TiVo Community Forums Archives - Recover recordings from B drive?

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Recover recordings from B drive?
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Posted by: kitten

Is there any way to get recordings off a B drive without access to the A-drive?

About a year ago, I upgraded my Tivo, augmenting the 15GB A-drive with a 60GB B-drive. Last week, the A-drive crashed, taking a lot of valuable recordings with it.

Fortunately, I had a virgin v1.3 backup, so I've replaced the bad 15GB A- drive with a good one and yanked the 60GB B-drive. Now I'm wondering, can I recover anything at all from that 60GB-B drive, or should I just give up on that idea and add the 60GB drive to the new 15GB A-drive?

I'm guessing I'm SOL since I tried listing the B-drive with 'mfstool mls', but it said the header was missing or something like that- does the A-drive index the B-drive or something?

Thanks in advance for any tips, thoughts or advice!

Posted by: scarabus

I'm guessing that your data is unrecoverable.

In which case since you're going to have to restore from a backup anyway,
why not use the 60Gb drive as your A drive - that way you can add a bigger B drive later.

Posted by: kitten

Yeah, that's my plan - to use the 60GB disk as the A drive, but only if I absolutely can't recover anything from it - guess I should give up all hope on that, eh?
:(

Posted by: aphro

next time backup...

my tivo is an unhacked 60hour unit. one of the reasons
i don't plan to upgrade it is because of this. instead
i spent my cash on a likko electronics vdr2100 and
record VCDs of my tivo shows/movies. before i got
the likko i recorded to my computer via tv capture card
(to DiVX). i prefer VCD though because its more portable(i use many different kinds of computers and operating systems and hardware). there are other methods to backup, DVD recorders(expensive last i checked, not sure how portable the media is), VHS(I don't mind the quality but don't like that the tapes wear out so fast), extract video(don't know how well this works), re-image the disks every so often using the tools(since ive never used the tools i don't know how this would go ..)

if my tivo were to crash tomorrow i wouldn't lose much(I routinely update all my season pass settings to a database in my PDA so i know what i am recording..)

it can take months to re-record a bunch of shows/movies that were lost in a disk crash. not fun :( (I'm having to re-record everything i recorded in DiVX onto vcd again ..so i sorta know how that goes)

Posted by: kitten

Fortunately, I did backup the most essential to HDD via TV tuner card, but I wasn't going to do that for 30+ hours.

And anyway, my tuner card doesn't have the best reception. I'm thinking the driver is lacking the proper filter, or something. Its not the cable, and I've switched the card to an isolated slot so it doesn't get interference from the graphics card. But I still get this strangely "grainy" picture from it; I say grainy, but only if grains are horizontal lines :)

Have you any thoughts on improving the video quality from a tuner card? Are there any filter utilities out there that can smooth it? I've noticed that Tivo also causes a similar picture quality with horizontal lines, if you really look closely, but its not nearly so bad as my card. Its as if they have a filter applied to the output or something. My card is a bare-bones Hauppage.

Any thoughts?

Posted by: martin.law

quote:
Originally posted by aphro
next time backup...

I routinely update all my season pass settings to a database in my PDA so i know what i am recording..

I don't know what you guys call it but in the UK it would be called being "very sad" - GET A LIFE...

Meant in the nicest possible way of course....

Posted by: kitten

;)

Posted by: jerobi

It's easier than that. Send the output to a VCR, press record, and slowly scroll through your SP list, Wishlist, and any other info you want to save.

Yes, you'll have to re-enter it all by hand, but it's extremely quick and easy, and nice for non-tech friends.

Posted by: newlooper

Kitten:

I think the horizontal lines you are reffering to are what is called "chroma bug".
It is in the Mpeg decoder output circuitry and would require a hardware mod to fix it.