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Dying HD in upgraded TiVo -- what can I do?
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Posted by: Ruth

I have a Philips HDR 31204. It has a B drive that I purchased pre-formatted about 9 months ago. I have never had any problems with the machine until the last week. Now, I fear the HD is dying. My symptoms are as follows:

Sometime overnight Monday night, it became unresponsive to remote ccommands and the green light on the front of the unit went out. It continued recording while it was in this state, but it did not make any channel changes (so it recorded at the correct times, but captured the wrong programs). I unplugged it and it booted right back up and worked just fine, until today.

Three times today it has frozen completely. When it freezes, the green light stays on, and the red light stays on if it was recording when it froze, but it will not begin new recordings and is unresponsive to all remote commands. It just stays frozen either in Live TV (if I wasn't using the unit when it froze) or in the middle of a recording that was being watched. A hard reboot is the only thing I've found that will fix this -- it always boots up just fine.

The remote does light up when buttons are pressed. New batteries don't help. Temperature is normal.
My questions are:

1. Am I correct that the HD is failing? Is it possible to estimate how long I have before it dies completely? Is there anything I can do to prevent its death or prolong its life? Is there an easy way to tell if it's the A drive or the B drive that is failing?

2. Is there any way, any way at all, to save the recordings currently on the unit?

3. I bought the B drive preformatted because I have limited technical skills, but I understand that the upgrade means that Phillips will not help me now that the unit is dying. The drive did come with backup CDs, but I am not sure I know how to use them competently. What are my options here?
Many, many thanks for any help you can give.

Posted by: Robert S

It could be a hard drive, but it's not the usual presentation. The symptom I want to hear is that the video stutters (or 'stopples'). If the video runs smoothly your hard drive is at least delivering data on time.

I'm wondering if it might be a loose connector or a failing power supply. You might want to PM weaknees (assuming he doesn't pick up this thread directly) to ask if he recognises these symptoms.

If it is a hard drive you can copy the recordings to a new drive (although this take many hours). Identifying the failing drive could be difficult - the failure may be too subtle at this point for PowerMax to pick it up.

Consider buying a 120Gb drive (I assume you're currently at 30+80?) and then you can use MFS Tools 2.0 to pipe the recordings from both drive on to the new one:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -xpi - /dev/hdc

obviating the need to determine which of your current drives is failing. If you can later determine which drive is failing you can add the other to the new drive as a B drive.

But as I said, it may not be a hard drive. You should treat this as a fairly urgent problem - I would definitely copy any treasured recordings out to VHS, just in case. Even if the drives themselves are OK, the problem might lead to the data on them becoming corrupted.

Posted by: Ruth

Thanks, Robert. I agree it's weird -- the video runs absolutely perfectly, up until the moment it stops completely.

Here is something else strange -- at least in some instances, the crashes are reproducable. I have at least two recordings that will consistently cause the machine to crash at the same place in the recording. If I can manage to skip over the bad spot using skip to tick and then rewind back, I can watch the rest of the recording without any problem, but there's one moment that, if I try to play it, will cause the whole thing to shut down. It's as though the recording itself is corrupted.

These are not recent recordings, BTW -- they're about two weeks old (stuff I recorded while on vacation).

I did a search but I didn't find this problem reported -- does it ring any bells for anyone?

Posted by: Robert S

Recordings that won't play right through suggest bad blocks - your drive probably is failing, but in a slightly unusual way.

If it is bad blocks you probably won't be able to copy the disk with MFS Tools as I suggested. That will probably crash in the same place as your TiVo does. You should be able to get a minimal backup off the disk, but your recordings will have to go onto tape.

If you can't get a backup you'll have to download one from the Internet. If your restored backup gets past 'almost there' when you boot it, it's probably good.

Posted by: weaknees

No guarantees, but the fact that the TiVo dies at the same place each time indicates (as Robert suggests) a hard drive issue. When a hard drive problem causes the TiVo to freeze, all bets are off as to how the lights, remote, etc. will behave. It's *possible* that you have some other problem, but I would think hard drive first.

You didn't sound like you wanted to tinker yourself, but if you do, you can pull the drives and test them using Maxtor's Powermax (as Robert suggests). That utility will very likely pinpoint a drive problem if your TiVo is restarting/freezing while playing--and at the same spot. If you don't want to put the drives in a PC, but you have a friend with a Philips standalone, you could also try to swap drives (be sure you move both of yours) and see if the problem follows the drives.

If you purchased your drive from a reputable upgrade shop, you might want to email them to see if they'll support you and/or help you out. Hopefully, your drive came with a 3-year warranty from the manufacturer, so if the 80gb drive is the drive that is failing, then you should be able to get that drive exchanged through the manufacturer. Note that *some* upgraders are using 1-year white label drives that cannot be sent back to the manufacturer for repair--they must go back to the shop where the upgrade shop purchased it. Thus, the safest and perhaps least expensive bet (aside from doing it yourself) is to contact the upgrade shop where you purchased the drive. Since it has been 9 months, they might charge you something to diagnose the problem and/or deal with the drive exchange, but it certainly should not be much. Even if the problem drive is your original A drive, the charge to reformat the 80gb drive--if that is all you want--shouldn't be exorbitant. (You can tell whether your drive is white label by looking at the top of the drive. If you see Quantum, Maxtor, Western Digital or some other brand name, you do not have a white label drive.)

You say you also have a CD backup, but I'm not sure this will do you much good unless/until you (1) figure out which drive is the good/bad drive, and (2) learn how to install the backup onto your good drive. Since you bought a drive from an upgrade company and don't sound like you really want to spend the time doing the restore from CD, then I'm not sure the CD is going to do you a lot of good. That said, if you DO want to make the effort to try, you've got an audience here that would certainly help you along.

If you get the cold shoulder from the place where you bought the drive (or if they've disappeared altogether), we would be happy to help...and there are others around here who can also help. Just look around or ask.

Good luck!
Michael
www.weaknees.com