TiVo Community Forums Archives - Is my drive dying?

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Is my drive dying?
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Posted by: wijamie

I upgraded my Hughes about 4 months ago and the last couple of days, my Tivo has been making a lot of noise. Kind of staticy (Sp?) hard drive noises, and I can tell that the HD is really crunching. Normally I couldn't hear the hard drive from my couch about 8 feet away, but now I definitely can.

Last night, while I was watching something I tivoed, it was crunching away and things started responding slower (i.e., pause wouldn't work for a few seconds, it took longer to be able to navigate the Tivo menus than normally). Then all of a sudden my picture began to freeze and pixillate. I rebooted and the problem was gone for another half hour, before it started again. My wife noticed no problems today using it in the morning, then while watching it this afternoon, it happened again.

Is my hard drive dying? Does that happen, or does it go all at once and is this the symptom of another problem? I have the original drive that came with it and upgraded with another 120GB Maxtor drive. Thanks for any help you can give me.

BTW, this is not backed up. I know I should back it up anyway, but has this now become urgent?

Posted by: Robert S

A failing drive is certainly a possibility - pull 'em out and run diagnostics. You should be able to make a compressed backup without any problems.

If you can identify the failing drive then you may be able to use dd to copy everything off it on to a replacement. (It's in Hinsdale, use conv=noerror,sync).