# MFStools LBA48 Boot FLOPPY?



## Tivogre (Jul 12, 2002)

Is there such a beast?

It seems I need it to upgrade the two drives in my HR10-250 to two larger drives.

Thanks!


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## Tracy RainH2o (Nov 18, 2005)

I made my upgrades back in December. I do remember reading something.......somewhere about making a boot floppy. It is possible. 

If I remember where I read it, I'll post the info. Good luck.


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## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

Make a boot USB thumb drive. Doable if you know how.


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## windracer (Jan 3, 2003)

Bumping an old thread, but this looks like a good place to put this rather than starting a new one.

I have successfully created a bootable USB thumb drive with MFSTools I can use do to my TiVo upgrades and backups.

Quick background: my PC has a SATA drive in it and thus only 1 IDE controller connected to two optical drives. Without a SATA-to-IDE converter, I had no way of being able to boot from the MFSTools CD and yet have two hard drives connected to the IDE channel at the same time ... thus, my quest to create a bootable USB thumb drive with MFSTools on it.

Basically I used some other tools on the internet that people have developed to create a bootable flash drive with Knoppix (substituting the MFSTools image for Knoppix). Here're the steps I used:


download the PTVUpgrade LBA48 CD image (http://www.dvrupgrade.com/dvr/stores/1/lba48_support.cfm)

check out this post on knoppix.net (http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=93758#93758)

from that post, download the grubi.zip archive (http://s94002264.onlinehome.us/grub/grubi.zip)

extract the contents of grubi.zip (say, to C:\GRUBI)

run the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool located under C:\GRUBI\Root_of_USB\BOOT\GRUB\HPUSBFW.EXE
pick your USB drive as the Device
use a File System of FAT
turn on "Quick Format"
turn on the "Create a DOS startup disk" option
under "using DOS system files located at" pick C:\GRUBI\Root_of_USB
click Start to format your USB device
click Yes when warned about losing all data on the device 
format should complete
you should now have IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM on your bootable USB drive

now copy the other contents of the Root_of_USB folder to your thumb drive _EXCEPT_ IO.SYS (per the above post's instructions)

extract the PTVUpgrade LBA48 CD image using your favorite ISO tool (i.e., WinImage) to a new folder under BOOT on your USB drive (i.e., BOOT\MFSTOOLS)

edit the MENU.LST file under BOOT\GRUB on your USB device and insert the following entry:

```
title MFSTools
	kernel (hd0,0)/boot/mfstools/isolinux/vmlinuz
	initrd (hd0,0)/boot/mfstools/isolinux/initrd.img
	boot
```
You can delete all the other entries if you want and change the timeout at the top.

check your PC's BIOS and make sure "boot from USB" is enabled and is first in your boot order

plug in your new thumb drive, reboot, and go!

This method only takes up ~9mb, so it'll fit on a very small thumb drive. I was successful using these steps on a 2gb Sandisk Cruzer and a 64mb VisionTek thumb drive (YMMV of course).

Using my new thumb drive, I was able to disconnect both optical drives in my PC and connect my source and target upgrade TiVo drives instead. Then I booted the MFSTools image from my USB drive and did my upgrade.

Hope this helps anyone else looking for a "boot disk" type of solution.


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