TiVo Community Forums Archives - Replacing a dead drive

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Replacing a dead drive
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Posted by: ZippythePinHead

My hard drive died this weekend and I was hoping to get some clarification on some things. Sorry for the long post.

This all started on Saturday when video was freezing up in both live and recorded TV. Eventually during a recorded show TIVO went blank. I tried unpluging it to start a reboot (since I couldn't get to any of the menus) but I couldn't get past the "Welcome Powering Up" screen.

Now here's the situation I'm in. My TIVO was a stock unit with no upgrades. I have a spare 40GB hard drive laying around that I wanted to replace my old drive with. Assuming my old drive is completely dead, I have another HDVR2 that I can use to get a good image from. I'm running XP in my current computer.

After reading some posts, it sounds like I can use my new drive to format with a FAT 32 partition, and record a backup from my working TIVO to the new drive. Then copy that backup to my XP NTFS drive. Using that backup from my NTFS drive I can restore back onto my new drive. Making sure of course not to boot to XP with my working TIVO drive hooked up.

Does that sound right?

My questions are:
1) when backing up onto my new drive should I disconnect my current c: drive and set the new drive up as the Primary master drive? Then should my TIVO A: drive be set up as the secondary master or doesn't it really matter as long as I get the command strings right.

2) Do I mount the new drive which I'm using as my FAT 32 drive during the back up? Do I have to make sure I unmount before powering down my PC? What will happen if I don't?

I'm sure I have more questions, but that will do for now. Thanks for any help you can give me.

Chris

Posted by: dwichman

quote:
1) when backing up onto my new drive should I disconnect my current c: drive and set the new drive up as the Primary master drive? Then should my TIVO A: drive be set up as the secondary master or doesn't it really matter as long as I get the command strings right.

I'd recommend disconnecting the current C-drive, this will eliminate the chance of booting into XP while performing the backup. The Primary/Secondary Master/Slave configuration does not matter, you just have to make sure to get the command correct based on the devices that Linux picked up (hda, hdb, hdc, etc.).

quote:
2) Do I mount the new drive which I'm using as my FAT 32 drive during the back up? Do I have to make sure I unmount before powering down my PC? What will happen if I don't?

Yes, you'll need to mount the new FAT32 that you're backing up to. It's in the hinsdale guide.

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hdX /mnt/dos

You should unmount before powering down. I'm not sure if Linux will automitically unmount the drive during a shutdown, but if it doesn't you risk the chance of corrupting the disk/partition.

Posted by: ZippythePinHead

Thanks for the reply dwichman.

I was planning on taking out my NTFS drive while I have my TIVO A: drive hooked up, just to be safe.

I did manage to think of another question. Once I restore the back-up onto the new drive, since this is another 40gb drive, do I need to continue on with Hinsdales directions for the capacity upgrade or can I just stop there since I'm not really upgrading capacity?

Posted by: Robert S

The TiVo drives tend to be Quantum or Maxtor drives, which are slightly larger than the equivalent drives from other brands. You'll notice that Hinsdale tells you to omit -s 127 when you're restoring to the original A drive. If you're restoring to a non-Maxtor 40Gb drive, you have to use -s 56 to shrink the swap partition slightly or the image won't fit.