TiVo Community Forums Archives - Ok, who knows a lot about bad sectors and remapping?

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Ok, who knows a lot about bad sectors and remapping?
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Posted by: controlio

Ok - I do believe I'm starting to uncover some bad sectors on my dual-60gig. The problems are too regular and predictable to be the MPEG encoder barfing... and the bad sections are all replayable. Heavy MPEG artifacting and freezing, repeating (2 or 3 times until proper data flow is restored), and broken-up audio. There are more symptoms... suffice it to say I think I've narrowed it down to bad sectors.

So now that I've done this... is everything going to magically disappear, or do I have to actively do something? Will the hard drive detect the bad sectors and remap, or am I going to have to rip the drives out and do something about it? And on top of that, is destructive testing the only option, or is there a way to fix everything and NOT destroy the data on the hard drives?

Wow, that's a lot of questions. http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

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"Wit is educated Insolence." -Aristotle

Posted by: ElectricLegs

The HD tests that are on the mfg's bootdisk are non destructive and will map out bad sectors and keep the data if at all possible. If you're regularly getting bad sectors send it back before it pukes. Sectors that grow never stop growing.

Posted by: DrBunsen

Yes yes yes - ElectricLegs is right. If you really are having bad sectors come up then it'd probably be best if you acted quickly to get your hard-drive tested and/or replaced. Almost never do hard-drives start developing bad sectors and then just stop doing so. In days of old it would happen if the magnetic film were too thin in an area or two and the magnetism "wore out" in those areas, but that sort of manufacturing defect isn't common these days.

If there's a fleck of dust that managed to sneak into the cleanrooms and under one of the read/write heads, it could be scraping away at the magnetic substrate, causing more dust inside the drive that exacerbates the problem.

I'm not saying you have to panic, but it's definately an option. http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

Bunsen out....

Posted by: DanT

Run the manufacturer's diags on it, and hopefully it will find and correct a bunch of bad sectors. Then run it again, just to make sure it doesn't find any the second time.

Then call up the manufacturer and tell them you want a replacement, because it keeps getting more and more bad sectors, and you know it's going to die. Tell them you want an advanced replacement. They'll take a credit card number from you, and ship you out a drive. When you get it, you then copy the old one onto the new one, and send them the old one. This way you don't lose everything on the drive when you replace it.

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Dan T.
RKBA!

Posted by: controlio

Ahh, DanT, good idea. http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif My main concern was going to be the fact that my entire TiVo setup would need to be restored from a backup, nuking everything I've done for the past 6 months.

I'll get right on that. Thanks a lot.

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"Wit is educated Insolence." -Aristotle