InstantCake Series 2 HELP PLEASE

[matts95tsiawd]

When i add any IDE drive to the secondary channel (or any drive channel at that) and boot from the instant cake disc it says unable to access drive, what am i doing wrong, ive read the steps and im pretty firmiliar with technology is there something im missing?

does the drive have to be formatted with a certain file type like NTFS or FAT32? oir does it have to be a RAW drive out of a manufactors box?

please im sure alot of people have done this before

thanks in advance!

matt

[greg_burns]

No the drive does not need to be formatted. Are you sure your jumpers (master & slave settings) are correct on the drives (hard drive & CD rom?).

[matts95tsiawd]

yes the jumpers are correct

what if the drive is alrdy been formatted can i use a drive i pulled out of a computer?

[jjberger2134]

When I used instant cake, I remember having to make the CD Rom the Primary Master and the new drive (to be imaged) as the Secondary Master. I then set the BIOS to boot from CD on the primary master.

As Greg_Burns says, confirm your jumpers.

Yes, you can pull a drive from another machine. Instant Cake should overwrite the drive and start from scratch.

[Solver]

Make sure that all your connected drive devices show up in your system BIOS. Make sure you do not start up with your windows drive during the process! I've had issues where some devices can not be a master device. If you try neither the master nor slave device will work.

[matts95tsiawd]

it wont even read my old tivo drive...

i will try the cd as the pri master and the drive as pri slave and get right back to you
thanks for the help i hope i get this working.

the only drives i have hooked up are a cd rom and my hard drive that im formatting for the tivo,

ive checked the bios and everything checks out fine all the drives are recognized.

[matts95tsiawd]

it still says Restore Failed: Unable to open the destination device for writing.

and it doesnt matter if i go in advanced mode and change it to the channel that the hard drive is on it still says the same thing, i guess i could try it with another computer.

i thought this was supposed to be "easy" and that everyone liked instant cake. :down:

[stevel]

It is easy and it works. Does your BIOS properly recognize the drive?

Are you aware that PTVupgrade.com has its own support forum?

[cokyq]

Both drives on my aging series 1 Phillips PVT300 failed this morning after being off line for over 6 months. I happened to have a Seagate 80 Gig drive unused and decided to install it on the machine. Without an image, I was in trouble.

I did some google search and found this forum. I joined and posted a help request. A prompt response sent me to InstantCake. Purchased a copy for $19.99, downloaded the ISO to my MAC, burned a CD, opened up my hardly used PC, unplugged my hard drives, verified my burner was the primary slave, connected my 80 Gig seagate on the secondary master, booted with the InstantCake CD, waited a few seconds, process started, selected a one drive system, and in less than 10 minutes was booting the TIVO w/o any incidents.

As has been suggested, check your jumpers and connections. It really was a super simple process for me.

Good luck... cokyq

[matts95tsiawd]

thanks for all the help but i got it working just fine.