Well here I am on a Sunday trying to change my TiVoHD from a 160gb internal drive and 250gb external drive I added several months ago via MFS Tools to a nice 750gb Seagate DB35 (quiet, reliable a/v drive). I find out that I don’t have an operating workstation here at this moment that will properly identify the SATA controller properly to mount the drives I wish to use when using the MFStools iso to boot. I have some older machines that are already ubuntu that I could use to do this but I would have to start ripping apart more machines.

So the MFSTools 2.0 install fails, it can’t recognize the drives with AHCI on and with it off all drives show up as 137439 MB. I decided I was just going to boot via Ubuntu LiveCD and then run MFSTools. I come to find out that when trying to boot with the Ubuntu 8.04 CD without changing anything (the LiveCD function). This only gets me to a blank screen that just says (initramfs) and goes nowhere. I do a little digging and find some people with a similar problem:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/222176

and used the following advice:

I was able to boot from ubuntu 8.04 HH live CD desktop. After selecting language, install, F6 I entered:

all_generic_ide floppy=off irqpoll

The image booted from cd-rom and the installation proceeded without problem. I am hopeful others will have the same success.

It worked so I wanted to put it here as well to help others on this issue when and if they run into it.