. That worked the process was really slow it took over 8hrs. The Linux cp command using DMA was much faster If i recall that took less then 4 hours. Ghost at least had a process indicator. Back then I did not know about the dd command back then.


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## gibby (Feb 26, 2002)

So what happened ?
did Ghost work ? using the bit by bit ghosting ?
and what ver of ghost are you using enterprise 8.3 ?
I use ghost all the time and we also ghost our linux boxes as well with no problems at all
I just don't understand why ghost would not work .... it would be sooo easy to upgrade the tivo system ..


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

Besides the fact that Ghost will not work for cloning Tivo drives, you still have to deal with the issue that the XP drive will not work in a Tivo. Booting any drive in an XP, Win2K or Win NT OS will cause a signature to be written to the boot partition that the Tivo OS will not recognize and prevent it from booting up.


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