MycroSopht
10-06-2008, 10:59 PM
I had this problem this past weekend, when i tried to use InstantCake to upgrade a spare hard drive. The TiVo booted to the Welcome screen then went to a grey/white screen and froze. I read in the forums that it might help to format the drive to FAT32 first, problem, Windows wont let you format drives larger then 32GB in FAT32. This is when i turned to Google for help and found a program and instructions below. All I had to do was load the drive in windows and do a format to FAT32 with a 3rd party application, load InstantCake onto the drive and TADA! it worked. I hope this helps other people out there that have drives not formatted or formatted in NTFS.
(for use under Windows XP)
Instructions:
Click Start menu, select Run and enter diskmgmt.msc
If it asks you to initialize the disk, make sure you select a Basic disk, as opposed to a Dynamic.
There's a guide on Disk Management here You need to find the disk with unallocated space. Right click on it and select "New Partition" and follow these steps, clicking "Next" to get move on at each stage.
1. Partition Wizard starts, just click next to move on
2. Select Primary Partition.
3. Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
4. Choose assign a drive letter. I used F:
5. Select "Do not Format this partition"
6. There will be a dialog box, summarizing all the previous stuff. Click Finish
Now you have a drive letter, this is what we will pass to the formatter
Now download a copy of fat32format (http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/download/fat32format.zip). Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like C:\. Click Start->Run and enter cmd. CD to the where you extracted the fat32format exe file, e.g. by typing CD /D c:\
Now you're almost done.
Type this
fat32format f:
You should see this displayed
Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n)
Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros. By typing pressing Y and hitting return, you're also absolving me of liability for whatever was on the disk before. ( So if you were using the disk before backup what was on it :P )
After this is done your drive is ready to be baked with InstantCake.
(for use under Windows XP)
Instructions:
Click Start menu, select Run and enter diskmgmt.msc
If it asks you to initialize the disk, make sure you select a Basic disk, as opposed to a Dynamic.
There's a guide on Disk Management here You need to find the disk with unallocated space. Right click on it and select "New Partition" and follow these steps, clicking "Next" to get move on at each stage.
1. Partition Wizard starts, just click next to move on
2. Select Primary Partition.
3. Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
4. Choose assign a drive letter. I used F:
5. Select "Do not Format this partition"
6. There will be a dialog box, summarizing all the previous stuff. Click Finish
Now you have a drive letter, this is what we will pass to the formatter
Now download a copy of fat32format (http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/download/fat32format.zip). Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like C:\. Click Start->Run and enter cmd. CD to the where you extracted the fat32format exe file, e.g. by typing CD /D c:\
Now you're almost done.
Type this
fat32format f:
You should see this displayed
Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n)
Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros. By typing pressing Y and hitting return, you're also absolving me of liability for whatever was on the disk before. ( So if you were using the disk before backup what was on it :P )
After this is done your drive is ready to be baked with InstantCake.