TiVo Community Forums Archives - Bad drive During upgrade

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Bad drive During upgrade - interesting question
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Posted by: rbtconsultants

I haven't been able to find anything regarding drives failing during backup (although I'm sure it has been addressed).

I have an orig 1 drive Tivo upgraded with 2nd drive. Stuttering begins. Becomes very frequent. Decide to pull out 15 gig and 40 gig and replace with single 120 gig.

Hook all drives up in a PC for the MFS tools backup and have to power on and off numerous times to get the 40 gig B drive to get recognized by the boot disk. Getting "drive is not ready", "drive is failing" type messages.

Finally get everything up and recognized. Do the backup to get one divorced 15-hour backup.

Move the drives around, get the 120 gig hooked up to copy A + B including programs to new drive. Have to go through several reboot cycles again to get the B drive recognized. Start the MFSTools copy and watch it for awhile. Looks like it's working good, but looks like it will take like 15 hours (50+gig).

Go to bed. Wake up this AM and the screen is blank. Hit shift to look at the screen and no response, everything is hung. Can't get anything, so shut PC off and go to work.

I speculate that there was some unforgiven error when the copy was reading the failing B drive, thus hanging. When I get home, I want to try and see if the drive will boot up and work in the TIVO.

Questions:

a) What do you think my odds are it will boot, assuming it got the A drive copied OK, and maybe some pice of the B drive?

b) If it did get the A drive copied and some of the B Drive, I would assume some of my programs will work and some won't. What happens if you try and play a program that isn't there? Will it give me an opportunity to delete it? Will it hang?

c) If it does boot, and some programming is there and I get the bad programs cleaned up, what is the long term prognosis for this setup? Assuming I check functionality, can I expect it to be stable in the long run?

I'm trying to figure out whether I should just restore from the divorced backup and lose all my programs. I would hate to do that if I can salvage most/some/any of the programs I had.

If anybody has experience in this sort of stuff, pleasde let me know your thoughts.

Thanks,

Bob

Posted by: Robert S

I would think there's very little chance that this'll work, but I don't think you'll have a latent problem - it'll either work or it won't. It may green screen when it boots, and this might enable the TiVo to clean up the mess!

One alternative would be to try to use dd to copy your B drive on to the new one. This would mean staying in a twin-drive configuration, but may give you a chance to view/tape your recordings.

Posted by: rbtconsultants

Thanks Robert - you have been very helpful. I guess I'll just try it and see what happens.

Is there more likliehood that the DD copy would work? Would it be more tolerant of errors from the failing hard drive?

Posted by: Robert S

Yes, especially if you use conv=noerror,sync (see Hinsdale). If it still crashes on bad blocks you can try to use PowerMax to 'fix' the bad blocks (other manufacturers have tools similar to PowerMax for their drives).

If dd still crashes after 'fixing' the bad blocks, I don't know of anything more you can do to salvage your recordings.

Posted by: rbtconsultants

Thanks Robert - tried to copy. No Joy. Drive definitely gave up the ghost. I/O erros, drive timeouts, general catastrophic failure. Oh well, lost a bunch of Law and Orders and CSI's we hadn't watched yet. Those all have no real continuity from episode to episode so reruns of them down the road is no big deal. Lost 2 NYPD Blues and 2 ERs. Those are a little more of a bummer.

Luckily the Third Watches, Alias's, John Does and 24s are on Tivo junior, the 30 hour.

Ah, well. The Tivo is now 141 hrs (67 in high which we watch) so I'm sure we'll fill it back up. We never seem to get caught up. Who has the time?

Thanks again for your help.

Bob