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dd to identical drive is failing
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Posted by: Llamas

I've seen a variation on this problem in another thread that I can't quite find, right now...

My 120GB DTivo drive is going bad: click of death, daily reboots with hang on power-up screen, etc.

I have a spare 120GB drive of the same exact model that's been sitting in a box on the shelf, so I hooked everything up to a RH9 Linux box I've got, and ran 'dd -if=/dev/hdc -of=/dev/hdb -bs=1024k'. There were a slew of errors at some point (overnight). The new drive would boot, but randomly selected shows all immediately proved to be gone (play->delete prompt).

Meanwhile, I was running the advanced Maxtor diagnostics on the old drive, which found a problem and fixed it. A second run showed no errors.

I hooked things back up to the Linux box and ran dd again, since I can't bring myself to trust the old, "repaired" drive. This time I included the -conv=noerrors,sync flag. There were a few clicks from the old drive during the process, but no [displayed] read errors. But...the copy ended with an insufficient space on the target drive error after approximately 117K records. WTF? The drives are identical. Does the "repair" open up reserved blocks on the damaged drive that now make it larger than it was originally?

In any case, I'm looking for options using the drives I have.

Can I mount the partitions and copy things the old fashioned way?

As an alternate, I guess I could run out an buy whatever drive is on sale (with rebate, of course) locally, and try a copy to a 160GB (or whatever is closest to 120GB), and eat the wasted space.

Thanks,

--Mike

Posted by: weaknees

This really sounds like you have a seriously failing original drive - when Maxtor "fixed" corruption, it didn't know what was on it, and if it was in the boot blocks, much strangeness may result. Have you tried that drive back in the TiVo to see if it will even boot?

You should really restore from a backup to the new drive - if you don't have a backup, make one ASAP (and it may already be too late) or post on here that you need an image and someone will likely find you one.

Michael

Posted by: Llamas

The drive is back in the Tivo, and running fine (well, it booted fine). We'll see if it's still up when I get home.

I will do a full backup to a 160GB drive, and a compressed backup to another location. I still have the original DTivo drive on the shelf as a backup, but that wouldn't keep my preferences.

Ugh.

--Mike

Posted by: Cletus

Just a comment. There's no such thing as 2 identical drives. Even though they are the same model, they will have a different number of bad sectors (yes - out of the factory they already have bad sectors), which may make your 2nd disk a few k smaller than the other, "identical" one.

Posted by: DrEvil

Try again with bs=32k. It just worked for me to dd copy two identical drives.

www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showt...threadid=124186