# what is the partition scheme and filesystem on used BOLTs ?



## zangetsu (Jan 12, 2010)

what is the partition scheme and filesystem used on BOLTs ?

i ask this as i would like to set up large capacity hard drives that are not from Tivo and use them, and back them up on my windows computer using a hard drive dock.

my experience so far is that i can not even tell if a tivo hard drive has a partition when i put it into a hard drive dock on my windows 7 computer.

i am unable to use disk testing software to see the health of the drive even.

i realise that the data would make no sense from a windows viewpoint but not even being able to test the health of the physical drive or see if it has a partition surprises me.

are there tools i can use to test the tivo bolt hard drives from windows using a hard drive dock ?

any and all help would be very much appreciated.

Thank you !

Tivo BOLT
500 GB
Model: TCD849500


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## ajwees41 (May 7, 2006)

you can't use non tivo drives the tivo needs the os on the drive your better off just copying the non protected shows


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

You can use utilities like WD's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics or Seagate's SeaTools to check the physical drive health, but Windows won't show any partitions. Bolts use a custom first sector (usually called Block0) followed by a heavily modified version of the old Apple Partition Map. A few of the partitions in the APM like the Linux Swap use the ext2 filesystem and the actual OS is on flash memory, but all of the recordings & settings are in MFS partitions. MFS is an undocumented proprietary file system developed by TiVo.

On Roamios you could duplicate the entire drive byte-for-byte to make an emergency backup drive, but on Bolts they moved the SQLite database with the guide data and index of the recordings to flash memory. As soon as the database changes the backup is basically worthless.

There are free tools here like kmttg, pyTivo & Dan203's pyTivo Desktop that you can use to copy individual recordings to a computer as long as they aren't copy-protected.


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## m.s (Mar 8, 2007)

Tivos use an Apple partition map, and platform software and recordings are kept in a proprietary "MFS" filesystem, which can span multiple partitions. At least that's how it was through Series 3, I assume that hasn't changed significantly.


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