Restoring a Tivo Backup Image
This is as much for my reference as for everybody else!
Recently my tivo hung on the boot screen. (“Your recorder is starting. Please wait a moment.”) Luckily, since I am a big nerd, I had upgraded my tivo to a larger hard drive, and in the process had created a backup image of my tivo’s hard drive. So I could restore the backup image and fix my tivo! Here’s what I did:
- Unscrew the top of the tivo. (You need a #10 torx screwdriver.)
- Unscrew and disconnect the hard drive.
- Find a PC to use, transfer your tivo backup image (tivo.bak) onto a FAT32 filesystem hard drive.
- Turn off PC, connect: Tivo hard drive to a Master (so you don’t have to change jumpers), FAT32 drive to somewhere, and CD-ROM drive somewhere.
- Boot the PC with MFSTools 2.0 in the CD-ROM drive.
- Hit
at the boot prompt. - mkdir /mnt/dos
- mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/dos (if your FAT32 drive is the Primary Slave)
- mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hda (if your Tivo drive is Primary Master)
- umount -f -a -r
- Press
and when you see "No more processes" or when the computer starts booting up again, turn the power off. - Remove the Tivo drive and reinstall in your Tivo.
- Start up Tivo, and in “Messages & Setup” -> “Recorder & Phone Setup” -> “Phone Connection” select “Make Daily Call Now”
- Wait a long time for the tivo to get 2 weeks of data, and to update its data.
- Wait overnight to be able to search for things by title, and for the To-Do list and things to work. I think Tivo needs to update some internal database or hash table.
- Voila!
MFSTools v2.0: http://mfstools.sourceforge.net/
Full backup and restore directions (The Gory Details): http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html