# WinMFS: Can select drive but then indicates "Not a Tivo Drive!"



## Brent94Z (Mar 15, 2008)

Hello! 

I used these forums a few months ago to upgrade my Toshiba TX-20 hard drive to 250 gig but now am having problems again  It looks like my 250 gig hard drive has a problem now as well. Ugh. 

I came home from work and noted my Tivo was in a continuous loop. It would get to the green screen (one indicating a problem was found and it might take 3 hours to fix so turn off your plasma etc) but only stay there for a couple minutes then reboot and start the same process over again. I can't do any of the kickstart commands because these Toshiba units don't accept them for some reason. The hard drive spins up and sounds fine but something is obviously wrong. 

I took the drive out of the Tivo unit and hooked it up to my computer and ran WinMFS. Everything looks good so far as it reports that it is a Series 2 or 3 drive and that it is a Maxtor and is 251 GB. I select the drive and then go to tools and select "Mfsinfo" and it indicates it is "Not a Tivo drive!". When my first hard drive failed I could select this and it would tell me the info about the drive but doesn't work with this drive. I have tried both option 1 and option 2 for Fix bootpage as well as trying fix swap and nothing has worked to solve the problem of it giving me the "Not a Tivo drive!" message. I've tried it back in my Tivo unit and the same results happen with the green screen then the reboot loop. 

Any suggestions? 

I'm not overly familiar with all this and was thinking about trying to mount the drive in Windows XP SP2 and try running check disk or Norton or something on it and then using the Fix bootpage option to change it back to a Tivo drive. No idea if this will work and it might be a stupid idea so asking here first. LOL 

Also, when everything happened 3 months ago I bought an Instant Cake image and still have that BUT I have many saved recordings on my drive that I'd like to salvage if at all possible. 

Any suggestions on what I should do next would be greatly appreciated. I have burned the iso image of the MFSLive to disk but have not tried any of that (not at all familiar with Linux stuff) and am hoping there is a solution from within Windows that I can try. 

I do have another 250 gig hard drive that I can use in attempt to copy one drive to the other if that might be a good option?

Thanks!!!


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

GSOD and reboot are the symptoms of the 0 swap partition error there is not enough memory to recover and rebuild the indexes. When you replaced the hard drive did if use mfstools and a swap partition parameter larger then 127 you need to run the program tpip to adjust the swap partition for your series2.



Brent94Z said:


> 'm not overly familiar with all this and was thinking about trying to mount the drive in Windows XP SP2 and try running check disk or Norton or something on it and then using the Fix bootpage option to change it back to a Tivo drive. No idea if this will work and it might be a stupid idea so asking here first. LOL


NO, Windows, Norton know nothing about the TiVo partitions and most likely the results will not be good.


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## Brent94Z (Mar 15, 2008)

Thanks for the reply, HomeUser!

I originally tried WinMFS to "fix" my old Tivo hard drive with no luck. I then purchased a InstantCake image, loaded it to my hard drive, and I believe I used WinMFS to allow it to see the larger hard drive (120 to 250 gig). Everything went perfectly and it had been working flawlessly since the install of the 250 gig drive. No freezing, no rebooting, nothing... perfect... until it went into this continuous loop from the green screen. FYI, I also saw this same behavior when the original drive failed... would get to the GSOD but only stay there for a minute or so then reboot and this was an endless loop. I'm not sure if these Toshiba units don't like this (They don't do the kickstart commands so maybe something weird here too?) or what?

I did not use mfstools and just used the directions with InstantCake and don't recall setting any special swap size settings... it just did its thing and worked 

Is it unusual for WinMFS to recognize the drive as a Tivo Series 2 or 3 drive and report all parameters on the "Select Drive" screen but then when selecting Mfsinfo having it indicate "Not a Tivo Drive!"? That seems a bit odd to me and I've done some searching and didn't see where this has come up before?

I'll do some reading about tpip but do you still think that may be an issue considering I never used mfstools to begin with?

Thanks!


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## mike93 (Jan 5, 2008)

I am trying to do an internal drive backup (Tivo S3 w/ external drive)
and I am getting "Not a tivo drive!" when I try to use "Mfsinfo.." option.
And same story happens when I try to run a backup.

Both drives are hocked to my PC directly to internal sata ports. bootpahe and Kernel back up worked fine.

Run WD diagnostics, passed.

Appreaciate your help


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

mike93 said:


> I am trying to do an internal drive backup (Tivo S3 w/ external drive)
> and I am getting "Not a tivo drive!" when I try to use "Mfsinfo.." option.
> And same story happens when I try to run a backup.
> 
> ...


The internal and external drives are married together so I think that you would need to divorce them to be able to use the internal drive on its own or to make an image of it.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

mike93 said:


> I am trying to do an internal drive backup (Tivo S3 w/ external drive)
> and I am getting "Not a tivo drive!" when I try to use "Mfsinfo.." option.
> And same story happens when I try to run a backup.
> 
> ...


When you say both drives are hooked to your PC, do you mean both the internal and external drive?

Do you have the internal hooked to a lower number SATA port? (may not matter)

Are you selecting both drives before doing anything else?


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