# TCD652160 - No Video Transferred on WinMFS Upgrade



## YupYup (Sep 13, 2006)

Ok, I’ve search the forums and the internet, and haven’t found a similar situation, so just thought I’d see if anyone had any ideas on this problem.

Background: Have a THD that I got from a friend after he moved on to later equipment. He had already upgraded it to a 1TB drive, and I’ve used it for the past couple years as an archive for shows from my other two S3 (OLED) TiVos (which I had previously upgraded to 2TB drives). The 1TB drive on the THD is now full, and I wanted to upgrade it to a 2TB drive.

1. Downloaded the latest (that I could find) WinMFS version (‘g’ but also tried ‘f’)
2. Connected the ‘old’ and ‘new’ drives to SATA ports on the motherboard 
3. Ran WD extended diags on a new WD EFRX drive - no errors
4. Booted up my ‘wdidle’ disk, and ran wdidle on it
5. Back to Windows(10) and fired up WinMFS
6. Ran MFSCopy, 1000MB swap size (in another iteration I left it as the default)
7. When complete (~1 hour), did not select to expand
8. Ran MFSAdd as a separate step
9. Set ‘Supersize’ on (was probably on from the previous expansion)

Everything went smoothly, put the drive into the THD and booted up. Everything ‘works’ except no video of any sort was transferred to the new drive:
1. All the menu text is there, but no colored moving backgrounds, just black.
2. The ‘Now Playing’ list looks correct (minus backgrounds), select a previously recorded program and all the details are there, but select ‘play’ and an error pops up ‘Error playing a recording’, with additional text saying the program wasn’t recorded because there was no video on the channel.
3. During startup, there was no ‘TiVo guy’ intro video, just blackness for the duration that the intro should have played.

If I transfer another show to the THD now, it does play just fine.
Interestingly, if I bring up ‘Live TV’, and then go back to the menus, the live TV stream will continue to play under the menu text.

I put the old drive back into the THD, and it still works fine.
Thinking it might be a target drive issue, I repeated this with another new 2TB WD EFRX I had on hand, and an older 1TB Seagate model, with the same results in both cases.

Tried booting up a JMFS disk, but it seems incompatible with my system (and I can’t seem to get appropriate settings in my BIOS for it either).

I’ll try a MFSTools 3.2 disk next, after the WD extended diagnostics finish on another 2TB WD EFRX.
Thanks to ThAbtO, I now have an imaged empty drive, if I need to take the long route of transferring all the shows off the old drive to another TiVo, and then back to the currently empty drive (but that will take forever...).

But wanted to ask, has anyone seen this before? Theories on what happened?
Is it possible that there’s some sort of ‘partition lock’ that’s preventing WinMFS from copying the video content off the ‘old’ drive? The reason I ask, is that the MFSCopy time seemed pretty short (~1 hour) for a full 1TB drive, and I ended up with everything except video content.

TIA


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

I'd try MFSTools 3.2, and do a full mfscopy -a from the original drive to the new WD20EFRX. No expansion needed because it does it all in one step.

Just guessing, but everything you posted sounds like a major glitch between the 'tyDb' database and the physical location of those files on the new drive. Typically all the video files (including screen backgrounds) are referenced by their FSID number in the database, then the inode tables are used to convert FSID numbers to logical sectors in the MFS file system. After that it still has to convert logical sectors to physical sectors. I think something got lost in the expansion.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

YupYup said:


> I've used it for the past couple years as an archive for shows from my other two S3 (OLED) TiVos


Tivo is not meant as a long term storage medium for your videos. If the drive fails (All will fail at some point), you will lose everything. It also is encoded to that Tivo and you cannot just swap drives with another Tivo and expect the shows to work.

Its better to save those shows to a computer hard drive (or NAS) and its also easier to make backups of these drives. You can use KMTTG to download and decrypt. Transfer back is with PyTivo (or PyTivo Desktop). This may even be to a new Tivo such as Roamio or Bolt (unless its Hydra)


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## YupYup (Sep 13, 2006)

ggieseke said:


> I'd try MFSTools 3.2, and do a full mfscopy -a from the original drive to the new WD20EFRX. No expansion needed because it does it all in one step.
> 
> Just guessing, but everything you posted sounds like a major glitch between the 'tyDb' database and the physical location of those files on the new drive. Typically all the video files (including screen backgrounds) are referenced by their FSID number in the database, then the inode tables are used to convert FSID numbers to logical sectors in the MFS file system. After that it still has to convert logical sectors to physical sectors. I think something got lost in the expansion.


The WD diagnostic completed, and I've started the mfscopy.
There are apparently some issues with the old drive, as the copy periodically pauses and prints some error info:

ata9: lost interrupt (Status 0x51)
ata9.00: limiting speed to UDMA/25 P104
ata9.00: exception Emask 0x0:Sact 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata9.00: failed command: READ DMA EXT
ata9.00: cmd (some hex data, slightly different in each dump) tag 0 dma 524208 in
res (some more hex data) Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata9.00: status: { DRDY }
ata9: soft resetting link
ata9.00: configured for UDMA/25
ata9.01: configured for UDMA/33
ata9.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
ata9: ER complete

The errors must be slowing it down, as there was an ETA of 15 hours, but after half an hour the ETA is at 48 hours and climbing. So this is going to take way longer than the WinMFS attempts, but hopefully it will copy the video content this time.
Time will tell.


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## YupYup (Sep 13, 2006)

ThAbtO said:


> Tivo is not meant as a long term storage medium for your videos. If the drive fails (All will fail at some point), you will lose everything. It also is encoded to that Tivo and you cannot just swap drives with another Tivo and expect the shows to work.
> 
> Its better to save those shows to a computer hard drive (or NAS) and its also easier to make backups of these drives. You can use KMTTG to download and decrypt. Transfer back is with PyTivo (or PyTivo Desktop). This may even be to a new Tivo such as Roamio or Bolt (unless its Hydra)


Agreed.
Years ago, I was using TiVo Desktop to pull files from TiVos to a PC, but it got tedious, and experiments with decoding software to generate video files that could be archived and viewed elsewhere, yielded less than desirable results.

A few years ago I bought a couple of NAS boxes, with intent to store software backups and photos on one, and videos on the other. Had one up and running, and archived a bunch of photos on it, but it proved pretty useless as a video server, so I never unboxed the second one.
Did some research recently and see that improvement have been made in NAS boxes, so I recently purchased a new one to replace the old photo archive, and hopefully it will work for video as well. Haven't unboxed it yet. It, and it's hard drives are in the entryway, and I hope to get to it in the next couple days.

Undoubtedly there have been advances in archiving TiVo shows since the last time I dabbled in it, so I'll need to take a look into kmttg and PyTivo Desktop.
Thanks!


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## kpeters59 (Jun 19, 2007)

I've abandoned trying to use DLNA as a source for viewing videos or accessing music files. 

Especially the Twonky Server built in to many NAS'. Once you get a lot of files, it becomes too difficult or slow to find what you're after.

Using Kodi to access the files via SMB is a total no-brainer. It can even look up Episode Info if the files are named properly and provide Poster Images and what-not.

Plus, you can build a Raspberry PI unit for under $50.

-KP


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## YupYup (Sep 13, 2006)

*Update:*

Just to complete the story, and not leave you hanging:
1. The mfscopy proceeded for several hours, getting slower and slower, with increasing frequency and severity of error messages, with the ETA climbing to over 100 hours, until mfscopy itself crapped out with a 'Segmentation fault'.
2. I put the old drive back in the TiVoHD, and it still booted up, looked normal.
3. Copied a handful of movies to a TiVo S3.
4. While that TiVo to TiVo copy was in progress, I downloaded kmttg and set it up.
5. It pulled the 'Now Playing List' successfully from the TiVoHD, so I started a transfer of a bunch of shows off of it.
6. That was apparently too much for the old drive to handle, and the TiVo rebooted shortly after initiating the transfer, without any shows arriving via kmttg (the TiVo to TiVo transfers had completed successfully before the reboot).
7. I have sort of a deadline to get this project completed, and T-T transfer of a terabyte of programs would likely take a long long time, if the drive would stay alive that long, so I started exploring what other options I might have.
8. Tried MFS Live 1.4, but like JMFS, it won't come up on my system.

I recalled the 'put the drive in the freezer' suggestion from other threads, so why not? Those suggestions were to wrap the drive in a paper towel, stick it in a plastic bag, and put it in the freezer for awhile to cool it down, then take it out, reconnect it, and proceed.
So I thought, why not take it a step further, and run with the drive in the freezer?
So I put the drive in the freezer, and the following day I got myself a long SATA data cable, and a couple of SATA power cable extensions, such that I could have the drive in the freezer, connected to the TiVo outside the freezer.
Guess the drive had been in the freezer too long before I tried it, as it wouldn't boot, must have frozen the drive lubricants. So I shut down, and took the drive out of the freezer to thaw.
The next day, I powered up, and the TiVo came up. So with the long cables still attached, I put the drive in the refrigerator, instead of the freezer, and proceeded to try kmttg again. And again the TiVo started to reboot, but just hung on the 'powering up' screen. Power the TiVo off and let it sit awhile.
Plugged it back in, and once again it came up, and looked normal. So I tried a TiVo to TiVo transfer and it worked!
Pushing my luck, I queued up a few more shows, and I think the hard drive finally gave up, and the transfer failed.
The TiVo has now lost all the menu background colors, and the 'Now Play List' is empty.

Well I tried, guess it was just too late to save the content. Probably take a few years to recover, via rebroadcasts, of the lost content, but that just the way it is.

In the mean time, I've fired up the new NAS, transferring everything from the old NAS, as well as TiVo files I had on my PC from TiVo Desktop transfers I'd done a couple years ago. Have started transferring a bunch of stuff from the other TiVos to the PC via kmttg, to archive on the NAS, and gave pyTivo a try to transfer something from the PC back to a TiVo, seems to work well.

Thanks for your interest!


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