[dgorman]

Thank you for providing this utility! I accidently ran WinMFS on a premiere drive and while it recognized it, it said it wasn't a Tivo drive so I did the fix swap and fixboot page (tried both option 1 and option 2) and it just causes my original drive to reboot after "Wait... Starting up". It's like I nuked the partition table. Wish I knew how to restore it back to the original.

I was able to use this utility to see all the partitions and make a backup and restore to a new drive, and as expected magically didn't fix the partition table since this is just a byte-for-byte copy, but it does work )

Anyone know how to fix a "I've WinMFS'd my Premiere drive boopage"

 

[dgorman]

What version of the Premieres do you have?

Hi,

I have the TCD750500 Premiere with the 500GB drive.

 

[dgorman]

What model is it? I may be able to write a "fixboot" type option into the program if I have an appropriate image to start from. It was on my ToDoList anyway, but I didn't expect anyone to need it this soon.

I don't know what the WinMFS fix swap might have done, but as long as it didn't modify the partition table we should be good. The actual contents of the swap partition are meaningless anyway. There seems to be a lot of leeway on Premieres - jmbach dumped the 746 image on a 748 and it repaired itself.

Cool. FWIW - I've been a sr. unix engineer for the last 15 years so I have comfort with using linux/unix tools - I just don't know what it "should" look like.

 

[dgorman]

I don't have a P4 image yet, but a standard Premiere boot sector may work. Let me see what I can do.

It may take a few days since I have to go back to work tomorrow. There are only 24 hours in a day and I've been living on scraps of sleep for months now getting this beast written.

Thank you! I am traveling for work this afternoon and won't be back until Thursday anyway. If it's of any help, I would be more than happy to donate to your work (paypal or other) on this project. I do appreciate people with the time and perseverance to hack on these products

In the meantime, is there a way to mount the full backup so I can at least see if I can convert the shows to watch on a computer? Obviously when I mount the VHD, because the partitions are unknown, it doesn't see them. I'm learning along the way here with the Tivo formats

Dan

 

[dgorman]

Sorry Dan, but that's way beyond what anyone can do. We may be able to recover your recordings by fixing the boot sector but that's about it.

The recordings are encrypted by the hardware and only the box that recorded them can decrypt them.

Got it. No biggie. If we can get the drive usable again I can put it back in the tivo, do a series marathon catch up. *facepalm* on my screw-up.

 

[dgorman]

Can you examine block 0. If you can then pm me the hex image to see if that is what is messed up.

Will do tonight on the superblock. I'm assuming I can mount my tivo drive through osx to a centos vm, otherwise ill see about Darwin ports for osx.

 

[dgorman]

Easiest thing to do is use iBored to look at the drive. If you have the VHD already made, then have windows attach the VHD instead of attaching the actual drive. Attach the VHD as readonly.

I don't have enough posts to send a PM, so I'll post this here. Screenshot attached.

 

[dgorman]

I don't have enough posts to send a PM, so I'll post this here. Screenshot attached.

Here is a view of the partitions. IIRC reading somewhere, the Premiere uses /dev/sda now (SCSI driver).

 

[dgorman]

Block 0 is definitely not a kosher Premiere block 0. If you can also post some pics of the first few blocks of the APM as well that would be good.

Do you mean block 1-14 by APM?