TiVo Community Forums Archives - dd seems to succeed but TiVo not happy

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dd seems to succeed but TiVo not happy
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Posted by: porges

I recently got a pre-installed upgrade Maxtor 120G disk (as B drive) from Hinsdale for my Sony SVR2000. It installed fine, but after a few days it seemed to have some bad blocks -- some recordings had parts that were guaranteed to lock up the TiVo, forcing a power cycle reboot. I isolated those blocks to a couple of half-hour recordings for the short term, and hooked up the upgrade drive to my PC and ran PowerMax, which sure enough showed errors. (Bill Hinsdale offered to have me ship him my machine and he would install a replacement drive, since it was so new. I decided to do it myself because I didn't want to be without the TiVo during the transit time.) So I got a cross-shipped warrantee replacement disk from Maxtor. I checked the replacement drive with PowerMax and it seemed all clear.

Wanting to preserve my recordings, I tried using dd (conv=error,nosync) to copy the old 120G to the new. I got some i/o errors (as expected) and at the end:

[message about end-of-file on the output]

116879+368 in [=117247]
117246+0 out

I note here that all of the i/o errors were reported at block numbers in the 4000's and 5000's.

I found the end-of-file message worrysome. (The bios sees both drives as 122.2G, for what that's worth.) This took about 18 hours, which others have commented on -- I don't know if it's been explained what causes it to take so long or if that's just how long it takes to move 120G.

Upon putting the new drive into the TiVo, I found that the existing recordings from the new drive were not playable -- they just gave "Delete?" . I had been expecting to lose only those recordings that had had bad blocks in their incarnation on the faulty drive. I also thought I found that Live TV didn't work, so I quickly swapped the old faulty drive back in. (I realized 10 minutes later that I had rehooked my cable input to the output connection, Mr. Genius, so it had been getting no signal.) Existing recordings seem to play fine again.

Anyway, I bet I have to fall back to plan B, which is backup the pair and restore to oldA+newB, keeping my personal info but losing recordings. My question is: is my experience a sign that something else has gone wrong, or was I just unlucky enough to have my bad blocks in some kind of partition header on the old drive, so that some whole index on the new drive got zapped?

One more thing -- I set the acoustic management on the new drive to "quiet". I hope that didn't slow it down too much for the TiVo (maybe that's implicated in my slow dd?)

Thanks for reading and for any opinions you might have.

Posted by: bsnelson

You need to use "conv=noerror,sync" (the opposite of what you put in your post). This means "don't stop on errors, but pad the target by the length of any errors you do find". That's what you want.

Unfortunately, it may be too late to fix it now, as the A drive is no longer in sync with the old B drive. I guess it's worth a shot, though, but I suspect that you need to look for a backup.

Sorry...

Brad

Posted by: porges

quote:
Originally posted by bsnelson
You need to use "conv=noerror,sync" (the opposite of what you put in your post). This means "don't stop on errors, but pad the target by the length of any errors you do find". That's what you want.

Unfortunately, it may be too late to fix it now, as the A drive is no longer in sync with the old B drive. I guess it's worth a shot, though, but I suspect that you need to look for a backup.

Sorry...

Brad

Whoops -- I see that I said the wrong thing in my message (noerror,sync), but I did the right thing (error, nosync) in the actual command line (since it did continue past the error blocks). Sorry for the confusion.

I do have a virgin backup for my hardware, since Hinsdale sent that with the 120G I got from him. It seems it would still be worth a shot to see if I can backup the settings-not-recordings info from what's running now, and then restore that. And if that blows out I can always try again from the virgin image. Thanks for your reply.