TiVo Community Forums Archives - Stopples on a Maxtor 120GB ... er... 10*MB* drive

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Stopples on a Maxtor 120GB ... er... 10*MB* drive
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Posted by: Nihilator

Hiya. Thanks for looking in.

Sat down today to watch some TiVo. My Philips HDR312 is giving me fits. It was upgraded with a single 120GB drive probably 8 or 9 months ago. I used a Maxtor 6Y120L0. Used MFSTools 2.0, and also AMSET'd it to /quiet.

It was stoppling something horrible. The show was unwatchable, and even button presses to get the main menu (for a restart) were brutally slow.

The restart failed. It went to the "TiVo doll" Bios image, then to "Almost there...", and then back to the Bios image for about ten minutes. I finally unplugged it and pulled the drive.

It's now displaying in my PC's Bios, MFSTools 2.0 CD, and a boot disk at 10MB.

I put it back in the box, and it worked so-so. Still minor stopples, but the head seeks sounded really...weak?, so I pulled it to change the AMSET setting.

I did *not* run qunlock on it, but I *did* change amset back to /off, both to see if it improved the efficiency of the seek *and* so that I could better monitor its progress when I plugged the whole thing back together again.

On power up this time, it was much better. Normal speed, no stoppling issues (yet, although I haven't been monitoring it constantly since turning it back on). Head seeks sounded solid.

I should replace the drive, obviously, but I'm also interested in letting it fail, mostly because the warranty period is up in less than a month.

I see from this thread that dlgchk.exe is a possibility for unlocking it without using qunlock. If that's possible, should I try to dd it (I *would* like to save programs, etc.) or just do a regular MFSTools backup and restore. I have a 160GB sitting around....

Any comments on this drive's morbidity? What does it say to you all that changing AMSET from quiet to off improved the quality of the playback and the speed of the boot?

Thanks again for looking in...

--Chris

Posted by: jmathey

Well,
Just from my frustrating experiences tonight, I would say it's over. Of course, I'm not the expert on this topic, Jeff seems to have a good handle on the data collection. I'm confident someone here will solve this, but for me, I'm going to probably return the drive and get a new one. If you do have the 160GB laying around and you did a good backup when you did the original upgrade, you should be able to mfsrestore the image out to your 160 GB and it should work. From what I've seen, the "locking" problem seems to occur when you put the Maxtor in your Tivo and then take it out and boot from the mfstools cd.

Hope this helps
John

Posted by: Nihilator

Update....stopples are back. And it rebooted itself at some point, too. Looks like it's screwed. I'm going to unplug it and wait until I have some time to gather the necessary tools.

--Chris