TiVo Community Forums Archives - Drive clicking ... is there *ANY* way to retrieve the recordings ?

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Drive clicking ... is there *ANY* way to retrieve the recordings ?
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Posted by: psxjunky

I had upgraded my series 1 standalone TiVo about 10 months back with two WD 120GB/5400RPM drives. Recently these drives started acting up, so I got two new 120GB drives and currently in the process of replacing them.

I would very much like to retain the recordings I had in the old drives during the upgrade, if at all possible. So I used option 5 in Step 10 of Hinsdale's guilde.

However, during the long copy procedure, one of the old drives started clicking from time to time ... and after I turned off the computer and re-started it, this drive is no longer being recognized by the BIOS.

Is there *ANY* way at all I can retrieve the recordings on the old drive now and transfer them to the new drive ?

Thanks very much in advance for *ANY* suggestions ... however impossible they sound.

Posted by: Robert S

If it's not being recognised by the BIOS (or, more precisely, if it's not recognised by Linux), there's really nothing you can do short of going to a data recovery service.

Posted by: psxjunky

Okay, thanks Robert :(

The drive *was* being recognized by the BIOS from time to time, but lately it is not being recognized at all !

I kind of guessed that there was no more hope ... but I still wanted to run this by the more experienced people here to see if anyone knew of any utility or something that could have helped !

Oh well !! On the positive side, now I can take advantage of MFSTools 2.0 to make the drives faster !

To make the drives faster, can I use the default steps outlined in Hinsdale'e guide (here ) under step 10 update configuration# 2 ? This uses the "mfsadd -x /dev/hdc /dev/hdb" command.

Is this command sufficient, or do I need to use any special switches ?

Thanks !

Posted by: Robert S

Presumably you've got your old drive running as an A drive on it's own now? mfsadd can only add a B drive to a lone A drive, it can't be used to replace the B drive on a twin.

You might want to add -r 4 to that for maximum speed - although I found -r 2 quite fast enough on my 120.

mfsadd -x -r 4 /dev/...

Posted by: badzymosis

I've dealt with a couple of dying drives in the past. Sometimes I was able to get the data off the drive by starting it up cold and copying as soon as I could before the drive got hot. You may be able to extend this time by putting the drive in the freezer (in a ziplock bag) for an hour or so to pre-cool it. At this point you've got nothing to lose.

Posted by: psxjunky

Thanks Robert ! I'll try that !

badzymosis: Thanks very much to you too. You are right, at this point I can lose nothing, so I'll try the cool in freezer method :)

Fortunately, I was able to take a backup of my existing drives before they got worse. I have tested the backup on the new drives and all my options, season passes etc are there just fine ... so all I stand to lose at this point are the recordings.