TiVo Community Forums Archives - Video/performance problems: HD dying?

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Video/performance problems: HD dying?
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Posted by: Vesper

I have reason to believe that my Maxtor 80 gig is dying. A month or so ago, I started having problems with it pausing during playback. This wasn't just a "stopple" type of thing, but it would sit on a frame for several seconds, play another second of video, get stuck again, etc. It was so bad that it would sit there on a single frame of a recording and wouldn't respond to any commands, forcing me to pull the plug.

Back then, I did a diagnostic scan on the drive, low-level formatted it, and restored my backup image. It's been working ok ever since.

This weekend, it started acting funky again although not as bad as last time. I saw MPEG-pixelization a few times during playback (reproducable with a replay), and then last night it started doing the pause thing again, but not as severe. At one point, I even noticed the background animations pausing/restarting.

I am currently running several loops of the "burn-in" tests with the Maxtor powermax diagnostic utilities. So far, no errors have popped up.

Do you think it's time to swap this drive for a new one (via the Advanced warranty replacement Maxtor offers)?

If I do, what's the easiest way to get the new drive running? I could restore from backup, but then I'd have to let it upgrade to 2.5.1 (this would be the 3rd time altogether) and would have to reset up my season passes, etc.

Or, should I do a full disk copy with dd?

Advice would be appreciated..

Thanks,
Mike

Posted by: Want1394

I suggest replacing the drive. Since your current drive is ok, I think you can backup it and use that backup to restore to a new drive, losing only recorded programs. Maybe one of the experts can confirm this??

Posted by: deebo

I am certainly not an expert but I will throw my .02 in there. It sounds to me like the drive is going bad and you should replace it. I think that doing a copy is the best course of action. Worst case scenario It does not work and you can still try to make a backup or use your old backup and just do not get to keep your recordings. Best case It works and you keep all your settings and recordings! The only loss is time I guess it depends on how much you want the recordings.

Posted by: deebo

Oh I almost forgot you might benefit from doing a mfstools backup keeping your recordings instead of a dd copy. I recently learned from Tiger in a thread http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...&threadid=41665 that you can do a backup and keep recordings by doing
mfstool backup -aqo- /dev/hda | mfstool restore -i- /dev/hdc
and it would be less likely to hit a bad sector and mess up because it only copies the info that is needed instead of everything to the new drive. Like I said before if you want to keep your recordings it is worth a try and couldn't hurt anything.

Posted by: Vesper

Thanks for the tips on the mfstools backup. I will do that for certain!

Also- I went ahead and RMA'd my drive. I sure hope my replacement works a little better than this one. (Although honestly, this one has been pretty good for 4 months... up until now that is.)

BTW- Do you guys recommend doing a low-level (aka write-pack) test on the new drive before doing anything with it? Or running burn-ins several times? Anything to avoid potential problems. I already know to turn off write-verification and accoustic management.

- Mike