TiVo Community Forums Archives - Need Help Replacing Tivo A Drive

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Need Help Replacing Tivo A Drive
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Posted by: farb

I have a Tivo that I expanded to 2 drives. I since lost my backup and one of the 2 drives failed. I now have my original Tivo Drive and a 100 GB Maxtor. I want to make the Maxtor my A Drive in the Tivo and get a large drive as my second. The original Tivo drive has been married to the now bad drive so it will not boot on its own for me to make a backup. How do I make the Maxtor my standalone A drive for now?

Thanks

Posted by: Robert S

You need to have two working drives to make a backup. None of the data from the B drive ends up in the backup, so the B drive can be pretty badly damaged and still give you a viable backup.

All the system software is on the A drive, so you need that to be working fairly well, although, again, only a few percent of the total drive capacity ends up in the backup, so the A drive doesn't need to be perfect to make a viable backup.

As a rule-of-thumb, if the TiVo boots (even if it then misbehaves or hangs), you should expect to get a viable backup. If the TiVo doesn't boot, backing up is more of a lottery.

If either drive is completely unreadable, then all you can do is reimage the good drive from an existing backup file.