TiVo Community Forums Archives - Will Powermax fix bad sectors on my drive?

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Will Powermax fix bad sectors on my drive?
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Posted by: nayrbb

Been having perpetual reboot issues with one of my DTivos, a DSR6000. I was a contributor in the long DSR6000 reboot after 2.5.2 thread. I still have a hard time believing there is anything wrong with my HD. No noise, no problem until after 2.5.2. Nevertheless I have to do something. First order of business would be to yank the drives and run powermax. I've read here that powermax has an option to fix bad sectors. Does this work? And will it screw anything up? I am also going to try and mess with the white ribbon from the mobo to the power supply as that seems to have fixed at least one guy who thought his drives were bad. This Tivo will go into a reboot loop for a while then after I unplug it for a few minutes it will be fine until the next morning where I assume it reboots after making it's daily call. The calls are successful but it seems like after I power down all it's fine until the call is made so it could be the modem. How do I isolate a modem problem from a HD problem if the modem does make a successful call each night? Any thoughts or similar situation resolution would be very helpful.

Posted by: stevel

Powermax doesn't fix anything - it just reports. You can use Powermax to do a low-level format of the drive - this may "paper over" bad sectors, but doesn't really repair them.

Posted by: kenr

Steve
I have to disagree with you. I've found with PowerMax that when you run the Factory Certification test, it'll say there's a problem and offer to fix it for you. Once you say "fix it", you'll find the drive from then on passes the test. It must be remapping a sector to a bad sector somewhere else on the disk.

The problem here is you'll lose whatever data is on the remapped sector. Depending on what partition it's in you might have trouble.

Posted by: Want1394

kenr is correct, but the results are usually ok regarding data. remember the "bad sector" couldn't be read anyway, but produces errors. the remapping function uses "spare sectors" and essentially replaces the bad sector with a good one (and the remapping IS transparent to the Linux drivers.) So no data is lost that wasn't already lost. If the bad sector contained critical software or table data for Tivo, then a software reload is necessary.

Posted by: Robert S

This remapping should happen transparently while the drive is in service (hopefully before the data become unreadable), if it gets to the point that you need to run PowerMax, the drive is in serious trouble.