MindTheCube
29Nov/09

Getting WinMFS to recognize Mac Pro internal SATA drives

I recently "hacked" my TivoHD by copying the internal drive to a larger capacity drive. The larger space is useful, but better yet, I now have the original drive as a backup just in case the one in the Tivo dies. (My old Series 1 Tivo lost a couple of drives over the years.)

There is plenty of information out there on how to do this upgrade, and I am far from expert on it myself, so I won't go into details except to say that I used WinMFS running on a Mac Pro. The two SATA drives (the one from the Tivo and the new one) were mounted internally.

Which is where I ran into difficulty. WinMFS (running in WinXP under VMWare Fusion) did not recognize the two drives. I even tried booting MFSLive in an Ubuntu VM, but again, no drives. I googled the problem, but the workaround appeared to be to buy a couple of SATA->USB adaptors for the drives.

Eventually I hit upon the obvious (in retrospect) solution, which was to boot directly to Windows using Boot Camp. WinMFS worked like a charm in that configuration.

If someone is aware of a way to get WinMFS or MFSLive to recognize internally mounted Tivo drives under VMWare Fusion, let me know. Otherwise, Mac Pro users should go with adaptors or with Boot Camp.

Comments (0) Trackbacks (0)

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

No trackbacks yet.