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Drive with bad blocks copied to new drive?

Hello all,

I have a 20 hour unit that I want to upgrade with an 80 gig drive. The problem is that I think the 20 gig drive currently in the unit has several bad blocks as I get break ups once in a while that are very reproducable.

My question is when I copy the drive image from the 20 gig drive and put it onto the 80 gig drive, will it also try to copy over the bad blocks and maybe make the 80 gig drive have the same problems?

Thanks for any help.

-Mark

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Clarksville, TN
Posts: 9

Yes and no. It will copy data from the "bad" blocks, which of course will be corrupt. If you try to play back a program that has some data in this bad area, you will still get stutters in the same spot, no matter what drive you clone to. But, copying from a bad block does not make the new drive have a bad block. The new drive is just fine; any future recordings won't have a problem (unless of course the new drive has bad blocks of its own, which it probably won't).

In other words, your current recordings can't be fixed. But new recordings won't be affected.

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Lanham, Md, 20706
Posts: 2

Josetann is correct on not creating the problem on the new drive. But before you copy over to the new drive I would suggest that you use the manufacturers drive utilities to check every sector on the drive and lock out any bad sectors. This will avoid the problem you currently have on the 14 gig drive.

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location:
Posts: 3615

You might be a little quick to jump to conclusions about your 14 hour drive. Just because the errors are reproducable doesn't mean they are even your TiVo's fault.

For instance, a few weeks ago, my roommates' recordings of Buffy were messed up - big MPEG artifacts, times where the audio (and sometimes video) would completely cut out. They were questioning whether the TiVo was having problems, but a quick look at the live feed using the TV's tuner revealed the problem was upstream somewhere, and the TiVo was just recording what was there.

If you do have bad spots on your drives, if you listen to your TiVo while playing back one of the reproducable errors, you should hear the drive go KA-Chunk when it retries the read.

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